More than a hundred Sitkans lined the street in silence on Wednesday, as a procession of police and fire vehicles accompanied a hearse carrying the remains of an unidentified WWII soldier from the police station to the Sitka Rocky Gutierrez Airport.
The remains of the soldier, known simply as X-3 Fort Randall, were successfully exhumed in late June after nearly eight decades in the Sitka National Cemetery, and are now headed to a Midwest forensics lab for possible identification. Sitka was the third burial site for the unknown soldier, and officials hope to give his remains a final resting place.
“It was a very successful, respectful, and honorable extraction. We had challenges with X-3, but ultimate success,” said Aaron Cummings, a senior planner with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), the U.S. Department of Defense agency in charge of recovering and identifying missing service members from conflicts worldwide.
Cummings has been working as an on-the-ground fixer and coordinator for the Sitka disinterment, along with a team of four others from the DPAA, including an archeologist, an odontologist, a senior recovery expert, and a medic, and representatives from Veterans Affairs and the cemetery.
Cummings used an analogy for how disinterments come about, and the multiple levels of approval they face: He said imagine them like cold cases and the DPAA’s historians and analysts are like detectives who pour over old war records pursuing clues to put a case together, arguing why specific unknown remains should be dug up.
“In the situation of these disinterments, they were able to put enough pieces together to determine there’s a really good case and a really good likelihood that they’re one of a short list of possible matches,” he said.
Cummings said hundreds of servicemen from WWII were lost in, or in the waters around, Alaska and were either never found or never identified. In this case, there’s evidence X-3 is an unidentified soldier who was killed in a plane crash near Cold Bay during the Aleutian Campaign in 1942.
“16 lost, six bodies found, five of those six identified, which leaves us 10 never found,” Cummings said.
A trapper buried six bodies that washed up onshore near his cabin until he could notify authorities, who reburied them in the Fort Randall Post Cemetery in Cold Bay. Five were identified and taken to their respective homes after the war ended. X-3 was transported to Sitka where he remained, unidentified.
Cummings said the DPAA has been looking into this case since 2017, but progress stalled, until a possible family member got involved.
“We are an agency with finite resources, and there are approximately 81,000 missing [soldiers] from Vietnam, Korea, and World War II,” he said. “With those kind of numbers, it’s hard to prioritize, it’s hard to rack and stack your missions, and family interest is one of the elements that we utilize to determine how we prioritize and which missions move up the ladder.”
While Cummings said all 11 unidentified or missing soldiers are possible matches, Chris Pfeiffer believes X-3 could be his great uncle, 2nd Lt. Eugene Christensen, the co-pilot of the C-53 that went down near Cold Bay. Pfeiffer has collected hundreds of pages about the crash and his uncle over the years, has pressured his congressmen and the DPAA to disinter the remains, and even started a blog to document the process. He flew in from Texas for the disinterment and watched the process unfold from about 50 feet away.
“Unless I got involved, it wasn’t going to go anywhere,” and so they, ” Pfeiffer said. “They mentioned that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and that’s why we’re here today.”
Pfeiffer said the whole process has been emotional.
“This is a story that’s been handed down and talked about,” he said. “Lt. Christensen was my mother’s uncle, but he was a surprise baby, and he was just a little older, like nine years from my mother, and she considered him her big brother.”
Pfeiffer said he has a letter from the Army to his great grandfather that says there’s no chance of ever finding his son. He said the Army “closed the door.”
“But that wasn’t true,” he said. “My great grandparents passed away. My grandparents passed away. My parents passed away, and all of their brothers and sisters all passed away, not knowing what I know. And they could have known it. It could have been shared. Now we know this is the one opportunity. It may not be a good opportunity, but the best one we have to see what happened.”
Cummings said the dig to exhume X-3’s remains was “unique” and “surprising” in many ways. It was the agency’s first disinterment in Sitka. The remains, which were located on a narrow step of the main hill at the national cemetery, had to be hand dug. He said the team also had to make a contraption out of wood to allow the archeologist to hover over the casket on her stomach to access it. Despite the challenges, he said everything was intact. The remains were in a metal casket that was placed inside another one made of wood and metal.
“Our extremely seasoned archeologist had never seen anything like it,” Cummings said.
There are about 20 gravesites for unknown soldiers in Sitka’s cemetery. Cummings said they also tried to disinter another soldier, known as X-1 Amchitka, during their trip. X-1 is thought to be a crew member from a ship that ran ashore in early 1943. But the team was unable to locate the remains, likely because of soil movement or a previous disinterment decades ago that wasn’t properly recorded.
Cummings said even when they aren’t successful, these disinterments are important to the nation’s promise, and agency’s mission, to never leave anyone behind.
“Some of these missions are difficult: The analysis, the historian work is difficult. Sometimes it’s really difficult in the field,” he said. “But it’s important for the closure of the families, and for just anybody to know that we will not lose faith, we will always pursue, we will always try to bring our folks home, provide closure to the families, and just honor our nation’s fallen.”
As for Pfeiffer, he said even if X-3 turns out to not be his great uncle, he’s so grateful to have been involved in this process and will stick with it until the end.
“I am really thankful, as a veteran myself, to just help whoever this is,” he said. “I’m gonna see it through. If it goes to Oklahoma, goes to California, goes to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arkansas, I’m gonna go with it.”
The remains of X-3 left Sitka on July 1 for Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, where, through DNA analysis, the DPAA hopes to get a positive ID.
