On the third Friday of September each year, the nation recognizes those were were prisoners of war or remain missing in action.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is a division of the federal defense department charges with providing the “fullest possible accounting” for those missing from past conflicts, to include World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Cold War, Gulf Wars and other recent conflicts.

They coordinate with countries and municipalities worldwide for research and operational missions.

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Nearly 81,000 Americans remain missing from WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Gulf Wars/other conflicts.

Of those, 75 percent of those losses are located in the Indo-Pacific, and more than 41,000 of the missing are presumed lost at sea due to incidents such as ship losses and known aircraft water losses, according to DPAA.

According to DPAA’s searchable database, there are 458 troops who listed Montana as their home of record who remain unaccounted for and 17 who have been accounted for.

Over the summer, DPAA released further information on the identification of U.S. Army Pvt. Leonard R. Jackson, 22, of Great Falls, since his family had recently received a full briefing.

Jackson was had died as a prisoner of war during WWII and was accounted for on Dec. 16, 2024.

He was a member of Battery L of the 60th Coast Artillery Corps, when Japanese forces invaded the Philippine Islands in December 1941. Fighting continued until the surrender of the Bataan peninsula on April 9, 1942, and of Corregidor Island on May 6, 1942.

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Thousands of U.S. and Filipino service members were captured and interned at POW camps and Jackson was among those reported captured when U.S. forces in Bataan surrendered to the Japanese, according to DPAA.

They were subjected to the 65-mile Bataan Death March and then held at the Cabanatuan POW Camp No.1 where more than 2,500 POWs died during the war.

According to prison camp and other historical records, Jackson died Oct. 31, 1942, and was buried along with other deceased prisoners in the local Cabanatuan Camp Cemetery in Common Grave 703, according to DPAA.

After the war, American Graves Registration Service personnel exhumed those buried at the Cabanatuan cemetery and relocated the remains to a temporary U.S. military mausoleum near Manila.

In 1947, the AGRS examined the remains in an attempt to identify them. Four sets of remains from Common Grave 703 were identified, but three were declared unidentifiable and were buried at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial as unknowns, according to DPAA.

In 2019, DPAA exhumed the remains associated with Common Grave 703 and sent them to the DPAA laboratory for analysis as as part of the Cabanatuan Project.

DPAA scientists used dental and anthropological analysis, plus circumstantial evidence; and scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used mitochondrial DNA analysis to identify Jackson’s remains.

Although interred as an unknown in MACM, Jackson’s grave was cared for over the past 70 years by the American Battle Monuments Commission and he is now memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines. A rosette will be placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for.

Jackson will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery on a date to be determined, according to DPAA.