The War Horse, the nonprofit veterans-affairs newsroom founded by Pulitzer Prize finalist Thomas Brennan, published a report this week framed for Memorial Day weekend: forensic DNA experts say the Pentagon's Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency could identify the remains of thousands of America's unknown war dead in years rather than decades, if the existing technology were matched with the existing samples. [1] The Pentagon counts roughly 81,500 American service members still unaccounted for from World War II forward.

The procedural gap is the news. DPAA's Family Member Donor Tracker accepts mitochondrial-DNA reference samples from any maternal-line relative of a missing service member; the agency has the lab capacity to process them, the disinterment authority to exhume from the Punchbowl and Arlington, and the genealogical staff to match. [2] What it has lacked is the public ask. The War Horse's "Honor a Veteran" Memorial Day campaign is the distribution surface: families can submit reference samples online, free of charge, through the DPAA portal. [3]

A first DNA identification opens a name on a headstone marked Unknown. A second identification from the same battle opens a procedural argument for batch exhumation. The May 18 piece in The War Horse — written by Ken McLaughlin against the agency's own published rate — names the calendar: 81,500 unknowns at the current pace clears in centuries. The same 81,500 at the technology's actual throughput clears in years. The constraint is policy and budget, not science. Memorial Day weekend is the year's one window when the gap is legible to a reader who is not already a veteran's daughter. [1]

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago