Vanished (11 page)

“
I learned more about my dad
in the first five minutes than the government had ever told us,” Tommy said.

While they spoke, the commander of the unit’s 424th Squadron, Jack Vanderpoel, wandered into the room. Vanderpoel had reached the South Pacific just a few weeks before the Big Stoop crew, and became famous for leading his men on their most daring flights. On one mission, he’d engaged in a dogfight with a nimble Japanese fighter plane and somehow chased it away. Even in training, Vanderpoel had been a daredevil pilot. Once, during a night flight, he’d swooped down over a train track, turning off his lights and rocketing toward an oncoming engine, then throwing his lights back on at the last second to blind the terrified engineer, who jammed on his brakes and squealed down the track while Vanderpoel raced into the night sky laughing. That stunt cost him laps on the quad, but his talent was impossible to deny. He was chosen by his classmates as cadet captain, and after graduation, became a flight instructor for the next class. In the half century since, he continued to straddle the line between mischief and command. At reunions, he was notorious for
flirting with the wives and daughters
of other veterans “on the outer boundary of what was appropriate,” Scannon said.

Vanderpoel had been the direct superior of both Arnett and Coorssen, and was one of the only men who could explain the last-minute change of crew. The trouble was, he refused to tell. At an earlier reunion, Scannon had approached him to raise the subject. “I was trying to work around to it carefully,” Scannon recalled. “I mentioned the Dixon crash first, and he said, ‘Yeah, a tragedy.’ Then I mentioned Arnett, and he said very quickly, ‘Another tragedy.’ But I could see the tone in his voice was different. Like, ‘Where is this going?’ So I said, ‘You know, there are these rumblings about Arnett . . . ,’ and that’s when the interview ended. He got angry. He said, ‘Let the dead rest in peace!’ and he took off. I was really shaken. It was the first time I had ever run into a wall. I had to figure, if he didn’t know anything about it, he would have said so. But it came across that he did know, and he wanted it laid to rest.”

Vanderpoel kept a watchful distance as Scannon conferred with the Doyles. After a while, he ambled off and Scannon leaned forward.
“There’s something else,” he whispered, explaining that Tommy’s dad had been flying with a new pilot when his plane went down. On every other mission that summer, Jimmie and his crew had flown with a guy named Coorssen. There was no official record to explain why they flew with Arnett on their final mission, and none of the veterans had been able to explain the whole story. Vanderpoel knew the truth, but he refused to say.

Listening, Tommy felt his pulse hammer in his temples. He found his own story spilling out for Scannon—how his Uncle Dan had driven from Arkansas to Texas when Tommy was just a boy, to break the news to his mom that his dad was alive; how relatives insisted that Jimmie called them to check in; and how two of his uncles had driven all the way to California to find him, tracking Jimmie to an apartment complex where neighbors confirmed that he was alive.

Now it was Scannon’s turn to stare in disbelief. Huddling together, he and Tommy tried to align the two stories, to see how they might fit together, how it all might make sense—but it didn’t make sense, none of it, and by the time they parted company, each was more confused than ever.

As Scannon left the reunion and made his way to the islands, he realized that, once again, something in his journey had shifted. He had always known that his search wasn’t really about airplanes, but he’d convinced himself that it was about the men on board—about finding those men, and honoring them, and leaving a record of their sacrifice. Now he knew that the search went beyond even that. It reached into a vast network of families, spread across the American landscape and bound together in grief. Theirs was a loss compounded by uncertainty and unresolved by time. When he scoured the archipelago with sonar, when he hung in the open doorway of a Cessna, when he slogged through the jungle and traversed the channel on yet another rainy day, he wasn’t searching for the dead. He was searching for the living.

PLEDGE

T
he human impulse to bury the dead is as old as civilization itself. In Greek mythology, King Priam crosses the front lines of battle to recover his son’s body from Achilles. In ancient Egypt, the remains of the pharaoh were entombed to last forever. From the earliest records of Jewish tradition, the principle of
k’vod hamet
called for a body to be cleansed and buried; Christianity and Islam inherit aspects of the same tradition. Among Native American tribes, the burial mound dates back at least three thousand years to the Adena people of the Ohio Valley, and African slaves, after being robbed of their homes, communities, and cultures in the Americas, nevertheless managed to preserve many of their funerary rites through a syncretic merger with Christian tradition.

Yet for most of American history, the fallen soldier was denied the same honor. From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, soldiers who
made the ultimate sacrifice were often denied the most basic thanks, their bodies pillaged by other soldiers and left on the battlefield to rot. As Drew Gilpin Faust described in the Civil War history
This Republic of Suffering
, men on both sides who fell were “
thrown by the hundreds
into burial trenches; soldiers stripped of every identifying object before being abandoned on the field; bloated corpses hurried into hastily dug graves.” To modern ears this may seem barbaric, but in the nineteenth century it was the norm. There were no identification tags for soldiers, no notifications for the next of kin; there was no national cemetery to honor the men, nor Memorial Day to remember them. Today, Faust wrote, “the obligation of the state to account for and return—either dead or alive—every soldier in its service is unquestioned. But these assumptions are of quite recent origin.”

After the Civil War, the US government did launch an effort to account for the wartime dead, yet within a decade the program was faltering with tens of thousands still missing. The first dog tags appeared with World War I, but the limitations were obvious. As E. B. Sledge recounted in his lyrical memoir of the Pacific,
With the Old Breed
, even military recruiters in the 1940s would point out the shortcomings of the ID. “
When he asked, ‘Any scars
, birthmarks, or other unusual features?’ I described an inch-long scar on my right knee,” Sledge wrote. “I asked, why such a question. He replied, ‘So they can identify you on some Pacific beach after the Japs blast off your dog tags.’”

Faced with the massive losses of World War II, the military funded an unprecedented recovery effort, pouring staff and funds into a unit known as the Graves Registration Service. But the obstacles were legion. For one thing, there was disagreement among the services about the mission itself. While the Army, Air Forces, and Marines all hoped to recover their dead, the Navy had a split view. Sailors adhered to an old seafaring custom that regarded a sunken vessel as a tomb, while naval aviators believed, like other fliers, that their friends should be recovered even if they went down in water.

Then there was the challenge of logistics in a place like the Pacific. Recovering a body from deep water was impossible with postwar diving technology, but even in shallow water and on land, finding a man in the islands posed a special problem. Unlike the cultivated fields and villages of western Europe, many Pacific islands had never been densely populated, and with the end of the war, they disappeared under a blanket of jungle. While European farmers and construction workers would continue to discover the remains of US troops with regularity, the lost men of the Pacific could linger on small islands for decades to come.

Finally, there was the problem of records. After the Japanese surrender, imperial commanders launched a systematic program to destroy their wartime documents—burning so much paper in some places that the sky turned black. Records that did survive were often trapped in a translation queue, and if they contained information about a lost crew, they could wind up as evidence files in the war crimes tribunals, which continued through 1951. It was not uncommon for information about a downed airplane to reach the Graves Registration Service only after their investigation of that case was closed. By the start of the Korean War in the early 1950s, nearly sixty thousand men were still listed as missing in the Pacific, but only one GRS recovery platoon was still active in the region.

It wasn’t until the Vietnam era that the United States launched another large-scale recovery effort, and even then, progress was halting. At the Paris Peace Conference in January 1973, the North Vietnamese government agreed to allow American recovery units to search for missing men in the hills outside Hanoi, but by the time the United States officially withdrew from the war two months later, the question of how to conduct those searches remained wide open. To tackle the problem, the Army created a unit called the Central Identification Laboratory. With offices in a metal warehouse on the Gulf of Thailand, the unit became known as CIL-Thai. While Pauline Boss was delivering her first lecture on ambiguous loss in 1973, the staff at CIL-Thai were ordering their first batch of microscopes and forensic tools—but when one of their first missions to
North Vietnam was ambushed that December, killing the team leader and several members, the program ground to a halt.

Another sixteen months passed before a crisis remobilized the unit. In April 1975, an airlift of orphans being taken to the United States for adoption crashed in South Vietnam. The Army had nowhere else to send the children’s bodies, so they shipped them to CIL-Thai. When the remains overwhelmed the lab, the Army sent more refrigerators and staff.

One of the first officers to arrive that summer was a tall, dour figure named Johnie Webb, who had spent most of his Army career in the logistics office of Petroleum, Oil, and Lubricants, which helps supply fuel for trucks and airplanes. When Webb received orders to fly to Thailand and manage something called the Central Identification Lab, he couldn’t imagine what it was. “I said, ‘What is that?’” he recalled, “and they told me, and
I said, ‘Well, I’m not interested
.’ And they said, ‘You don’t understand. It’s an emergency requisition. They need an officer. You’re going.’”

Webb arrived at the CIL in June 1975, and spent the rest of the summer waiting for instructions. It was still unclear whether the American families who wanted to adopt the orphans should be legally responsible for their burial, or if it was the Army’s responsibility to dispose of the bodies. As the weeks passed, Webb recalled, “it turned out that nobody was really willing to take that responsibility.” Finally, at the end of August, a judge ordered the Army to handle the remains. “So then it became an issue of, what now?” Webb said. “What happens to the remains of all these orphans? And I’ll tell you what happened: Those of us that worked there took up a collection. We bought a burial plot in Thailand. We had a headstone made. And many of us took the weekend and went down to a local monastery and cremated the remains of those orphans. We had them buried in plots that we bought with our own money.”

For members of the CIL staff, the experience proved to be as galvanizing as it was tragic. The unit began to cohere with a new sense of camaraderie and purpose, and when the Thai government requested a drawdown of US troops in 1976, the lab staff relocated to Hickam Air
Force Base in Hawaii with a dramatic new mission. No longer confined to the Vietnam theater, Webb and the other officers expanded their purview to include earlier wars. In 1978, Webb led the first mission to a World War II crash in the jungle of New Guinea, and soon the lab was adding historians, anthropologists, and forensic scientists to its staff. Dozens of times each year, they would descend on some remote location to examine the wreckage of a ship, truck, or plane, and if it turned out to be a US military vehicle, they would sift through the soil in search of bones. Then they would bring home the remains, use forensic tools to identify them, and return them to a family for burial.

By the early 1990s, while Tommy Doyle pushed his mother’s trunk into a back room and Pat Scannon discovered Palau, Johnie Webb was wrapping up twenty years in the CIL. He had transformed the unit from an isolated morgue in Thailand to one of the most ambitious recovery operations in the world, and had come to think of it not so much as a military operation but a humanitarian mission, less concerned with the waging of war than its psychic toll. When Webb finally retired from the military in 1995, he took a civilian position at the recovery lab, serving as the primary liaison for grieving families. He also began to make new inroads with foreign governments: In 1996, he opened a dialogue with North Korea, and sent a recovery team across the Demilitarized Zone—the first American troops permitted to cross in four decades. Over the next ten years, he sent another twenty missions over the DMZ, bringing home the remains of more than two hundred missing service members. In 2002, he helped coordinate the first US recovery mission to Burma, one of the most isolated countries on earth, and in 2003, the CIL ascended from its position within the Army to become a joint operation of all military branches, with a new name: the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC.

For the four hundred men and women who worked in JPAC’s campus of trailers and warehouses on Hickam air base, there would always be a fragile balance to the unit’s work. On the one hand, members of a JPAC
recovery team had to excel in the logistics of military deployment—preparing for and enduring long encampments in remote places, sorting and transporting mountains of technical equipment across inhospitable terrain, and coordinating tens of thousands of man-hours toward a single purpose. Yet there was also a profound intimacy to the job—the delicate task of handling a man’s remains, the haunting awareness of his family’s grief, and the daily struggle to maintain emotional distance on a recovery site. At a fundamental level, it was the unit’s job not just to bring home remains, but to provide each family with answers, in the hope that truth would allow life, finally, to go on.

It was with this delicate goal in mind that JPAC field teams could be found, on almost any day of any month, in the most rugged environments on earth. No other unit of the US military deployed so often in both peacetime and war. A typical member of a JPAC team could expect to spend between five and ten months in the field, every single year. At each location, she would combine her own area of expertise with those of other scientists and historians, and with site-specific experts drawn from throughout the military. At one site, there might be a specialist in land-mine disposal; at another, an authority on altitude sickness. There could be forensic dentists on the mission, or Navy deep-sea divers, or mountaineers trained to navigate glacial ice—each member arriving in civilian clothing to spend the coming weeks and months serving an archaeological team.

Meanwhile, Johnie Webb spoke for them all. Most of the family members who contacted JPAC wound up on Johnie’s line, and he would take the call in an office stuffed with memorabilia from around the world, leaning back in his chair to offer information, or just to listen. He kept a small, plain box on the corner of his desk to remind him of why he was there. Once in a while, he would lift the lid and remove a silver bracelet, twirling it gently between his fingers.

“This was for a young NCO in the Special Forces during Vietnam who was lost in a helicopter crash,” he explained one afternoon. “Over
the years, I got to know his family very well. We became, I would say, friends. A very patriotic family. But I watched over the years as we searched for their son, and they began to lose some of their patriotism. I can remember the father telling me many, many times, ‘Johnie, I don’t want you to send me a bunch of bones. I gave the government my son. I expect you to give my son back to me.’”

Webb stopped and swallowed. He stared at the bracelet in his hand and shook his head, and it seemed obvious that, however much Johnie Webb believed in his work, he did not, strictly speaking, love it.

“Shortly after we excavated the site for his son,” he continued. “I met the dad at a National League of Families meeting. I told him, ‘You know, you need to prepare yourself. We’re going to have some information for you in a short period of time.’ And again, he reminded me that he didn’t want any bones. He wanted his son back.”

Webb cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “eventually we made the identification. There was a huge military funeral. A lot of politicians turned out. And after maybe three weeks, I received a packet in the mail. It had a very simple card with the POW/MIA logo on it and a note that said he wanted to thank me for all that we had done. He wrote, ‘To show my appreciation, I am sending the POW/MIA bracelet of my son that I have worn for the last twenty years. . . .’”

Webb’s voice cracked, and he ended the story.

—

I
N THE SUMMER OF 2001,
a new anthropologist arrived at Webb’s lab. Eric Emery was still in his early thirties, but he had the worn eyes and compact physique of a lifelong outdoorsman. Just two weeks before he reached Hawaii, he’d been on a tall ship at the end of a fifty-thousand-mile journey around the world by sail, rounding Cape Horn at the tip of South America, and the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, sleeping under the giant moai heads on Easter Island, and swimming with the manatees of the Galápagos Islands. With a master’s degree in history, a PhD in
archaeology, a lifelong mistrust of authority, and a general aversion to rules, Emery came to the crisp confines of the lab for one overriding reason: to develop a new program for underwater operations.