Recovery missions are, noble, and vastly rewarding. The reward and joy of personally finding documentable evidence or looking into the eyes of a reunited family member cannot be expressed in words. A successful recovery provides real and tangible value to the often-used term “giving back.”

As a Vietnam era Veteran, from basic training to completion of my first tour in Korea, most of my peers served in Vietnam. Their personal stories were endless with more than one tear, drunken outburst or scream in the night calling out for missing buddies that had not made it home. Almost 50 years later, the stories have faded, but the emptiness in many Vietnam veterans and their families still burns.

During my second tour in Iraq, I served as a senior negotiator for the Multi-National Force commander. Sitting across from enemy insurgent members, one goal was to determine the fates of our missing soldiers at the time – American and Allied. Negative news was too often forthcoming. Now, with your help, I get to lead an organization towards the goal of fostering good news to families and friends.

In addition to the notable physical effort involved, participants obtain mindfulness health benefits for this gratifying effort. The solace of reuniting a fallen serviceman with a family who has long awaited any information regarding the fate of their loved one is immeasurable. Moreover, to those with disabilities and others who cannot commit to fieldwork, working on the research, planning and documentation aspects of the mission is just as rewarding and valuable.

There’s an appeal of the challenge to take recovery missions to the next level. The contemporary recovery and identification of MIA’s involves concurrent operations across multiple spectrums of the U.S. Government, scientific community, and international hosts.

Each step presents complex political, technical, cultural, operational, and logistical challenges. It’s more than just digging. MIA recovery missions allow participants to explore the past while influencing their future. Potential disciplines include openings to modern military history, cultural and physical geography, archaeology, anthropology, program and project management, complex planning, logistics, leadership dynamics, human resource management, and more.

” Colonel (USA, RET) Philip (PJ) Dermer – TERRA Search Founder & President