Korean American Helps Identify Fallen U.S. Soldiers
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Korean-American forensic anthropologist Jennie Jin is the woman in charge of identifying the remains of U.S. soldiers who died in the Korean War and were recently handed over by North Korea.
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At Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu, Hawaii, Jin has the challenging task of identifying bones that were handed over without any aid to identification except a single dog tag.
Jin (39) graduated from Seoul National University with a degree in Art History, followed by a master's in anthropology from Stanford University and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. In June this year, she got a phone call from her boss at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency asking if she was willing to go to South Korea.
She was already pregnant with her second child but packed up and headed to Seoul believing she could not be left out of such an important event.
"Most of the bones aren't even fully grown, which means the soldiers were just 18 to 23 years old and died fighting in a country they'd never heard of. Could they have imagined they would die so young fighting in a place like that?" she said.
Thirty out of the 55 remains that were returned are supposedly those of soldiers who died during the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. "Temperatures dropped below freezing during that battle and American soldiers died without access to painkillers because the drugs were frozen too", Jin said.
Jennie Jin (second from left) looks at documents with officials from the U.S. and North Korea in Wonsan, Kangwon Province on July 27. /Courtesy of the U.S. Forces Korea
She always places the U.S. flag next to the remains when she analyzes them in her lab. Jin explains that she wants them to be greeted by the Stars and Stripes if they somehow rise from their sleep.
Jin has identified 330 fallen U.S. soldiers out of around 600 remains returned from North Korea since the 1990s. Thanks to the help of family members of fallen soldiers, DNA samples of around 90 percent of U.S. soldiers who went missing in action have been secured. The DNA in the bones of many soldiers has been damaged, making identification difficult, but Jin said some remains can be handed over to the families within months.
Jin's maternal grandparents were refugees from North Korea who fled to South Korea during the war. Her grandfather came to the South on a boat along with retreating U.S. soldiers who fought in the Battle of Chosin Reservoir.
"I heard my grandmother was captured and suffered in North Korean captivity as she fled to the South", she says. "I was deeply moved to receive the remains of U.S. soldiers found in Wonsan, where my grandparents must have passed through".