The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) was established in 1991 as a division of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System as the only Department of Defense forensic DNA testing laboratory for the identification of members of the US military who lost their lives during conflict.

In this interview, Laura interviews Suni Edson, who works within the Past Accounting Group at AFDIL. She shares a project that she has been working on since 2014 to identify those who perished at the Cabanatuan Prison Camp located in the Philippines during WWII. While the prisoners where allowed to keep records of those who had passed at the camp, the remains were subsequently disinterred and moved to a cemetery in Manilla, where they were unintentionally co-mingled, fixed with a formalin powder, and subjected to environmental degradation.

Suni describes the careful work being undertaken to identify the 3,000+ remains located in this cemetery as well as challenges that the team is facing, and new research being done to overcome them to return the remains to family members for a proper burial.

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