Linkmeister

Forensics

You rarely hear about it, but the military's Central ID lab is out here. Most of the time it only makes the news if a new set of remains from Vietnam is discovered and turned over to the lab for forensic examination, but it still has other work to do.

Currently the laboratory is identifying about 2 service men a week - over a hundred a year. There is one American still missing from Operations Desert Shield/Storm, and there are more than 1,800 from the Vietnam War, 120 from the Cold War, more than 8,100 from the Korean War, and more than 78,000 from World War II.

There are a couple of these labs; the San Antonio military ID lab

...is now working on 16 cases referred by the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command. Artifacts in the cases may fit into a shoebox or be 2,000 pieces. Each case takes two to six months or longer to complete. Technicians at the lab also work on more current cases, assisting in about 12 major investigations of incidents involving equipment failure on Air Force aircraft. The most recent involved a helicopter crash in Afghanistan earlier this year.

The lab can do infrared and ultraviolet examination to find serial numbers blurred by rust and time or separate blood stains from fuel spills.

But its most striking research aid is the extensive collection of military uniforms and equipment from World War I through today. It has one of the largest collections of aircraft ejection seats in the world, as well as complete cockpit sections of Vietnam-era F-4 Phantoms, Huey helicopters and the F-15 fighter.

Ejection seats? Man, there are a lot of oddities kept around in various places, aren't there?

Posted by Linkmeister at July 31, 2005 03:30 PM | TrackBack