one — X-816 — had gold inlays.
Eakin was ecstatic that the clues led so directly to his cousin. Unknown soldier X-816 — seemingly, Bud — was buried in grave A-12-195 in the Manila American Cemetery. Eakin went back to the Army that April, thinking, “We’ll have him home in a week.”
By September, the only progress the government had made was to produce a research memo on Bud’s case. Heather Harris, a DPMO historian, concluded that the archival evidence — mainly the death report ledger that the POWs had kept at Cabanatuan — was unreliable and therefore insufficient to warrant disinterment. She also noted another complication: Some of the remains appeared to have been commingled when they were first disinterred in the 1940s. It was possible that identifications made then had been wrong.
On Sept. 21, a J-PAC dentist compared the dental records in the Grave 717 X-files with other dental records for the 10 men buried in that grave. He couldn’t conclusively match any of them. There’s no indication in the report that Herman Kelder’s taped statement about Bud’s gold inlays was part of the analysis.
Eakin had hit another wall.
By this time, proving X-816 was really Bud had become an obsession. Eakin was prone to such quests. When serious injuries from a helicopter crash ended his career as a pilot in the mid-’80s, Eakin combed through FAA data to understand the cause of the accident. He couldn’t simply file it away as an unfortunate accident and move on.
“I had to know why it fell out the sky,” he said.
Teaching himself to write computer software, he turned the agency’s 4-foot stack of 9-track tapes into a searchable database, then sold the agency his improved version of its own data. Consulting on aviation accidents became Eakin’s full-time job.
“If J-PAC thinks he’s going to give up, they’re wrong,” said Joan Eakin, his wife of 38 years.
Increasingly frustrated by the military’s inaction, Eakin broadened his efforts beyond Bud. After a drawn-out battle with the Department of Defense, Eakin obtained access to all World War II and Korea X-files, more than 9,400 in all. Then he built a database with material from 3,000 files for unknowns buried along with Bud in the American cemetery in Manila, methodically entering information for weeks in the evenings.
He discovered that all the way back in the 1940s, the military had made tentative identifications for more than half of those X-files, tying each set of remains to a few service members or, in some cases, just one. Many of the cases seemed as solvable as Bud’s. In one instance, Eakin concluded, a Silver Star recipient had never been identified because his name was spelled wrong.
“It’s not rocket science,” he told anyone who would listen.
Eakin didn’t understand why the military didn’t just exhume all the men who had been buried in Grave 717.
While some oppose focusing on disinterments, arguing those men have already been found, the Pentagon began encouraging J-PAC to exhume more unknowns 15 years ago based on the emerging promise of DNA. J-PAC has done just 111 disinterments since then. Half of those were exhumed in the past two years, in part a response to the mounting pressure to make more IDs.
“The laboratory is pursuing disinterments very aggressively,” Holland said.
J-PAC recently set a goal to dig up 150 sets of remains per year by 2018. Even at that pace, the agency would need until about 2081 just to get the 9,400 unknown World War II and Korea service members out of the ground.
Holland approves just a handful of the disinterment requests that come across his desk. Cases go first to the head of the disinterment unit, who dismisses about 80 percent of them, Holland said. The rest go to Holland, who said he rejects another 80 percent. That means only 4 percent of cases considered for disinterment move forward.
Holland said he is “handcuffed” by a 1999 Pentagon policy that requires a “high probability of identification” before exhumation.
There is disagreement within the military about whether the policy is still in effect. Officials at DPMO, which frequently squabbles with J-PAC, say it isn’t.
“It’s J-PAC’s choice,” said Navy Capt. Doug Carpenter, chief of accounting policy for DPMO. “How they choose to hold themselves accountable for disinterment is up to J-PAC, and they do a fine job.”
Regardless, Holland has the power to define the exact standard for disinterment. He has imposed strict parameters for how many people a set of remains could possibly be before moving forward to dig them up: typically, no more than five. He will not lower the threshold even in instances where comparison DNA could be used to identify disinterred remains.
Holland might still be smarting from a 2003 blunder in which J-PAC dug up remains of unidentified sailors who had been on the USS Oklahoma when it sunk in Pearl Harbor. Agency officials had failed to investigate the historical archives adequately and exhumed a container with bones from hundreds of people instead of the five they were expecting.
After this, the Pentagon decided to halt any further Oklahoma cases and required additional layers of bureaucratic approval for disinterments, but as a practical matter it is still Holland who makes the calls.
McKeague, the military commander of J-PAC, now has to endorse disinterment requests approved by Holland. Asked whether he ever questions Holland’s judgment, McKeague held up his hand like a stop sign and said that lab decisions were squarely Holland’s domain.
“His credentials are impeccable,” McKeague said.
The request next goes to DPMO, which has its own historians check the work, then to the assistant secretary of the Army for final approval, but the Army has never turned J-PAC down.
Holland acknowledged that what he called the Pentagon’s “knee-jerk” reaction to the USS Oklahoma mess left him reluctant to push for disinterments for fear of losing more autonomy. He expressed concern about having bodies that J-PAC can’t identify stack up in his lab.
“I might have a certain amount of discretion in how I interpret ‘high probability,’ but that discretion will be taken away from me” should the ratio of exhumed graves to identifications get out of balance, he said. “I guess in that sense, I am a little risk averse.”
In January 2011, Eakin’s persistence finally seemed to spur some progress.
J-PAC anthropologist Paul Emanovsky examined the cases of the 14 men who had been buried in Grave 717 in Cabanatuan, including Bud’s, and concluded that identifications were possible.
“I think it’s worth pursuing these cases, there are some pretty strong correlations for a couple of causalities, and others are reasonable,” Emanovsky wrote in a previously undisclosed email to Holland and the lab manager, John Byrd.
Regardless of the likely poor condition of the bones, “I think that all hope is not lost,” Emanovsky’s note said. Since the bones of the soldiers might have been commingled, he advised exhuming them all and comparing them with DNA from family members. “We could potentially identify several of these individuals,” he said.
Ten months later, the head of J-PAC’s office of disinterment reviewed the case and echoed Emanovsky’s findings in a brief memo, noting that while the bones were “eroded,” DNA “may help in identification of remains from Common Grave 717.”
The memo was sent to Holland on Oct. 19, 2011. Even then, he did not act to disinter Bud and the others and carry out DNA testing.
At another family update meeting in Texas on Feb. 26, 2012, Eakin met with Johnnie Webb, J-PAC’s external relations chief. Despite the reports from members of the agency’s staff supporting disinterment, Webb told Eakin there was no evidence to support further investigation into Bud’s case.
Eakin had had enough. “We waited and waited and finally filed a lawsuit in federal court,” he said.
On Oct. 18, 2012, Eakin sued the Department of Defense, naming the secretary of defense, Webb and the head of DPMO, in United States District Court in Texas to force them to disinter Bud and the other World War II unknowns.
The lawsuit has survived several government motions to dismiss.
In a January 2013 memo prompted by the suit, Holland cited the policy that, again, he himself interprets.
“No definitive individual associations could be established based on the available documentation,” he wrote. “While it is possible that one or more individuals could be realized if all unknown remains from this incident were disinterred for analysis, the existing and available data do not meet the level of scientific certainty required by current DoD disinterment guidance.”
Citing the suit, J-PAC and DPMO declined to comment on any specifics of Bud’s case.
After years of fruitless struggle, Eakin has become convinced that J-PAC’s “job is justifying doing nothing — and they do their job well.”
It’s unclear whether the law will come down on Eakin’s side, but there’s reason to believe the judge is sympathetic to his claim.
“Notwithstanding giving his last full measure of devotion to this country,” U.S. District Judge Fred Biery wrote,
