University Place

cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotech Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year, and it's another opportunity for you to participate in the discovery here at your public land-grant research university. Tonight, in the run up to Veterans Day, a very special Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'll be very brief in the introduction so that the three gentlemen who are talking can have as much time as possible. The three folks will be Josh Hyman, who is the director of the DNA sequencing facility here at UW-Madison's Biotech Center, Chuck Konsitzke, who is the associate director here at the Biotech Center, and Jed Henry, who is a filmmaker and researcher and a citizen of Wisconsin who's collaborating with UW-Madison. And without any further ado, I'd like to introduce to you Jed Henry and welcome him to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

APPLAUSE

>> Thank you all for coming. Again, my name is Jed Henry. I live in Middleton. Just a little background on myself. I do video production for a living. I work for different network TV stations. I work for a lot of different companies. You can see some of it here at Camp Randall, Lambeau Field, and Miller Park just to name a few. So, how I got involved. My grandparents, David and Evelyn Henry, were from Viroqua, Wisconsin, my grandfather was. My grandmother was from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and they met at a soldiers dance in 1943. She went to the Harrisburg YWCA to visit a girlfriend, and she happened to meet a soldier and about three months later they were married. And not long after, he went off to fight the war. This is my grandfather here in the center. This is my favorite picture of him from the war. I believe this picture was taken somewhere in Germany. We're not exactly sure where. I've tried on a couple of occasions to actually find the exact spot. So far no luck. This is the company that he was in, the Reconnaissance Company, 32nd Armored Regiment, 3rd Armored Division. My grandfather is over here on the far side, and PFC Gordon, who was a member of his unit, is right in here. So, the company is made up of 199 men, 190 enlisted men and nine officers. This picture was taken about the same time my grandparents were married in August of 1943 before they left to go overseas to train to fight in Europe. A little bit about reconnaissance, some people don't know what it is. I certainly didn't when I started. So I have some clips here from some of the veterans from PFC Gordon's unit to talk a little bit about what reconnaissance is. First of all, how I got involved in the PFC Gordon story. In November of 2011, I decided to go over to France because I wanted to know what it was like. I wanted to know where my grandfather had fought, and I wanted to see what it was like. I wanted to see what a hedgerow was. I wanted to see how far the distance was. And so I wanted to experience it myself. And the last night that I was actually in Europe, I met Alexis Boban here on the left. He's a French historian, and he actually had records that said PFC Gordon was still missing. And I was quite surprised because at the time I didn't realize that there was anybody from the unit who was missing. I knew that there had been 44 casualties from the unit, just the reconnaissance company, and at full strength there's 199 guys plus replacements, so roughly there's 500 or 600 people that come in and out of the unit during the war, and there's 44 that were killed. And PFC Gordon was the only one that wasn't accounted for. So something about that bothered me. I just, it's a feeling, I guess, that he fought and died and it seemed unfair that he never came home. So to explain a little bit about reconnaissance, here are some guys from the unit. >> Well, I was a corps commander. You do anything they tell you to do. You go down the road and somebody, you were supposed to, the idea of a recon outfit is to make contact with the enemy. And slap them a couple times and then head back with the tanks. Of course, the armored cars were considered like a light tank mounted with 37-millimeter weapon, a 50-caliber on a ring around the turret, and that was all the armor. That was all the fire power we had. So you didn't tango with any-- It was great infantry, but you didn't mess with those panther tiger tanks. You make contact and then you got the hell out of there. >> It was dangerous because we were at risk all the time. We were traveling to a country we didn't know. There were all sorts of places where we were seeking an enemy that wanted to shoot us, and we didn't know where he was. We didn't know if he was a mile away or 15 miles away. So you had to be watchful from the first moment on. >> We were always ahead of everybody. We were ahead of the tanks; we were ahead of everybody. >> The reconnaissance company operated outside of the headquarters platoon. The platoons operated on our own. We would go down the road until we met opposition. And if they didn't knock us out first, we would reconnoiter and find out what kind of guns they had, how many soldiers they had, and what their strength was. >> So, the last guy pictured there is Technician Fifth Grade Harry Kelly. He's a dear friend of mine. We talked quite frequently, probably once a month, and of all the veterans that I've interviewed and spoken with, he is probably the one person that actually called me on a consistent basis just to know how things were going, which was unique. None of the other veterans ever called me. And he was the last person alive that remembered PFC Gordon, and we lost him about a month ago. So how does one find a missing soldier? Well, it's not easy, and it takes a lot of searching through records. Primarily there's two main records. There's an IDPF, which is known as an individual deceased personnel file. On the left there, you can see a couple of records from that. This is PFC Gordon's missing crew report here, and you can see over here he's listed as missing 13th of August 1944, where they left from, what their destination was supposed to be, and at the bottom it says he was a member of an armored car crew which was knocked out. The records here on the right are morning reports. Morning reports are important because they give you an idea of what happened, and generally they talk about a change in status of a particular soldier. And in this case, you can see here that Private Bowman and Private First Class Gordon are listed here in the center. And it basically just notes that they are missing since August 13th. These two boxes on the right, those make up about half of the records that I have. These are the textual records. I probably have at least twice that in electronic records now. And so that's what it takes to be able to put together a lot of this and understand what happened. So the crew that day on August 13th, we don't know for sure but we believe that PFC Gordon was the car commander, and the guess comes from his rank in comparison to the other guys in the vehicle. We believe Private Bowman was the gunner who would have been also up in the turret. Those two guys would have been in the turret of the vehicle up here. And then Private Kurtz, who would have sat on the right-hand side, which you'd know as the passenger side, and then Aboto, Technician Fifth Grade Aboto would have been the driver, and he would have sat here in the normal driver's seat. This is a map of where the unit traveled while they were in Europe. You can actually see the full sized map over there, but up here is Omaha Beach. They landed D+17, so June 23rd of 1944. And the reconnaissance company itself saw very little initial action. Because of the job that reconnaissance is, which is to go and seek out the enemy, when they first landed on the beaches, the enemy was known and the front lines were pretty well established. And so they didn't need to do much. They were more of a liaison and used to check on different infantry units and things. Now, when the famous breakthrough at Saint Lo happened, that's when reconnaissance started to become used. And so as they pushed south, they started to realize that they had trapped a large group of Germans in a pocket here. It later became known as the Falaise Gap. And so on August 13th, PFC Gordon and his crew, along with the rest of the company, was down in this area, and that's where they took off from that morning.

They left about 6

00 AM on the 13th, and by that afternoon they had started to turn north to start the closing of the gap. And it is around this area that we believe they were hit. A map here that was made up by our French historian Alexis Boban, it's his conclusion that he thinks they were most likely hit at this location here, which is Pont d'Atrel. Pont is a bridge in French, and we think that's where they were most likely hit. I've been to the location a couple of times and tried to make sense of it. And we do know that there were a whole bunch of Germans in this area at the time they were hit. This is the type of vehicle they were in. This is an M8 armored car, nicknamed a Greyhound, I think primarily because it was a very fast armored vehicle. It's essentially kind of a light tank with wheels. Very light armor. You have a 37-millimeter gun here in the front and a 50-caliber machine gun on the ring here at the top. According to the surviving member of the vehicle, when they were hit they took a direct hit to the gas tank. The gas tank is here, circled in red. It's located just behind the turret, and it runs kind of straight across, all the way across. And when they were hit, we know that that would have caused a fire, and the surviving member, Private Kurtz, says that they were hit by a German 88, which typically means that it was a large caliber shell. It could have been an 88; it could have been a 75. So we know that the destruction and what would have happened to these guys would have been devastating. This is the inside of an M8 Greyhound, inside the turret. This is from a restored vehicle down in Rochelle, Illinois. And you see here circled, this is the ammunition that would have gone into the 37-millimeter gun. Generally this ammunition also exploded when they were hit. So not only did you have the gas tank that exploded, but you also had ammunition within the inside of the vehicle that probably exploded. And you can see here the note at the top. This is actually from a letter Private Kurtz, and he said they were hit in the gas tank, and the two men in the turret burned up. So we believe that PFC Gordon and Private Bowman were both in the turret at the time they were hit and never made it out. So, what happened to PFC Gordon? Well, what we do know is probably in late August or sometime in September his family was notified that he was missing in action. This is probably what his family would have received, would have came mostly likely in a yellow telegram envelope, dropped off by a cab driver or a delivery person. No chaplain, no army people. Just dropped off and here you go. It's very different than what it is today. And it just basically says that he was missing in action, and that's most likely all the information they got. So, again, this is Private Bowman over here and PFC Gordon. They were the two guys that were in the turret. And Private Bowman is important because when you look at his files, Private Bowman was originally known as an unknown soldier. So when they originally recovered his remains, they thought he was an unknown American soldier, and he was classified as what's called X-2. The X here signifies unknown. So when they bring in a set of remains and they don't know who they are, they assign them an X file. And so Bowman was originally X-2. And you can see, here's where it says he was X-2, and you can see his cause of death is listed as shrapnel and burned. Now, the only way that they were able to identify him, because we assume that the remains were almost indistinguishable from the outside because of the fire and the destruction, is that they had six fingerprints, and you can see them here. They five on one hand and just one on the other. And in April of 1945, the FBI was able to identify these fingerprints based on what they had on file. Now you see that I've got this portion here circled on the bottom, and I've got this slide highlighted here. So this is where things become important for PFC Gordon. There's a notation in Private Bowman's files that says that he was reported to be an American. So they still didn't know when they first made this notation that he was an American. And they said that the body was found with another unidentified body known as X-3. So for us that's kind of when the mystery started and the progression of where is this body, if the two guys that were in the turret together and one's missing and one's found, but yet they were found together, why wouldn't this be Private First Class Gordon? And so that's what we tried to figure out. Now, the records aren't clear of what proximity they found them. Were they both in the vehicle together? Were they outside the vehicle? Was it a hundred yards? It's not really clear. So we don't know for sure. What we do know is Private Bowman's records say that his remains were burned. So, again, it's probably hard to distinguish, and that he's missing a leg, a foot, one hand, and his head is severed and crushed. So it starts to give you an idea of what this is like and the dramatic destruction that would have came at the hands of this shell. PFC Gordon's wallet. Now, this becomes one of the big key pieces of evidence that we have that says where is he at. The wallet here was returned to Private First Class Gordon's family in Canada. Lawrence Gordon was born in Canada. He lived in Canada most of his life and was actually working on a ranch in Wyoming when Pearl Harbor happened. And according to his family, he decided to join the US Army rather than the Canadian, which one of his other brothers did, because he felt the US was better equipped. So my understanding is that he had dual citizenship back then because his parents were American but he was born in Canada. So he chose to join the US Army. April 3rd of 1945, which is one day after Private Bowman is identified based on the fingerprint analysis, his family is notified that he is no longer missing in action, that he is now killed in action. Now, it was customary in the US Military that if a soldier was missing, they carried him as missing for one entire year and then after the expiration of a year, then they can say that he wasn't missing anymore, he was dead. And so it seemed strange that they wouldn't have waited one full year unless they had some evidence that he was in fact killed, which we presume that they identified the guy that was next to him so they assumed he must have been dead as well. So the US Army did a pretty good job back in the '40s and the '50s, early '50s, of trying to identify these guys. And I think all of them got an investigator who was charged to actually go to the location where these guys were killed and see if they could find the remains, talk to the mayors, talk to the priests, look for whatever information was available to find these guys. And, unfortunately for PFC Gordon, as his investigator says that due to lack of precise initial information, his remains would probably never be found. What does that mean? Well, we assume that they recovered the remains under battlefield conditions. Not ideal for identification and maybe somebody didn't take the appropriate notes. We really don't know, and there's no way to find that out anymore. September of 1951 there was a board hearing with three officers in which they made a determination of non-recoverability. It basically means that they've looked at everything that's available, and they don't think they will probably ever find him. It doesn't mean that they didn't recover his body. They just don't know. And so Private First Class Gordon has stood as non-recoverable missing since 1951. So why X-3? We talked a little bit earlier how X-3 was found with Private Bowman who was originally X-2. So then we get into some more of the textural records, and these records actually came from the German archives. And, as you can see up here, you can see the notation for X-3. Down here you see the place of death, which is listed as Normandy, France, which is correct, estimated date of death August 13th, which is correct, and then the cause of death is burned, which is correct. And you can see here there's a notation that says found to be enemy dead, and the number is changed from X-3 to X-356 which is a German number. So the remains that were found with Private Bowman have now been determined to be a German. This is the cemetery where both of the remains were interred. X-3 was originally buried as an American soldier, and it was buried in this cemetery, this temporary cemetery here until it was later determined in March of 1945 that it was in fact a German. Now, the report here says that the remains were completely clothed in German equipment and labels of German manufactured tags. Now, there's also one note there that he was in a German uniform. Now the problem with that is when these guys were brought to the cemetery where they were buried, the graves registration people, their job was to try and identify these guys and find as many clues as they possibly could, which is why you see that Private Bowman had his fingerprints taken and that they're marking whatever they find. And so we know that the Germans had a gray uniform during World War II and the Americans had a green one. So it seems unlikely to me that a graves registration crew could mistake that this guy had a German uniform on and then buried him as an American. So for some reason the original crews thought he was an American, and they buried him that way. And until March 17th when they reprocessed the remains out of orders from higher command that they determined all the sudden, well, now he's fully clothed in German clothes. So what we think happened and an explanation for the German clothing, what we know from Private Kurtz, who was the only survivor of the vehicle, is that when they were hit he said they still had winter wool uniforms on. And this is August and the August temperatures over there are very much like our August temperatures here. They're very warm. And so these guys have got heavy wool uniforms on. They're hot. They've been in country now for two months, and what we think is they probably scavenged what they needed. And I suspect that he probably grabbed a t-shirt, something lighter weight that he wore underneath his uniform. The uniform would have been much like this suit coat that I have, and he probably put it on over the top of it. And part of what supports that theory is the section here at the bottom. This is actually from Private Bowman. When his remains were reinventoried in March of 1945, they say that he had a German raincoat. So if the guy sitting next to Private Bowman has German clothing, it seems likely that PFC Gordon could have some. And keep in mind that if Private Bowman, if they didn't have his fingerprints, he probably would have ended up as a German because of that clothing. So, what do we have? Well, first of all you have the wallet, and the wallet, according to the record, says that it was burned and blood stained. So if you have the wallet and you have Private Bowman who was sitting next to PFC Gordon and according to the maintenance records it looks like they most likely recovered the vehicle that the men were in. So if you have the wallet, the guy next to him, and the vehicle, the only question you have left is where's the body. And so that's why we feel so strongly about X-3 and that it's likelihood to be PFC Gordon. So, we get into Lawrence, which is the namesake of the deceased. This is Lawrence R Gordon. He lives in Canada, Medicine Hat, Alberta. And I got in touch with him because I had requested his uncle's file from the National Personnel Record Center in St. Louis. You can see here on the left is my original request. And in the file, 1973 there was a fire that destroyed 80% to 90% of all of the World War II army records, including my grandfather's. So if you look for my grandfather's records, the majority of what's in there are the three pages that I sent in. And so if you were looking for your family member and you wanted to find information, you would probably get about the same letter that Lawrence Gordon got, which is we're sorry but the records that you're inquiring about burned in 1973 and there is nothing. And so what Lawrence does, you can see that here in the middle, is he said I intend to visit France in the near future and wish to visit the graveside of my uncle. And so he says that maybe he didn't read the response completely accurately or maybe they didn't word it right, but he got the impression that his uncle was buried at an American cemetery in Saint James France known as Brittany American Cemetery. And so Lawrence, this is Lawrence here at the age of four. He was named after the deceased soldier, and he told me that his father told him it was in memory of his uncle, and so that his name would not be forgotten. And this is Lawrence's family here. This is PFC Gordon's mother, and this is the living Lawrence's mother and father here. So, a little bit about Lawrence. I'll let you meet him here. >> I was named after my uncle, Lawrence, and to me that imposes an obligation and it's probably a self-imposed obligation. But I still feel a commitment to the family, and it started out by my making a commitment to my father but it's become something much bigger than that. To me it's the whole concept of not letting his life be forgotten. >> So, we produced this video back in December, and the numbers have changed slightly since then. According to DPMO's website, there are 73,661 World War II soldiers that are still missing. And the numbers from last year, November of last year, that I got since 1978, as far as the records go back, there have been 638 World War II soldiers identified in the last 35 years. Of that, 533 were airmen, and the number comes from, primarily, I assume that the reason they're finding these guys is some farmer plows up a field and his an airplane prop or an airplane wing or something, and it's a lot easier to identify an airman. There are 14 cases listed as being the result of cemetery disinterment. And currently we have 8,000 to 10,000 unknown remains from World War II sitting in cemeteries, and only 14 of them have been identified in 35 years. The wallet. The wallet becomes sort of the central piece of all of this. You can see here, this is actually the inventory of the wallet, and the dating is a little bit different than we use here in the states. But this is an eight. So August 27th of 1944, which is two weeks after PFC Gordon is killed, his wallet is inventoried. Now, we can't figure out who exactly inventoried the wallet. I know the graves registration crew that handled the burial, and I can't find this person's name listed on the roster of those guys that were there. So we don't know who exactly inventoried the wallet, but we know that it was inventoried within two weeks. And a little bit more about the wallet from Lawrence. >> It became apparent to me fairly early that my father didn't have a lot of information about what had happened to my uncle. He didn't know where he had been killed. He didn't know where he was buried. He just knew that it had happened in Europe in August. There had been requests made by my grandmother to get information about the death of her son Lawrence, and she hadn't gotten any satisfactory answers. >> Coleman, Alberta. October 8, 1946. To the War Department in Washington DC. Dear sir, I am writing you in regards to the location of the grave of my son, PFC Lawrence S Gordon, of the 32nd Armored Regiment, who was killed in action in Normandy on August 13, 1944. I have written you concerning this and also to the Red Cross, but as yet have failed to get a satisfactory reply. I should think by this time they would have located it. Please let me know at your earliest convenience and oblige. Mrs. Ella Gordon, Coleman, Alberta, Canada. >> The inability to find my uncle's grave left my grandmother thinking the body had been lost. The problem was the wallet. The wallet came home with no identification in it. So they knew that the wallet had belonged to Lawrence S Gordon. They knew where his family was. They got it back to the right family. It was the right wallet, but there was no body. And they couldn't give a location, a grave site, any information to my grandmother. So here conclusion was that something wasn't right. The body had been lost, misplaced, whatever. It just doesn't make sense that you have a wallet that is in reasonable condition and there's no body left. >> So we talked a little bit ago about how I met Lawrence and about going to the National Personnel Record Center and getting his letter. This is Lawrence here in 2000. His father died in 1999. And to live up and honor the commitment that he made to his father, he went to France to visit his uncle's grave, and when he got there it was the first time that he realized that there was no grave. His name was simply here on a missing in action wall at the Brittany American Cemetery. And, again, he was confused because he had the wallet, and he'd never heard anything different from his family, so he'd always assumed that there was a grave. And apparently the information that he had gotten from the US government was that he thought there was one. And so at that point he gave up. They told him there were no more records. There was nothing he could do, and that was it. Until I found him about a year ago. So, in March of this year, Lawrence and I went over to Germany. And this is Alex Meyer here. He's a family friend of the Gordon's. He's also an attorney in Germany. And we went to the Volksbund, which is the German War Graves Commission, and we went with our information. We have a full report that's over here, and we basically said that we think you have Lawrence's uncle in one of your cemeteries, and we'd like to have permission to test him. And we weren't really sure how that meeting was going to go. We expected to have to present our case and that they would send us home and say we'll get back to you and will let us know. Well, we were kind of shocked by within 40 minutes when the Germans basically said we believe what you're saying, we think your evidence is correct, and we think you're probably right that this is probably this guy's uncle, and so we will support you in whatever you'd like to do. And at that point, the only answer, the only way to get an answer, was DNA. We had circumstantial evidence, and we had a pretty good idea that this was probably his uncle, but we had no way to know unless we could get DNA. And that's where the University of Wisconsin came in. I live down the street. I'm probably 10 to 15 minutes from here, and I thought, I don't know a thing about DNA. I don't know where to start. I don't know who to ask. And I started looking things up, and I thought, well, the university has a DNA laboratory here, and they seem to be well known an respected in the area and in the expertise of DNA, maybe they can help. So it just so happened that I was lucky enough to meet these guys, and they'll talk a little bit about how we got to meet and how that happened. >> So, the University of Wisconsin, as Jed stated, he needed help with DNA analysis. But before we get into the actual DNA analysis regarding this project, it really falls down to the Wisconsin Idea. The University of Wisconsin is here to be public service. So the Wisconsin Idea is the principle that the university should improve people's lives beyond the classroom. It spans UW Madison's teaching, research, outreach, and public service. And this is one way that the UW can contribute. So, regarding the Wisconsin Idea,

there are three points

resolution, fulfilling the commitment, and family comfort. So this project fits that model very well. One, resolution, resolving the issue. Hopefully we can do the DNA analysis and find a positive match. Second is fulfilling the commitment. Fulfilling the commitment that the US government should have provided, but with this certain situation with the remains being in a German cemetery, it's outside of the protocol. So that's one way that the UW Biotechnology Center can fulfill that commitment. And the third is family comfort. There are many families involved with this project. It's not just the Gordon family. It's not the Henry family. It's not just my family. It's the military family. It's other individuals who are related to this. There are many families involved with this that with this outcome this issue can be solved. And as Charles Van Hise stated in February of 1905, "I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the university reaches every family of this state." >> So, at this point, we have a fair amount of information indicating that this is PFC Gordon. We have good evidence, but it isn't 100%, and, unfortunately, for the most part we can't say that this is PFC Gordon until the military, the US Military is satisfied. They won't give him military honors until we can absolutely 100% prove that it is PFC Gordon. The only way we have to do that now is through DNA evidence. Now, a little background on DNA. As most of you know, you got about half your DNA from your mom and half your DNA from your father. Well, that's the nuclear DNA. We have 46 chromosomes, 22 sets that are, I will say, shared equally, but there is a set of chromosomes, the sex chromosomes, and if we take a very, very close look at them out of the whole 46, you'll notice one very obvious thing. Women have two X chromosomes. Men have an X and a Y chromosome. Now, obviously, a woman cannot contribute a Y chromosome to her child. Only a man can. So when Henry VIII was dispatching all his wives because they weren't producing sons for him, the obvious person to blame was not any one of his wives. It was obviously him. But what that leads us to is that obviously a woman is not going to be the one contributing a Y chromosome. So that's significant. Now, we also have mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is not in the nucleus of the cell; it's floating outside in the mitochondria. The mitochondria are the energy powerhouses of your cell. It's what is driving all of the activity in the cell. It just takes certain components and creates what we need for every single major reaction in the cell. There are many, many mitochondria in a cell. And within each mitochondrion you have a number of circular DNA. Okay? And so from this, if you start looking at that, we have one copy of all the nuclear DNA, but we have many, many copies of the mitochondrial DNA. And we know it comes from the mother. We know that we can trace if we have a daughter anywhere, in every single generation, we can go from that daughter to her daughters to her daughters, and every single one of her children within that generation will also have her mitochondria. The men won't pass it on to their children, but the daughters will. So when we look at the family structure, and this family structure is essentially what we're seeing in the Gordon family, we have the grandparents, mom and dad, the grandparents, and then we have PFC Gordon, missing in action, his brothers, and a sister. This has actually made it very, very easy for us because all the brothers and his sister had children. So now we have all of the nephews. I don't think there are any nieces, but we have all the nephews of PFC Gordon. Some of them through maternal lineage; some of them though paternal lineage. So we can trace the Y chromosome through all the brothers and their sons. None of the brothers are alive anymore, but all the nephews are. But we can use the Y chromosome which should be the exact same Y chromosome in all of these nephews as is in Private Gordon. And for mitochondrial testing, we can do the same thing except now we'll look at all of the nephews from the sister. Which brings us to Mont de Huisnes. This is the ossuary where the remains finally came to rest. And right now this is our best hope for finding Private Gordon. The problem you have to realize is Private Gordon has been dead for 70 years. First, the body was buried in the ground, and then after it was exhumed and identified as an unknown German soldier then eventually it made it to Mont de Huisnes, which is above ground and all the caskets are no longer, the body is no longer exposed to earth or anything like that. It's just sealed in a vault above ground. But still, it's 70 years old and a lot of degeneration of the DNA occurs, which is why the mitochondrial DNA is so important. Without many, many, many copies of DNA, we may not get enough good copies out to identify the remains. And this is a major concern. So at this point, I was over there and we're seeing the casket, the vault being opened up. I was over there to watch over and make sure everything was done correctly, all the protocols are followed correctly, because if they aren't, the US government is not going to accept this as evidence, and there are very strict protocols for collecting all the bones, for categorizing all the bones, for sorting them and acknowledging exactly where they were found, and then following that with a chain of custody to the folks that are extracting the DNA. >> So you can see on the right-hand side there the burial box, as I call it, over here on the right-hand side. This is actually the remains that we were interested in. This is the remains that were formerly X-3. So this is kind of a scene of what it was like there. I work in the media so I'm used to a lot of media, and I will tell you that I was quite overwhelmed. We expected about 20 people, German, French, and those of us that came from the United States and Canada, and there were probably at least 20 or 30 media. Apparently we made every TV station in France. We made three newspapers at least and the front page of one, and we were on at least one radio program. So it was a huge deal in France. They are very interested in this part of history still, and it is still very relevant to them. The guy here closest, this is the director of the forensic institute in France, which would basically be the head of the FBI crime lab here in the US. The guy next to him is the procurer, which is who we had to get permission from to actually do this whole testing. So the Germans gave us permission in March, but they said the problem is you have to get permission now from the French because our cemetery is on French soil. So you have to get permission from the French, and we actually had to get a legal court order to actually do this. And so the French now are doing the testing for free on behalf of the family and a soldier that we believe was killed liberating France. And when they're finished with their testing, they are going to send a sample down here to the University of Wisconsin to confirm the results. This is a very important moment when we were there. We were there September 13th, and you can see the procurer here. This is Lawrence Gordon, and this is Lawrence's brother Sam who also went with us. And what you're looking at here are the dental records. And we actually had a copy of this when we were there. And when they started examining the remains, I think it was Lawrence who picked up on it first that on the bottom right-hand side of the jaw there was a tooth missing, and it was a very precarious tooth. So we started looking at the dental records, and it seems like it's a very good match for PFC Gordon's records from 1942 and 1943 before he went into the war. And so what that means is the dental evidence seems to correspond with the remains that are in this German cemetery. So on top of all of the circumstantial evidence that we've had, now you have dental evidence that also suggests that this could be the soldier. This is afterward. When they processed the remains, it took about an hour and a half, and Lawrence and I talked about this before we went over, and we wanted to get to know everybody that was involved because there were so many people that had to come together to make this happen. The Germans, the French, and those of us that were coming from the United States and Canada. And you'll see this is the guy that actually did the processing of the remains here. These are our two German translators that came with us. Josh is here, myself. These are two people from the US government who came. Our French translator is down here. This is the guy from the German War Graves Commission that we had to get our permission from. His photographer, the head of the forensic institute, Lawrence, and down here on the end are two guys from the German embassy in France. So for me personally, this was probably one of the coolest moments while I was there because sitting at this table and looking around, you're dealing with a lot of very intelligent, powerful people who have a lot going on in their lives and their business world. And they all took out time of their busy schedules to work on this case because they thought it was the right thing to do. This is Lawrence and Sam. From an earlier slide you can remember here this is Gorron. This is the cemetery where the remains were originally buried. And this picture here shows what exists now of that temporary cemetery. The remains were all removed. The American remains and also the German remains were all removed, and it is now a cornfield. And the only thing that shows that it was once a cemetery are these markers here. And so Lawrence and Sam wanted to see that. They wanted to have a picture there, and I assume that that picture was taken somewhere right here in the front. I assume the roads were probably the same then as they are today. The wallet and its meaning. We've talked a number of times about how important the wallet is. It becomes sort of the one tangible thing that the family had. >> The wallet is interesting. It's burned but not terribly. It has three pictures in it and two pieces of money. The three pictures were taken in front of the farmhouse where my uncle Lawrence had grown up. One of them is with his mother and my three older siblings, and two of them have his girlfriend Nancy in them with him. The wallet is something that is treated as being very precious. I keep it in a safe at home. It's very fragile so I don't like to handle it. It's the one thing that he was carrying at the time of his death. It's the only thing that we have left of him. >> So, whatever happened to the girlfriend? Well, I wondered that for a long time. And I had been told by Lawrence that he talked to a high school classmate of his who was a niece of Nancy, and I was under the impression that she had passed away. Lawrence had said that his uncle and Nancy had written letters back and forth to each other over the years, and that a few years before he contacted her, and this was seven or eight years ago I think, that she had destroyed the letters. She'd kept them for 60 years or so and then had finally destroyed them. And my understanding was that she had passed away. And we were interviewed by the CBC for a radio program and a national news broadcast, and we found out about a month ago that Nancy was still alive and well. And because of that, I couldn't help it, I had to go meet her myself. >> I wanted to show you this. This is what Lawrence had in his pocket when he was killed. >> Oh. No! Oh, god, love his heart. Oh! Oh, look! See? There he is with me. >> How does it feel to know that when he was killed he had pictures of you in his wallet? >> Yeah. He did love me, didn't he? Yeah. And I guess this was taken just before he was sent overseas. And look at this. Oh, this is just precious. Oh, look. Oh, this is just wonderful. Yeah, that darn war. Too bad there has to be wars. >> What does it mean to you to know that he carried your picture? >> Oh, everything. I never realized that. That he was carrying these in his wallet of me. He must have loved me very much. >> You okay? >> Yeah. I don't know why there has to be wars. But I guess there always will be, won't there? >> Does it make you feel better knowing he carried pictures of you? >> Yes. Oh, yes. Yes, it really does. >> What's it like to... >> What a surprise. >> What's it like to touch that? >> Just like I have him in my hands. I knew that he felt-- I thought he-- We had a lot of fun. He liked me because I was a good dancer, but he must have really cared for me. This proves it. He really did. >> So, one of the things that I get asked a lot is, it's been 70 years, is any of this really important anymore? And I think part of what you see here from Nancy is that this even gave her some closure. She even got something out of it, and even a bad situation like this, I think what we've done in some ways has healed not only her, but I think the Gordon family. And one of the things that happened that I didn't expect is the Gordon family has become closer from this. And even Lawrence's brother and his cousins all wondered why he got involved when we first started doing this. They all thought it's been so long, you're never really going to find anything out. What's the big deal? Why go through all of this? And I think, for me personally, I think that Lawrence Gordon served, he fought, and he died, and I think that even if we can't find him, I think in some ways that we've honored his memory by doing the best we can to bring him home. And, fortunately, we have DNA now which is a good chance that we might be able to identify him. >> It matters to me because I had said to my father that I was going to visit uncle Lawrence's grave and there wasn't one. So you can let it go if you wish. You can just drop it. You can forget about it, but if you forget about it then, to my mind, you forget some of the lessons of history. And I think that that would be a terrible way to treat the commitment that was made by those people that have died during a war. I think my dad would be very happy that I'm doing this. That was part of the pact I had with him that I was going to find uncle Lawrence's grave one way or the other. And he'd be very pleased that I'm carrying out my word. >> This is Lawrence Gordon. And this is actually the wallet. I brought it here. Lawrence came down about a month ago and left it here with me so that I could show Nancy. It is the one tangible piece of Lawrence Gordon that we still have. And we hope that the DNA that these guys can help with can actually bring him home and we have more than just a wallet. So, thank you very much for your time and for coming.

APPLAUSE