VFW Commander Addresses Archives Issue

Week of November 02, 2009

The national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S., Thomas J. Tradewell, Sr., recently returned from a 12-day trip to Europe to urge the Russian government to revitalize the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs and reopen its military archives. According to U.S. officials in the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, Russia's military archives are vitally important to the Full Accounting Mission because documents in the archives could help to determine the fate of some of the 88,000 missing and unaccounted-for Americans going back to World War II. For more on the U.S. full accounting efforts, visit the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office website or the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command website.