Weekly Column: Honoring America's Missing Servicemembers

Through a Congressional Record Statement, I once again had the opportunity to pay tribute to servicemembers lost in service to our country and their loved ones who await resolution, those ensuring our missing servicemembers are not forgotten and those working to bring our missing servicemembers home. We can never let up in this American responsibility.

The following is the text of the Congressional Record Statement:

Madam/Mr. President, I join the POW*MIA Awareness Rally Corp. of Pocatello, Idaho, in acknowledging National POW/MIA Recognition Day this September 18, 2026.

I am grateful for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s, DPAA, steady and often challenging work to meet its responsibility of recovering America’s servicemembers. Each year, the DPAA leads the creation of a poster commemorating National POW/MIA Recognition Day, as ceremonies are held across the country to honor those who were held captive and returned, as well as those who remain missing. The year’s poster reads, “Warrior Ethos: ‘I will always place the mission first . . . I will never leave a fallen comrade.’”

Second Lieutenant Charles Atteberry, a World War II servicemember from Parma who had been missing and unidentified for 80 years, is one of the Idaho servicemembers most recently returned home. Through the U.S. military’s use of DNA testing, Lt. Atteberry was identified from a mass grave in Taiwan and returned to Idaho in 2025. Lt. Atteberry’s brother, Lloyd, also served in the military as a pilot during World War II and is still considered missing in action since he was reportedly shot down in 1943.

On June 10, 2026, the DPAA also accounted for U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Harold T. Thompson, 24, who was killed during World War II. The DPAA reported, “In the winter of 1944, Thompson was assigned to the 718th Bombardment Squadron, 449th Bombardment Group, in Italy. On Jan. 30, he was serving as a gunner aboard a B-24 Liberator bomber on a mission to Udine, Italy. The plane was shot down while returning from its mission and was last sighted north of the Isle of Morgo off the Italian coast near the town of Grado. Three crew members made it out of the plane before the crash, but only one survived. The other seven members, including Thompson, were believed to have still been in the aircraft when it crashed.”

As we celebrate Idahoans’ return home, we maintain hope for the return of Idaho’s other servicemembers, including the eight who remain unaccounted for from the Vietnam War. This includes Major William Ellsworth Lemmons, who was on a visual reconnaissance mission in South Vietnam on June 18, 1967, when the aircraft he piloted failed to return from the mission for unknown reasons and was declared missing. Major Lemmons is memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.

I thank America’s servicemembers, veterans and their families for their extraordinary commitment to our country, as I remain deeply grateful to those who keep attention on bringing every American servicemember and the DPAA and its partners working steadily to provide the fullest possible accounting of missing U.S. personnel to their families and our country.

To support these efforts, I continue to use every opportunity to press for enactment of the Bring Our Heroes Home Act. This legislation would help eliminate obstacles preventing families and caseworkers from accessing the records needed for recovering America’s POWs and MIA.

We honor America’s missing servicemembers and those they served beside by never giving up in our pursuit of finding them and bringing them home.

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