"My mission is Matt [Maupin]. We are going to find him, and bring him home."

Please note the "good and encouraging" quote at the end of this exceprt regarding the search for Matt Maupin:

Galesburg reservist returns to Iraq to search for GI (emphasis added):

BY ANDY KRAVETZ

GateHouse News Service

PEORIA - April 9, 2004, weighs heavily on the mind of Sgt. First Class Michael Bailey.
On that day, the Galesburg man and other reservists with Bartonville's 724th Transportation Company deployed in Iraq came under a massive attack by insurgents while making an emergency fuel run just west of Baghdad.

Two GIs were killed. Several were wounded, and one man, Staff Sgt. Keith "Matt" Maupin of Batavia, Ohio, was captured.

He remains missing. Bailey, a federal police officer in Rock Island when he's not deployed, aims to change that in the coming months.

"My mission is Matt. We are going to find him, and bring him home," Bailey said Wednesday, hours before he left for Iraq.

He is on active duty, voluntarily on assignment with a military unit looking for Maupin. Bailey said he could not comment further on the assignment or the unit he joined.

The mission is seemingly simple. Coordinate intelligence regarding Maupin and help guide the search for the missing soldier. The difficulty comes in that Iraq is a large place, roughly the size of California.

"It's like looking for a needle with 10 haystacks dumped on top of it, but we know where he's not," Bailey said, noting that hundreds of tips already have been followed up by soldiers and Marines in Iraq. More than 200,000 wallet-sized pictures of Maupin have been passed out. There's a Web site, written in Arabic, that offers a reward for any information.

Bailey declined to comment on what, if anything, has changed in the situation, saying only the Army wanted to try something new and wanted to speed up the process. He did, however, said there was new information, and that it was "good and encouraging."...