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242 epilogue “What will be thought of the great adventure of the War Department in returning thousands of dead to the United states in fifty years or a century from now . . . is impossible to say,” mused Colonel Harry F. rethers, chief of the Paris office of the Graves registration service in 1920. optimistically, he predicted, “The story will serve to show the sincerity of men who honestly tried to carry out their mission well and who made the history they afterwards wrote.”1 The possibility that future generations might forget this war would have been considered an unspeakable tragedy by those who lived through it. The U.s. repatriation policy and the heritage landscapes that men created in an attempt to remember the apocalypse of their era have endured. ironically, memories of the First World War and its aftermath have been misplaced in favor of the multifarious Civil War monuments of reputed “bad taste.” Nevertheless, these national icons share a powerful hold on popular memory, along with the uniform rows of identical second World War headstones that emulate their more obscure predecessors.2 repatriation of the dead from overseas battlefields after 1920 was the catalyst that drove American First World War commemoration. Yet democratic choice, initially offered to assuage the grief of the living, also contributed to a massive diffusion of memory. With more than 60 percent of the known dead scattered in graves throughout the United states, interest in overseas commemoration was undeniably diluted. Generations later, ABMC records offer precise details regarding the burial locations of those within their national cemeteries, whereas the government maintained no records of servicemen’s graves once a body was released to families in the United states. in America’s transient culture, this information readily disappeared , leaving no trace of the deceased. Although a similar choice was offered to the public after the second World War, conditions were radically different. The aims of that “just” war were clearly achieved, and America’s role as a victorious power was firmly Epilogue 243 established by 1945; thus, the nation required few unifying commemorative structures to validate its contribution or to stir collective memory. When the ABMC met in 1947 to determine its second postwar direction, senator David A. reed, once more at the helm as chairman, stated that the erection of large monuments overseas was “unnecessary.”3 in July 1958, the enigmatic Gold star matriarch Mathilda Burling died in a New York nursing home at the age of seventy-eight.4 Her death came just months after the remains of two unidentified American second World War and korean War servicemen were buried in Arlington National Cemetery’s tomb of the Unknown soldier. These bodies were the last to rest there permanently, ending a practice that began in 1921, with disregard for Chaplain Charles Pierce’s plea that the United states return all the bodies of the unknown to Arlington for interment. He believed that there was still a chance that identifications could be made, and until that time, the burials would become “a mecca for all the mothers of the land whose dead could not be given back to them.”5 in July 1998, forty summers after those second World War and korean War burials, the remains of a vietnam veteran buried in the tomb of the Unknown fourteen years before were returned to his family and buried in st. Louis, Missouri. scientists using cutting-edge mitochondrial DNA testing , identified the remains as those of U.s. Air Force pilot First Lieutenant Michael J. Blassie, effectively fulfilling Pierce’s dream that one day no unknown soldier would ever be considered permanently unidentifiable. today, most Americans are probably unaware of the repatriation efforts of the Grs after the First World War, but they will indeed be familiar with images of soldiers’ caskets being returned home from contemporary war zones. The recovery work of early graves-registration pioneers such as D. H. rhodes and his unfortunate successor, second Lieutenant v. M. Conway, lives on through the military organization called the Joint PoW/MiA Accounting Command (JPAC) and the U.s. government’s Central identification Laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii. each year American taxpayers contribute more than forty-six million dollars to sustain its mission of searching for, recovering, and identifying America’s soldier dead.6 Although the majority of JPAC’s efforts are currently focused on locating and identifying second World War and vietnam-era remains, the organization is occasionally asked to investigate finds believed to...

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