A touching tribute and repair greater than 80 years within the making for the household of Francis Bud Hannon.
“My dad was waiting in California. He was in the Army,” defined Hannon’s second cousin Vanessa Helming. “And he and Bud were to take their R&R together. And Bud was at Pearl Harbor, and Dad said as soon as he heard that Pearl Harbor had been hit, he knew that Bud was no longer with us.”
Hannon was considered one of greater than 400 sailors killed onboard the USS Oklahoma…one of many first battleships hit in the course of the assault on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Hannon was simply 20 years previous and two years into his navy service.
“It was extreme loss to the family, extreme loss to his parents, my grandparents,” Helming mentioned. “It was just overwhelming.”
Some of Hannon’s remaining family members traveled to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl from Indiana for closure. He’d been buried right here for many years in graves with tons of of different unknowns recovered from the wreckage of the Oklahoma till 2015. That’s when the navy began Project Oklahoma with the objective of utilizing DNA testing to return recognized stays to their households.
“For a large project like this, where the remains are really commingled, we have to do a lot of DNA testing,” mentioned Carrie Legarde, a mission lead for Project Oklahoma. “And so that’s where we need family members involvement, because we need a DNA refrence sample from that family that we can compare to the remains.”
The course of takes time and includes labs throughout the nation. For this mission preliminary processing was carried out on the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency lab at Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam, then additional evaluation at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, and DNA testing on the Armed Forces Laboratory in Dover Delaware.
“And they provide us that information to help us kind of piece together the remains basically, it’s kind of like a big puzzle that we have to put together and sort out,” Legarde mentioned. “And once we can figure out which remains go together, we can figure out who they belong to.”
Officials began with 394 service members unaccounted for. They hoped to establish 80% of them however ended up figuring out 361 sailors, greater than 90%.
“It made it really exciting to get, as far as we did, of course, I’d love to identify all of them,” Legarde mentioned. “And it’s a little bit heartbreaking in a way to have some that we couldn’t. But we, you know, we surpassed what we thought we could do. And so that’s pretty amazing.”
Amazing for households who by no means thought they’d be right here, giving a cherished one a last resting place.
“It really helps re-establishing faith in the government and the military and it’s fantastic,” mentioned Thom Reddington, considered one of Hannon’s second cousins. “Something like this, I would never have believed and it’s just so exciting.”
“The most rewarding part of what we do is being able to talk to families or go to a burial, and see that all the way to the end,” mentioned Legarde. “And I think it helps kind of give you a boost in what we do, and a good reminder of how important this is and how, how meaningful it is to the families.”
In December 2021 on the eightieth anniversary of the assault on Pearl Harbor, the navy held a last reinternment ceremony for the remaining 33 unidentified USS Oklahoma sailors.
“I escorted the remains from Nebraska on that C-17 to Hawaii. And then we had a big ceremony here when they arrived here, and that was that was also really cool for me to be able to do. I was able to kind of see them once again to the end,” mentioned Legarde. “It’s kind of making me emotional right now. But you know, I got to escort them here, and then come back for the ceremony and so see them kind of all the way back to their final resting place.”
A reminder that no service member is forgotten.
“As a veteran, it has significance for me because we understand what the families go through and we understand what it means to them,” mentioned Gene Maestas of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl. “So it’s very important for us to make sure that we can assist in our way to provide this final closure.”
The navy additionally has tasks underway to establish different unknown service members from Pearl Harbor, in addition to the Korean War and a number of other different World War II battles.
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