Warbird Information Exchange

In the three years of the Korean War, 8,177 United States servicemen were designated Missing In Action. At least 800 of these servicemen now rest in the Military Cemetery of the Pacific at the Punchbowl in Honolulu, Hawaii. Remains of others rest forever at sea and on land in both North and South Korea.


The Punchbowl remains are to date largely unidentified. The only potential means of positive identification is through DNA samples obtained from family members of the lost.

In addition to the Punchbowl remains, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) Laboratory at Hickham AFB in Hawaii has hundreds of remains ready for DNA matching and possible identification.

According to the Department of Defense, DNA samples are needed from family members of these missing.

As tensions between North and South Korea cool, many of the MIA's now resting in North Korea and the DMZ are expected to be repatriated to the United States. It is with great hope that many of these remains may be identified in the future through DNA analysis.

In August 2000, the Korean War Project, a non-profit corporation based in Dallas, Texas, began a program to identify the specific MIA servicemen and find their families. That project evolved into Finding The Families.

The Korean War Project maintains the most comprehensive public Korean War casualty database on the Internet.

With the cooperation of the four military services, the Project obtained the names of all personnel for whom DNA samples were needed from family members and placed flags on these names on the central Korean War Project casualty database.