James Coyle, intelligence research director for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, has spent most of his professional life investigating the whereabouts of Americans lost in service to their nation.
His commitment to that quest has not flagged in 18 years, he said. But Coyle, 57, defines his motivation more narrowly than would many of his colleagues.
“I don’t really do it for the families,” he said. “I do it for the memory of the people who gave their lives in service to their country. Those people deserve to have what happened to them found out and reported.”
As a historian, linguist and intelligence analyst, Coyle over two decades has made dozens of trips, conducted hundreds of interviews and sifted through mountains of documents to find lost U.S. service members. Perhaps given his immersion in the human cost of war, he has strong personal views on topics such as the Iraq war, which he shared when asked.
“We’re in Iraq because we failed to learn from Vietnam,” Coyle said. “You don’t bring democracy with bayonets.”
But most of my interview with Coyle, and with Air Force 1st Lt. Ken Hall, a former Marine and spokesman for the accounting command, dealt with the evolution and growth of the POW-MIA effort. The command leads a $100 million-a-year campaign to gain the fullest possible accounting of Americans who went missing in past wars. Half of that total is spent by the command directly, with 75 cents on every budget dollar going for investigation and recovery missions.
The 440-person command was formed in October 2003 by combining the world’s most sophisticated forensics facility, the Army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, and Joint Task Force Full Accounting. The accounting task force got its start in 1992, a better-funded version of the Joint Casualty Resolution Center begun after the Vietnam War.
The forensics laboratory, since its own founding 30 years ago, has had a global mandate to identify U.S. remains from all past wars. But most remains came from Southeast Asia because the resolution center’s mandate was to find the missing from Vietnam.
By 1992, pressure from the families of lost Vietnam veterans help shape support for a full accounting of missing from all past wars. Creation of the accounting command, Coyle said, reinforced that national priority.
“This probably is never going to end, certainly not in my lifetime,” he said of the searches to find remains.
Though the remains of 1,849 service members are still missing from the Vietnam War, that number is small compared with about 78,000 never recovered after World War II and 8,100 lost in Korea. Another 120 U.S. service members disappeared during the Cold War, and one pilot disappeared in the first Gulf War.
Hired in 1986 as a casualty resolution specialist, Coyle said he intended to expose any cover-up of Americans still held captive. Instead, he came to believe the “real cover-up” was how little Americans knew of the extensive efforts to find the missing.
In 1988, Vietnam finally allowed U.S. search teams into the country. Coyle, who speaks Vietnamese and has master’s degrees in Vietnamese history and culture, led one of those first two teams.
Today, he feels most of the missing from Vietnam probably won’t be found. The soil there is highly acidic, which accelerates decomposition of bone. Porcupines also eat such things as teeth for calcium to replace their quills.
“The real problem facing us … is time,” Coyle said. “Time is reducing the number of eyewitnesses (and) destroying, little by little, the physical evidence, including aircraft wreckage, uniform pieces and remains.”
Through extraordinary efforts, remains are being found, both from Vietnam and earlier wars. That makes the effort worthwhile, he said.
“As long as people want us to keep looking,” Coyle said, “we’ll keep looking.”
To comment, write Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, VA, 20120-1111, e-mail milupdate@aol.com or go to www.militaryupdate.com.
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