WEBVTT

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^- Been doing this for seven and a half years now,

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^so I really fell in love with the job almost immediately.

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And can't really see myself doing anything else now.

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(birds chirping)

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So we are in Papua New Guinea.

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We are right outside of Wewak which was

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held by the Japanese during WWII.

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The incident that we are currently working on

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is the 12 March 1944 loss of two individuals

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on an A-20G aircraft.

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They were coming into Horham airfield on a bombing run

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and they never came back out of one of the runs.

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And no one knew what happened to them.

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So they were missing in action.

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Now, in 2016, we're here doing the full excavation

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to hopefully find the remains of those individuals.

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As we're doing excavation we wanna be able to

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control all of the aspects of that excavation.

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One of the things with archaeology and excavation

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is you only get one chance, when it's a disruptive process

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and so we need to make sure that we do it the right way.

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Especially for cases like this

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where it's forensic archaeology and these remains

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need to be properly handled for families.

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The first step after clearing some of the vegetation

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is to put in a grid system.

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That grid system basically gives us a way

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to track exactly where things are.

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For this particular site, it's all relatively contained.

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The plane came in and crashed in a relatively small area.

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So we've been excavating almost exclusively

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with small hand tools.

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So trowels or other small picks.

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Everything that we excavate goes into buckets.

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Those buckets of dirt are then screened

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at a screening station.

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Everything goes through that mesh.

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Everything that we excavate out of the unit,

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all that soil goes through the mesh

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and is looked through by Americans as well as

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our local support from the Papua New Guinea folks.

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So everyone looks through that very carefully,

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it goes into an evidence bucket,

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and then me as well as the life support investigator

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will look through every single piece of those,

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because we're the experts.

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For me, this job as my primary occupation is very important

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because I'm able to bring home these service members

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to families that have been waiting for 70 years.

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And that's really an amazing feeling,

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to be able to give something to a family they never thought

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that they would even be able to have.