The hike up the sheer mountain was steep, making them winded and sweaty in the July heat. They stood for a moment, a group of about 24 men and women, gathered in a German forest, catching their breaths. PJ Dermer spoke out loud, calling to the missing WWII airman by name, asking him to guide them in their search.
And then the work began. Each morning for nearly a month, a team of volunteers made an arduous trek up the mountainside, often in the rain and slipping in mud, searching for the remains of an airman missing since WWII. The Department of Defense had sent them here; assigned them a quadrant of forest land where information indicated that the airman’s remains may have been. One cadre of individuals dug 6’-by-6’ sections of ground; another piled the dirt into buckets and carried it over to sifting screens. There, others carefully examined the soil, hoping the screens would catch bits of evidence and show they were in the right place. In a corner of the area where they worked, a father and son who were part of the crew set up a Fallen Comrade field table as a remembrance, using pieces of fallen trees for makeshift chairs and a table.
Dermer, founder of the nonprofit Terra Search Promise which helps the U.S. Government locate, recover, and repatriate missing U.S. Service personnel, had organized the MIA recovery mission. A Team Rubicon Greyshirt from northern Virginia, Dermer spent 30 years in the Army, retiring as a Colonel. The seeds of his new mission—this search for missing U.S. service personnel—had been planted decades ago, as a 17-year-old serving in Korea. Virtually everyone he met had also served in Vietnam, and all had buddies who hadn’t come home. He heard soldiers screaming in the night, crying in their sleep, remembering lost comrades.
It was Team Rubicon, however, that inspired Dermer to found Terra Search, which he calls America’s first service-disabled, veteran-owned, nonprofit dedicated to POW/MIA research, recovery, and repatriation. When he joined Team Rubicon in 2018, he had been impressed by the professional organization Jake Wood and Clay Hunt had created. He realized that enlisting other veterans in the kinds of MIA recovery missions he’d been serving on outside of Team Rubicon was, as he says, a “no-brainer.” And so, he took that inspiration and founded Terra Search in October of 2020.
Dermer was also inspired to start Terra Search because he believes that MIA soldiers are fading into memory given the generational changes in the military. The Department of Defense estimates 78,000 Americans are still missing, and that about 38,000 are deemed recoverable.
“I believed we could set up a professional organization, centered around veterans, that could address this issue. It’s time for families to get the answers they deserve, once and for all. Let’s either find the guys or have the guts to tell a family they won’t be coming home,” says Dermer.
Today, Terra Search has roughly 100 volunteer members, has conducted a handful of search and recovery operations, and is even a Department of Defense partner. Among those Terra Search volunteers are other Greyshirts, including Chuck Hartman from Indiana and Frank Fumega. Fumega, a Connecticut Greyshirt, deployed to Germany with the Terra Search team in July. Fumega says the work was hard but the mission was exciting, and he was honored to be a part of it.
The Germany dig was just Dermer’s latest mission: Terra Search personnel have searched for missing soldiers everywhere from Laos to the Netherlands.
He acknowledges the work is sometimes hard, but the rewards are many. Searchers are looking for any clue about the aircraft or its crew. When someone finds something they believe shows they may be close to finding important evidence, “it’s beyond exhilarating,” Dermer says. “The whole place lights up. It’s the brightest light.”
His team uses professional archeologists, which are core to any mission. Anything the team finds is sent to a DOD lab for further identification and determination. That process can take more than a year for a final identification.
“We are not authorized to determine [who belongs to the remains], only to provide the evidence,” explains Dermer.
Before the team’s final descent down the mountain in Germany, Dermer and his team bid farewell to the missing airman. While Dermer cannot disclose specifics about what they did or did not find, due to evidence and chain of custody agreements with the Department of Defense, which conducts formal analysis and determination and interacts with the family, he is confident that the team’s efforts were not in vain.
