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 w
as 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.
—
IN 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.
It was not so much a job for Emery as the fulfillment of a personal mission.
Growing up in northern Vermont, Emery had always been a creature of the water. His family spent summers on Lake Champlain, where he swam and fished and joined his dad on a small Bristol sailboat for weeklong jaunts. On a typical trip, they would bring fishing gear and little else, enjoying the rough simplicity and the raw wear of nature, but the summer Emery was twelve, his dad tossed a scuba rig in the cabin. It was a primitive system, just an old steel tank with a heavy chrome regulator that he’d picked up years earlier on a trip to Key West. “This was back in the day, when you didn’t need to be certified,” Emery said. “You could just go in and buy the equipment and use it.” The gear had been languishing in the family garage, but once his father dusted it off and brought it to the lake, Emery was determined to try it. They hauled the tank to a gas station one afternoon, filled it using an air compressor behind the store, and dunked it into a garbage can filled with water to make sure it wasn’t leaking. Then they headed offshore to give the thing a try. The last thing Emery’s father told him as he stood on the deck with the tank in a backpack and the regulator strapped to his face was “Never stop breathing.”
“And what I think he meant,” Emery said, “was that the number-one rule in diving is not to hold your breath—because if you change your position in the water column, you could embolize yourself.” Years later, when Emery thought back on his father’s advice, it would mean much more.
As the summers passed and Emery moved through high school and college, he continued to use the tank and regulator until they were as familiar as well-worn shoes. But it wasn’t until he began a master’s program in American history at the University of Vermont in 1992 that he discovered a link between his studies and his hobby. He was walking down a hallway in late spring when he spotted a flyer on the wall: it was an invitation for students to participate in an archaeological project nearby. As Emery read through the details, it was like seeing a Venn diagram of his life.
The project would take place on Lake Champlain. Documents from the American Revolution described a floating bridge on the water, which linked the star-shaped Fort Ticonderoga on one side with a peninsula called Mount Independence on the other. But there was no longer any sign of the bridge, and no one knew why. Some people thought it had floated away; others wondered if it had ever really been there. Now a research team from Texas A&M University, led by an underwater archaeologist named Kevin Crisman, was coming up to find it. For Emery, it would bring together his graduate studies in history, his love of diving, and his connection to Lake Champlain. He signed up.
Scuba diving was by then a popular sport, first made famous by Jacques Cousteau in the 1950s, and brought to the mainstream in the 1960s by the organizations NAUI and PADI, which certify divers. But underwater archaeology was something else. It was a young field, still looked upon with skepticism in many corners of the archaeological world, where the prospect of conducting a professional dig in a cloud of muddy water seemed dubious at best.
Though the earliest cases of underwater archaeology could be traced to the fifteenth century, with the discovery of ships built by the emperor Caligula under a lake near Rome, the effort to salvage treasure from shipwrecks had not become common until the mid-1800s, and the first academic exploration of underwater sites did not begin in earnest until the 1930s, when helmet divers examined a four-hundred-year-old Swedish warship in the Baltic Sea.
By the time Emery arrived at the excavation site on Lake Champlain that summer, only a handful of universities offered a degree in underwater archaeology. Among them, Texas A&M was widely considered the best.
Emery tried to maintain a low profile as he watched Crisman and the Texas team work. He was there to check equipment and help carry gear, but he wanted to learn as much as he could. “I didn’t know anything,” he said, “but I think that helped me, because it allowed me to go in there and be a sponge.” As the days turned into weeks, he watched in amazement as Crisman moved through the water with minute precision, documenting each detail of the subaquatic landscape. When the team began to uncover evidence of two-hundred-year-old pylons to support the bridge, Emery felt his own future shifting in the water around him.
Suddenly, he was acutely aware of his frustration with written history. It told a story of the past, but like any story, it was vulnerable to the whims of memory and perception. Archaeology seemed to offer a more tangible approach. All the theories and doubts about the br
idge on Lake Champlain dissolved in the presence of Crisman’s research, and to Emery, the endless conjecture of historians seemed like a flimsy substitute for science. “I’m not sure who it was that said history is just the best string of lies,” Emery said, “but what appealed to me about archaeology was that you could confirm or refute those stories.” By the time he received his master’s degree in history, he had already enrolled in Crisman’s underwater program at Texas A&M.
To cover his tuition and expenses, Emery worked summers and took the occasional semester off. He became a kind of journeyman archaeologist, flying to remote locations to help with underwater recoveries. By the spring of 1999, he was in his fourth year of the program when he accepted a position with a French team in the Ecuadorean mountains. There were ruins from a Cañari Indian civilization buried in the sediment of a high-altitude lake, and he would spend two months living in a pup tent while he retrieved them.
Or anyway, that was the plan. Within days of Emery’s arrival, the seasonal rains picked up, and as the weeks rolled by, he spent most of his time trapped inside the tent with another archaeologist, Jon Faucher. Day after day, they stared out the screen window of the tent as canyons of mud opened on the hillsides. Their supplies grew thin. The team helicopter sat grounded in the rain. “It was ugly,” Emery recalled. “Just solid rain for weeks, and we were fully exposed.”
Finally, during a break in the weather, Emery and Faucher decided to get out. They scrambled their things together and climbed aboard the chopper with one other member of the team, rising over the lake and looking down at the bamboo huts trailing into the valley, when suddenly there was a deafening grind and the chopper hung right, lurching and twisting as it plunged toward the water, its tail whipping into the surface.
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