There are roughly 81,000 American service members who are still listed as Missing in Action, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency or DPAA. And nearly 400 of them are from Arizona.
Later this month, a group of Arizona State University Army ROTC cadets will hopefully bring one MIA service member home.
Rich Ingleby is the director of the Arizona Center for the Missing in Action — a statewide organization that supports the research and recovery of missing U.S. military personnel stemming from World War II to current conflicts.
“It’s a process. It starts with historical research, going through the old records, crash and missing air crew reports from 1945 in this case," Ingleby said.
Troy Takesian, and ROTC cadet at ASU, is part of the team that'll be travelling to Poland later this month to excavate a WWII crash site where they hope to find the remains of missing service members, including one from Arizona.
“It's not something that people talk about a lot, but a lot of the people that fight in these wars for us, that sacrifice themselves and pay the ultimate price, they're never found.”
For Ingleby, it was important to have someone like Takesian — who is from Arizona — to help with the recovery.
“The experience that he's going to have is life-changing. He's going to work every day and he's going to get to know this air crew that's missing," Ingleby said. "He's going to see their faces and then hopefully be able to help bring them home" to a family who has been waiting for answers and much needed closure after more than 80 years.
Ingleby said most of the roughly 81,000 service members are from WWII. There are about 7,500 from Korea, and another 1,500 from Vietnam.
