Based on the article "The Bone Collectors" By Debra Rosenberg and Ron Moreau, Newsweek, July 16, 2001, p 26-27.

This is the amazing and sad story of the men who work full time to bring home from Vietnam the remains of the 1,966 American soldiers still listed as missing in action. Specialized teams of searchers and scientists including anthropologists are brought in to find and excavate fragile pieces of 30-year old bones and teeth located by the recovery unit. The evidence is shipped to the Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu where the remains are identified, often using new methods such as mitochondrial DNA testing, which has been used to positively identify 619 soldiers since 1973.

Seven American soldiers belonging to a recovery unit of the Joint Task Force/Full Accounting Team were killed last April when their helicopter crashed into a hillside in Vietnam. The American soldiers were working to fulfill their long-standing promise never to leave a fallen soldier on the battlefield. From 1999 to 2001 the team had recovered 83 sets of remains.

A new set of soldiers has replaced the ill-fated recovery unit and the search in Vietnam goes on.