Today we celebrate the founding of the Untied Stares of America…..but I would like to post on some “good” news…..

Today will be a short day here on IST for I would like to spend time with my better half doing what adults do in the privacy of their homes (use your imagination)……

There have been many MIAs from our many wars and it is always a good day when one is identified and returned home for a proper burial……

A World War II airman missing since 1944 was buried in his Iowa hometown Saturday afternoon, decades after the Army buried him in Italy as an unknown.

Staff Sgt. Byron Nelson’s remains were interred at Pleasant Hill Cemetery in Primghar, in northwest Iowa, with full military honors provided by soldiers from the Iowa National Guard, according to a press release from the Guard.

Nelson, 28, was a nose gunner aboard a B-24G Liberator that was shot down by German fighter planes April 25, 1944, over Italy. Eight crew members parachuted from the bomber and survived. Nelson and another airman, Sgt. John E. White, were reported to have died.

Local residents found the remains and buried them in a cemetery in Fognano, just north of Florence. After the war, the Army twice disinterred the remains and tried to identify them, but failed.

The ones later linked to Nelson were labeled “Mirandola Unknown X-190,” from the name of a cemetery where they had been buried. They were moved to the Florence American Cemetery in central Italy on May 26, 1949.

In 2015 the Defense Department changed a long-standing policy that strongly discouraged attempts to identify service members buried as unknowns. Historians at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency reviewed the records of Mirandola Unknown X-190 and wartime Italian military police records, linking them to Nelson.

His remains were disinterred in August 2015 and shipped to an accounting agency lab at Offutt Air Force Base. Dental and anthropological analysis, and a DNA match with one of Nelson’s grandnephews, allowed scientists to identify Nelson late last year.

(Omaha World-Herald)