The Forensics of War

The Forensics of War

PURSUITS

SARAH E. WAGNER ’94

What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home From the Vietnam War

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 304 PP. $29.95

WITH HER THIRD BOOK, WAGNER EXAMINES the efforts to locate, identify, and return the remains of U.S. military personnel who went missing during the Vietnam War. “Over the past decade, I have traced the arc of Vietnam War MIA accounting along the line of science and its social import, paying particular attention to how its advances have influenced, indeed changed, the way the United States as a nation remembers and honors its fallen service members,” writes Wagner, an associate professor of anthropology at George Washington University.

Wagner, a Guggenheim fellowship receipient in 2017, interviews veterans, forensic scientists, policymakers, current members of the military, and the families of the missing. She notes that new advances in forensic science have provided powerful new tools to identify remains, raising the hopes of families with missing loved ones. She spends 28 days with a recovery team as it searches the jungle for the remains of five Vietnam soldiers lost in a helicopter during the war. One chapter details the meticulous fieldwork of sifting through fragmented and partial remains, “bits of bone and teeth that may barely fill your palm....There is no evidentiary silver bullet, though DNA and dental analysis often provide the data that tip the scales of probability and exclusion,” Wagner writes.

She traces America’s unique tradition of repatriating soldiers’ remains back to the Civil War, when the carnage of 600,000 bodies forced new ways of thinking about death—and new forensic tools to solve the mysteries of the vast number of unidentified corpses on battlefields. During World War 11,19 percent of U.S. fatalities were unidentified, in the Korean War, 22 percent. During the Vietnam War, less than 4 percent were unaccounted for, yet the United States spends roughly $130 million each year on repatriation efforts, an amount unequalled by any other country.

The MIA designation creates an unusual uncertainty. “How does one remember a person who is neither definitively dead nor positively alive?” asks Wagner. “I have come to appreciate science as another ‘language of memory’—it too frames how we see and understand war’s human tolls and shapes what recovery efforts and identifications mean to families of the missing and veterans, most of them far removed from the inner circles of Beltway policymaking.”

Sean Plottner

alumni books

EDITOR’S PICKS

RICHARD KENNEY ’70

Terminator: Poems, 2008-2018

Knopf

Kenney, an English professor at the University of Washington, focuses his fifth book on poems that range from discussions of boundaries to questions about neckties. Sometimes humorous and sometimes sad, they provoke thoughts about the past, the future, and everything in between.

DOUG WHITE ’75

Wounded Charity: Lessons from the Wounded Warrior Project Crisis

Paragon House

White, former director of Columbia University’s master of science in fundraising management program, discusses the criticisms surrounding the Wounded Warrior Project. He investigates the failure of the charity’s leadership but also defends its beneficial aspects. Demonstrating the ways all charities can learn from the incident, he states that they “need to provide better evidence than they do now that the world is a better place because of their work.”

STEPHEN J. FARNSWORTH ’83

Late Night with Trump:

Political Humor and the American Presidency

Routledge

What would TV talk show hosts do without politicians? Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington, analyzes tens of thousands of late-night jokes since 1992 and offers analysis of “the golden age of political comedy.” Political humor was somewhat gentle and less frequent, he explains, until Bill Clinton came along. And Trump? Of some 6,337 jokes told by TV hosts in the first year of his presidency, more than 49 percent targeted him.

BELINDA H.Y. CHIU ’98

The Mindful College Applicant: Cultivating Emotional Intelligence for the Admissions Process

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

A former college admissions officer combines her experience with research on emotional intelligence in this guide for prospective students. “I was compelled to offer something to help shift the current stress young people go through each year to ‘get in,’ ” Chiu tells DAM. “Given the recent national news about the process, I feel it is even more important for young people to know that there is a healthier way.”

Additional titles and excerpts can be found on the DAW website.