Texas A&M hosts conference to educate on missing military personnel
COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) – Texas A&M University hosted the conference Never Forgotten: Conflict Archaeology and Military History on Wednesday and Thursday.
This conference highlights research that the university has done on the location, recovery, and identification of missing military personnel from past conflicts.
“There are many people who were never accounted for and the impact on those families who never got the answers,” said Katie Custer Bojakowski, a professor at Texas A&M.
Faculty, students, archeologists, sociologists, geographers, and different agency partners gathered at the conference.
A professor at Texas A&M, Katie Custer Bojakowski, says the presentations included surveys, excavations, research, geographical analysis, and data visualizations on the fallen whose remains never returned home.
“We wanted to highlight the research that has been done already on campus by so many different professors and departments that’s really focused on finding the missing military persons around the world,” said Bojakowski.
A professor at Texas A&M University, Adam Seipp, says our duty as a country is to bring these soldiers home.
“As a country and as a society, we owe a debt to those 81,000 military personnel whose last remains are unaccounted for, we owe them a debt to try our best to bring them home,” said Seipp.
There are a total of 164 missing soldiers that are Aggies.
“But we wanted to honor that legacy of military history here at A&M. And even, you know, start compiling the names of missing aggies,” said Bojakowski.
A Doctorial student at Texas A&M, Tristan Krause, was personally able to bring the remains of 2nd Lt. Walker B. Stone, or “Buster,” home after he crashed his P-47 Thunderbolt.
“I was lucky enough to deploy with a team from the University of Wisconsin to France looking for a pilot that was shot down in 1943. We were lucky enough to go and discover his remains identify the plane he was in and bring him back. The nephew of the pilot recounted that the pilot’s mother, a woman named Momma Stone, had four sons go to war and three of them came back and one of them did not. So she had a memorial for her lost son put up in their family plot. Even though she did that, she firmly believed he was going to come home any minute through the back door. And she believed that all the way up until the day she died. She was buried right next to that memorial of the lost son. And in 2019 when we successfully did that excavation and found his remains, we were able to bring him home, have him identified, and put him right next to his mom which would have been a few days off from his 100th birthday and one day before mother’s day,” said Krause.
Teams like this who search for the identification and recovery of missing American military personnel gathered at the conference.
