The Doughboy Still Waiting To Come Home

A sad tale.
"When Beverly Dillon’s home phone rang on a late summer evening in 2019, she ignored it. She didn’t recognize the number and assumed it was a pesky marketing call to her home in a small Montana town near Glacier National Park.
But as the caller began leaving a message on her old-fashioned answering machine — mentioning the surnames Vincent and McAllister — Dillon raced to pick up the phone.
“Yes! I was a Vincent before I was a Dillon, and my grandmother's maiden name was McAllister,” the self-described “genealogy nut” recalled saying. “I nearly jumped out of my skin I was so excited.”
On the other end of the line was Jay Silverstein, a forensic anthropologist who said he believed he had identified the remains of Pfc. Charles McAllister, her great uncle who died in battle during World War I.
Silverstein had just retired from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Hawaii, the U.S. government’s official agency tasked with bringing home the remains of the nation’s missing war dead, but this was the one case he could not bear to leave unresolved. The remains had been stored at the agency’s Hawaii lab for 15 years.
Dillon, now 80, and her son, Sean, submitted DNA samples to the Department of Defense DNA Registry in August 2019, for which she received a letter of receipt a few weeks later. It was the last contact she had from the government concerning the samples, she said. More than a year later, the case has gone nowhere.
Silverstein, who now teaches forensic anthropology in Russia, is frustrated with what he regards as DPAA’s foot-dragging on a case he insists could have — should have — been completed years ago.
Silverstein’s criticism of how the Defense Department operates its accounting effort is nothing new. He had been among the internal whistleblowers who complained of failings of the agency’s predecessor, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, sending a memo, for example, to the agency’s commander in 2012 describing shortcomings in efforts to recover World War II remains on Tarawa.
His complaints were among those that led the Defense Department to reorganize the effort to account for the nation’s missing warfighters by creating the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA, in 2015.
In a civil lawsuit he filed that same year in U.S. District Court in Hawaii, Silverstein alleged that certain agency personnel had retaliated against him over his complaints and other matters, a case he lost by jury trial in 2017.
Nevertheless, when Silverstein was leaving the agency last year, he was presented the Meritorious Civilian Service Award by Rear Adm. Jon Kreitz, then deputy director of DPAA.

‘Not authorized by statute’
DPAA Director Kelly McKeague outlined the agency’s position on the World War I case in a Nov. 23 letter to U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., in response to the lawmaker’s query.
The agency, McKeague wrote, is not authorized by statute to account for remains in conflicts before World War II.
“At the same time, acknowledging Dr. Silverstein’s efforts, DPAA is coordinating with the [Defense Department] components to hopefully facilitate an identification,” he wrote. More DNA samples are required from “other known family members,” but the U.S. Army Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operation Center had not yet located them, he wrote.
Silverstein contends that DPAA has an overwhelming amount of physical, circumstantial and historical evidence indicating the remains are those of Charles McAllister. He also argues that the agency has an obligation to account for pre-World War II remains that come into its possession — as has been done in past cases."
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