Inside what was once the Glenn L. Martin Bomber Plant building at Offutt Air Force Base near Bellevue, 20 forensic anthropologists hunch over long tables examining skeletal remains – searching for the tiniest of clues.

Together with other specialists including dental technicians and historians, these detectives use state-of-the-art scientific technology to solve the coldest of cases for the Department of Defense. Their job: identify military service members and civilian personnel missing from conflicts and wars from around the world.   With care and respect, the military returns the remains to families.

“We identify not just Nebraskans, but people who came from across the country to serve. This is incredibly humbling work,” said Dr. Franklin Damann, Offutt’s lab director for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. “Our work enables Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice to return home with respect and honor.”

Offutt’s forensic skeletal lab in what is now officially known as Building D, currently receives remains found in North America, Europe and Russia. The lab’s major identification effort for the past 5 1/2 years has been the USS Oklahoma Project.

Since 2015, the lab has had more than 5,000 DNA samples sequenced for this project. The effort has led to the positive identification of 338 of the 388 service members who died when the battleship sank at Pearl Harbor in 1941 but were unaccounted for when the project began.

“Sometimes people ask me, ‘These remains are from almost 80 years ago, does it still matter to identify these folks?’ I’ll tell you it absolutely does,” Damann said. “A missing service member has a generational impact on a family. Their story is passed down like a family Bible. To bring closure to a family is so important.”

The 2019 identifications of U.S. Navy machinist’s mate 2nd class Leo Blitz and U.S. Navy fireman 1st class Rudolph Blitz, twin brothers from Lincoln assigned to the USS Oklahoma when it was attacked, were especially poignant for the Offutt lab staff.

“Several members of our team were invited to the Blitz brothers’ burial, and we had a chance to meet their surviving family members,” said Offutt anthropologist Carrie LeGarde. “The experience was really emotional, but ultimately one that I treasure and reflect upon often in my daily work. I found it so rewarding to have a hand in closing this chapter for the Blitz family after all these years.”

More than 81,000 Americans  remain missing from various conflicts. Every year, the Offutt lab deploys anthropologists to places such as Laos, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, Russia and Panama to locate and recover remains.

According to Damann, Bellevue provides an ideal location for the U.S. military’s only mainland lab. He touts the area’s supportive community, and the lab’s proximity to military runways and aircraft. The lab partners with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of Nebraska Omaha to fuel advances in forensic science while providing a local training pipeline for students. 

The lab on Peacekeeper Drive occupies the building where 1,500 B-26 “Marauder” and 500 B-29 “Superfortress” bombers were built during World War II. Those aircraft include the “Enola Gay” and “Bockscar” bombers that dropped the atomic weapons that hastened the war’s end.

“I think it is amazing that the planes that carried the bombs that ended the war were built right here, in the same facility where we are now identifying some of the first U.S. casualties of that war,” Damann said. “We see this very neat historical arc – how Building D and the Nebraskans who have worked here – are connected to the very beginning and end of World War II.”