Today's article from the San Francisco Gate 
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/11/13/state/n213041S25.DTL&type=printable

Scientists scouring clues to identify airman found in ice 
- By AUDREY McAVOY, Associated Press Writer
Monday, November 14, 2005 


(11-14) 00:01 PST HICKAM AIR FORCE BASE, Hawaii (AP) -- 


The airman's possessions, laid out on a table in a military lab, offer a peek deep into the past.

His pockets produced 51 cents in dimes, nickels, and pennies dating from 1920 to 1942. A neatly handwritten note tucked inside a faded address book reveals the words "all the girls know," though the rest of the letter is mostly decomposed and unreadable.

Forensic scientists at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command are using these and other clues to help them identify the body of World War II airman found in a California glacier last month. The Hawaii-based experts have spent the last few weeks meticulously examining his bones, taking DNA samples, and studying his teeth to learn who he was and when he died.

"We want to be able to understand what happened to him fully," said Robert Mann, deputy scientific director of the lab identifying the remains. "And we also want to be able to answer whatever questions the family may have about 'exactly what happened to my son, my brother.'"

Mann and his colleagues believe the airman was one of four aboard a navigational training flight that disappeared after taking off from a Sacramento airfield on Nov. 18, 1942.

So far they have determined the airman was Caucasian, in his early 20s, and stood between 5-foot-9 and 6-2. He had either light brown or sandy blond hair.

X-rays showed many of his bones were broken, indicating he sustained massive trauma when his plane crashed. He wore an unopened parachute.

Close examination shows a partially visible name on a heavily corroded metal badge attached to the airman's brown U.S. Army Air Forces uniform.

But though it would be easy to jump to the conclusion this name tells whose body it is, researchers want to identify him through dental records or DNA — not just by whose shirt he was wearing.

The airman generated a sensation when two climbers found his body protruding from the ice and snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains last month. Families of the men who perished on the 1942 Army Air Force training flight called the Fresno County Coroner's office to see if he was their lost loved one.

The POW/MIA Accounting Command has recovered and examined the remains of missing U.S. servicemen everywhere from Laos to Germany, but skeletons are usually all that's left of the bodies. Scavengers often run off with the belongings and even the remains of the dead, depriving scientists of valuable clues that could help in the identification.

This airman's mountain grave, however, had apparently been untouched since his plane crashed. The frigid temperatures mummified his remains, leaving flesh on his bones.

The flight from the Sacramento airfield was piloted by 2nd Lt. William A. Gamber, 23, of Fayette, Ohio. It also had three aviation cadets aboard: Ernest Munn, 23, of St. Clairsville, Ohio; John Mortenson, 25, of Moscow, Idaho, and Leo M. Mustonen, 22, of Brainerd, Minn.

Some remains from this plane were found and buried in 1947 in a group plot at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, Calif. But the lab hasn't been able to find records that say what or who was buried there.

The identification effort may be hampered because the cadets were at the beginnings of their military careers, meaning the Army may not have extensive medical files on them.

Complicating matters further, a 1973 warehouse fire in St. Louis destroyed most of the Army's original World War II-era records.

The lab has ordered the medical files of all four airmen from the mainland, said Thomas D. Holland, the lab's scientific director. So far the lab has only received the file for one, and it had virtually no useful information.

If the other three files contain good information, the lab may be able to identify the airman by early to mid-December. But if the lab has to rely on DNA analysis, scientists probably won't be able to identify him until early next year at least, Holland said.

Making a DNA match could also be tricky.

To identify remains through genes, the lab most frequently uses mitochondrial DNA, or a piece of DNA that people inherit mostly unchanged from their mothers.

Since everyone shares this form of DNA with their siblings and with their maternal cousins, there should be a pool of possible DNA donors for each of the four airman aboard the plane to cross-check the body's DNA against.

But one of the cadets doesn't have any living maternal relatives in the United States. Researchers may have to go to Finland, where his mother was from, to make a DNA match for him, Holland said.

Though the unique circumstances of the airman's discovery have put the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in the national spotlight, the scientists say their work on his case is fairly typical of the kinds of challenges they face.

They analyze the belongings and DNA samples of hundreds of missing servicemen each year and successfully identify the remains of about two people each week.

But that's only a small fraction of the roughly 1,100 sets of remains they have on site in the Hawaii lab. And it's an even smaller share of the nearly 90,000 Americans missing in action, including some 78,000 from World War II.

Mann marveled at the fortuitous timing of the climbers.

"We're just lucky that somebody walked by there when there was a thaw and his body was exposed," Mann said. "If not, he could have stayed there for hundreds of thousands of years."