84,000 U.S. Soldiers Are Listed MIA From The Nation's Previous Wars

Capt. Melissa Ova searched a pasture in Germany, where an American bomber crashed in 1944. Martin Specht for The New York Times

Teams Seeking Remains Dig Back to World War II -- New York Times

BAULER, Germany — At the start of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, an American bomber was shot down by German fighter planes and sent into a fiery, nose-first crash in a cow pasture here. The pilot’s body was never found.

Almost 65 years later, on a recent late summer day, a 10-member Defense Department team was in the same pasture, searching through mounds of excavated mud for a trace of the airman. The group had already unearthed shreds of a parachute and part of a leather glove when one of the team’s forensic anthropologists, Allysha Powanda Winburn, found a crucial clue to the mystery: a small piece of what she called “possible osseous remains,” or potential human bone.

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My Comment: The sentence that stuck out for me is the following ....

84,000 Americans still missing from the nation’s previous wars.

I never realized the MIA total was so high.