JUST KIA:

MIAs No Longer Haunt U.S. Warfare (DAVID WOOD, 6/10/05, Newhouse News Service)

Until now, the United States has fought its major wars haunted by the thousands of young Americans who have gone missing in battle.

From the Civil War onward, in this nation's wartime experience, families sent their loved ones off to serve -- and many simply vanished in the fog of war: vaporized in explosions, buried hastily in unmarked graves or trapped in remote crash sites or in underwater wreckage.

The bitter agony for the families, perhaps nourishing hope that one day the missing will turn up alive, runs like a livid scar down through generations.

But two years of conflict in Iraq and three years in Afghanistan have produced an unusual clarity: The fighting has left 1,875 Americans dead and 13,337 wounded, according to the Defense Department, but only one MIA. He is Army Sgt. Keith M. Maupin of Batavia, Ohio.

What's changed, strategists and historians say, is that in the current fighting with hit-and-run insurgents, U.S. forces control the terrain as they did not in World War II, Korea or even Vietnam, so that the dead can be recovered.

Nor are they likely to take anyone alive.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 13, 2005 5:02 PM