Vanished

by Wil S. Hylton

  By the time Nora met Tony Scannon, they were both living in postwar Germany. Nora had brought her parents in a harrowing journey by train, and Tony had a job organizing performances by visiting stars like Roy Rogers. It was a world apart from where each had been a year before—Nora ducking bombs in Leipzig, while Tony fought through the Ardennes—but they found themselves dancing together at the parties Tony arranged.

  It was still illegal for a US soldier to marry a European bride; the abundance of American men in the ruined cities of Europe was a social tinderbox that the Army was not eager to ignite. Brothels abounded on the streets and dalliances were commonplace, but it would be another year before marriage was formally allowed.

  Somehow, Tony and Nora escaped those rules. The story they passed down to their children was that Tony’s boss, General Patton, approved the union shortly before his death in December 1945, and lent the couple a Mercedes that had once belonged to Hermann Göring for the reception. Whether or not that story was exactly right, the Scannons did marry in Germany before Patton’s death, and afterward they left Europe to live near Tony’s birthplace in Georgia.

  The move was hard on Nora. Hostility toward European refugees was fierce in the rural South, and as she gave birth to three children in four years—Pat in 1947, Harriet in 1948, and Mike in 1950—the pressure of living in a hostile, alien environment proved too much. When Tony deployed to Korea in 1951, Nora filed for divorce. Two years later, she met another Army officer and tried again.

  For the Scannon kids, Harry Walterhouse would prove a different kind of paternal figure. Like Tony Scannon, he was a lieutenant colonel, but where Tony was strict and distant with the children, Walterhouse was warm and attentive; even as a soldier, he was less a warrior than an intellectual, interested in the role that military force could play in postwar development. By the time the Scannon children entered adolescence, his theories on what is now called nation-building had become early benchmarks of the field. In particular, a small, dense book entitled A Time to Build, which described the history of “military civic action” from ancient Rome to modern Africa, would be a staple of scholarly studies for decades to come. When the opportunity arose for Walterhouse to spend four years in postwar Germany, he and Nora settled into a large house near Nuremberg.

  Like rural Georgia, small-town Germany was still laced with postwar hostilities, and Nora encouraged the kids to stay close to home. They spent most days playing in the forest adjacent to the house, and to keep them occupied, Nora embraced their curiosity. When Mike, at age six, showed an interest in biology, she brought home dead frogs and birds to dissect, using her medical school background to tease apart the musculature in an impromptu biology lesson. “They were always cutting something up,” Scannon said. “It was gross.”

  Pat’s interest was chemistry, and Nora brought home liquids, powders, and booklets of experiments. When he finished the written recipes, he would mix concoctions of his own. “Mostly I just burned a lot of things,” he said. “I always wanted to make a big explosion.”

  There was no television in the house, so in the evenings they listened to military broadcasts on the radio or made up stories of their own. Years later, the Scannon kids would look back on their years in Germany as some of the best in their lives, which made the return to the United States all the more difficult. In 1962, Nora and Harry Walterhouse split, and Nora sank into a depression. She sent the children to live with their father, who was back from Korea and living in Georgia with a wife and two daughters.

  Tony Scannon was forty-nine years old with a lifetime commanding men, but he had little idea what to do with young kids. He turned to the tools he knew. There were inspections on Saturday morning, harsh penalties for mistakes, and consequences for any hint of insubordination. Even today, the Scannon kids wince at the memory. “There wasn’t a lot of joy in the house,” Harriet Scannon said.

  For Pat, school became an escape. He threw himself into his studies, finding in academic success a solace from the vagaries of life. At sixteen, he graduated from high school and took a year of classes at Augusta College to burnish his résumé before applying to universities. His first choice was Georgia Tech, which had a stellar chemistry program, but at Tony Scannon’s insistence, he also sent an application to West Point. Then Tony pulled strings at the military academy, and intercepted the letter of acceptance from Georgia. In the fall of 1967, Scannon drove to New York to attend the only option he believed he had.

  Today, West Point is widely celebrated as an academic force, but during the turmoil of the Vietnam years it was somewhat less renowned. Scannon felt listless. His mind disengaged. By the end of his first semester, he was ready to transfer out, but he was terrified that his father would think he’d given up. He decided to finish his freshman year and attend yearling summer camp, including the notorious Recondo week, before announcing plans to drop out.

  He finished his undergraduate degree at the University of Georgia, and drove his Mercury Cougar west to begin a doctoral program in chemistry at UC Berkeley. It was 1971. The Bay Area was a notorious cacophony of drugs and protest, but Scannon passed through oblivious. At a party one night, he was surprised to find that a brownie was spiked with marijuana; it would be the only drug experience of his life. Instead, he chased the doctorate at breakneck speed, finishing his coursework in three years and writing his dissertation in two months. Years later, when he gave the commencement speech at Berkeley, he would be introduced as the only person ever to receive a chemistry doctorate in three years. But as he was walking across campus a few months before graduation, he experienced a sensation that he would later describe as an epiphany. “I was literally halfway through a step,” he said, “when I realized that I didn’t want to become a chemist. I wanted to become a doctor.”

  Scannon collected his PhD and enrolled in medical school. By the time he graduated in 1976, he was twenty-nine years old, with an MD, a PhD, and a debt to the military still hanging over his head from West Point. He decided to complete his military service with a residency at the Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco, where he met a radiologist named Hugh Cregg, whose son was emerging as a popular singer with the stage name Huey Lewis. Cregg was looking for a young partner to join his practice, and he offered to bring Scannon in. Scannon by then was married to his girlfriend from Berkeley, and their daughter, Nell, was three years old, but he declined the offer, telling Cregg that he wanted to start a company of his own. He found financial backers, including technology magnate David Packard, and set out to build a company that would combine his interests in chemistry and medicine. It would be a few years before someone told him that what he was doing was called “biotech.”

  By the time Scannon connected with Chip Lambert and made his first trip to Palau, he’d spent more than a decade of his life at Xoma. His colleagues had no inkling of his military background, his studies at West Point, or the deep influence those experiences would have on his life. But as Scannon began making journeys to Palau, he realized that his interest in the missing men was linked to his past. It was driven by a sense of duty and the need to sacrifice as his parents had, by a feeling of awe at his father’s drive through the Ardennes, and his mother’s courage in a Nazi consulate, and his stepfather’s unwavering faith in the benevolent potential of military might.

  To anyone else, Scannon’s spontaneous obsession with the lost men could seem peculiar, even bizarre. He carried no visible tether to his military past. But to Scannon, the work in Palau felt like the solution to a lifelong conundrum. It was a way to focus his passion for science on something larger than his own company, and to honor the military tradition in his family without abandoning his sense of self. “I had always wanted to be a civilian, but my history brought me back to the military,” he said. “What I’ve found is that I love working with the military. I just don’t want to work for them.”

  TEN

  WASTELAND

  As Franklin
Roosevelt steamed away from his meeting with Nimitz and MacArthur, the strategy for the war was settled, but it remained top secret. In fact, Roosevelt’s trip itself was secret. Though the president had met with reporters on the dock and at the Holmes mansion, the interviews were under embargo until his return to Washington, DC. Other than MacArthur, Nimitz, and a few senior commanders, no one in the US military knew which way the war was turning.

  Certainly the men on the ground didn’t know. In the Central Pacific, they drove onward through Tinian and Guam, while in the South Pacific, MacArthur pushed across the rim of New Guinea—with the Long Rangers bridging the distance between them. Some days, they flew north to cover Nimitz; others, they zipped west to back MacArthur.

  One rainy afternoon at the end of July, Ted Goulding kicked about the Big Stoop tent aimlessly. It was his day off, and Ted hated those. Every successful mission counted toward the end of his tour, and the day he finished fifty, he would go home. To speed things up, he’d volunteered to fly as a substitute for any crew with a sick man, but so far, no luck. So he was in the tent. Listening to the rain patter on the flysheet, he tried to imagine life in New York, the summer heat fading into autumn’s descent, the snow arriving soon to blanket the banks of the Hudson, and he picked up a sheet of paper to write Diane’s parents with a request.

  “Hey folks,” he began. “Here I am at last. How is everything at home? How is Dee and our son Teddy? Please take good care of them for me because I will be home pretty soon. I wish this whole mess was over so that we could all come home. . . . There are only a few more months left of warm weather, then it will get cold. Could you look in a catalogue and find some warm clothing for Dee and Ted? Don’t worry about the money because I will send it to you. Get some nice warm little shirts, hats, mittens, and sox for Teddy, and get Dee some warm slacks, shoes, sox, gloves, and undies and such. Send me the list of things and the total amount, and I will send you the money. That way Dee won’t have to use up the money she is trying to save. Keep all this to yourself until you get the stuff and then give it to Dee and tell her that I didn’t even forget about the weather at home. I want them to be warm and healthy. . . . In other words, please make sure that Dee and Ted have everything they want.”

  When the sun returned a few days later, Ted pulled his cot outside and stretched out below the tropical glare, baking the cold from his bones, but after a few minutes, Jimmie Doyle rousted him for a swim. They ambled toward the shoreline and tumbled through the rough surf. As evening fell, they returned to their bunks and Jimmie wrote to Myrle, “We sure got dunked a lot, and both of us are a little red!”

  Since the mix-up over Crum’s girlfriend, Jimmie and Myrle had settled back into an easy rapport. Myrle reported from Lamesa with the weather, the gossip, the progress of crops, and the comings and goings of friends, while Jimmie soaked up each detail, combing through the newspapers she sent for the most arcane trivia. “I have read everything in the paper, even the want ads,” he wrote, noting, “Lee Barron has a lot on 4th and Miller for sale. What sort of place is it, and is it worth what he asks? You know the place, just north of the old lady’s where I built the fish pond? I think there used to be a couple of houses there. Why not take a look at it, and if it’s worth the price, maybe we can arrange for the money. What do you think?”

  When Myrle sent a copy of the book Big Spring, a collection of folksy tales from the town where her sister lived, Jimmie grew homesick reading lines like “Why, on a clear day, you can stand on top one of these little hills around Big Spring and see to hell and gone, way over to Lamesa.” He confessed to Myrle in a letter, “Sorta got the blues in a way. I have been reading the book, and it brought back everyone so plain. I can just see the whole country, and boy, that country sure has a hold on me. Those plains would sure be a welcome sight to Jim.”

  Always, Jimmie asked about family. Growing up with just his father, he’d taken to calling Myrle’s parents “Mother” and “Dad,” and he traded letters with each. When Myrle’s mother wrote that one of her other daughters, Dorothy, was pregnant and moving to a new farm with her husband, Tracy, Jimmie wrote to Myrle for specifics. “Where is this farm of Tracy’s?” he asked. “Mother said they had a pretty nice place, but she didn’t give any details.” When two weeks passed and he still hadn’t heard more, he brought it up again. “I have heard about Tracy and Dorothy’s farm,” he wrote, “but no one has ever said a word about where it is. Is it close to Sparenberg, or near town? And how are they doing with it?”

  Jimmie had a special fondness for Myrle’s sister Gladys, whose broad, round face was perpetually lit up with glee. Back in Texas, she and Jimmie were forever prodding and teasing each other, and Jimmie tried to keep the spirit of the relationship alive in his letters. “Tell Gladys it’s a good thing that her boyfriend is in Italy instead of here,” he wrote to Myrle. “Because she would probably lose him to a native woman. The native women don’t wear any clothes from the knees down, nor from the waist up.” When Myrle wrote back that Gladys had taken a job in the egg dehydrating plant, making military rations, he wrote, “Tell Gladys to leave just a little more taste in those eggs when she dries them.” But when Myrle replied that she was taking a job alongside Gladys at the plant, he responded with uncharacteristic worry. “Please don’t hurt yourself,” he wrote, “for the money isn’t anything compared to your health. I know you feel better when you are working, and you’re awful sweet about it, but please take care of yourself.”

  While Myrle’s letters always seemed to brighten Jimmie’s day, Johnny’s letters from Katherine often had the opposite effect. Each time he received one, he would tear it open eagerly, skimming through the pages in search of news that she was pregnant. Nearly three months had passed since they said good-bye, and Johnny could hardly stand waiting for the good news. So far, it hadn’t come. In fact, Katherine sent confusing signals, suggesting in one letter that she was pretty sure she was pregnant, then wondering in the next why she wasn’t. “She keeps him in a state,” Jimmie wrote to Myrle. “He will get a letter saying she is, then the next day, he’ll get one saying she isn’t, so he is on needles and pins about it. But that is one of their worries we can’t do anything about. I talk to him, and try to help him all I can, but I feel sorry for him. I know just how he feels, for I went through the same experience. Remember?”

  Johnny also had a tendency to write Katherine when he was lonely. His frustration would bleed onto the pages, and throw Katherine into a panic. Jimmie told Johnny to knock it off. Put on your best face, he said. The letters are for her, not you. But Johnny seemed incapable of holding the loneliness in. “When he gets the blues,” Jimmie confided to Myrle, “he sits down and takes it out on her, and it doesn’t do a bit of good. It must make her feel worse. The best thing he could do would be to just try to keep from getting low, and when he does, just sweat it out.” When Johnny’s sister Mary wrote to let him know that Katherine was keeping a secret herself, and had been fighting an infection for several weeks, it only made his depression worse. He wrote to Mary, “Six months ago I got married. Now I’m thousands of miles from my wife. What a life.”

  The one thing airmen could not discuss in their letters was the war. Each time they pushed an envelope into the postal drop on base, they knew it would be opened and read by a censor, who would use a pair of scissors to snip out any explicit reference to the unit, the islands, the mission, or the enemy. How much else the censor read was anyone’s guess; each man was left to imagine for himself which of the officers he encountered on the base knew the most intimate details of his life. “The officers that censor our mail are with us in our same squadron,” Ted Goulding wrote to Diane. “They aren’t supposed to mention anything they have read, or whose mail they have read, but there is always that feeling in our hearts and minds.”

  Once in a while, an errant mention of the war would slip past the censors, as when Johnny wrote to his brother-in-law in early August, “You should have seen
us bombing yesterday, Gilbert! We really blasted the hell out of things!” Or when Jimmie wrote to Myrle the same day, “I have shot down one Jap ship so far. I can’t say where or when,” and praised his crew: “All the guys are swell, and I couldn’t ask for a better bunch. We have the best pilot of the war.” To his sister Mary, Johnny wrote, “Our pilot told us if there was anything on the ship we wanted to learn to do, to tell him. So I told him I wanted to fly it. He’s gonna teach me!”

  But what Johnny couldn’t know as he finished that letter was that hours earlier the news of Roosevelt’s trip to Hawaii had broken in the US news. The cover of the New York Times that day showed a photo of Roosevelt, MacArthur, and Nimitz sitting on the deck of the USS Baltimore in Hawaii, beside the headline “Roosevelt and Leaders Map Plans for Return to the Philippines; A Job for M’Arthur.”

  For the first time, the path ahead was clear. If the president was sending MacArthur to the Philippines, he would have to get through Palau. That meant the Long Rangers would be packing up soon and leaving Camp De Luxe for a new base, six hundred miles to the west and right on the front lines of war.

  —

  THE ISLAND OF NEW GUINEA stretches across the South Pacific like a lid hovering over Australia. It is the second-largest island on earth, and in 1944, it was one of the most politically fractured. At the western end, it lay deep in Japanese territory, almost to the oil refineries of Balikpapan, while the eastern end was just as firmly in Allied hands, reaching to the doorway of the Solomon Islands. In between, the wild core of the island was a swirl of impenetrable jungle, with soaring mountains, yawning canyons, and verdant forests filled with so many native tribes that some eight hundred languages were spoken.

  For months, MacArthur’s troops on New Guinea had been fighting their way through the jungle, trying to drive the Japanese west, while Australian forces pressed up from the south. But the jungle did not allow for clean dividing lines. The same folds and pockets that kept native tribes isolated now became sprinkled with Japanese holdouts, some of them so deeply naturalized into the landscape that they lost all contact with the imperial command. A few would remain in hiding for decades, trading gunfire with anyone who approached.