they are interesting, important and i love this community. thank you joe scarborough thank you commonwealth club of california. >> i love commonwealth club, can't win to get out thereand see you . >> book tv on c-span2, created by america's cable television companies and brought to you by these television companies to provide book tv to viewers as a public service. >> good afternoon and welcome to this session of the washington history seminar, historical perspectives on international and national affairs. this afternoon we will focus on a new book i professor sarah wagner, what remains:

america's missing home from the vietnam war. here's the book. we are delighted to have you with us to talk about it and welcome to the washington history seminar. it's fortunate to have chris mcdermott from the department of defense with us as a commentator. welcome to you as well chris. i am christian ostermann and i direct the wilson center history program and i'm delighted to be cochairing this seminar and as always which eric garner from george washington university. today, eric will introduce our speaker and moderate the discussion . as many of you regular viewers know, the washington history seminar is a collaborative decade-long effort of our two

organizations, the wilson centers story and public policy program , international history center of the historical association. prior to the pandemic we met on a weekly basis at the wilson center. now we are pleased to come to you via zoom and facebook. behind the scenes there are individuals who help produce this event, peter beer stecker of the policy program and rachel wheatley with the national history center. even in this zoom only era, staging these events is labor-intensive and given tuesday tomorrow, let me ask for your support. we thank our two institutional reporters at the page center for history and public interest and to george washingtonuniversity's history department . both of them support the event series financially and we're grateful to a number of individual donors who make these meetings possible and

whose rank weinvite , encourage. we encourage you to join. details about how to do so are now available in the chat room or simply go to our institutional websites. today's session is being recorded and will soon appear on our affect the respective organizations websites. for the q&a part of the webinar as eric will remind you again please use the raise hand function and the zoom room functionality if you'd like to ask a question. once you press the button you will be added into a queue and the moderator calls, please unmute your screen. you can also submit questions for rachel wheatley by email at rw hba tle @historians.org.

and with, thanks to our speakers. let me turn the room over to. >> christian. it is my privilege to introduce our speaker sarah wagner and christmas. professor wagner is associate professor of an apology at george washington university he received a ba from dartmouth. a phd from harvard. her research focuses on post conflict national identity and forensic science in the wake of war. she's the author of to know where she lies, dna technology and the search for ships missing an ethnographic study of the forensic and memory practices in response to genocide published by the university of california press in 2008 and the co-author in the aftermath of genocide, published in 2014

by cambridge university press and today she will be speaking on her new book what remains: bringing america's missing home fromthe vietnam war published by harvard university press . sarah, the room is yours. >> thank you so much and first of all my thanks to christian, to eric and chris mcdermott for being here as well as as christian mentioned the people behind the scenes, both peter and especially rachel for getting the logistics and allowing us to be together. i will say having taught the entire semester remotely i'm getting used to zoom but i miss the opportunity to be together and to be in a room and feel the energy, or boredom whatever the case may be but to have that. i'm grateful we have so many attendees and i look forward to a robust discussion. i would like to begin with just some basic remarks about

the book and i think it may be helpful if i share my screen and i will have this presentation prepared, i think the visuals may help set the scene for where i did the research. at this moment i'll share my screen. and i hope that we can all see one another. but you can see me on this top one. >> on a cold damp day in november 2018 i went to the tomb of the unknown soldier at arlington national cemetery. i live here in washington dc so the trip isn't difficult, just a trip across the memorial bridge, a structure built to connect the monumental face with the national mall and the hollow ground of the cemetery.

rain pelted down on those of us assemble on the steps as these round-the-clock sentinels facing before the blocks of white marble . with me was my stepson, then a 10-year-old boy who watched in rapt attention as the sentinel clicked its heels and shifted his rifle from one shoulder to the next. my companion looked skeptical when i told him the guard would take exactly 21 steps in 21 seconds and we counted them together, our eyes following the shiny black shoes as he glided across the street for the credit for the major conflicts of the past century. world war i, world war ii, the korean war and the now empty, that other vietnam war. i've gone to the tomb many times over the past several years and on the one hand it's a site in itself, in which to consider the

pedagogy of visitors before an alternate military ritual and the place where the so-called widening civil meant military gap is performed each hour on the hour through the changingof the guard . overshadowed as it is by the pageantry of synchronicity, not only is the great war on succeeded, there seems little space at the tomb for the messages that invite reflection about what it means to die and to die a horrible, painful death fighting on behalf of the nation. the pointless critique of john does passes are the stuff of a different era. if you could here at every jolt the carvings on the front corrupted long, of file incurable source, my friend you would not tell with such

high zest children for such desperate glory. against the backdrop of this evolving meeting the tomb served a different role for me. it represents the kind of touchstone. the book dominates a project i've worked on for well over a decade, ethnographic study of the us military, efforts to account for its members missing in action from the wars of the last century including andespecially the vietnam war . if the tomb memorializes wars ultimate told, that is to not be on it and not be recognized, then the vast enterprise of mia accounting the us has developed over the past several decades is hubristic confidence that its destruction may well decimate equality but it can no longer

steal away identity. it's sitting on the tomb's disruption in 1998 when the remains of the vietnam unknown soldier were disinterred and identified by dna testing that us secretary of defense william cohen made a remarkable pronouncement saying quote, it may be that forensic science has reached a pointwhere there will be no other unknowns anymore . >> .. we sought to understand the complex relationship united states has with its unrecovered and unidentified who are dead

from the conflict in south east asia. and what it means when i take it after the wars in, american remains come home and what it means we don't come home. for a real discussion i will discuss two of the stories. the first story pertains to the accounting process writ large. it's exclusively national politics. in the book i argued that for the united states, the vietnam war was solidified and expanded a national tradition of individuated recovery, repatriation, and identification. while this is a tradition of the stretches back the civil war, is one of which bring them home trump's bearing them were thereby.

the creation of comprehensive system of national cemetery and compunction to account for the unidentified, the conflict between the north and south transformed the nation sentiment towards caring for the dead. the evolution of practice across the major conflicts of the 20th century, we still live in a world of the dead civil war created and take frequent the obligations of states to account for the lives it claims in service. more recently that tradition of carrying for the missing and unidentified dead as benefits of transformative property of sites. science has formed a virtual. for the war in south east asia is giving rise to a forensic enterprise that has orders of facts and fall into spent decades while hundreds of millions of dollars and return thousands of absent american war

dead to the surviving family and to the nation. the enterprise has in turn fostered an idea, what i call exceptional care. i want to emphasize and in that championing this effort, instead of anthropologists to understand what it comes from, how it operates and what it produces. and by a accounting at its core is about recovering and identifying, reattaching and individual name to an otherwise nameless that or even a handful or a single tooth. and then sydney does remains home. indeed, the enterprise of the named individual comes home has become the expected. a final act of the nation's proper care for missing in action or killed in action, the body recovered. with that, i argue a particular of those has formed.

to put in its simplest terms, this exceptional care is the story the state tells itself its military past and present, the families of the missing in the american public, that even unparalleled and unprecedented efforts it spares no expense, no resource to bring its former member so. this accounting works to accord asymmetry of law. love. a quick look at the numbers makes this clear. an estimated 3 million people were killed between 1954-1975, most of them by the united states. while 58,220 u.s. forces are counted as killed in action or as noncombat deaths. at the signing of the paris peace accords nc-273 the united states listed 2646 americans as unaccounted for from the war with roughly equal parts of this missing in action or killed in

action, body not recovered. of those, 1005 and 85 just service five just servicemembers are currently still missing. those numbers, those lives focus to include outside the scope of this enterprise of exception barrel, were described as an exclusionary practice of remembering one's own. to be sure it's in essence exceptionalism forged to shatter meant, as a story christian argues the war in southeast asia fundamentally dislodge the central tenet of american national identity, naming the notion of american exceptionalism. we take series scrubbing of historical record he explained to rehabilitate that notion. by the 1980s a political winds begin to shift with reagan rebranding the wars as noble cause, the forensic science of accounting offered the state and

needs to distance and rehabilitate the wars y recovering and identifying those missing in action. the price of the system of exception of thursday. three decades of youth ministry spends approximately $140 million per year on this mia accounting effort. this does not take into account millions of dollars to support -- [inaudible] approximately ten teams of military civilian personnel, hundreds of personnel parsed out over the fiscal year 2000 east asia to excavate sites and recovery remains. this is a typical to plan and schedule. it's frantic largest in the world with to make additional satellite labs and armed forces dna identification laboratory working at full throttle, the united states does, in fact, send part to repatriate

scientifically individual its own debt. but for me more than exceptional costs and resources is what this applies a full of pop vocal under possible account for the case itself enables. on one level as if it provides the state for writing narrative to push past the vietnam war is considering divisiveness, and it's the turn attention on its unparalleled efforts to bring its fallen home. science answers defeat, and the corollary anomaly death. it allows the state to shift its focus, the call to defense secretary that forensic science has reached the point where the will be no other unknowns in any war. science practice share capable of transmogrify a scrap abouto a human being, thus gives rise to a new sacred thing to borrow,

a new language of remembrance proffering techno- rational servitude to the tools of genetics, isometrics, mallory, graphic technique. at another level the atlas of exception care exposes the fragment to the unstable nature of memory itself. [inaudible] this brings me to the second thread of the book, and essence of exception cares privileges to nation state and its terms bureaucrats and scientific terms. research moved across the art of account from recovery, repatriation identification and finally to commemoration. remember --

[inaudible] more often than homecomings were often homecoming events. rather than being commemorate a static or flattened categories of the fallen hero come home, the missing in action are often than not a term of intimacy of relation to particular -- [inaudible] sometimes returns are front. sometimes they are forced to the surface painful memories come ripping off the scabs that have decades help to cover over the profound cut of faith in unanswered sorrow. as most mia families tell you, the homecoming rarely if ever brings closure. it's a word anathema to their experiences of protracted grief. in this light the symbolic way of homecoming is bound up with

the nation. a single bone, a teeth, whatever collection remains, lies in homecoming as an active local reclamation. as an illustration of this dense, often fraught homecoming i will end with the story of lance corporal merle allen. he was one of three young men in the community in northern wisconsin to be killed in vietnam. i took part in a recovery mission, oncological tigta located his remains, a single tooth that would constitute his official recovery and identification. we follow the trajectory of his homecoming through the eyes of the surviving family and local veterans in the community. basically his homecoming was publicly celebrate but is also a painful reminder of compounded loss. at the time he was declared mia, his symbolism broke in a battle

to keep their property from being seized by the u.s. government on an issue of eminent domain, the line was supposed to become part of a national park, a lakeshore along lake superior. so in short, the allentown is lost both a son, brother, and the property, or home, the place of business in a few short years. the father had struck back, deeding a small portion of the island that they had owned, he deeded this title strip of it to the local township. he and his wife wanted to be buried to their and they wanted merle if he should ever be recovered to join them. so i would read a short passage of the book that describes this long overweighted reunion.

it's quirky treaties on space, place in memory spaces, george writes,. [inaudible] prices are stable, unmoving, intangible untouched and almost untouchable, and changing deep-rooted places that might be points of reference of departure, of origin, a birthplace come the cradle of my family, house from a been born, the trees i may have seen. he tells us such places don't exist because just as time wears away, our memories also vitreous. quote, space smells like san running through one's fingers. there is only one recourse, to wait, delete some sorrow somewhere, a trace, mark or even a few signs of these fragile places. he overlooks of the

possibilities for keeping the site to live in our memories as point points that only of reference in departure but also spaces of communion and commemoration. the allen family crafted their own possibility the day they brought merle home to your island. once the military rights had been rendered, the family and a group from the other attendees bordered the outer ivan, and world war ii navy vessel that it helped ferry troops, armor and supply to the beaches of your in 1944. it was an ideal book for the occasion both arts historical significance and logistical reasons. it's about two and half miles from the little sound they doctor the southern tip of york island where shall the waters met the sandy shore. the farmer amphibious assault craft could drop its rent directly onto the island beach, allowing its passengers a and

little children to more senior attendees to disembark easily. a special escort, junior, now junior was someone who fought with merle and who survived the helicopter crashed they killed myrtle. junior was trusted with caring merle, the wooden box on which all activity now focus, to the burial site. the group made its way from the boat onto the island waiting to light brush to write arril clearing several yards in from the water's edge. this place i visited two years after the funeral again to get a sense of where the lance corporal alan found resting place. it is a serene place bordered by mix of words, birch, ash and pine and with the carpeted island grass and wildflowers as groundcover. now i will skip to one last paragraph. at first the island wasn't quite as recipient as planned. the deep narrow plots at

filtered water overnight. this guy was nearly cloudless at morning, it rained heavily in the preceding days leaving the ground saturated. casey and john the two brothers, together had to press their white onto the urn vaults but alas the vaults vault seo place in the attendees one by one took a small handful of sand to sprinkle over the water bathing merle in the grains of the beach that he had so loved. he was finally at rest. on the mountainside of vietnam to the examination table in hawaii, to a clearing on york island, merle and ray allen had traveled a long way to come home from war. when asked the siblings about whether it mattered to them that's a little of their brothers physical remains were recovered and repatriated, they uniformly told the no. s casey explained, i was thrilled even one bone came

home. i knew it was my brother. i finally knew his fate and he was coming home. i will end there, stop sharing the screen, and -- okay, so at this point i would welcome the opportunity to talk to all of you, and chris, if we have questions from you you are s from the audience. >> terrific. so let's have chris share his thoughts. you can respond to them if you like, then we will open it up to our larger viewing audience. are our discusses this afterns chris mcdermott who received his ba from appalachian state university, an ma from st. john's college in santa fe, a degree from dublin and phd in science and technology studies program at virginia tech turkey serves as a cheap data officer at the defense prisoner

of war missing in action accounting agency. prior to the establishment of the agency in january 2015 he was the senior historian for the joint pow/mia accounting command at the national archives and offices of the defense pow missing personal office in 20 years army sent authentication authentication laboratory in hawaii in 2001. starting as a stark research. >> research fellow he helped lead the transformation of case research and analysis for world war ii field and laboratory analyses. and in addition to his case research come his convective field investigation missions across europe and pacific. chris, the screen is yours. >> thanks very much, eric. sarah, i very much enjoyed having opportunity to kind of deeply go into your volume and to really think about the perspective that you are able to bring as -- within the mission

both within laboratory for the science, in the field, one of the things that struck me as a great contribution from the book is its movement among the different places that matter to the story into the individuals involved. it really highlights the geography of the conflicts and geography, you know, much more meaningful the place is to the people who live there and how much more meaningful to the people who lived these people, the connection back to their home. one of the things that really resonates for me is what we have been talking about his individual contributions but then at the same time that shared collective experience. wonder the things that's always struck me about the mission is that ability to recognize that individual who was subsumed by

the state and expended by the state, but the state still owes something. and who do they owe it to? to the outages back to the service? do they owe what just back to the nation, or do they owe something to the people who knew this person in a special way works what do they owe to the people who knew that person as family, the people who knew the person, who shared come walking along that lakeshore together? that become so much more meaningful but then at the same time you look at all of the contributions that go in and that's what i like the way you some that up with this ethos of exceptional care concept. what we're trying to show is that ethos can be something much, much larger than any individual but at the same time can recognize the contribution of that individual. and at the same time one of the things that really is a problem

with ties think about it is, certainly the mission continues and we continue making identifications, we're not able to do field recovery but we're still able to examine sort of the unidentified and try to make them go from unidentified identified. but you also have something i would like to know more about in terms of that contribution and what the global meaning is of the unknown soldier. the mystery that is a bear, the one that represents them all, but then as we unpacked that in every look at there were no longer be any more, what is the transcendent mystery that we risk losing when we move in that direction? the mission that you talk about here with vietnam in with korea, with world war ii, we have memorials with names, the names mean something when we make an identification, we get to have this small homecoming that connects both the times and

places in director wray's but for the most recent conflicts where we have the small volunteer force, small percentage of the population is really directly affected, there's a much more mechanical operation of the identification process. there's a much more hidden aspect of it. while we thank all the servicemembers for the contribution, i can see lots of places where the names are memorialized and where that story may echo generations further on. i'd be interested to talk to you more from that framework? >> chris, that's a fantastic, and it's something i wrestled with. in fact, it's a question i repeated again and i'm not sure have a satisfactory answer but i want to at least work you through what some of the thoughts and findings. when i began this process, this entire research project, it was

with the identification of the vietnam unknown soldier. i was so startled by the fact that what seems to be this eternal, you think unknown soldiers having the eternal flame. i think rome has one. this is enduring and yet it was 1990, a total rupture of that icon and the remains are removed. and, in fact, i love the passage in benedict anderson's imagined community, try to get us to understand what is this thing, national unity in national belonging. he says he shows that the tomb of the unknowns, there's these perfect material cultural artifacts to office understand how we imagine our connection to someone who sacrifice for the nation. therefore, we imagine we go to the station. it has disliked about him and michael allen also, written very

beautifully about this, that who is this busybody? like only the sacrilege, some going in and trying to pull out those remains and named them. that's in fact, what happened. so then your question is, what happened then? what do we lose? i remember when i started this tragic i thought okay, it means when secretary cohen says that, maybe it means will not have any more unknowns. it's an off-the-cuff remark but an amazing one, that we were are entering into this uncharted territory, and i assumed as an anthropologist who is not very good at crafting hypotheses because i'm social culture anthropologist, that what is hypothesis then? so what changes? i wanted to understand, i assume that most of national commemoration changing when you can't have this aggregate of the

unknown or this symbolic unknown. i was attentive okay, does this mean it's all going to come down to the personalized narrative? i do, in fact, think some of it is true or what that complicated for me is understanding the personalized narrative is never only about the state and i try to mention this in my company, it's never only about the local family or the biography that precedes someone's service in the military. it's this amalgam, this strange mix of it. that sometimes that makes is contagious or it is fraught and it pulls up some pretty terrible memories of a war and what families in particular have lost. it's harder for the nation to get us to imagine because we had particular histories. and yet when i opened the book with merle ray allen's homecoming and what are the things that's extraordinary to me is people came from all over just to witness the convoy

vehicles including the hearse as a letter from the st. paul, the twin cities airport, and headed up north to lake superior. that speaks volumes. maybe there is something about that personalized narrative of the fallen hero coming from that helps the nation to the work of bringing us back into that -- whether it's the airbrushed history of the war or its inviting us to think about what obligations we as contemporary members of this society have too those who fight on our behalf. so again i hate to say i don't have really easy quick answer but i think that's the crux of what's going on here. i think will continue to see this change and will continue to see the tension between the local, the personalized come the particular history, the biography prior to military service and to the aims of the state to rewrite or two we tell a story of a war that was incredibly contentious and very

hard even for the veterans to this day grapple with their own experiences. long-winded answer. i promise i will try to keep them shorter from here on in. >> no worry. that ties into the transformation of the symbology of the tomb of the unknowns, what is now the flag, the pow/mia flag that so much more common and carried in marathons and parades to this day and the four brings that message, you are not forgotten, that's really what i think of the themes i always find difficult is that the named individuals who were trying not to forget. something specific about that individual, but then this can also get washed into the symbology. i still find it interesting to think about what america has this much more openly fraught

relationship with it then sort of the commonwealth with the poppy and the tomb to come represent anyone and then leave them where they fell, why would you bring those remains home? >> yeah. that is been understanding that tradition, writ large the social contract between the state and the military as one with the state and current, past servicemembers, families, the american public. it took me a while as an anthropologist who traffic in the contemporary to learn and understand that tradition with all the way back to the civil war, that it changed, it heightened and gained force from world war i, world war ii to the korean war, there was expectation of return to the vietnam war. i think i'm necessary for me to babble and let's be honest, i am in ethnographer.

standing on the shoulders of historians who written very eloquently, and i would say michael allen, john anderson the political context, that gave rise to i think the increase cultural demand and advances in forensic science that dovetail to produce this as those to the frantic enterprise and almost this mythical notion that our science can triumph. it can triumph in stepping back to the previous or and he can triumph with this promise that there will be no other unknowns. that's something that's helping unpack or that's what i try into indy ethnography is help them unpack the, is that magic but the work of transformation that science offers us a new rituals that come out of that, that attempt to bridge chasms of prolonged grief, of ambiguity

and uncertainty of doubt. >> such as to transition quickly to the science part, one of the things i also found very rewarding in your account is the conversation about how the certainty and the expertise about identification size also evolves and changes. at the same time they're still the traditional hallmark you talk about how the family member will say i recognize every portion of that persons body. you must show me the remains. that's how i will recognize them. but then as that sort of moves back and you a visual recognition, your dog tag recognition, then you have anthropology, you start thinking about well, did you get to level of expertise were only certain people can recognize the fragmentary remains that we are talking about. when you bring dna into the picture it gets to another level

as well, and there's a transition of the expertise in the sacred moving up in that chain but then also always wanting to return back to, but i know this thing goes with this. >> yeah. so much of what i try to write about in the early chapters from the scientific process was that all extraordinary powerful tools are now they're at our fingertips. genetics use, it can do extraordinary things. but it doesn't -- impinges upon that rudimentary element of trust. what a mean to say is, if families do not believe that it has been a scientifically sound process, that the experts have done their job well and that there hasn't been a margin of error, they received this information and they can say, yes, i believe this. i believe this tiny fragment of

my brother is my brother, right? or is my father. that's something by the way that i found to be common with my earlier research. that since of truss and the efficacy of the science, they go hand in glove. you're not going to have families buy in. in the case of bosnia-herzegovina, remains decimated by genocide, it was necessary for families not just to trust but also participate, partake in the process because i had to give the dna samples. in the early years as they were trying to build up the system that could come like a house of cards, fall apart if if you t have families providing dna samples and in believing the results presented to them. i felt like i was hearing a

different version, of course different because it's current context, different concerns run victims versus combatants but that sensibility of, and we have truss, can we trust, and without trust, this in the price may well fail, and a positive identification might all of the sudden look problematic if an identification was salty or someone cast aspersions about its trustworthiness. so there's so much more than just the lab. it's the social morals around the lab. >> i think it's interesting to look at the language around accounting which kind of has a financial history, and when you think about it, the of the parts where commerce comes into it. what does it cost to find recover and identify someone versus what is it worth? it means everything to the family but does that mean we could spend everything to achieve it?

there's this interesting balance of the terminology but also problematics of thinking about these things in terms of the dollar values attached. >> sorry. there is a helicopter overhead some not sure if you that but apologies for the extra noise. in fact, those one interesting,, i got to the lab. i did my research on what was in the central identification laboratory in 2011 2011 and then it came back a couple more times but that was a moment where i think the nation as a whole was -- the mission was undergoing a fair amount of scrutiny about efficiency. there was this oversight that congress had pursuing about -- [inaudible] or possible what was he doing at the time, , how could they be

increased. and understandably there's always, how do you make the system better, more efficient? but i was struck by this language of efficiency as one that, even to the point that the was a consultant brought in. chris, i'm not telling you anything you don't know, but in this oversight, in the process of external consultants, you know, trying to ascertain whether the mission was being accomplished, had the opportunity to speak with one and i remember her describing, using the language of customers, like customers our families. i thought, that's such a mistake. because this entire enterprise operates on a necessary notion of sanctity, that the missing

are sacred and that the families are not families. they are the closest thing we have to the sacred and what he mean by that is they are the guardians of the memory and they are the ones of the missing and they're the ones who have been waiting and waiting and waiting for some news. so all of a sudden to hear them described as customers, right, and it's ever to make the mission more efficient and more responsive to this i i thought don't go down that path. i know that many in the defense pow/mia accounting agency felt the same sort of frustration with that language because it wasn't true to have an overwhelming majority of people working for the defense department on this mission would ever, they would never conceive of that. >> at the same time there is another side to that where there

was scrutiny and oversight for reasons, not may be a certainty putting your finger and what was wrong but certainly something was wrong in terms of there wasn't a sense that the sacred mattered in that broader sense, in that specific sense. that's really where, i think the language always gets really problematic, like the accounting name for our effort still causes problems will he go to other countries and we say we are an accounting agency and a safe do you want to look at the ledgers? no, we want to talk to villagers and go to a small place and pick up a crash site. that's not accounting anywhere else. when you talk about the language as well, one of the things i always found interesting is you look at the situated knowledge of the laboratory, but we do care very much about this. but at the same time how can we be more effective, how can we

get more cases accomplished? it can't always be there's another part of bureaucracy that deals with it. we all have to figure out a way to make that change happen. i think we should open up to broader questions but there's a lot to continue to unpack in what it means to be responsive to the customer, what it means to be responsive to the participant in the sacred cow into the individual that sacrifice himself? what is the appropriate level of anticipation that we need to be able to show? >> if i could give one more juxtaposition between my work in bosnia and with the us military, i went back after i've been working on the youth ministry component, i go back to boston very frequently and and i sh a friend, a pathologist, and a member he was so surprised to

hear that if families did not accept an identification, and they have a chance to appeal, that ultimately if that appeal was not successful, that the military would still take care of its own. it would still bury those remains, whereas in bosnia herzegovina at that time had all depend on the family members living us to accept the validity of an identification. i recall him asking how is it the case with families could be, not overridden, but their opinion didn't count? it was more about ultimately there was no way that identified set of remains would ever languish on a more terry shelf if the dedication was found. there was need to render proper military rights. i think that checks position is always struck me. >> tickets at the problems of

the term -- [inaudible] and in what we does it close anything? administrative or is it meaningful? >> do you have some questions? >> yes. >> you preempted me there. so i will invite our audience to use the raise hand function to e-mail questions to rachel if you're on facebook or to use the q&a function and we will do our best to call on everyone. i would like to start off, cochair prerogative. an limited amount of time to share the content of the book with us, and the are many things in the book. they are absolute faceting that may or may not be familiar to either historians or to average americans. so as an anthropologist at as a

ethnographer, if you could talk a little bit about how you go about doing your research? because you not only interviewed people but as you mentioned a few minutes ago you travel to hawaii, you worked at the lab, and, an absolute faceting section in the book, you travel to vietnam with one of these accounting teams and you spent many weeks first-hand to sedating in one of these kind of reclamation projects. if you could talk as a scholar how you went about doing this and the various components that allowed you to ultimately tell this story. >> as a social culture anthropologist my bread-and-butter is ethnographic research, and ethnographic research, imagine that it's essentially the hope that you can stand sustained amounts of time with your community of study or the practice you want

to understand well, or the place that you want understand well. so when this case this project was complicated. that's what took me over effective because you were so many different sites and are so many different, will call them stakeholders, people involved in the process. so could never only be about the science. could never only be about members of military veterans or current servicemembers. they could never only be about the families. somehow i needed, i try and get a feel for perspectives, involvement, understanding on of these different fronts. i kind of thought about the project as one where i was tracing these art of recovery and identification to commemoration. i didn't start with commemoration although one could argue because i started at the tomb of the unknowns i started at the flip in but that was more around curiosity. i followed the expertise and i

traced the science first, , whai mean by follow the expertise, in fact, there they were twoa scientists a geneticist who it worked in bosnia herzegovina would come from the armed forces dna identification laboratory so i was tracing back here both of those individuals have had a hand in the identification of the vietnam unknown soldier. i got in touch with one. i was able to tour the armed forces dna identification laboratory and that opened the door. it meant this ethnographic research where i am shadowing scientists day in, day out in laboratory and trying -- there's a black lab, she has arrived. let's just hope she doesn't mark. so then i would spend weeks trying to figure out what is forensic anthropological protocol with the set of remains. i never spent in depth time in

the armed forces demand identification laboratory. i have done a fair amount of work with nasa. and then gradually it was a point at which the head of then, then head of the scientific laboratory, the central identification laboratory in how i said if going to understand the forensic scientific process of it indication you need to go on a mission to see what a recovery mission is. without that access, this project would have been so different. i accompanied a mission, a recovery mission to central vietnam. it was the 28th day archaeological dig. we base camp which meant the structures for for a rudimey camp was set up. we spent the 28 days each day hiking up to a steep mountain so

in seeking to find remains of a flight that even ascertained as the pinpointed helicopter crash site. yeah, so that was working with military, incredibly fortunate, and wonderful group of teammates. the end of it we recovered remains and those remains led to the story of michael ray allen, and so that gave me the last portion of by research which was to follow the remains back to this little town that had been the locust of loss and the face of the celebrate homecoming. the scope widened a bit more because that little town had suffered three losses, one man was killed, body came home right away. merle ray allen was killed and his remains returned researchers later, then another person is still killed in action body

never recovered. in that little town working with the veterans i get a much better sense of what that were looked like decades later both with resolution, early on and then this protracted, ambiguous loss of the person who will never come home. the ethnographer, my task was to move across these spaces and to move through different machines of knowledge, different ways of knowing, thinking through a understand this process from the most scientific to the most intimate localized version, and that which i described in this little town of bayfield wisconsin. >> thank you. i have a second question that has to do with the ethnography side, and you met with people. your multiple and in-depth conversations. one certainly gets the sense of

the local meetings and the personal meanings of the war. what i didn't get a clear sense on is the extent to which it matters that this was the vietnam war, other than its position in time. world war ii, the good war. we fought nazis. this war, as you said earlier in your talk, was a contentious one. the chinese government for all of the talk now about the sacred, lied to the american people, lied to its own politicians, lied to the men and women who serve in vietnam. and i am wondering if in your discussions with the people that you talked to if there was any kind of reflection, critical or not critical, about this particular war, what it meant to

them in their historical memories and/or their thoughts about the government in relationship to the war. was this something that was just subsumed in the intensely personal that you talk about? >> no, no. i think there are moments where you see the anger and bitterness about this war, otherwise this is a celebration of a soldier returned home, to hear some examples. this third person from this little town, this community in northern wisconsin who's not returned, when when a family put on a 50th remembers ceremony like 50 days to the date of his death or disappearance, you know, standing at the back of the room was a vietnam veteran who talked about how the u.s.

government rights blank checks with every person who enlisted served and then, and he said and fairly strong tone, that it'd cached those checks of these three men. so very distinctly a critique of the government. in more subtle ways the person who might quote in introducing that community is a woman named mary defoe. she writes poignantly, she did not lose someone in the ways the other families. she lost her husband in 2015. he died come in her words, not just of lung cancer but more likely from ptsd. she shared a fair amount of her feelings about what that war stole from him, or took from them. and yet at the same time gave him his insistence he did want to be forgot. he wanted his service acknowledged. one of the things i stress, to

me the person, the figure that encapsulates that frustration, that anger, that sense of betrayal is one of the two guys from again from milwaukee, wisconsin, who built that motorcycle, the famous motorcycles as part of the vietnam veterans collection, artifacts left at the wall. he talked about, , really movin. he talked about he was with a group of other bikers who had come to the capital as part of rolling thunder, coming to memorial day weekend. he kept separate from the other bikes ended up roaming around d.c. d.c. can be a really disorienting place if you don't know exactly where you're going. he was thinking about that feeling of lost, like here is the nation's capital that the

sense of not knowing where he was and that feeling of having returned after the war and never really being welcomed home. that became their project. that bike is a message to the state, account for the missing but also recognize who we are, recognize what we gave. i think the shades of it. i also say, particular my wisconsin crew, if i can call them that, these are people who don't wear the politics on this leak. when they came home many of them told me, those who fought in the war, told me we were told not to come to take off her uniforms. take the bus back home, , you should be in civilian clothing. how did people treat you when you got back? well, they were happy to have me back, right? there's a sense in that

community that, how shall i say, that their own community, this is my point about the particularities of the local, that their own community welcomed them home. whether the nation at large welcome them home, that might be a sticking point that that's the advantage to spend some time with spaces outside the beltway to get a feel for how people live their lives over 50 years and what thorns are still in his sides and which ones have come to accept and according to what term? again, long-winded answer but i think it is there but it is also because frankly, that's the subtlety with which my interlocutors displayed regularly about this topic. >> thank you. before we open it up, christian offerman as a question. >> thanks, eric. sarah, really a a wonderful bk and fasting presentation, thank

you. i realized you're an and ethnographer but were in a historical premise you but if you could for the audience kind of put your book and the vietnam war efforts, recovery efforts into a broader historical context. take us if you could just quickly kind of the historical article from the civil war through the most recent war experience in terms of the effort to account, the effort to recover. and then secondly connected with that, where do you see your most important intervention with this book? place it all of in the context as well. >> very good. as i say, took me a while to understand. i needed to do better and

contextualizing the vietnam war and it became clear to conversations into conversation with historians. early on i had read a book which allowed me to see that the notion of repatriation is income doesn't begin with world war i. in fact, it's that sense that whole system was built up around northern body at needing to return, which ford still could be the south. that kind of blew my mind. i hadn't been thinking about it in those terms. in the world war i. i will say the best work on commemoration on working memory for me as an early stages of this project was to read j winter, thomas lacour. i was very lucky to have him come for for a book workshod about me sure up the historical account of the book.

i just finished teaching with my graduate students insights of memory insights of mourning. this is such a seminal book for anyone who works on commemoration in the war dead and the politics. i do think if i can jump ahead a little bit and say, he catches on something that resonated and i knew that that's for my work would articulate. i'll come back to the animal. let's say in world war i you had a decimation of bodies unseen come and experience before so that 10 million people died, 5 million of them are unrecovered, may not come back. there's this rupture of the sense of where do they belong. what is interesting is for the american, the american family member of a world war i loss, they want when given the opportunity to decide if you

want the remains to lie where they fell? their response, 70% was no, we want them home. that is a tradition that continues and i would say gains force. world war ii it is 65% of families. there's been fantastic work that looks at the unknown buried in military cemeteries, doing sort of soft diplomacy of rendering visible to europe what were the sacrifices they u.s. made on behalf of the world, on behalf of europe to stop the war. so there are others have written about that but i focused on that number, that the majority of families wanted those remains to come back to that repatriation, it's strong and it is gaining force. by the korean war i read and learn this is something that is concurrent term. this is a practice during the war, military is involved not

waiting for after the treaties to be signed but rather during the war as battles raging, that remains are to be returned. and then the vietnam war, this is already in effect. i think was helpful to learn from some of my colleagues, not just about the forensic scientific changes but also the tactical changes the way vietnam was fought. the iconic helicopters, the helicopters were about insurgents. molin ray allen was part of session being inserted but it's also about extraction, the billy to take the wounded and the dead out from the battlefield, out from the war and back home. these are things that it took me a while to appreciate but it wasn't a one-off. this was building and was a cultural sensibility in the never tactical operational aspects of how the u.s. decided its worst and the other

scientific advance of dna testing. that story, , it wasn't immediately aware to me. if i can circle back to world war i. so much of j winters writing and tom, they help me understand the democratizing impulse of recovery on the battlefield, and insistence on naming, like the naming of the grunt, the naming of the lowest on the military hierarchy, that that persons body needed also to be recovered. in j winters work he spends time thinking about what memorials and monuments do, right, as the space of bereavement and the morning that help a community whose fabric has been torn asunder, to begin to stick it back together and appeal to one another. he talks about how the monument

is inscribing in some central place in the village subscribing the names of those who died but in the state also pointing to the families who will need help, who will need support. and that i thought, i knew i needed to study that after graphically, and though it's 50 years, 60 years late, that's what i was hoping to get at in seeing how families, communities, veterans came together around these for winter were not remains to be returned. >> thank you. we have some hands in the queue and questions in the q&a and with some questions from e-mail. so first up will be james. her hand is up. if you could unmute yourself you can ask your question. >> take you, eric. and thank you, professor wagner. i ask this question as a veteran who served in the u.s. army many

years ago and in france where there are bodies, french, german, americans that have never been found. i was sensitized to this problem then and have been fascinated amateurishly, though historian, since then. as you were speaking, i thought of an extraordinary documentary that i saw some five, six is ago, maybe you've seen it. it's called taking chance. it's the documentary of a journey of the body of a soldier from my guess the air force base, dover air force base in delaware to his hometown and the care and dignity with which the military arm, i think was the marines, a court that ceremony in making the journey of this body possible. so i'm interested, i have a cousin who lost his life also in

the second world war. his death certificate, and he is buried at arlington but his death certificate reads head not found, which means that part of him remains in italy someplace. .. >> can you imagine treating all of the dead that were

lost in the first and second world war the way we treat individuals now coming home from afghanistan with the care with which we treat the search for missing in action in the? >> thanks so much for your comments and thoughts on a number of very important themes. i'm not sure i can respond to all of them but let me start with where you began which is this film with kevin bacon and i could be wrong. i remember thinking speaking with the son of an air force pilot who lost his father when he was 6 1/2. and one of the things that you described is the

extraordinary surprise he felt when he learned that remains had been recovered and frankly he never mentioned someone was searching for his father's remains. he was not one of these many families who werepolitically mobilized so when he got that call it was totally out of the blue . so we spoke on a couple of different occasions and he asked me if i had ever seen the stone and the reason why he wanted to go is he felt the film had captured so much of that attentiveness to ritual and that elements of performance in, a performance of respect that especially the military escorts have in

bringing literally bringing those remains back to the family. so i wanted to acknowledge that film is a good portrait and resonated at least with one family member who i think is very attentive to this process of one, which is incredibly costly and that he feels his family to be extremely fortunate for getting remains and that his father has been returned. there is this, aside from the ritual care, i think there is a flip side to the ethos of exceptional care that i explore in the book and that's that expectation that we have come to think of forensic science as all-powerful. that it happens like dna especially, that in 24 hours you have your results and it is absolutely certain.

and that the science will, this is what i mean when i write that response to the stigma of defeat but the problem and i've witnessed this firsthand is the problem that families now assume that that's what necessarily must happen and can happen and will happen but if there are no remains recovered or if those remains are recovered and yet thereisn't , and i know you know the kind of examples of this where are certainly several examples where remains are maybe not going to yield maybe not enough to yield many examples. maybe the remains are so degraded because of the conditions inwhich they were located . but there will be no definitive dna profile to match up. so there is a sense that the science can do it all.

and when it doesn't deliver, that's extremely frustrating . so you referenced world war ii losses. one thing that i'm always a little bit surprised by and chris, you may want to wait in here because i find so fascinating is i'm surprised by their are some world war ii families that have essentially sued the state. if gone to court to insist that the defense department do a better job to, they believe they know that remains are buried in the national cemetery, those unknowns are definitely more relative and there's usually a couple of generations removed and there's a sense that that case should jump the queue and it should be, that case should be resolved immediately. and i sometimes think about

again what i've learned and i'm not answering for anyone, if anyone want to correct me feel free but i have the impression that around world war ii losses particularly for thefamily there was a kind of stoicism . this was not something that people -- they brought it home and they put it away. theydidn't have that same sensibility . so we live in a different era. we already live in a tedious society but there weren't outsized applications of with this process can achieve and some of this has to do with our not understanding the nuances ofthe science itself . i can see you may have something to add. >> it gets to the messiness of the actual work and messiness of war in andof itself because on the one hand , i think there is a common there is that stoicism will will put it away and

endure but then there's also the constant worry point that puzzle that hasn't been solved, that peace that never has been found, that piece that's still missing, what happens to that and i care in a way about that that helps me worry and assault something. certainly you see that in, from the perspective of any individual case. that's what matters. when you talk about there being a cue of cases, that's impossible to understand . how can one mean more than another? how can you judge which one to work on today andwhich one next week ? aren't all of them of equal weight and when they are of equal weight how do you constantly make progress and show you care and that broadway just to show that you'rehelping to advance the many ?when you talk about the families that want to push their own case where they think there's a clue or

something that can leave them there there is still also a world war ii nuance. is that someone? is that your loved one? is that where the ultimate clues will end up? we don't know for sure and we know mistakes were madeand you talk about we've only included our most recent mistakes . there's also that challenge. for world war ii be recovered and identified 280,000 people after world war ii using the science and technology that was available in the 1960s. and what you're really talking about if you make one percent of error, then that's a quarter of all the unknowns are really mistakes that we have to work through so that also highlights why we have to have an ethos of care that acknowledges that the zone of problems and an ethos that really tries to push ahead with what we can do, what we can prove and have standards of proof that do withstand that level of scrutiny.

>> thank you. we have a hand up with john martin. if you would unmuteyourself, you can ask a question . we see that you are still muted. >> there we are. >> thank you. i don't want to take a lot of time on my question because it's selfishly entered and i wondering what happened when a brother like myself is common or rare. we both served in the vietnam war and my brother served as a company clerk in the marines in an air squadron and was ambushed one night,, he was this private and one for silver star for his bravery .

i was drafted in the 60s about 10 years before him. and was assigned to germany. we met again in washington. in the 1990s and went to the vietnam wall . and as we stood there my brother to the names and finally he said oh my god. he was still alive when i put him on the chopper. and i wonder if that's a common experience. the other question is 10 years later, daniel ellsberg wrote secrets, his memoir of the vietnam war and the pentagon papers and i was serving as a journalist in washington at the time and i got it and when i started teaching at columbia i was just overwhelmed by the, by what you saying and doing and i said copy to my brother in california. and his wife erected in anger and sent it back and told me i had no business doing that.

we still don't talk about this. all these years later. is this common? >> there's a lot there. let me start with the wall and let me say as i look at some of the attendees, there's some very special people who would like to say a word or two but. [inaudible] and as you describe that moment of encounter, of finding a name and that tragic realization that the person you once thought to be safe in fact died. i reference a woman from this little town in northern wisconsin. and mary's husband had a similar experience. and it was the experience of knowing that his best friend or presuming that his best

friend had been killed in an airstrike thathe himself had had to call . and the extraordinary guilt that he lived with and in fact, took a while to really understand this but i think it was more a case that her husband had assumed he had died when his best friend had in fact survived and the sadness and that realization that these two men after the war had never learned one another's fate. and this is confusing but maybe a little confounding and it perhaps is nacvetc on my part that when people came home and often i hear from veterans that they weren't coming home as agroup, they were coming back on their own that there was the sense of

putting the war behind them . and of not knowing how or not having i don't know, that feeling, that what the right course of action would be to figure out. and then as you describe to learn that as a name listed on a beautiful but abstract and powerful memorial but one that was so jarring in the number of names and way in which you yourself were reflected in the sheen of that etched stone. so i say all this to say your story doesn't surprise me, but in a way it saddens me because i think it was true i don't know for how many people but this war was not one people came home and reached out to one another. it was years later when they found their way to a vfw post

or even now as retirees they have more time, they have more emotional space to kind of thing through the memories and connect withpeople. but again, i'm not sure . i wouldn't say that i've done in depth andphotography of that experience . i'll leave it there and i wonder if pam, if you might wish to either now or in a few minutes talk about your experience about what the wall has meant to you as a space of encountering and honoring your father but i'll put that out there but i understand if you would not wish to say a few words. >> if you wish, that's the raise hand function and i'll be able to call on you. until then we have a question from the q and a function

from larry berman who asks can you discuss the efforts on finding the missing on the vietnamese side? >> wonderful question. i've had the good fortune in the last few years to begin to pair up with a vietnamese scholar, she's at the university of amsterdam and riyadh which is a bit like the russians science foundation for the dutch and she has embarked on a multi-year study as again after the graphic and archival research into the vietnamese experience and particularly its efforts that have been ramped up in recent years to recover and identify its 300,000 missing. so we talked regularly, has a research team and the hope is we will begin to work together a little bit shedding light on the american experience

particularly when the vietnamese experience but it's been fascinating . she began her experience looking at the vietnamese government. it was slow to not embrace but slow to say we will build up the laboratory capacities, the genetic capacities to seek to identify all 300,000 and now that it has, it's a combination of local resources but also partnerships with multinational biotech firms. it's ongoing and the scholar tom neil has been a fantastic interlocutor. she weighed in on my research at early points helping me understand the things that were necessary to augment or provide more nuance. my understanding orthe vietnamese understanding , but it is a process that is

just recently underway in earnest and what i mean is certainly there have been recoveries and rituals and burial spaces for the vietnamese missing, not the south vietnamese but there now is this new era of dna led identification and they partnered with an organization that was functional to the work so it should be a fascinating story to watch unfold. but i personally right now i'm just at the event is from afar. >> we have a question from a historian at carnegie mellon who is working on. war pow and mia issues and has a number of questions but i'll ask in a moment one in particular.

they write i read your article about k208, i'm not quite sure about vietnam but my personal thinking about north korea is some north koreans want to make identification difficult in order to demonstrate their hatred of americans. could you describe how forensic science has intervened in pi pow mia diplomacy? >> that's a fascinating question and not one i'vedone a ton of research on . capably, this is a set of remains and multiple remains were turned in the early 1990s,from 1991 and chris, correct me if i'm getting this wrong . there were 208 boxes essentially and the presumption was that 208 individuals inside those extensive co-mingling so that one set of names coming from one box may contain multiple

individuals. so this has been an in or miss puzzle for the forensic anthropologists and the forensic anthropologists have had torely heavily on genetics or dna testing . it's been slow going but there's been a significant amount of progress as well so that cases have gradually yielded, i don't know what is it about 150? the last time i checked it was around i don't know how much more that come out of it . >> it's a little about 200 now. >> sorry, but we want to say there are approximately 600 individuals presumed to be part of the k2 h cases and these were recently, those of you who may remember from on the singapore summit, 55

boxes again of remains returned so those who are significantly co-mingled and identifications have been, they yielded identifications but those two will be slow going. but the larger question is on the part of the north koreans, it is if there is an attempt to stymie identification . i would not venture, i know there are cases where recovery is done in the late 1990s, to thousands. there's sites of recovery that may have been not the most genuine sites, meaning in the parlance of archaeologists, the remains may have been placed on sites and then us teams will direct to those sites, excavation took place and they could tell that the skeletal

elements were recovered and they are but presumably had been placed there. >> i was going to say it is not straightforward but i think we would be premature to describe deeply nefarious intent. at the end of the day this is about the us and us military in southeast asia dropping its military personnel on the default southeast asian country that are still dealing with the vestiges of extraordinary bombing and chemical warfare and so forth . one can imagine that this is not this straightforward,, here are your remains. that these are part of a larger geopolitical negotiations . that said, i don't know enough to ascribe a mal intent to each and every one and chris, weigh in ifyou

know that . >> certainly, we have examples from base collections and different opportunities we've had to work with in north korea to know that we have gone to sites that appear to have been prepared. we have found remains in the early 1990s turnover also at sites that they've taken us through and from the remains that were turned over from the following singapore summit. some of those remains have been combinations of we found sites from a site recovery site in 2000 and there's some remains in the fall. but whether there's mal intent, i think it's less that then there's, the us mission does not seem very straightforward in these other cultures and other societies. it seems like they've been very concerned about a drop in the bucket compared to the large number of people who they know were killed in their country and it being so concerned that you pull off all the other political

progress for all the other military talks until you stratify this one element. it's very hard to translate very hard to understand but that's also where our humanitarian mission is embedded in these larger geopolitical challenges and it is something that we had to work very hard. normalize the relationship with vietnam was held contingent on them providing all of this information. so the incentive was never how do i get all of these things done, how do i solve these mysteries for these people people i can't ever solve? i don't know what happens in laos says that negotiator on the vietnamese side. i don't know how i can answer thatquestion adequately . but i can try to work with you and come up with solutions but again, when you make everything contingent on that, it gets difficult to parse out the other geopoliticalinterests . >> thank you. it's past 5:30 and i think we could go on for much longer

but am afraid i have to draw this to a close. i want to thank sarah and chris and turn this over to christian to wrap us up . >> an eric. let me remind our viewers that we hope to see you again at our next session. this wednesday, december 2 when we will discuss columbia university historian victoria ross yes new book the perfect fascist. a story of love, power and mussolini in italy. thanks to sarah, chris and eric for really a terrific conversation. thanks to all of you, to our audience for watching and participating. we are adjourned. stay safe and be well. take care. >> you are watching tv on c-span2 every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. book tv on c-span2, today

brought to you by these television companies who provide book tv to viewers as a public service. >> you are watching book tv on c-span2. television for serious readers. there are problems towatch out for tonight . professor yasmin talks about misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic. and former fbi assistant director for counterintelligence frank d lucy shares his thoughts on the bureau standards and how it operates. that all starts tonight at 8:20 eastern and you can find more information on your program guide or online at booktv.org. >> joyce weatherford is the author of victory for the boat