So, closing the circle on these cases requires intense forensic work, as Cronauer explained a few years ago, when he stood before a platoon of military lawyers in training. Speaking at The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School in Virginia, Cronauer likened the challenge to mastering the complicated numbers game Sudoku. He mentioned the more than 600 people engaged in the effort. He referred to the labs in Hawaii, Maryland, and Texas, and the operations in Russia and Southeast Asia. And he described the grit and the grime and the science involved — the excavation of earth, the piecing together of rusty shards and remnants to identify belt buckles, flight suits, and ejection seats; the compiling of oral histories to establish time and place of death, the maintenance of giant electronic databases with the names of the missing soldiers and their branch of service.