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Hearing for POW-MIA is first in 11 years

A House subcommittee has scheduled the first congressional oversight hearing in more than a decade to look at military efforts to locate and identify service members missing from past wars.

Navy Rear Adm. Donna Crisp, who heads to Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, and Charles Ray, the deputy assistant defense secretary for POW and MIA policy, will testify Thursday before the military personnel subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee.

One focus of the hearing will be joint efforts between the U.S. and China to discover the fate of missing Korean War veterans. An agreement signed earlier this year has opened Chinese archives that may contain clues to what happened to more than 8,000 U.S. service members unaccounted for at the end of the Korean War.

For example, on June 25, the Pentagon announced the identification of the remains of a Korean War soldier. The remains of Army Sgt. Gene F. Clark, who had served with the 1st Cavalry Division in 1950, were identified by military officials and turned over to his family for burial.

Clark’s unit, the 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, was attacked by Chinese forces and withdrew from its defensive positions along the Nammyon River, according to defense officials. Clark was one of more than 350 U.S. service members reported missing from the battle.

Clark was identified from remains that North Korea turned over to the U.S. in 1993, which pre-dates the new agreement on opening the archives.

Armed services committee aides said the hearing also will ask questions about whether POW/MIA operations are getting enough resources and attention in a Pentagon where military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are the top priorities.

The last armed services committee hearing was held in 1997, as Congress was considering an overhaul of the Missing Service Personnel Act that set up requirements for searching for missing service members, identifying remains and dealing with the families of the missing.