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Dear Doug Collins

The USS Arizona Unknowns: Eighty-Six Men, Eighty-Five Years, One Word on the Stone

Eighty-six sailors and Marines of the battleship USS Arizona have names. Their names are on the ship's muster rolls, on the wall of the memorial that stands over the sunken hull at Pearl Harbor, and in the records of the families who lost them on December 7, 1941. What they do not have, as of October 2026, is their names on their own graves. These are the men who were recovered after the attack — pulled from the wreckage or the harbor, burned or broken past recognition by the standards of 1941 — and buried as Unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, the Punchbowl, ten miles from the ship. For more than eighty years the institution declined to open those graves, on the stated ground that the family DNA needed to identify them could not be gathered in any reasonable time at any reasonable cost. A civilian — one of their own grandnephews — gathered it in three years. On April 23, 2026, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced that the required threshold had been met, and in October 2026 it set the date: the first eight caskets come out of the Punchbowl on December 7, 2026, the 85th anniversary of the attack, with hundreds of family members present. This page is the record of the service, of the eighty-five years of refusal and reversal that followed, and of what remains undone.

The service and the promise

The USS Arizona (BB-39) was a Pennsylvania-class battleship, commissioned in 1916, and on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, she lay moored along Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor. Her crew — Navy sailors and an embarked Marine detachment — were waking, eating breakfast, and preparing for a peacetime Sunday routine; some officers had gone ashore to their families. In the Japanese attack that opened the Pacific War, the Arizona was struck by up to eight bombs. One ignited the forward ammunition magazine. The explosion and fire overwhelmed the ship; her damage control officer, Lieutenant Commander Samuel Fuqua, organized the firefighting and got wounded men off until he ordered the surviving crew to abandon ship. The fire burned for two days as the ship settled into the harbor mud.

The Arizona suffered more loss of life than any American ship in the attack: 1,177 of her crew were killed, nearly half of the 2,403 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor that morning. The promise the service makes is the oldest one it has: the fallen will be accounted for, identified where identification is possible, and returned to their families or honorably buried under their own names. The Arizona’s dead fell into three groups, and the promise has run differently for each. More than 900 remain entombed in the sunken hull beneath the USS Arizona Memorial — a war grave the Navy treats as their final resting place, which this project does not touch. A second group was recovered and identified, in the aftermath and again in 1947, and rests under named stones. The third group — the subject of this page — was recovered, could not be identified with the tools of the 1940s, and was buried as Unknowns. Their names were known. Their graves were not matched to them. That gap is the whole case.

One of the 1,177 was Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Robert Edwin Kline, killed at twenty-two. His family, like most Arizona families, understood for generations that he was in the ship — never recovered, lying under the memorial with his shipmates. His grandnephew, Kevin Kline, a real estate agent in Fairfax County, Virginia, grew up on that understanding: “Growing up in our family — we knew our uncle was never found [because] he was in the ship. That’s where everybody always thought where he was.” The discovery that some of the crew had in fact been recovered, and lay in a cemetery ten miles away under stones that said only “Unknown,” turned a family member into the carrier of this case. Robert Edwin Kline may himself be among the 86; as of October 2026 no one knows, and Kevin Kline has said he does not assume his great-uncle will be among those identified. The mission was never only about one man. It was about the word on the stones.

What happened

The men who became the Arizona Unknowns died in the explosion, the fire, and the sinking, and their remains were recovered in the aftermath — some blown clear of the ship by the magazine explosion, some recovered by Navy divers and salvage crews before work in the wreck was judged too dangerous to continue. Many were burned beyond recognition. With the identification methods of 1941 — fingerprints where they survived, dental charts where they existed, personal effects — the unidentifiable were buried as unknown servicemen in two Oahu cemeteries, Nu’uanu and Halawa.

The institution made one serious early attempt. In September 1947, the American Graves Registration Service exhumed approximately 170 unidentified bodies from Halawa and Nu’uanu, thought to be linked to the Arizona, and brought them to the Central Identification Laboratory at Schofield Barracks. Working with the best methods of the day, the laboratory identified more than 100 of them, and their families were notified. The rest were declared unidentifiable — the record also uses the word “unrecoverable” — in an era when DNA identification did not exist. Those remains, presumed to be from the Arizona, were reinterred at the new National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, in multiple graves, many of them commingled, and marked “Unknown.” Most families were never even told that remains had been recovered and separated from the ship; they believed, as the Kline family did, that all of the unidentified dead were beneath the memorial.

There the case rested for more than seventy years, through a revolution in forensic science that the institution applied to other ships and not to this one. The precedent is named Project Oklahoma. The battleship USS Oklahoma, capsized in the same attack with 429 dead, had her unknowns in the same Punchbowl ground. In 2015 DPAA — the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, charged with accounting for America’s missing service members — launched Project Oklahoma, disinterred those unknowns, and individually identified more than 360 previously unaccounted-for crewmen, whose families were notified and who were, in the Museum’s words, finally able to go home. The Oklahoma identifications proved the method: historical research, forensic anthropology, and DNA matched against Family Reference Samples — cheek-swab DNA provided by living relatives to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory.

The Arizona was excluded from that logic on arithmetic. Under a Pentagon policy dating to 2015, commingled unknowns may be disinterred only when identification is more likely than not — for a group case, when DNA or other medical means exist to identify at least 60 percent of the associated service members. For the Oklahoma, the military already held DNA from more than 80 percent of families. For the Arizona, the missing number 1,072 men, so the threshold works out to Family Reference Samples representing 643 crew members — and the file was thin in every direction: personnel files on only about half of the missing, medical records on about half of those, dental records for only 130 men, some records destroyed with the ship and others believed lost in the 1973 National Personnel Records Center fire. Family DNA on file stood, by DPAA Director Kelly McKeague’s own February 2021 account, at 12 of the 1,177.

What the institution proposed instead, in February 2021, is the low point of this record. At a DPAA family update meeting on February 20, 2021, asked when the agency would disinter the Arizona unknowns, McKeague said it did not make “pragmatic sense” to identify them, and described a proposal discussed with the Navy: “We have had preliminary discussions with the Navy, and one of the proposals that we have notionally talked about is to disinter all of them — not for the purpose of identification — but to entomb them in the hull of the Arizona along with their shipmates.” Families reacted with outrage at the prospect of the remains being moved into the hull unidentified — with no assurance, absent identification, that every set of remains in those graves is even an Arizona crewman. Under that pressure DPAA reversed the proposal, stating the remains would not be disinterred for re-interment in the hull without identifying them. But the affirmative position did not change: Deputy Director Rear Admiral Darius Banaji told the Associated Press in 2021 that the agency had no plans to disinter the remains and try to identify them, because documentation was insufficient. McKeague’s formulation, in the same period, was that identifying the unknowns was a process “we could never take on.”

In March 2022 the position was put in writing to Congress. A report by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs priced the preliminary work — locating surviving family members and obtaining their DNA — at approximately $2.7 million for the Navy and Marine Corps casualty offices’ portion, 12,600 man-hours, and ten years. The report, as quoted by Military Times, held that while the agencies “agree that the identification of the 85 Unknowns associated with USS ARIZONA and buried at [the Punchbowl] is feasible, it will require significant resources and an inordinate amount of time,” and warned that “pursuing this effort will give false hope to the vast majority of USS Arizona families that their loved one may be identified.” It recorded the starting point: samples on file for only 25 families. Ten years, $2.7 million, 643 families needed, 25 in hand. On the government’s own numbers, the 86 men would stay unknown past the last of their siblings’ lifetimes. That report is the document this case turns on, because a family member read it as a challenge rather than a conclusion.

What the institution did afterward

What the institution did afterward was, first, nothing — and then, when a civilian did the work it had priced at a decade, it reversed itself in writing, credited him by name, gave him its public service award, and scheduled the disinterments. The carrier of the reversal is Operation 85. Kevin Kline launched it on April 6, 2023, as a privately funded, civilian-led effort with a small team — research analysts and a forensic genealogist among a handful of volunteers — and a single objective: find the families of the Arizona’s missing, connect them to the Navy and Marine Corps casualty offices, and build the Family Reference Sample base to the 643-family threshold. The name carried both the original count of the unknowns and the deadline Kline set: the 85th anniversary of the attack, December 7, 2026. Kline put his real estate business on hold and funded the effort himself; the reported figure grew with the work — more than $50,000 at first, about $75,000 by late 2025, about $150,000 in Stars and Stripes’ October 2026 reporting.

The work itself was genealogy at industrial scale, against an eighty-year gap. Many of the dead died in their twenties before having children; the relatives who carry identifiable DNA are siblings’ descendants — nieces, nephews, cousins, several generations removed, scattered across the country, some unaware they had any connection to the Arizona at all. Operation 85 worked through personnel files, enlistment and medical records, and dental charts, traced family trees forward, and walked each family through submitting a DNA kit. The early pace already contradicted the Navy’s estimate: within seven months, the team had tracked down nearly 600 family members, more than 400 with viable samples, and crossed the halfway point of a threshold the government had said would take ten years. Families who declined were rare — by Kline’s account to the Associated Press in 2026, only about 15 of some 1,500 people contacted. He has told the story of a woman who understood, only as an adult, why she was always sad around Christmas: her grandmother had lost a son on the Arizona, her mother had lost a brother, and neither had ever celebrated the holiday that fell weeks after the anniversary. He calls it generational grief, and it is the constituency this project organized.

Congress moved a short distance alongside. In July 2023 the House passed its fiscal 2024 defense act with a USS Arizona amendment, introduced by Representative Doug Lamborn, aimed at contracting the family-location work; the provision proved unworkable in conference, and the final act instead directed DPAA to brief the Armed Services Committees by April 1, 2024, on sample collection and its obstacles. What changed the threshold was the sample count itself. Operation 85 announced in November 2025 that it had reached the 60 percent mark — 653 DNA kits obtained, against 643 required. McKeague confirmed the laboratory was close behind, holding DNA from 613 families with more kits in process. By September 26, 2026, the laboratory reported 724 crew members with DNA representation, up from the 25 families of 2022. The formal partnership followed the facts: Operation 85 signed a memorandum of understanding with DPAA on August 7, 2026, per Stars and Stripes.

On April 23, 2026, DPAA announced that the 60 percent threshold had been met for the USS Arizona (BB-39) Unknown Identification Project. “Reaching this 60 percent threshold allows DPAA to formally request and begin planning the disinterment of potentially 141 unknowns currently buried in multiple potentially comingled graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu,” the agency said — the larger figure covering, in the accounting settled on by the autumn, the 86 unknowns associated with the Arizona and a further 55 Pearl Harbor unknowns whose ship was never determined. DPAA extended “its sincere appreciation” to Kline “and the ‘Operation 85’ team for their devoted efforts over the past three years to locate and connect enough USS Arizona families to help reach this important milestone.” On May 11, 2026, at DPAA’s All Hands meeting in Arlington, Virginia, McKeague presented Kline with the agency’s Superior Public Service Award. The reversal was completed in October. On October 9, 2026, Air Force Times and Military Times reported the finalized plan, with McKeague’s statement: “DPAA is honored to be able to provide long-sought answers to families of these Unknowns,” and, on how the disinterments became possible, “Being able to disinter the 86 Unknowns associated with USS Arizona is singularly due to the determined initiative and extraordinary efforts of Operation 85.” Kline’s own formulation, to Military Times, was that the families “turned a hard ‘No’ to a ‘Yes.’”

Where it stands now

As of October 2026, this is an open, live case with a dated beginning and no identifications yet. Disinterment is scheduled to start on December 7, 2026 — the 85th anniversary of the attack — at the Punchbowl. DPAA teams are to disinter the first eight caskets that morning, weather permitting; Stars and Stripes reporting places the first disinterments at 6 a.m., followed by an 11 a.m. ceremony at Kilo Pier on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, a family reception, and a laboratory tour. The invocation is to be given by retired Army Colonel and Chaplain Brian D. Ray, himself an Operation 85 family member — grandnephew of Gunner’s Mate 3rd Class Robert Adair Anderson of the Arizona — who donated his own DNA to the project. More than 700 family members are expected, per Stars and Stripes; Air Force Times puts the gathering in the hundreds. The remaining caskets follow in groups of about eight — Air Force Times reports about eight each week; Associated Press and Stars and Stripes reporting puts the pace at about eight every two to three weeks — until all 86 have been disinterred.

What happens after a casket is opened is laboratory work, and the record is plain that it will take time. The remains go to DPAA’s laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam; DNA samples go to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, for comparison against the family reference samples, alongside dental and skeletal analysis and the historical record. Because many of the original burials were commingled — more than one man’s remains in a single grave — identifications are expected in waves over months or years, and none is guaranteed for any individual grave. Each identification returns the decision to a family: a named burial where the man lies, among his shipmates in Hawaii, or a return home. The search for family DNA continues in parallel; DPAA’s April announcement states that reaching the threshold “does not conclude the search for additional USS Arizona and associated Pearl Harbor family members,” and Kline made the same point in October 2026: the start of exhumations “doesn’t mean we’re done. We’re still looking [to] take those words unknown off those graves” remaining in the Punchbowl. “I think this is a problem we can fix.”

Two boundaries define what this project is not. First, the more than 900 Arizona dead entombed in the hull are untouched, by design and by every party’s agreement — the Navy and the National Park Service treat the wreck beneath the memorial as a final resting place, and only remains already buried in the cemetery are exhumed. Second, the 86 are not the whole Punchbowl account: DPAA is finalizing a separate proposal to disinter the further 55 Pearl Harbor unknowns whose ship affiliation was never determined; as of October 2026 that proposal has not been approved, and its disinterments would follow the Arizona project. Until the first laboratory results are announced, the ledger below holds at its October 2026 state: authorization won, date set, names not yet restored.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

The case was carried on video by the families themselves: Operation 85’s founding appeal, in which its executive director lays out the excavation and DNA process alongside a family member who had already given DNA; Kline’s commencement address to the families and partners who built the sample base; and the project’s return of a single sailor’s letter — Seaman 1st Class Norman Kenneth Iversen’s May 24, 1941 letter from the Arizona, found after his sweetheart’s death and reconnected to his family through Operation 85. Three films, in that order.

The mission, stated. The project's founding video — its executive director describes the process needed to excavate the cemetery gravesites and conduct DNA testing, and a family member who has already provided DNA speaks. (Pacific Historic Parks.)

The address to the families. Kevin Kline's Family & Partner Commencement Address for Operation 85 — the mission to bring home the crew members buried in commingled graves marked only as "unknown," and the call for continued family participation. (Operation 85.)

One sailor, in his own words. The rediscovery and return of Seaman 1st Class Norman Kenneth Iversen's letter to Edis Higgins, written from the Arizona on May 24, 1941 — found by her daughter after her death and reconnected to the sailor's family through Operation 85. (Operation 85.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.