More than 1,500 Wisconsinites are missing in war zones around the world. This bill would fund the search for those MIAs.

MADISON - Near an exhibit illustrating the heroism of Wisconsin National Guard soldiers who fought in the brutal Buna campaign during World War II, legislators on Tuesday announced a bill that would fund efforts to find missing service members from the state.

Among the more than 1,500 Wisconsinites missing in war zones are men who never came home from Buna, New Guinea.

If approved by lawmakers, the state would pay $180,000 annually to the University of Wisconsin MIA Recovery and Identification Project, which has helped find and identify the remains of three service members killed in Europe during World War II. While those military members were from other states, the dedicated group of UW volunteers and researchers will begin concentrating on bringing Wisconsin MIAs back home.

Wisconsin would be the first state to pay for recovery missions of its fallen. 

More than 1,500 Wisconsinites are missing in war zones, with around half those deemed recoverable, while the others are mostly service members lost at sea. The highest concentration of Wisconsin MIAs are in New Guinea, 60 missing men, and the Philippines, 135 missing.

State Sen. Dale Kooyenga (R-Brookfield), an Iraq veteran, noted that the United States is the only country that has an agency dedicated to finding, identifying and recovering its fallen military members.

"It really highlights how unique and special we are," Kooyenga, an Army reservist, said during a news conference in the area spotlighting 20th Century conflicts at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.

Standing near a map showing all the communities in the state whose sons are missing in action from several wars, Wisconsin Secretary-designee of Veterans Affairs Mary Kolar said the need to support the UW MIA team is urgent, particularly for families still coping with "the agony they experience of not knowing where their loved ones are."

The UW MIA Recovery and Identification Project was founded in 2015, two years after helping identify the remains of a U.S. service member mistakenly buried as a German soldier. Since then, UW has forged a unique partnership with the Department of Defense that harnesses the cutting edge technology and knowledge of the Madison campus — and now other academic partners — to find and identify America's MIAs.

The UW team traveled this summer to Belgium to look for remains of service members at the crash site of a bomber that took part in the Battle of the Bulge.

Since the UW team formed, MIA searches have mostly been handled by student volunteers. The group has no budget. Travel expenses for the most recent trip to Belgium were paid by the U.S. government.

The annual funding will help the team find one to three Wisconsin MIAs each year as well as provide updates for families waiting so long for word of their loved one. Since media reports of the team's work were published last month, many family members of MIAs have reached out, hoping the researchers will take their relative's case, said Charles Konsitzke, associate director of the UW Biotechnology Center and leader of the MIA search team.

It's possible other state legislatures will fund efforts by university researchers to find more than 82,000 Americans officially listed as missing in action, including 72,000 from World War II, 7,600 in Korea and almost 1,600 in Vietnam.

"We would hope other states would follow Wisconsin's lead," said Chris Zaczyk, the team's operations manager who is an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran. "We're happy to lock arms with them and get the job done together."

The cost to find MIAs varies widely depending on terrain and location, the number of searchers needed to travel to a site to dig and sift through dirt or clay. The group's first recovery cost $85,000, but team members had a pretty good idea of the location of the service member's remains.

The Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency spends an average of $1 million on each recovered service member because it can take years to locate and identify remains.

UW researchers are working to improve technology to shorten the time it takes to identify someone, including eventually performing DNA sequencing in days rather than weeks and making identifications in the field.

This spring the remains of 2nd Lt. Walter B. "Buster" Stone, whose P-47 disappeared in 1943 on a bomber escort mission, were buried in May in Alabama. The UW team helped find him in 2018.

What's it feel like to find and identify a missing service member?

"Humbling is the right word," said Zaczyk.

The UW team has compiled a database of hundreds of names of Wisconsin MIAs with details of their lives and service records. Some missing Wisconsinites will likely never be found - those whose planes never returned from flights over oceans or went down on sunken ships.

But ultimately the UW researchers hope to account for everyone, bringing back as many as they can to Wisconsin.