Oregonian travels the world finding service members Missing in Action

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency recovers American service members who were listed as prisoners of war or missing in action during their service. Earlier this year, the agency recovered U.S. Navy Aviation Ordnanceman First Class Anthony Di Petta, who was killed during World War II. His remains were located in the Republic of Palau.

The federal agency partnered with Project Recover, an organization that uses science and technology to find missing service members worldwide. Derek Abbey is the president and CEO of Project Recover. He is based in Bend but travels around the world working on missions for the organization. He joins us with details of his work and why he continues to locate service members that have been missing for decades.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Pentagon announced last month that it had accounted for a service member who had been missing in action. U.S. Navy Aviator Anthony Di Petta was killed in Palau in World War II. His remains were finally found after 79 years. The federal agency behind the announcement partnered with Project Recover. That is a nonprofit that works to find some of the more than 80,000 service members all around the world who’ve been missing in action since World War II. Bend-based Derek Abbey, a Marine veteran, is the president and CEO of Project Recover. He joins us now to talk about this work. Derek Abbey, welcome.

Derek Abbey: Thank you, Dave. It’s a pleasure to join you today.

Miller: I want to start with the very first mission that you took part in with what’s now called Project Recover. This was to search for a Marine who was missing in action and had actually been in your exact squadron 70 plus years earlier. Do you mind telling us that story?

Abbey: Yeah, that was the mission that really hooked me on to this work for… now it’s been close to two decades. At the time, the organization, or the group, was called the BentProp Project, and I was invited to be a member. The very first mission I went on was a mission searching for this Marine aviator. As it turned out, the Marine was a member of my squadron. I was in VMFA-121 as a modern-day Marine and flying out of Miramar, and this Marine was a part of the squadron during World War II. And we were able to find his site.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for what that search was like?

Abbey: Yeah, it’s a lot of hard work – blood, sweat and tears – that goes into years and years of effort. Ultimately, it starts in the archives or some museum, putting the case together and interviewing veterans and elders and hunters and fishermen and stuff in jungles and waters all over the world. This was in Palau as well. Then we take a scientific approach to the effort, finding and collecting all the evidence that we can to find the best spots to search. And then we go into the jungles, deep jungles, to grid out a search pattern for these sites and spend a lot of time searching for them. Sometimes, as in this case, we go into these very, very dense mangroves and we find it relatively quickly. But in other cases, sometimes it takes decades to locate the site.

Miller: What evidence were you and the team able to find on that final search?

Abbey: Well, for that specific case, we were able to find a very, very small piece of wreckage. That’s typically how it occurs: we find one small piece and then we tend to scour that area and then find a lot more. That’s what happened in this case. We were in a very, very dense jungle. We found one small piece of aluminum. We very quickly determined that it was aircraft related. Then we fanned out from there, scoured more and more of the mangrove jungle, found a lot more aircraft. From there we were able to establish a debris pattern and then find evidence that determined what type of aircraft it was and then specifically, exactly what type of aircraft it was and who was associated with it.

Miller: Were that particular Marine’s remains ever recovered or just the plane that he was flying?

Abbey: Actually, this is still an open case. We’re still working to conduct the recovery in that area – to recover those remains and osseous material related to that Marine and any other artifacts that can help with the identification and bring them back to the lab – so that remains an open case. That’s not unusual for a lot of these cases where it can take years to find the final resting place for that individual or those individuals, recover those remains and transport them appropriately back to the labs in the United States where an identification will take place. Then ultimately they’re repatriated back to their loved ones.

Miller: What does it take for the DPAA [Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency], that’s an agency within the Defense Department, to officially announce that a service member has been accounted for? I guess I’m wondering if they ever say officially that this Marine, this Airman, this soldier is no longer missing in action, even though we haven’t found their remains?

Abbey: They need some sort of 100 percent evidence that the individual is accounted for. In this case, it will need to be some sort of osseous material or remains from that individual for them to close the case. They won’t close it until they can 100 percent say that this Marine or [inaudible] service members have been accounted for.

In the case of Anthony Di Petta, we were able to recover osseous material from this crash site and return that to the United States. They went through a blind identification to determine that this was actually him. Then once that occurs, the family is notified and they’re officially accounted for.

Miller: Do you remember what was going through your mind when you saw some of the telltale pieces of airplane parts and you knew you had found this navy plane?

Abbey: Well, you get a flood of emotion in every single case. You know all the hard work that went into finding this, everybody that contributed to it: from our historian combing the archives, from those that program the robots – in this case to find this site underwater, to diving in and determining which site it was. You know all the effort that went into getting to this point, but then also the flood of emotion in knowing everything that’s going to take place after this point. Families are going to have answers to the questions that they have had, for decades in this case. The truth is finally going to come home. They’re gonna know what happened to their loved one. That allows healing and the grieving process to continue in cases where it’s been interrupted for decades.

There’s an incredible feeling of accomplishment and victory in locating the site, but it’s also very somber. It is a grave site. You have these somber feelings and knowing that this individual, or perhaps the entire crew if it’s a multiple crewed aircraft or site with multiple people, they sacrificed everything that they had so that we can live with the freedoms that we live with today. It’s a very special moment; it’s an all-consuming emotion. It’s a number of emotions. But it’s very fulfilling, that’s for sure.

Miller: I want to turn back to the case of Anthony Di Petta, whose discovery was recently announced by your group and by the Pentagon. What can you tell us about his story?

Abbey: Well, he was missing since 1944. September 10, 1944 was when his Avenger was on a mission in the island nation of Palau in the South Pacific. Unfortunately, they were shot down and went missing and had been missing since that date. We were very sure that the entire crew was lost. Although every single family holds on to hope that they somehow survived, in every single case that we’ve worked on these service members were killed in action as well as being missing. We had been working on his case for more than two decades actually. We knew that the aircraft was missing. We knew that it was within the confines of the nation of Palau and the general area that it was located. We found a piece of it about a decade prior to finding the primary debris field. That was a wing in relatively shallow water in a lagoon, so we knew that the aircraft had to be somewhere close by.

In 2012, our nonprofit started partnering with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Delaware. What they brought to our mission was the incredible capability of utilizing automated underwater vehicles that could basically map the ocean floor using side-scan sonar. That really advanced our mission significantly. We could now search the ocean floor utilizing these robots, which was a lot safer and a lot more quick. Then when we would find points of interest using that side-scan sonar, we would simply dive [to] them using scuba to determine if they were man-made. If they were man-made, then were they aircraft and if that aircraft was the aircraft that we were searching for.

So, a few years after partnering with them, in 2015, we were searching parts of Malakal Harbor in Palau and found some points of interest that appeared to be man-made, and when we dove that site, discovered that it was the aircraft associated with Anthony Di Petta. We quickly determined that it was exactly that aircraft and turned all that information over to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Then, in partnership with them down the road, [we] actually conducted a recovery mission in 2021. Another organization also did a recovery mission on this site. And then that’s when the osseous material and the remains of Anthony Di Petta were ultimately recovered. Over the next couple of years, they went through the identification process until the beginning of this year where it was determined that it was in fact him. And now he is accounted for.

Miller: What you’re talking about here is recently the work of decades. But that follows earlier searches and attempts to either recover people or recover their remains. What makes these remaining missing in action cases so challenging?

Abbey: Well, if they were easy to find, they would have been found by now. That’s the easy answer to it.

Miller: Right, I guess that’s sort of the obvious piece of it. I guess I’m not sure if what I’m asking is a question of topography or depth of oceans or the thickness of the jungle, but I guess I’m wondering what makes these so challenging?

Abbey: It is exactly that. A lot of these sites that we’re looking for are deep in the ocean or corners of the ocean or in jungle environments or forest environments that they have yet to be discovered – many times places that a lot of people are not frequenting or that are hard to access. So, they’re definitely difficult, but technology continues to advance. That opens more and more area that allows us, hopefully, to find more and more of those that are still missing. Our intention is just to keep on working until we get that number as close to zero as possible.

Miller: The number is daunting though. As you noted, just for Anthony Di Petta’s case, your team had been working on this for more than 20 years – ultimately successfully, but that’s just one of more than 80,000 cases. And my understanding is the number is even higher than that if you include missing in action from, say, training missions. How do you reckon with the scale of that denominator, the scale of the missing?

Abbey: It’s intimidating. But it’s not impossible. I tell people all the time… As you mentioned, I was in the Marine Corps. We have a lot of ceremonies in the Marine Corps. When I was a young Marine, we would always recognize our prisoners of war and missing in action. In my head I’d say a silent prayer, but I couldn’t fathom how I’d be able to make a difference. Even when I first started this work with Project Recover, I never thought that we would have the success that we have had. However, we have a lot of resilience. We have a lot of persistence. We’re expanding our capabilities every single year, and we have information related to a lot of those cases. Our historian has built out our database to include about 700 cases associated with 3,000 missing Americans. That’s actionable information that we can take tomorrow when the resources are available. Coming out of COVID, our biggest challenge is exactly that: just resources available as a nonprofit organization to execute these missions.

Miller: In other words, if you had just countless teams of divers or pilots or land-based search teams, tomorrow you’re ready to execute searches in places that you have reason to believe could be fruitful.

Abbey: Absolutely. We’ve created a model and protocols that have proven successful, and it’s just a matter of getting those people with those skill sets in the field to find and ultimately bring these cases to a close.

Miller: I imagine that one of the tricky things is communicating with families, and in a way that is honest and shows that you’re doing work, but that doesn’t give them false hope. These are families who have been dealing with the pain of a very specific kind of mystery and uncertainty for close to a century, for almost 80 years in some cases. At what point do you loop families in? At what point do you talk to them?

Abbey: Our general policy is we don’t reach out to families for the reason that you mentioned exactly. We’re not gonna establish any false hope. We’re not gonna ask anything of them. We would never ask anything of a family member. Of course, we are contacted on a regular basis by families. Once that line of communication is open, our policy is of course to not keep any information from them. So, if we have information related to their loved ones, we’ll share anything that we have. Or if something pops up down the road, we’ll share that information with those families.

We do encourage families to reach out to us to establish that line of communication because many times these family members have information related to their loved ones, and it might be just that one last piece of information that we need to be successful in locating them. Our general policy is we don’t reach out to them unless the case has come to a close, and it’s completely closed as in the case of Anthony Di Petta. But, once they reach out to us, of course we welcome that communication, and we’ll share any information that we have, and of course we’ll receive any information that they have and add it to our database related to their loved one.

Miller: What is it like in those cases when you can tell a family definitively, ‘We have found your loved one’s remains’?

Abbey: Yeah. It’s another one of those situations that’s not quite describable because of the amount of emotion that you feel from it. We have been honored to bear witness to the memorials and celebrations of these loved ones when they’re returned to their families and appropriately recognized in whatever fashion that they want. What we have witnessed is, families come together, communities come together, and it’s healing that occurs from the individual level, the family level, community level, all the way up to the national level now that this promise has been kept. It’s life changing for the families as you can imagine, but it’s just as life changing for each one of the members of my team when they contribute to this mission. It is a team effort, that’s for sure. Knowing that you’re having a healing impact on members of our community is very, very important to us. That we’re providing some sort of closure or answers to these family members is very, very important to us.

We just truly believe that, when you don the cloth of our nation and you swear on oath to the Constitution, that we as a collective make a promise to that individual and their family that we’ll do everything that we can to return them to their loved ones should they fall in battle. More than 80,000 of those promises have yet to be kept, but they don’t have an expiration date. We’re gonna do our part to keep that promise as part of that collective.

Miller: At this point, it’s very possible that no family or friends, or very few family or friends, who knew the missing service members are themselves still alive. That’s just a numerical reality if we’re talking about people who, say, were in planes that went down in 1944. Does that affect the way you think about this mission?

Abbey: It doesn’t at all. It’s sometimes surprising for people that don’t have a connection to an MIA, but even though the firsthand accounts, or the people that knew that person firsthand, may have passed or are no longer with us, that connection and that grief associated with that loved one is passed from generation to generation. Every single family that we’ve interacted with has some sort of altar in dedication to that loved one in their homes. They’ve assumed this mythical status. That grieving process has been interrupted, and that grief is maintained across generations. So, when you do provide the answers related to their lost loved one, I don’t care if it’s three generations removed; it’s just as important to that generation as it was to those that knew this individual firsthand.

There’s a difference between somebody that goes missing and somebody that’s killed in action. We’ve all lost loved ones and we know the pain associated with that and the grief associated with that. But when somebody goes missing, it’s different in the sense that the family holds on to hope. The regular role changes that occur when somebody is killed or dies in a family, those role changes don’t occur. It kind of puts a pause in the grieving process, and that is passed from generation to generation. So you can provide healing for these military Gold Star families by returning this loved one and… pretty amazing to witness, that’s for sure.

Miller: Before we say goodbye, we’ve been talking about this national number: 80,000 American service members missing in action. How many of them are from Oregon?

Abbey: There’s close to 1,000 Oregonians still missing in action. We’re very proud to say that our most recent repatriation, prior to Anthony Di Petta, was repatriated right to Springfield, Oregon. Paul Avolese was missing in action from Vietnam, and he was buried in Springfield last year. Hopefully we can continue to work on that 1,000 – or a little bit less than 1,000 that are still missing from Oregon – and get that number as well, as close to zero as possible.

Miller: Derek Abbey, thanks very much.

Abbey: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: Derek Abby is the Bend-based president and CEO of Project Recover.

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