June 5, 1997 The Honorable Susan Molinari Member, U .S. House ...

FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE ARMY NON-BATTLE STATS[Methodology Used]Going into this exercise, I knew with some certainty fromDepartment of Army, Surgeon General and Department of Defenserecords and statistical data, that 2,452 Army non-battle deathswere officially attributed to the Korean Operation ; whetherall of the names are to be found in official files is anotherstory .The Reister Study :Then I was lucky enough to find a rare copy of a studyentitled Battle Casualties and Medical Statistics : U .S . ArmyExperience in the Korean War , put together by Frank Reisterand published by the Surgeon General, Department of the Armyin 1973 .He developed the statistics using a variety of records,including hospital patient records ; some 1943 deaths wereattributed to injuries, burns, wounds, poisonings, suicides,homicides and other causes, and 509 deaths were attributed todiseases .Reister's report is very comprehensive, as evidenced bythe exhaustively detailed preface he wrote for the book .DOD Acknowledges the Reister Numbers :DOD acknowledges the Army study and uses the informationin their statistical tables which routinely are made availableto the public, though it does not actually have a list of the2,452 names to back up the statistics .Then I got a copy of a 1954 Army microfiche set which Iobtained from the DA under the Freedom of Information Act .[As mentioned elsewhere in this study, the reference is :601-87 (Fiche page Nos . 0001 - 0018) "POW, MIA, Non-BattleCasualties, Korean Operation (All Services, Korean War, as ofMarch 31, 1954 . Note : the title would lead one to believe thatthere are not KIA, DOW ; however, they are included .]MethodologyThen I analyzed the microfiche .I found 2,389 DNB, "Died-Non-Battle ;" 3 MNB, "Missing,Non-Battle ;" and 22 FOD, "Finding of Death" entries for a totalof 2,414 names .[Some 38 names short of the official DOD count of 2,452 ;the difference, however, may lie in the possibility that someof the hospital records used by Reister were of DNB who werehospitalized in Japan, or U .S ., and may have been picked upin the mix of the 17,355 "other" deaths attributed to outof-theateroperations . Eg : Roland Carey who died in Japan aftercomplications arising from an accident in Korea - see Page 56 .]I next cross-referenced the 2,414 names to the 1994 DODDIOR data base of 34,461 names and the POW/MIA list [PMKOR]of 8,196 names prepared by the Pentagon's POW/MIA Office [DPMO]and released after the second edition of my study was published .176-1