More than 100 attend POW/MIA workshop
Jennifer O'Callaghan, left, a mitochondrial DNA analyst with the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, takes a DNA swab from Jack Gross Sr. of East Syracuse, Saturday, during an information session for relatives of servicemen and women missing in action. Gross wants to know what happened to his uncle, PFC Jack Henry Gardner, who was lost at Guadalcanal during World War II. The hope is to find, identify and recover the remains of the missing.
They attended to gather information and, if nothing else, to show they still remember the fathers, uncles, cousins and brothers lost decades ago.
More than 100 people from around the region and beyond signed up to attend a “Family Update, POW/MIA” workshop Saturday conducted by the federal Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.
The department holds eight outreach meetings a year around the country to answer questions for relatives of the missing, share specific information and collect DNA samples that can be used to identify remains. The federal contingent at the Doubletree Hotel off Carrier Circle included a DNA expert and representatives of military, among others.
Gene Pietras, 72, of Liverpool, had been to such meetings before and long ago gave a DNA sample. His family already possessed some facts about his uncle who went missing in the Korean War but Pietras was there to see if anything new had surfaced.
His mother, aunts and uncles are gone now, and he is the keeper of the effort to locate his uncle’s remains and have them brought home for burial.
Bernard Demski, from Rome, was a Marine reported missing in action in 1952, Pietras said. He was only five years younger than his uncle, whom he called Junior and looked up to as a role model. Pietras joined the Marines about five years after his uncle went missing.
“He was out on perimeter with four or five other fellas and what happened is they got attacked by the chicom -- that’s the Chinese Communist people. And they just shot everybody up. He got shot up pretty bad but they carried him off. They carried him off to a hospital some place in North Korea, a prison hospital. According to what they can glean out of it, he died in the prison hospital,” Pietras said.
When he and his siblings are gone, they want their children to remember the relative who fought and died for their country.
“It’s something that belongs to my family. We don’t want to forget, you know? We don’t want to forget,” Pietras said.
Jack Gross Sr., 63, of East Syracuse, has taken on a similar task on behalf of his uncle. He served in the Marine Corps and was lost fighting in World War II. Gross was named after the man he never knew, Jack H. Gardner.
The family never talked about Gardner, Gross said, but when his grandfather died in the 1960s, he left Gross a book about the 1st Marine Division in which Gardner served, plus some letters and paperwork about the son he lost.
Gross started digging about five years ago to find out what happened to his uncle, who was reported missing at Guadalcanal in August 1942. He gave a DNA sample Saturday. He doesn’t expect his uncle’s remains will be dug up and identified.
“I just want to know what happened,” he said.
Thomas Holland, scientific director and forensic anthropologist with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, was there Saturday to talk about the identification and recovery process. He said the government has unidentified remains of an estimated 500 service people from various wars decades ago.
Families sometimes get the news they seek, even after all these years. Charles Henley, an official from the missing personnel office, told families Saturday that four servicemen from World War II and several from Vietnam were just identified.
The mission to identify and recover the fallen continues over the decades because it is beyond politics, supported by Democratic and Republic administrations and lawmakers alike, Henley said.
He told the relatives at the Doubletree not to give up hope.
That was the way Pietras looked at it going in, even though he says the lack of cooperation from North Korea makes the outlook bleak at best for recovering his uncle’s remains.
“I guess you really can’t close the door anyway,” he said.
Contact Maureen Nolan at 470-2185 or mnolan@syracuse.com.