HICKAM AIR FORCE BASE, Hawaii — Last month, yet another flag-draped metal box was ceremoniously borne through the back doors of the Central Identification Laboratory by four solemn soldiers.
Since then, scientists have given the new arrival their customary attention -- a kind of intense scrutiny seldom given to the living.
They have weighed and measured and X-rayed the mummified remains of the man who was found Oct. 16 in a glacier in the Sierra Nevada.
If he was one of four young airmen whose World War II training plane crashed nearby, he would have been encased in ice for nearly 63 years.
At the lab, near Pearl Harbor, investigators have combed through every fiber of his tattered green pants, green underwear and green cable-knit sweater, looking for a name, for laundry marks, for sizes that would indicate height and weight.
They have puzzled over high-tech ways to make out a severely corroded metal name tag that was still pinned over his heart, figuring it might have belonged to one of the men on the ill-fated 1942 flight.
They have conferred with a rare-manuscript expert at the University of Hawaii, who plans to freeze-dry the man's tiny red address book and tease open congealed pages that may be blank -- or may yield a wealth of clues to the man's identity.
"We go through thousands of items," said Robert Mann, deputy director of the lab, who is charged with identifying the remains of all American troops missing in action. "We take buttons and boots and grommets and lighters, and watches that stopped at the moment of impact. It all matters."
The well-preserved remains from California's Mt. Mendel are just another entry on the lab's long list of active cases.
The oldest is a soldier from the War of 1812. There also are two Civil War sailors found three years ago in the wreckage of the naval warship Monitor; one of them, scientists theorize, was a pipe smoker in his 40s who was accustomed to heavy labor.
They are brought here from around the world, sometimes bone by bone.
The pilot who couldn't make it over the Himalayas in World War II is flown from Tibet. The GI who disappeared in a blood-soaked German forest, the fighter jock who plunged into a Vietnamese rice paddy, the prisoners excavated from a mass grave in Korea -- America's lost who now are found wind up here.
Some are discovered by local residents tilling a field or clearing a forest. Others are found by teams from the lab and its parent agency, the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command.
