BANGOR, Maine — Rocked by a trio of torpedo strikes on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, the battleship USS Oklahoma was already listing when two more torpedoes hit.
Just 12 minutes after the first Japanese bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor, the Oklahoma’s masts dug into the bottom of the harbor. In all, 429 American sailors and Marines died on the ship, many of them trapped inside the overturned hull.
In the years after the attack on the Hawaiian base, the remains of 35 servicemen were recovered from the Oklahoma, identified and buried. But the remains of an additional 388 personnel recovered from the ship couldn’t be matched with a name. Those remains were divided among 61 caskets and buried in 45 graves marked as “unknowns” at a Honolulu cemetery known as “The Punchbowl,” according to the Navy.
Now, more than 73 years after those servicemen died, a Maine native is part of a lab team working to identify their remains and bring closure to their families.
Air Force Lt. Col. Alice (Reynolds) Briones, who grew up in Hampden, is a forensic pathologist in the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, or AFMES. She also serves as director of the Department of Defense’s DNA Registry, a role she stepped into Oct. 1. The massive Oklahoma identification effort will be her next “mission,” she said during a Thursday telephone interview from Washington, D.C.
“I take pride in the fact that we have the expertise and science to provide answers to the families after all these years,” Briones said.
In April, the Department of Defense announced plans to disinter the remains of the Oklahoma crewmen. The disinterment policy applies to all unidentified remains from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and other permanent American military cemeteries, but does not extend to those lost at sea or whose remains are entombed in U.S. Navy vessels serving as national memorials, such as the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, according to the department’s website.
As the remains are disinterred, the Oklahoma servicemen’s bones will be transferred to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. The agency will coordinate with forensic pathologists, who will try to match DNA from the bones of the victims with DNA samples provided by family members of the lost sailors and Marines.
The POW/MIA agency will send bone samples to Briones’ lab at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where pathologists will extract the DNA.
Families of 80 percent of the unidentified personnel have provided either DNA cheek swabs or dental records to help pathologists make matches. Many family members of those killed in the attack are getting older and would like to see closure for their loved ones, Briones said.
“Age and time are not our friends with these when we’re trying to get these answers,” she said.
Her lab will work closely with the defense accounting agency to identify as many of the remains as possible during the next five years.
Once remains are identified, they will be returned to their families for burial with full military honors.
“The secretary of defense and I will work tirelessly to ensure your loved one’s remains will be recovered, identified, and returned to you as expeditiously as possible, and we will do so with dignity, respect and care,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, who approved the disinterment order, said in a statement posted on the website. “While not all families will receive an individual identification, we will strive to provide resolution to as many families as possible.”
The identification plan hasn’t come without controversy. Some argue the remains shouldn’t be disturbed after all these years. Previous efforts by other military agencies to identify war dead resulted in questions about the accuracy of identifications and possible mishandling of remains.
Briones graduated from Hampden Academy in 1990, and from the University of Maine’s clinical laboratory sciences program four years later. She joined the military after graduating high school.
“I did that with the intent of getting worldly experience, and mainly to pay for school,” Briones said.
When the Gulf War broke out, she was rushed to Texas to complete advanced training to become an Army medic. The war ended while she awaited deployment in Fort Devens, Massachusetts. She jokes that the only desert she saw during the Gulf War was in Texas.
The training and war pulled her out of school, so she took summer courses to catch up and graduate in four years. Briones still has family in Maine, and visited for Thanksgiving. She says she likely won’t make it back for another trip this summer because work will begin piling up around this identification mission.
She went on to medical school, residency and a fellowship, moving to Washington in 2010 to work in the laboratory. She said she was drawn to science because she liked finding solid, fact-based answers to questions.
“No matter your opinion on something, the science is what the science is,” Briones said.
Follow Nick McCrea on Twitter at @nmccrea213.