09/18/2026
Last year, 231 missing Americans came home.
That is the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's fiscal year 2025 count. 165 from World War II, 58 from Korea, 8 from Vietnam. It was a record, and the first time since 2019 the agency exceeded the 200 identifications Congress asks of it.
It also barely moved the number. More than 80,000 Americans are still unaccounted for from past conflicts. Roughly 38,000 of them are assessed as recoverable. Most of the rest were lost at sea.
Those two facts sit together uncomfortably, and they should. The work is painstaking, it is slow, and it is still producing results eighty years after the fact. Somewhere last year, 231 families got a phone call they had stopped expecting.
Today is National POW/MIA Recognition Day, observed every year on the third Friday in September by presidential proclamation.
The flag says You Are Not Forgotten. The 231 is the proof.
Share this post in their honor.