LEILA FADEL, HOST:
More than 81,000 U.S. service members are still missing after conflicts around the world, never found or never identified. This summer, a Defense Department team exhumed the remains of one of these unknown soldiers in the small island community of Sitka, Alaska. Now they're trying to learn his identity. KCAW's Hope McKenney reports.
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UNIDENTIFIED OFFICIAL: Company, attention.
HOPE MCKENNEY, BYLINE: Back in June, a dozen members of the U.S. Coast Guard, American Legion and local police and fire departments solemnly saluted as two service members carried an American flag-adorned case from the cemetery to a hearse.
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MCKENNEY: They were transporting the recently disinterred remains of an unidentified soldier known simply as X-3, who's been buried in the Sitka National Cemetery for nearly eight decades. During World War II, Japan bombed Unalaska, a community about 800 air miles from Anchorage in the Aleutian Islands. The U.S. military sent resources to help defend against the attack.
MICHAEL LIVINGSTON: One of the planes crashed outside of Cold Bay on the north side of the Alaska Peninsula. All the service members on that plane perished.
MCKENNEY: Michael Livingston is a local history buff who's spent a lot of time studying World War II events in the Aleutians. He says a local trapper found the remains of six of the servicemen washed up on shore and buried them temporarily until after the war, when the U.S. military dug them up and moved them to their respective communities. Only one of the men remained unidentified - X-3.
LIVINGSTON: He was moved to Sitka. We've been trying to get X-3 identified for a long time.
MCKENNEY: For years, Livingston advocated for the Department of Defense to disinter X-3 and try to ID him. Meanwhile, in Texas, 71-year-old Chris Pfeiffer had also spent years trying to figure out what had happened to his grandmother's brother, who was one of the men who went down on that flight.
CHRIS PFEIFFER: We've always known that we lost a great-uncle in the Aleutian Islands.
MCKENNEY: Pfeiffer believes his great-uncle, 2nd Lieutenant Eugene Christensen of Nebraska, is X-3. He's collected hundreds of pages of records about the crash and his uncle over the years and petitioned the Department of Defense to disinter the remains.
PFEIFFER: Could it be my uncle? Yes. Could it not be? Yes. We have to manage our expectations on this.
MCKENNEY: Pfeiffer, a military vet himself, says his great-grandparents, parents and other relatives passed away without ever knowing what happened. He wishes the disinterment had been approved sooner.
PFEIFFER: It could have been shared. And so there's some closure 'cause we know this is the one opportunity to see what happened.
MCKENNEY: Most of the 81,000 service members who are still missing were lost during World War II, the Vietnam War and the Korean War. According to the Department of Defense, missing or unidentified soldiers on U.S. soil are rare because it wasn't a primary theater of war. But in some places like Hawaii and Alaska, it's more common. Aaron Cummings is a senior planner with the Department of Defense's agency in charge of recovering and identifying missing service members. For a case like X-3, he says, Pfeiffer's advocacy was vital.
AARON CUMMINGS: Family interest is one of the elements that we utilize to determine how we prioritize and which missions move up the ladder.
MCKENNEY: Investigating these cases, he says, is important to the nation's promise to never leave anyone behind.
CUMMINGS: It's important for the closure of the families to know that we will always try to bring our folks home and just honor our nation's fallen.
MCKENNEY: The DOD is now doing DNA analysis to identify X-3. If he turns out to be Christensen, Pfeiffer says he hopes to bury his great-uncle's remains in a Lutheran cemetery in Nebraska, where the rest of his family lies.
For NPR News, I'm Hope McKenney in Sitka.
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