PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
June 2016
395
A N I N T E R V I E W
A retired Naval Officer, founder of the MIA Recovery Network, and author of
Courtesies of the
Heart
, a book documenting the recovery of US Army Air Corps Lt William Lewis.”
KEN BREAUX
What is the MIA Recovery Network?
TheMIARecovery Network is a clearinghouse, an advocacy
group for the missing in action of all wars and their
families. We provide historical and archival information
to the families of the missing with respect to their loss,
assist other researchers in gathering of data to be used in
field searches, and to serve as a liaison between families,
government agencies, and field operators working overseas
when pursuing MIA cases.
Why did you start this organization?
While I was in the Navy, a friend of mine, Charles Lee, was
shot down. This affected me greatly. He was eventually
recovered in the late 1980’s by the Joint Personnel
Accounting Agency, now known as the Defense Prisoner
of War and Missing Person’s Accounting Agency (DPAA).
This was the first I knew of recovery efforts for MIA’s.
Even though I was anguished over the people I knew
who went missing in Vietnam, I didn’t think about the
WW II MIA’s until 2000 when a friend told me about her
father, Lt. William Lewis, who went missing in September
1944. I felt this was something I owed to any brother in
arms and offered to help. I started with an internet search
which lead to a clue; the record of Lewis’s last mission. One
clue led to another which led to more questions and more
clues. Her father was eventually recovered, and buried
in his hometown of Tulsa in 2004, with a very dignified
military funeral. I wrote a book about the experience, and
since then have been working closely with families of the
missing, particularly those MIA from WWII.
MIA Recovery Network was incorporated in June
2015 as a 501-c-3 organization, and our website is
miarecoverynetwork.com.
How can the MIA Recovery Network help the families of
MIA soldiers?
There are 78,000 WW II MIA and of that number the
Defense Department believes 25,000-30,000 can be
recovered and identified. The greatest number of these are
already buried as “unknowns” in military cemeteries in
the US, the Philippines, and Western Europe and North
Africa. We at the MIA Recovery Network assist families
in following the clues leading up to the time their loved
one disappeared. We have volunteers across Europe
and connections throughout the world as well as access
to government documents and the knowledge on how to
interpret these documents. A lot of it takes time and the
understanding that when a promising clue doesn’t produce
new information sometimes something that was originally
dismissed as insignificant can produce more information
leading us to more clues.
About once a month we and various other groups who do
MIA recovery get together. We have groups representing
Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, and World War II. We
get together on a conference call to talk to the people
at the Pentagon who run the Defense Prisoner of War
and Missing Person’s Accounting Agency. We exchange
information and leads on people we are searching for, and
are updated on DPAA’s search efforts worldwide.
In February I received an email from the mayor of a small
town in Germany. I had never met him or heard about him
but he heard about me from someone I had communicated
with. The gentleman emailed me and said he was very
certain they have an American soldier buried in their
little communal cemetery. I got his contact information
and shared it on the next conference call. One of the DPAA
groups had someone going to Germany the next week The
European DPAA Director then met the German contact,
and the remains were disinterred, and are now at a DPAA
