As residents gathered at Pikes Peak National Cemetery Monday under cloudy skies, they reflected on those lost in war and tens of thousands still missing.

Stephen P. Johnson, international engagement officer with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, reminded the somber crowd wrapped in jackets and hats that of the more than 80,000 American service members still missing, about 2,500 of them are from Colorado.

“Those families are still awaiting identification and the return of their loved ones,” he said.

The agency’s focus is currently on identifying remains in southeast Asia from the Vietnam War era, because only 1,571 service members remain to be identified and they were lost in a relatively small geographic region, said Johnson, a historian who has worked numerous cases to identify remains. In addition, many of their immediate family members are still alive, he said in an interview.

The department is also working to identify the almost 72,000 service members still unrecovered from World War II, a process that was halted between 1951 and 2010, he said.

Johnson started helping to identify Americans lost over Italy when the effort was restarted in 2010 and using a map his colleagues had created, noticed a similarity between the last known location of an A-36 Apache plane and a recovery site of an unknown American.

The pilot had crashed on the ground of a villa in Manziana, Italy, and the Germans had buried him under a simple marker.

It read: “Here rests one American fighter-pilot shot down 6 March, 1944,” Johnson said.

The 22-year-old pilot was exhumed in 1947, but his body had no ID tags and his plane had been salvaged by the Germans, so no one knew what type of aircraft he had been in, Johnson explained. So the body was moved to the American Battle Monument Commission Cemetery south of Rome.

By 2015, Johnson had gathered enough evidence to make the case to exhume the pilot’s body and collect DNA from his family. For the next four years, he stayed in touch with the family in West Hartford, Conn., and was able to tell them in 2019, he had found their loved one.

Johnson attended the pilot’s funeral and was invited to sit with the pilot’s sister Estelle after the work he put in to bring the 22-year-old home.

“That answered one family’s enduring question,” Johnson said. “I don’t say it brought closure, because I don’t believe closure for that kind of loss is ever possible.”

The agency’s goal is to identify the remains of 200 people each year, he said. Last fiscal year, the agency came close to identifying 172 service members, it said in a news release.

While the focus is in Southeast Asia, some of those remains are particularly tough because some service members were lost as their aircraft disintegrated and so remains are widely scattered, he said.

Lost along with the service members are their stories because so many did not have enough witnesses to document their dying acts of heroism, said Jay Bowen, a candidate for national commander of the American Legion.

Those heroes come from all genders, races and religions and some are not even American by birth, he said.

“They are a diverse group wedded to the belief that America is a nation worth dying for,” he said.

Contact the writer at mary.shinn@gazettedev.gazette.com or (719) 429-9264.