How a Grandnephew’s DNA Hunt Is Bringing USS Arizona Unknowns Home

Kevin Kline’s great-uncle never came home from Pearl Harbor. Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Robert Edwin Kline went down with the battleship Arizona on Dec. 7, 1941. For most of a century, the government’s answer to families like his was simple: the remains could not be identified. It would cost too much and take too long.

Kline, a real estate agent from Virginia, decided to test that answer. Three years later, the USS Arizona unknowns are coming out of the ground. On Dec. 7, 2026, the 85th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency will begin disinterring 86 caskets of Arizona sailors and Marines buried without names at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. Hundreds of their relatives will be there to watch.

The USS Arizona Unknowns: 85 Years Without a Name

The Arizona’s losses are hard to grasp even now. The battleship lost 1,177 sailors and Marines in the Japanese attack, nearly half of the 2,403 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor that morning. More than 900 of them remain entombed in the sunken hull beneath the USS Arizona Memorial, where oil still rises to the surface.

Others were recovered and buried. According to Military Times, 277 Arizona crew members rest at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl. The identities of 86 of them were never determined. Their headstones mark them only as unknowns.

The military did try after the war. In 1947, according to the National WWII Museum, 170 unknowns from Pearl Harbor were exhumed and more than 100 were identified using the methods of the day. Dozens were declared unrecoverable and reburied in Honolulu. For the families of those men, that was supposed to be the end of the story.

Why the Government Said the USS Arizona Unknowns Couldn’t Be Identified

Modern DNA science changed what is possible, but it came with a catch. Pentagon policy requires family reference DNA samples from at least 60 percent of the service members who could be associated with a group of remains before the military will disinter them. The rule exists to make sure an identification is more likely than not before graves are disturbed.

For the Arizona, that meant finding and testing 643 families. In 2022, a Navy report to Congress said the government had DNA on file from only 25 of them, according to Stars and Stripes. The report estimated the work would take about 10 years and cost roughly $2.7 million. In practice, it meant the USS Arizona unknowns would likely stay unknown.

That report is what pulled Kline in. He has said he was brought into the mission by Randy Stratton, the son of Arizona survivor Donald Stratton, who pushed him to get involved. In 2023, Kline founded Operation 85, a name that points to the 85th anniversary of the attack.

How Operation 85 Found the Families of the USS Arizona Unknowns

Kline built a small team of research analysts and a forensic genealogist. They worked through personnel files, enlistment and medical records, dental charts, letters and photographs tied to every man on the crew. Then they did the harder part: tracing family trees forward 80 years to find living relatives willing to send in a cheek swab.

Eight decades after the attack, the search for relatives of the USS Arizona unknowns often ran through siblings’ descendants, nieces, nephews and cousins scattered across the country. Each family had to be located, contacted, convinced and walked through the process of submitting a DNA kit to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory.

On April 23, 2026, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced that the 60 percent threshold had been met. DPAA publicly thanked Kline and the Operation 85 team for three years of work locating families. It was an unusual moment: a federal agency crediting a private citizen for doing what its own estimate said would take a decade.

Kline paid for much of the effort himself, a sum Stars and Stripes most recently put at about $150,000. He has also been quick to share the credit. In a letter on the Operation 85 website, he thanked team members John Hardy, Melinde Byrne and Danny Abel, along with the Navy and Marine Corps casualty offices and the lab staff. “I was just one family member with one DNA kit,” he wrote.

The partnership has since become formal. DPAA presented Kline with its Superior Public Service Award at a May 11 ceremony, and Operation 85 signed a memorandum of understanding with the agency on Aug. 7 for future cooperation, according to Stars and Stripes. That is rare footing for a volunteer group, and it reflects how much of the groundwork Kline’s team handed the government.

By the Numbers

What Happens to the USS Arizona Unknowns on Dec. 7

If the weather cooperates, DPAA teams will disinter the first eight caskets at 6 a.m. on Dec. 7 at the Punchbowl. About five hours later, a ceremony will be held at Kilo Pier on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. DPAA plans a family reception and a tour of its laboratory afterward.

The remaining caskets of the USS Arizona unknowns will come out in groups of eight over the following weeks until all 86 have been recovered. Forensic anthropologists at DPAA’s Hawaii laboratory will examine the remains, and DNA testing will be done at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Delaware. Because many of the original burials held commingled remains, the work will take time. Identifications could come in waves over months or years.

DPAA is also finalizing a proposal to disinter 55 more unknowns from the attack whose ship was never determined. That work would begin after the Arizona project.

DPAA Director Kelly McKeague, a retired Air Force major general, said in a statement that the agency is honored to provide “long-sought answers to families of these unknowns.” According to Military Times, McKeague credited the ability to disinter the 86 unknowns singularly to Operation 85’s work.

The USS Oklahoma Showed It Can Work

There is a precedent, and it is encouraging. In 2015, DPAA launched Project Oklahoma to identify sailors and Marines from the battleship USS Oklahoma, which capsized during the attack. More than 360 previously unaccounted-for crewmen have since been individually identified, according to the National WWII Museum.

Those identifications brought sailors home to hometown cemeteries and to Arlington National Cemetery, often with relatives who never met them standing at the graveside. Families of the USS Arizona unknowns are hoping for the same.

When an identification is made, the change is personal and specific. A sailor who has been one of 86 anonymous caskets becomes a man with a name, a hometown and a family that can decide where he is laid to rest. Some families choose to keep their loved ones in Hawaii near their shipmates. Others bring them home to a family plot or to Arlington. Either way, the headstone no longer says “Unknown.”

Why It Matters

The military makes a promise to every person who serves: if you fall, the nation will bring you home and give you back your name. For 85 years, that promise went unkept for the USS Arizona unknowns, not because anyone stopped caring, but because the system decided the job was too expensive and too slow.

One family member with a stubborn streak and a small team proved otherwise. That matters well beyond Pearl Harbor. DPAA counts roughly 81,000 Americans still missing from past conflicts, and many cases depend on the same thing the Arizona project did: families who submit DNA. Operation 85 is a working model for how relatives, volunteers and government agencies can close cases that once looked permanent.

It also matters to the families of today’s service members and to Gold Star families who know what an empty grave feels like. Stucci Media recently told the story of a 95-year-old Gold Star mother who still greets veterans at the Miami VA. The thread connecting her and the Arizona families is the same: remembering is a duty, and it does not expire.

For veterans, the lesson is practical too. If a relative was ever listed as missing or unknown from any American war, submitting a family reference sample can be the piece that finally makes an identification possible. Our coverage of new VA grants for disabled veterans shows the other side of the same commitment: caring for those who came home, and accounting for those who did not.

What Kline Says Comes Next

Kline has made clear that Dec. 7 is a milestone, not a finish line. He told Military Times the start of disinterment “doesn’t mean we’re done.” Hundreds of Arizona families have still not submitted DNA, and every additional sample improves the odds that a specific man gets his name back.

“I think this is a problem we can fix,” he told Military Times. On his group’s website, he puts it more simply: “It’s impossible… until it isn’t.”