The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency held the largest-ever family member update in its history on Saturday, Feb. 22 in Sacramento.

More than 500 Gold Star families attended to learn how the agency is proceeding in efforts to repatriate the remains of service members who never returned home from the Vietnam War, the Korean War or World War II.

Around the nation, the DPAA holds several family updates each year so the families of service members who went missing in action can meet with officials one-on-one to discuss the details of their cases. Since 1995, DPAA has conducted these family updates, reaching more than 31,000 family members through face-to-face meetings.

Nearly 82,000 service members still remain unaccounted for from conflicts dating back to World War II. According to DPAA, 71,981 service members are missing from World War II, 7,444 are missing from the Korean War, 1,573 are missing from the Vietnam War, and 126 are missing from the Cold War.

Finding those service members and bringing them home is the sacred duty of the DPAA, said Fern Sumpter Winbush, the principal deputy director of DPAA.

“Not only is this mission a sacred obligation, but it’s a moral imperative,” she told families. “The agency exists because there are unaccounted for … there are men and women who gave their ultimate all. We serve the families because you are the ones that are still here. You are relying on us because we’re the only ones that are doing this mission. We’ll continue to put mission first. We’re not going to accept defeat. We’ll never quit, and we’re never going to leave a comrade behind.”

Winbush told family members that the DPAA mission would take recovery operations to 33 territories and countries this year. The ability to do that requires building relationships with nations around the world to earn the trust needed to gain access. It’s something she said the agency will continue to work on. Right now, she said, there are 10 ongoing missions in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines.

Winbush also stressed to families in attendance the importance of getting family member DNA on file.

“We can’t make an identification unless we have something to compare it to,” she said. “For many of the unaccounted-for, we don’t have the proper family reference samples on file. This is one way we work to collect them.”

Also, she noted the number of young people attending the family member update and stressed how important it is that families keep other family members aware that a family member who served overseas never returned home and that the DPAA is still looking for them.

“We need third, fourth and even fifth-generation families to stay on top of their loved one’s loss,” Winbush said. “We don’t forget … we have all of the records. But it’s critically important that you stay on top of it so that the story can continue to be told.”

She said it’s common for DPAA to call families with a notification that a loved one has been found, only to find that some families were unaware or don’t believe what they are being told.

“They don’t know this mission exists,” she said. “They don’t believe that we’re still searching for their great, great uncle [or] father … from World War II,” Winbush said. “We’ve got to keep all of the families involved.”

As part of the family member update, the DPAA also unveiled its annual poster, which will be used later this year to commemorate National POW/MIA Recognition Day, Sept. 19.

This year’s poster was created by artist Jeannie Huffman, the daughter of Navy Cmdr. Edward James Jacobs Jr., a Vietnam War pilot who never came home. He went missing Aug. 25, 1967, while piloting an RA-3B Skywarrior aircraft over the Gulf of Tonkin in North Vietnam.

When her father left for Vietnam, Huffman was only two weeks old. She was just five months old when her mother learned her father went missing. She said her father had been able to hold her as an infant before he deployed for the war, but there’s no record of that for her to look at today.

“One thing that kind of bothers me … I have no photos of that,” she said. “I wish I had a picture of him and me, and I don’t.”

Back in 2018, Huffman attended her first DPAA family member update in Greensboro, North Carolina. There was not a lot of information then about recovery efforts for her father, and this was because her father had been put into a non-recoverable status.

Huffman’s husband, Dave, explained what had happened.

“In 1993, when previous iterations of what’s now the DPAA [were] charged with the mission, there was an order that came out to try to touch as many sites as possible,” Dave Huffman said. “They got in a boat and went out to the grid coordinates of the last known location of the airplane and said there’s no visible wreckage.”

That finding resulted in Jacobs and the crewmen he was with being deemed unrecoverable — which stood until January 2024. However, the two did their own research and were later able to convince DPAA to begin anew in an effort to find Jeannie Huffman’s father.

“We had a meeting with the DPAA in Washington, D.C., and we presented our research and investigation to them in November of 2023, and they revisited his case, and now his case and the two crewmen that were with him have all been changed from non-recoverable to active pursuit,” Dave Huffman said.

This year’s DPAA annual poster is not Jeannie Huffman’s first for the agency. However, it is the first time one of her works will be used as part of the agency’s official National POW/MIA Recognition Day commemoration.

On the poster are five service members, four men and one woman, representing each service and the conflicts from which there remain service members who have not come home.

“It was important to capture all the conflicts of the POW/MIAs,” Jeannie Huffman said.

Another aspect of the poster is that each individual photographed, representing each service and each conflict, is wearing period uniforms and gear.

“I believe that each of our missing is still seeking their way home, and they expect that our nation’s promise will be kept, which is to bring them home,” she said.