An ISU alumnus who locates and identifies missing soldiers visited Iowa State on Tuesday to meet with members of ISU ROTC.

Lt. Col Mark Brown, who graduated with a master’s in journalism in 1983, and Tech. Sgt. Les Schneider, came to Iowa State as part of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a military organization devoted to investigating and accounting for Americans missing as a result of the nation’s conflicts.

“We are an organization that goes around the world finding past American heroes and soldiers that never returned from conflict,” said Brown. “It’s our job to achieve the fullest accounting possible of what happened to these missing people.”

Brown said the organization’s first priority is to find missing soldiers who may still be living.

“If there’s any chance someone may still be alive, that becomes our most important objective,” he said. “If we can’t find anyone still living, we return the remains to loved ones for a military burial with honors.”

Brown said he and Schneider met with the ROTC to reassure the reserve members that JPAC will do everything it can to accomplish its mandate.

“In our briefing with the ROTC, we told them that one day they may be serving in a conflict,” he said. “All soldiers are given a promise that they won’t be left behind. We’re keeping that promise.”

Schneider said a job with JPAC involves worldwide travel.

“We go on about 25 missions a year,” he said. “We usually do 10 missions to Southeast Asia, five to Korea and 10 other missions around the world.”

He said the investigations require extensive research before a team is sent anywhere.

“We look through any historical records we can find before we do anything else,” he said. “We then send in a recovery team for an excavation process. We then try to piece together exactly what happened at the site.”

Brown said the investigations usually yield positive results.

“More than likely, we will bring remains back from every trip,” he said.

“The odds are good that we return with something.”

He said most remains brought back by JPAC are identified from skeletal characteristics, but he said the organization can’t always identify the skeletal remains.

“We have in our labs 1,200 sets of remains we can’t identify,” he said. “Usually, this is because there were no artifacts at the scene, no dental records and no DNA to recover.”

He said part of the organization’s mission involves looking for anyone who may have clues about the unidentifiable remains.

“We’re doing a nationwide search for people who may have leads,” he said.

He said JPAC has helped identify remains from conflicts as far back as the Civil War.

“We’ve helped identify soldiers from Civil War submarines like the Hunley and the Monitor,” he said.

Remains that old are entirely skeletal, Brown said. He credited the researchers at the JPAC lab, located at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu, as the best researchers of their kind in the world.

Both Brown and Schneider described their job as one of the most rewarding experiences of their lives.

“When you’re hiking through a jungle in Vietnam in 110 degree weather looking for a crash sight, you see just what those soldiers went through,” Schneider said.