East-West Center 233d ago

Excavating the Ghosts of War: Interdisciplinary Approaches to MIA Recovery 2025 marks 50 years since the Vietnam War’s end and 30 years since the normalization of US-Vietnamese diplomatic relations. Both countries benefit from a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that structures collaboration on trade, science and tech, humanitarian assistance, regional security, and defense. Although war’s tragic legacies endure, both nations have formed the basis for reconciliation and cooperation on issues concerning unexploded ordinance removal, Agent Orange remediation, and the recovery of US and Vietnamese war dead still declared “missing-in-action” (MIA). The MIA accounting mission is considered a hallmark of the modern US-Vietnamese partnership—former adversaries working together to account for personnel killed or missing in wartime. This US effort is led by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), which regularly partners with academic institutions to identify and recover remains of missing US military personnel from past conflicts. This talk examines how US universities contribute to these efforts by discussing the Missing-In-Action Accounting and Recovery Coalition (MARC), an emerging interdisciplinary research initiative at Purdue University that supports the DPAA’s Vietnam War recovery mission. MARC integrates history with social science methods, fostering participation across disciplines to advance 3 lines of effort: (1) public-facing archival and data-driven research to locate MIA servicemembers and contribute to a bipartisan undertaking of national importance; (2) development of a research hub that models interdisciplinary collaboration; and (3) production of scholarship that examines the POW/MIA recovery issue in the US and connects it to broader dynamics of death commemoration, conflict resolution, and postwar cooperation. The views expressed are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect East-West Center policies or positions.