—
SCANNON TOOK A YEAR OFF. Then he took another. Without a team, he had no plan, and without a plan, no reason to go back. Yet the rest of his life seemed to be drained of purpose without the islands. He felt restless, adrift; he tried to re-immerse himself at work, but work was no longer enough. The intricate puzzles of biotechnology still captivated part of his imagination, but now there was another part, one that longed for the physical mystery of the islands and the plunge into the unknown.
One day, without telling Susan or anyone, he drove up to the Yolo County Airport in Davis, California, and signed up for a tandem skydive at a company called SkyDance. As the plane climbed to ten thousand feet and the door cracked open, Scannon flashed back to his flight with Spike Nasmyth over Toachel Mid, and he took a deep breath and dove into the battering void, the instructor at his back as he streaked down, his mind as clear as the cloudless sky. A few days later, he jumped again. Then he was jumping all the time. In the space of only a few months, he racked up more than one hundred skydives, and began training for a high-altitude jump from thirty thousand feet: he spent three days in a hypobaric system at Beale Air Force Base until his blood was accustomed to the same hypoxic levels as a climber halfway up Mount Everest; then he climbed aboard the tiny plane, rising through the jet stream and leaping into air so thin that it didn’t even ripple his clothing. But with each jump, Scannon felt his interest waning. It wasn’t that skydiving was no longer fun—every time he stepped through the door of a plane, he felt the same terrifying rush of adrenaline—but he no longer doubted that he could do it, and without the doubt, it was no longer an interior journey. “Then it just wasn’t satisfying,” he said. “It was skydiving for the sake of skydiving.”
Finally, in the summer of 1998, after two years off the islands, Scannon pulled his old sketchbook down from the shelf. He flipped through the pages, remembering all the hopes and discoveries and the days of thwarted plans, the business cards taped into the margins, the ideas jotted on yellow stickies. It had been five years since his first trip, and the book was nearly full. He could close it, and leave the last five pages blank, or he could return to the islands and fill some unknown number of books in an endless search of the Arnett channel.
Scannon bought another book. It was identical to the first. He cracked open the front and wrote “Vol. 2” on the inside cover. Then he called the Lamberts and Dan Bailey, and they agreed to go back with him.
For six days in 1999, they trolled Toachel Mid, dragging a side-scan sonar device and staring blankly at the monitor. Each time they got a ping, they splashed in for a closer look, but as the week groaned by in driving wind and rain, they came up empty. In their downtime, at restaurants and bars, they chatted with other divers. Nearly everyone who dove the islands knew of some unidentified wreck, and they began to jot down directions and coordinates. After a few hours on the channel each morning, they would follow those directions, wading through mangroves or drifting through shallow water until they came upon fragments of metal. On the western edge of the barrier reef, they found pieces of a small airplane that looked like it could be a Marine Corsair; in a bay on the western coast of Babeldaob, they came across the remnants of another; and on the southern tip of the islands, they found a Navy Avenger. By the time they went home, they were no closer to Arnett, but they faced a world of new possibility: there were dozens of small American planes yet to discover. Scannon knew less about them, but he resolved to learn everything he could. He had started with a search for three airplanes; now he would search for hundreds.
By the time he got the call from Parade magazine in the spring of 2000, he was planning his sixth trip to the islands, and he’d put together a long list of Avengers and Corsairs he hoped to find. He regaled the Parade reporter with the story of his first mission with Lambert and Bailey, described their discovery of the Bush trawler, and explained how he’d gone to find Dixon and Custer. He told her about his return with Lambert and Bailey a few months earlier, finding Avengers and Corsairs, and his plan to find more on the expedition to come.
He left out the Arnett plane. It was his great white whale.
When the article appeared on Memorial Day weekend, Scannon bought a copy of the magazine and studied the opening photo. The man in the picture beside the vintage bomber with the rope spooled over his shoulder was almost unrecognizable as the same man pictured on his ID tag from Maxwell Air Force Base just a few years earlier. His hair and beard were graying, but something else had changed as well. His eyes were more alive and focused, his posture more assured. He looked as different as he felt. It was as if he had found another body on the islands.
In the days to come, as calls began flooding the Xoma switchboard, Scannon sorted through a stack of blue “Phone Memo” messages. He saw the names of veterans, families, and historians, all calling with questions and clues. One of the memos said, “Corsair is his baby.” Another said, “Bloody Nose Ridge.” A third said, “Survivor of Bataan.”
And one said simply, “Doyle.”
—
FOR SCANNON, THE PARADE ARTICLE marked a turning point in several ways. It was a reminder, first, that his fascination with the air campaign was not a lone obsession. After years of scouring histories for any glancing reference to the Long Rangers, he was suddenly inundated with calls from other history buffs who shared his frustration with the comparatively thin record.
But he also discovered that for families of the missing the oversight was far more personal. To the sons and daughters of the disappeared, the wounds of loss remained fresh, and the lack of answers about what happened to a father, brother, or son was only deepened by a dearth of information about the war he fought. “That was the biggest surprise,” Scannon said. “I wasn’t sure how many families even cared anymore, but when you talk with them, the first thing you find out is that the later generations care even more—it’s like there’s an empty chair at the dinner table all their lives.”
To someone outside the MIA community, this can be difficult to grasp. The special grief of the MIA family is little understood, and only a handful of researchers have ever focused on the issue. One of the first to do so, in the early 1970s, was a student at the University of Wisconsin named Pauline Boss. A doctoral candidate in family studies, Boss was interested in the way that grief can be heightened by uncertainty, and she was beginning to develop a concept that she would eventually label “ambiguous loss.” Whether it’s the sudden disappearance of a child or the slow erasure of a parent by dementia, the grief process is disrupted because so much of grieving depends on the knowledge and acceptance of what has happened.
When Boss presented her early ideas on ambiguous loss to a conference on family relations in 1973, she was approached by two social scientists who worked with military families. Edna Hunter-King and Ham McCubbin had been counseling the families of missing men and prisoners from the Vietnam War, and they recognized the signs of ambiguous loss in the MIA community. If Boss wanted to focus her dissertation on the military experience, they told her, they could put her in touch with MIA families. “They said, ‘We have data on this, but no theory,’” Boss recalled, “‘and you have a theory with no data.’”
In the decades to follow, Boss, Hunter-King, and McCubbin would develop a small literature on MIA grief. What distinguished the missing soldier from other combat losses, they found, was that the family was deprived not only of a son, but of a clear explanation for his loss. Without knowing where the man died, or how, they faced a story with no ending, and their inconsolable grief had as much to do with narrative as with death. “When you have someone missing, it does something to the human psyche,” Boss said. “It’s not logical. It’s not natural. There are no rituals for it. The rest of the community doesn’t know what to do. And grief therapy doesn’t work. They don’t have closure, and they never will.”
Boss was also intrigued by the way MIA grief passed through families. Like Scannon, sh
e noticed that in many cases, a daughter, son, or grandchild would become fixated on the loss of a man they had never known. By 1998, Boss and Hunter-King had documented so many MIA families in which the grief carried into a second or third generation, that they were invited to draft a new chapter for the clinical handbook of multigenerational trauma, alongside entries on the effects of slavery, nuclear annihilation, and the Holocaust.
“Unlike the Holocaust,” Hunter-King wrote in the manual, “mothers of MIA children were not suddenly uprooted from their homes and deprived of their possessions, countries, and cultures. They did not lose parents, siblings, and husbands to programmed incineration. They were not subjected to incarceration, underfed, and abused, as were Holocaust victims. . . . On the other hand, most children of Holocaust survivors have not waited for over a quarter of a century in a state of ambiguous grieving, wondering whether their parent is dead or alive, as children of MIAs have done. Both groups, however, have perceived the conspiracy of silence between survivors and society, and between survivors and their children. . . . For most of these MIA adult children, unless they are convinced that the fullest possible accounting has been made, and/or unless the father’s remains are located, adequately identified, and returned to the family, their prolonged, ambiguous grieving will continue indefinitely.”
Even as Boss, Hunter-King, and McCubbin began to document MIA grief, their emphasis on Vietnam left out the majority of MIA families. Over the past century, some eighty-three thousand service members have been listed as missing, of whom seventy-three thousand disappeared in World War II, and forty-seven thousand in the Pacific theater alone. To put it another way, the number of men who disappeared in the war against Japan makes up more than half of all missing service members, and is nearly the same as the total number of combat deaths in Vietnam. Of course, this is partly a reflection of the difference in scale between those wars, but it also calls forward the special challenge of the Pacific theater. The same watery expanses that made the B-24 essential would later make the task of finding a lost crew nearly impossible.
It may be tempting to imagine that for the MIA families of World War II, the grief and confusion were somehow less acute than for Vietnam families, and that the men and women of the “greatest generation” were imbued with a special storehouse of stoicism that softened the agony of loss. But this is a modern myth. At the military’s MIA recovery office in Hawaii, specialists who work with families of the missing say that the lingering pain from World War II is as potent as any other war. This is a point made clear in the unit’s main research room, where the words of a letter sent to the Army flash against a blood-red screen: “If those bodies or bones aren’t recovered or returned home, I hope all 19 boys haunt you nite and day—until you die.” The letter was written in 1947.
By the time the article on Pat Scannon appeared in Parade magazine, the Pacific war was half a century past, yet Scannon continued to receive a deluge of calls through summer and into the fall—nieces, grandsons, great-nephews, cousins, and daughters all searching for the final chapter of a family story.
When Scannon spoke with Nancy and Tommy Doyle, he could hear the same longing in their voices. Though the Doyles did not mention the rumors in Tommy’s family, they offered to meet with Scannon for a longer conversation at the next reunion of the Long Rangers, which was scheduled for San Antonio that fall. It would be Scannon’s last stop in the United States before leaving on yet another journey to Palau.
At the reunion, Scannon and the Doyles found each other and slipped into a side room. They sat down at a small table beside a model of a B-24. On the wall, a reunion organizer had propped up a poster-sized map of the South Pacific, marked with long red lines to show the movement of the Long Rangers. Scannon opened his briefcase and laid a stack of folders on the table.
“This is everything I have on your father’s plane,” he said, passing the folder to Tommy. For the next two hours, they pored over mission reports and photos. Scannon walked over to the model plane and explained the crew positions; he stood before the map and described the two-column strategy of the war, and the distinctive position of the Long Rangers, flying in support of both MacArthur and Nimitz. Periodically, Tommy or Nancy would interject with questions, but mostly they listened in wonder.
“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 netwo
rk 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.
SEVEN
PLEDGE
The 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.”
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