By the time Scannon sat down with Tommy and Nancy Doyle at the Long Ranger reunion, the lab was gearing up for its first mission to Police Hill, and by the time Scannon left the Doyles to make his way to the islands, the lab was already there, searching for the grave.
Still, Scannon had little contact with the recovery unit. Though they’d come to Palau as a result of his work, he was determined not to interfere. He stayed in a different hotel, kept his distance from Police Hill, and spent most of his time on the Arnett channel, continuing the underwater grid in a series of infinite passes—up and down and back again with the magnetometer. Near the end of the trip, they bumped into the recovery team at an Internet café on Koror, and to Scannon’s surprise, a member of the lab team presented him with a ceremonial medallion. It was inscribed with the words “Central Identification Lab—Hawaii.” The team hadn’t found anything yet, but they had seen enough evidence on Police Hill to suggest that it was the right place to look. They were planning to come back for a more thorough search, and if they ran into Scannon, they expected him to have the medallion in his pocket.
For Scannon, the medallion was puzzling. He knew it was a gesture of friendship, but he’d never heard of a challenge coin before. The tradition dated back to the European theater of World War II, when US intelligence services in occupied France used a special coin as proof of identity. In the decades since, it had become common practice for military units to design their own coins, stamped with their name, logo, and motto. Men from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines all traded coins, and if any two guys who had traded coins were to cross paths again, each was expected to have the other’s coin in hand. In his journal, Scannon marveled at the strange “gold medallion” from the lab. “They said if they ever met up with me anywhere in the world and I didn’t have it, I owe a round of beers,” he wrote, adding, “Fair enough.”
Scannon was just settling back to work in California when Don Shuster called with another breakthrough on the mass grave. He had found a tribal elder on Palau who remembered where it was. Katalina Katosang had been a teenager during the war, and was close with the Jesuit missionaries living on the islands. A few days after they were executed by the Japanese in 1944, she walked up and down Police Hill looking for their grave. When she found a pair of white, wooden crosses planted in fresh earth, she knelt beside them, crying and praying, and went home with the small comfort that she knew where they lay. Now she was willing to return to the spot and take the recovery unit with her. It was just a few hundred yards north of where the lab had been looking the year before.
Scannon and Shuster called the lab. There was a field team gearing up for a recovery in the Marshall Islands, and they agreed to stop in Palau for one day. The lab invited Scannon to join them and he jumped at the chance. He flew to Koror in November 2001 with two of his skydiving friends.
The lead archaeologist for the lab this time was a stocky civilian named Bill Belcher who, like the lab’s newest hire, Eric Emery, was a curious fit on a military team. With a sardonic sense of humor and a prickly temperament, Belcher was accustomed to doing things his way. In his free time, he enjoyed deep-sea diving at depths that went far beyond the usual limits of scuba. Many of the most famous deep-sea wrecks lay at about 250 feet, like the Andrea Doria near Nantucket, at 260, or the mystery U-boat off New Jersey, at 230, but Belcher had crept below 400 feet, into the cold, black, oppressive zone where gas roiled in the blood and chemical narcosis took over, drowning men in a crazed euphoria. He knew that his diving experience did not qualify him in the peculiar tools and methods of underwater archaeology, which was why he’d encouraged the lab to hire Emery that summer. But on land, Belcher yielded to no one, especially a hobby sleuth like Scannon. As his plane touched down in Palau, he braced himself for a testy interaction.
“I always have a very, very deep, deep level of skepticism about people involved in this,” Belcher recalled. “Particularly with World War II, because a lot of people want it for notoriety, they want to feel important, and it’s also the issue that the artifacts are actually worth quite a bit of money to collectors. A lot of times, I’ll get in almost a fistfight with divers—like these guys you see holding the skulls of the Germans from the U-boat. I have a real issue with that. They’re destroying the sites.”
But Belcher also knew enough about Scannon to hold out a glimmer of hope. For one thing, he knew that other archaeologists at the lab had been impressed on the previous mission. Scannon hadn’t badgered them or tried to inject himself in their work, and they found him sufficiently serious to bestow a challenge coin. That wasn’t enough to convince Belcher, but it counted. What counted even more was Scannon’s background in science. A licensed MD with a PhD in chemistry was not your typical scavenger. With most of those guys, Belcher believed, it was pointless to explain how delicate a crash site was, or how, even after half a century of rain and mud and wind and rummaging animals, the wreckage had to be treated with microscopic precision. A single touch or movement could obscure a clue, possibly the last one, and if a field site was like an enormous test tube, it was reassuring to know that Scannon was a scientist.
Belcher was operating on just a few hours’ sleep when he awoke on his first morning in Palau. He trudged into the lobby of the Waterfront Villa hotel to meet Scannon for the first time. As they shook hands, Belcher took a look at Scannon. He was slim but muscular, with a gray beard and thinning hair, and he wore a faded red bandana rolled around his neck above a long-sleeved gray T-shirt and loose cargo pants. Belcher wore an olive bushmaster hat over a khaki shirt, and together the two men looked as if they knew their way around a jungle.
After a few curt words, they stepped outside to a pair of four-wheel-drive trucks that Belcher had rented at the airport. They climbed in, and rolled through the back roads of Koror to pick up Katosang, then crossed the bridge to Babeldaob over the Toachel Mid channel. As the small convoy barreled north, Scannon gazed out the window. Fields of chest-high grass waved slowly in the tropical breeze, separated by stands of jungle. He had been up the road dozens of times to interview tribal elders about the plane crashes they had seen and the stories they remembered, but he always found the big island striking. Unlike the rest of the archipelago, which was mostly limestone rock, Babeldaob consisted of bright orange clay that had a way of sticking to the fibers of clothing. Many of Scannon’s shirts and backpacks were stained with the mark of Babeldaob, and sometimes as he unpacked his gear at the end of a mission, he would hold the stain to his nose for a whiff of the warm, tropical smell that always brought him back.
After forty minutes on the serpentine road, stopping occasionally to clear fallen trees, the outline of Police Hill crested on the horizon and the trucks turned right, climbing up a small road over the rutted earth, past outcroppings of carnivorous plants that lay in wait for crickets. At the top of the hill, they pulled to one side and parked. Katosang sprang to the ground, hurrying into the elephant grass alone. She dodged from side to side, as if following a scent. Scannon, Belcher, and the rest of the team scrambled to collect gear, then took off after Katosang.
To the untrained eye, the hillside appeared no different from any other wilderness on the big island. It was a broad expanse of grass interrupted here and there by bare patches of clay. But Katosang saw the past. There had been a hospital a few yards uphill, she said, and a scattering of buildings down below. She stooped to sift through the dirt and came up with shards of glass and metal. This was from a small wooden building, she said, with a view to the road below.
Katosang continued down the hillside and stopped at a low depression in the earth. Something changed viscerally in her posture. She turned, paused, and nodded. This, she said finally, was it. This was where she’d seen the crosses. This was the mass grave.
Belcher and the lab team fanned out, searching the ground for clues. Scannon stayed close to the depression, studying its shape. He walked a circle around it, then another, widening the
spiral as he searched the ground for debris. An hour passed as the team scoured the area. There were no shouts of discovery, no clear signs of the grave or the wooden crosses—but then, Scannon realized, how could there be? Whole buildings had disappeared into the earth, their lumber swallowed in the clay and grass. A grave would be nearly impossible to find.
For Belcher, the lack of material evidence was troubling but the shape of the depression was unforgettable. It was about ten feet wide and twenty feet long, with corners much too neat to be natural. It could have been a building foundation, but there were no other signs of a building. In the places where Katosang did recall buildings, the remnants were still apparent.
Belcher approached Scannon. They stood together under the gaping tropical sky, the faint sound of breeze and rustling grass in the air. The site, Belcher said finally, was too much to ignore. When he returned to Hawaii, he would recommend a dig.
Scannon hesitated. Then he nodded. He removed his backpack and pulled out a folded American flag. “Would you mind if we had a small ceremony?” he asked. “In case there were Americans?”
Belcher took a corner of the flag and together they unfolded it. They stretched the fabric over the depression as the group converged for a photo. After a moment of silence, Scannon refolded the flag. He tucked it neatly into his backpack and began walking toward the trucks.
Belcher watched. He realized that his doubt about Scannon was gone. The strange, silent doctor was difficult to read, but Belcher had seen enough to know that he wasn’t a treasure hunter. He approached the site with an air of sadness, humility, and reverence. He responded to the prospect that they’d found a mass grave not with bravado but resignation. He seemed to want nothing more from the search than answers.
“The thing I liked about him,” Belcher said later, “was that he was sincere. He wasn’t in it for fame or glory. He just wanted to find these guys.”
—
FOR SCANNON, the connection with Belcher meant the mission had changed. With help from the lab, he would not just be looking for lost men; he would be working to bring them home.
Three years had passed since his skydiving days, but he remained close with his friends from jump school. The founder of the SkyDance program was not just any skydiver. Dan O’Brien was a former world champion who had been featured in the opening ceremony of the Seoul Olympics, where he descended into a stadium of screaming fans to stick a landing at the center, while a swirling mass of performers waved white banners around him. At the jump school, he offered classes for beginners like Scannon, but he also used the building as a locus for elite skydivers to gather. On any given afternoon, depending on who was in town, there might be half a dozen world-record holders in the building. The friends Scannon had brought with him to meet Belcher on Police Hill, Jennifer Powers and Clem Major, were both elite divers. Powers was a world-record holder with more than five thousand jumps, and Major specialized in base diving, with seven thousand jumps. From time to time, Powers, O’Brien, and other members of the SkyDance community would gather in some remote corner of the world to embark on an outlandish odyssey, like trying to organize the largest airborne formation in history. In between, they would regale one another over beers with stories of their exploits, while Scannon traded his own tales from the archipelago.
Something about the skydivers resonated with Scannon in a familiar way. Like the veterans of the Long Rangers, they were disciplined in the sky, with a clear chain of command, while on the ground they eased into an egalitarian ethos born of shared experience. “I don’t care if you skydive a thousand jumps or twenty,” Scannon said. “Everybody that I ever saw go into the plane had an abiding respect for everybody else. There are rich people who do it, there are people who save every penny they can get to do it, young people, old people, professionals, military, and yet you carry this respect for every other person that puts a chute on their back.”
As Scannon returned from his meeting with Belcher on Police Hill, he was beginning to realize two things. The first was that skydivers like Powers, O’Brien, and Major were uniquely qualified to help with his search. Like the Lamberts, they had traveled the world and were accustomed to rugged conditions. They were comfortable with a high level of risk, and used to working together under pressure. Their experience in aerial formations was also surprisingly adaptable to the water—the best way to conduct a grid search in the channel was to canvass the seafloor in a linked formation. Finally, many of the skydivers had learned to jump while serving in the military. They had a bone-deep respect for the missing men.
The other thing Scannon was beginning to realize was that he needed a better organization. If he wanted the recovery lab to see him as a partner, he would need to make his work more palatable to the military command. That meant giving it a name and a stated mission, something that could be written down to show that it wasn’t just one man’s quixotic obsession. Over the next several months, Scannon began to craft a formal identity for the search. He came up with a name: the BentProp Project. He designed a logo of a battered propeller superimposed above blue and red stripes. He found out where military units printed their challenge coins, and produced one with the BentProp logo on the front. On the back, he printed a line from the Laurence Binyon poem “For the Fallen”: “At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them.”
Next, Scannon decided to name his expeditions. A journey to the islands would no longer be “a journey.” It was a “PMAN,” short for Palau-Marines-Army-Navy, and he gave each PMAN a Roman numeral. He backdated the first to 1999, so it was PMAN-I. That made the trip to Police Hill with Belcher PMAN-III. Then Scannon began to change the way he kept records. When he reached the last page of his fourth artist’s notebook in 2002, he didn’t buy another. Instead, he bought a small yellow notepad with waterproof pages, which he could stuff in his pocket and bring into the field to fill with diagrams and coordinates. The lyrical reflections that wafted through the huge white pages of his journal disappeared. There would be no more long descriptions of the rain on Iberor, no thoughtful contemplations of the sunset on the golf course overlooking the southern bay. On the small, lined pages of the yellow pads, he assigned formal positions to the friends who joined him. As more skydivers came along in 2002 and 2003, he gave them titles like “Dive Safety Officer” and “Team Navigator” and “Military Liaison.”
Watching the BentProp Project emerge, the Lamberts rolled their eyes. They found the stiff formality amusing at best. In less charitable moments, they would say that it was pretentious and unnecessary. The shift from an ad hoc labor of love to a routinized organization felt awkward and stiff, and they were deeply skeptical of all the skydivers showing up. On their own recent missions with Scannon, they had been forced to insist that he take days off, and relax a little, and enjoy the islands. But the skydivers were willing to drill down with Scannon day after day, and it seemed to the Lamberts as if the whole endeavor was becoming uncomfortably militarized. It was as if, in his quest to find the missing men, Scannon had discovered a new side of himself.
In fact, it was just the opposite.
—
SCANNON’S NEW CONNECTION with the military emerged from a long and conflicted past. He had spent most of his life trying to get away from the US Army, and it was only with reluctance that he now turned back. Born in 1947, he was a product of the war himself. His father, Tony Scannon, had been a captain in Europe, who fought a line through France and then worked for General George Patton in postwar Germany. His mother, Nora Esterházy, came from the other side: born in Romania and raised in Czechoslovakia, she worked for the Nazis during the war.
For Nora, the job was not a choice. As a teenager in eastern Europe, she watched the Nazi ascent with natural suspicion: her family lived in Bratislava, just a short train ride from Vienna, where Hitler’s arrival in 1938 brought cheering crowds to the Heldenplatz—but Nora’s family had sufficient money and social stand
ing to be wary of any change. She was a well-educated young woman, fluent in German, Hungarian, English, Czech, and Slovak, and she was even proficient in Latin. When the German consulate instructed her to help their embassy with translation, Nora made the journey each morning past barbed wire to transcribe documents in a windowless room. At night, she listened to her parents rail against the Nazis she was helping—and on the streets of the neighborhood, she found a small community of teens who groused about the Germans. When some of those friends drifted into the Czech resistance, forming a link to the underground network that stretched across Europe, Nora began to feed them information from the consulate. Anytime she translated a document that seemed important, she would carbon an extra copy and slip it into her purse. Then, to avoid being frisked on the way out, she would flirt with an embassy officer until he offered her a ride home. “I don’t know exactly how that relationship worked,” Scannon said with a bemused smile. “She never went into detail, and I sure didn’t ask.”
For Nora, the small subterfuge was an act of faith as much as daring. Though she would eventually pass along more than a dozen documents, she never knew how far they made it, or if they went anywhere at all. She would later confess to her daughter, Harriet, that the only file she could remember described her homeland, Romania, and its vast oil refineries at Ploesti.
In 1943, Nora convinced the German government to let her move to Leipzig and enroll in medical school. But just as classes began, so did the American bombardment. She spent as many days hiding in a bunker as she did in class, listening as American bombers turned the city into one of the most devastated in Europe. Years later, at her condominium in Florida, she would surprise her children by jumping from a chair and cowering on the floor as a vintage B-24 bomber passed overhead.
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