Vanished

by Wil S. Hylton

  As the years passed, Mario Campora returned to western Massachusetts—with a burgeoning family, and a job running a gas station, and a life that left little time or money for cross-country trips. Near the end of his life in 2007, he confided to his family that he had always been haunted by the loss of the Big Stoop crew, and by his own broken promise to offer comfort to their families. “That was his biggest regret,” his daughter, Cindy, said, her own voice breaking. “He always thought he should have found a way.” And a few miles east, in the hills of Amesbury, Norman Coorssen tried to return to the life he’d left behind. But nothing, including Coorssen, was the same.

  He’d waited a month after the crash to fly again, boarding a plane on October 3 to attack the oil refineries at Balikpapan. It was one of the most heavily defended Japanese positions in the South Pacific, and every man on the mission expected heavy losses. “It is doubtful that a more dangerous, grueling, and heart-breaking mission was ever flown in any theater of the war than the October 3, 1944, raid by the 307th to Balikpapan,” the historian Sam Britt wrote. By the end of that day, the Long Rangers would return with seventy airmen missing and their fleet in tatters.

  For Coorssen, the mission also had a personal resonance: he was scheduled to fly with Jack Arnett’s most recent crew. Whatever had brought on the crew change of September 1, it was echoed a month later on the mission to Balikpapan: the pilot who had lost his men, with the men who’d lost their pilot.

  Yet they never finished the mission. A few minutes after takeoff Coorssen turned back. “This turn back,” the mission report explained, “was made due to pilot illness and failure of the auto-pilot.” Squadron commander Jack Vanderpoel never believed that explanation. Sixty years later, he was still fuming. At a Long Ranger reunion in August 2004, just six months after Scannon’s discovery of the wreckage, Vanderpoel sat down with Greg Babinski, whose father had flown with Arnett that summer and with Coorssen on the October 3 mission. Babinski knew little about his father’s war, and even less about Arnett or Coorssen. But he was compiling interviews to piece together his father’s story. As he and Vanderpoel sat together in a booth at Rachel’s restaurant in Nashville, Babinski handed Vanderpoel a list of names he’d seen on mission rosters with his father. Vanderpoel scrolled down the list, noting the names he remembered. When he got to Coorssen’s name, Vanderpoel stopped and his face darkened. “His opinion,” Babinski said later, “was that Coorssen turned back, not because of mechanical problems, but because he lost his nerve.” In his notes, Babinski wrote, “Coorssen was a coward.” They were Vanderpoel’s exact words.

  For Coorssen’s family in Amesbury, the man who returned home from the war was unmistakably changed. The carefree kid who had laughed his way through college was gone, replaced by a grim figure who rarely smiled. He would live out the next forty years of his life in a routine so exacting that even his close relatives found it baffling. “He wore the same outfit every day,” his nephew, Gary Coorssen, said. “A gray suit, white shirt, and a maroon tie and socks.” He also drove the same car, buying a new model every year. “Always blue, always a Pontiac, always a sedan,” his sister-in-law, Helen Coorssen, said. Each morning, he would disappear into his office at the family business, whiling away the afternoon on Marlboros and nips of scotch. In the evening, Helen said, “you could tell what time of day it was when he would drive through town on his way home.” At home, “the house was so meticulous, you could eat off the basement floor,” Gary added. But Norman Coorssen seemed to take little joy from his ritual existence. “I don’t recall him ever laughing,” Gary said. “I can’t even picture him with a smile.” Once in a while, a family member would press for an explanation. “Norman,” his brother George would say, “tell me what happened in the war.” Norman would only frown and mutter, “I don’t want to talk about it.” In forty years, he never did.

  “Norman just refused,” Helen Coorssen said. “Absolutely refused to discuss it. It’s one of the mysteries that I shall carry to my grave.”

  Many of Coorssen’s relatives wondered if he’d done something wrong. They never knew about the crew change, never heard the name Jack Arnett, and never found out about his final, aborted mission until after he was gone. All they knew was what they saw in Norman himself. By the time he died of heart failure, in 1983, it was as though he’d been gone a long time. He’d vanished somewhere in the South Pacific, the last casualty of the Big Stoop crew.

  FIFTEEN

  RECOVERY

  Tommy and Nancy rarely left Texas. They rarely saw the point. Once in a while they might slip across the border with New Mexico for a weekend getaway or pop into Arkansas for a visit with Tommy’s family, but most of the time it suited them better to stay home and save the money. Nancy was frugal by nature, and Tommy by experience. After you’d lost everything, you learned to hang on to what you had.

  On cold winter evenings, Nancy liked to fire up the computer after dinner to check on friends. When the BentProp team was in Palau, that meant a stop by their website to read the latest news. Nancy no longer expected a breakthrough on Tommy’s dad but she enjoyed the daily updates all the same. It seemed like every year the team uncovered three or four new fighter planes, and when Colmer and Joyce would post photos on the website with a short description of what they’d found, Nancy would lean close to the screen to study every detail, marveling at the infinite variety of colors in the coral and the jungle, and the way the gnarled wreckage of a plane disappeared into the landscape. There was something mesmerizing about Scannon’s transformation, too. On the islands, he abandoned his usual uniform of khakis and blazers and pressed oxford shirts, and in the photos of him crawling through woven mangrove roots in a mud-splattered T-shirt and cargo pants with a machete strapped to his back he was almost unrecognizable. Even his face looked different on the islands, with the whites of his eyes and his snow-white beard gleaming against tan, weathered skin.

  Yet when the BentProp team began to post photographs of the Arnett wreckage in early 2004, Nancy didn’t see them. She and Tommy were farther from home than they’d ever been. Their son, Casey, had emerged from his childhood health problems and become a US Marine. He was about to graduate from officer candidate school in Quantico, Virginia. Between planning, packing, traveling, and then finally settling home after the 1,300-mile trip, Nancy and Tommy forgot all about the BentProp mission. By the time they remembered and Nancy pulled up the website to catch up on the daily reports, all the references to “Jack Arnett” and “the 453” had been wiped clean. Instead, she found herself staring at the vague, redacted language approved by the military lab. “All it really said,” she recalled, “was that there was a four-engine bomber, it was in the water, and they’d been looking for it a long time. I just read that, and read it again, three or four times, and I thought, ‘I’m not reading what I’m reading.’”

  Nancy shouted for Tommy to come into the room. When he loped through the door, she jabbed a finger at the computer screen and said, “Tommy, you read that. Tell me if I’m going crazy.’”

  Tommy didn’t spend much time on computers, but he squinted his eyes and read through the post. Then he read it again. It sure sounded like his daddy’s plane. But wouldn’t somebody have told him? While he scrolled through photos of the wreckage, a blur of brown and gray shapes in a haze of blue-green water, Nancy picked up the phone and punched in Scannon’s number. When he picked up, she blurted out, “You found the plane!?”

  Scannon didn’t answer. His mind raced to find the words. After months of wondering if the Doyles knew about the discovery, it was a relief to know they did—but he still couldn’t confirm the details. The military was adamant: only they could verify the identity of the plane, and only they could notify the families. It was just the kind of bureaucratic red tape that had turned Scannon off to the military as a younger man, but if he wanted to stay in the good graces of the lab—if he wanted them to trust him, and work with him, and investigate the sunken
plane, and bring home the lost crew—then he would have to play by their rules. If he wanted to give real answers to the Doyles, he couldn’t answer their questions now.

  “I can’t tell you it’s Jimmie’s plane,” he said finally. “Here’s what I can tell you: it’s a four-engine bomber, it’s in the water, and it’s near Koror. The only four-engine bomber that flew over there was the B-24, and there were only three that went down near Koror. We’ve found the other two. So you have to decide for yourselves.”

  Tommy had picked up a second handset and he exchanged a quizzical look with Nancy. “Can you tell me what it looked like?” he asked.

  Scannon exhaled. “I can describe the site,” he said, explaining that the coral head was small and round, barely a mile from shore, with the front of the plane scattered across one side and the tail resting on the other. He described swimming through the debris and recognizing parts—the nose-turret bracket embedded in coral on the western slope; the pilot controls just below that, fused in position; the shell casings on the sand beside the tail; and inside the fuselage, the parachute shrouds billowing in the current. The end of the tail, he said quietly, was pushed into the seafloor, which made it impossible to see the tail turret.

  Tommy felt a knot in his gut. It was clearly his dad’s plane, Scannon didn’t have to spell that out. But the image of his father’s tail turret buried in sixty years of muck and debris filled him with dread. If his daddy was in that turret, it meant he’d experienced a brutal death, trapped inside the plexiglass bubble with a clear view of the sky as the plane spun and tumbled toward the water, then smashed into the surface and drifted toward the bottom of the lagoon while water poured in through the cracks. Yet finding his daddy in the tail would also mean that the rumors weren’t true, that Jimmie hadn’t abandoned him, that he could let go of the great torment of his life.

  “I want to see it,” Tommy said quietly.

  “We’re going back in a few months,” Scannon replied.

  “If I go,” Tommy said, “I want to go down.”

  “You get certified, and I’ll take you.”

  —

  LEARNING TO DIVE in West Texas is a study in chlorine and mud. Tommy signed up for a winter class and spent his weekends blowing bubbles in the shallow end of a pool, then he survived a half-hour dunk in the cold brown mess of an inland lake, and he was a licensed diver. Of course, he’d never actually been deeper than twenty-five feet, hadn’t touched a single flipper into salt water, and the only thing he knew for sure about diving was that he didn’t plan to make a habit of it. But he figured he could get down to the plane at least once, and whatever happened after that was worth it.

  Tickets to Palau were $4,000 per person, which was about as much money as Tommy and Nancy had ever spent on anything. The flight was so long that it took a whole day of traveling each way. Then there was the day that disappeared over the international date line, and the day you lost trying to get the fuzz out of your head. Tommy and Nancy swallowed their disbelief, and in March 2005, they drove to Dallas to begin their journey to the far side of the world. Tommy wore jeans and a plaid shirt, with a belt buckle the size of Texas. Nancy wore a slim white blouse and sea-green slacks. She’d lost forty pounds for the trip.

  As the Doyles made their way west, Scannon was on the islands with Chip and Pam Lambert. It had been four years since their last expedition together, and the Lamberts were still skeptical of the direction Scannon was heading. They had no love for the skydivers or the new rituals of BentProp—the logo, the coins, the embroidered hats, and the quasi-official leadership titles might have helped with the military brass, but to the Lamberts it felt contrived and off-putting, especially Scannon’s title of “Team Leader.”

  Yet the Lamberts still felt deeply connected to the Arnett plane and crew. They had helped Scannon begin the search in 1993, when he returned from their mission to the Bush trawler; then they joined him on the channel in 1996, and again in 1999, and once more in 2000, logging hundreds of hours in the quest to find the plane. Now the president of Palau had declared the wreckage protected. Both the Palauan and US governments resolved to keep its coordinates secret, but the Lamberts were still listed as members of BentProp, which gave them special dispensation.

  Scannon was equally conflicted about his split with the Lamberts. At a certain level, he would always regard them as superior explorers. They had a wealth of diving experience that he would never match, and although they hadn’t found Yamashita’s gold, they continued to make staggering discoveries, like the wreckage of the USS Mississinewa on a nearby Pacific atoll. Chip had also begun to appear in a television series about wreck diving on the History Channel, and some of the most famous divers in the world counted them as friends.

  But in other regards, Scannon believed he was better off without the Lamberts. When they joined him on missions, they always wanted to take days off for fun, splitting their time between the channel and recreational dive sites on the reef. Scannon had no interest in those things. He didn’t even particularly like to dive. Gliding between sharks and giant clams and bursts of neon coral was, to him, only a half step removed from sitting on the sofa and watching television, and in the skydivers he’d found a team that was focused entirely on the search.

  As the Lamberts joined Scannon for three days of diving, they agreed to leave the past behind, swimming through the Arnett wreckage, examining tiny details, and dissecting everything they’d seen over cocktails at the Palau Pacific Resort.

  By the time the Doyles reached Palau, the Lamberts were on their way home, and the BentProp team was beginning to arrive for the 2005 mission. As Tommy and Nancy stepped into the terminal after the thirty-hour journey from Texas, they found Scannon and Colmer and Joyce cheering, while Joe and Esther Maldangesang draped pink floral leis across their shoulders and crowned them with wreaths. Then they all stepped outside into the warm tropical night, piled into a van, and sped to a hotel in Koror, where Tommy and Nancy collapsed into bed.

  Nine hours later they were back in motion.

  At 7:00 a.m., Tommy and Nancy reported to the large hotel room that BentProp always used as a hub, and they studied a map with Scannon while Joyce organized camera equipment and Colmer whipped up bacon and eggs. By 7:30, they were on their way to the waterfront at the Neco Marine dive shop; by 8:00, they were racing through the impossibly blue water on their way to dive.

  As the boat ripped between islands, Tommy and Nancy stared over the foredeck in a dreamlike state. Many of the islands were so small they looked like sculptures floating on the water, with rocky walls that shot straight up and small holes bored into the sides.

  Tommy and Nancy exchanged a wary glance. “We both had the same thought,” Tommy said later. Every wartime document that Scannon had given the Doyles made mention of the parachutes. If some of the Big Stoop crew escaped, Jimmie might have been among them. Maybe it was madness to believe he could have survived and hidden until the end of the war. But looking at those tiny caves, it didn’t seem like madness at all. “You’re looking up at those islands,” Nancy said, “and you see a cave here and a cave there, and you realize how close it is—you’re within swimming distance of the crash. You could hide. Run into the water, get on a coral head, duck down. It would be possible. You hear stories about how many Palauans lived in those caves. They were born in the caves. And in the sixties and seventies, some of the Japanese finally came out of a cave on Guam! Now, if they could live in a cave for twenty-five years . . .”

  “And then the other side of it is,” Tommy said, “where did the stories come from?” Tommy still couldn’t imagine a reason that his dad would have left his mom, but he also couldn’t imagine why his uncles were so sure he did. Why did they go looking for Jimmie in California? Why did they try to get the TV show Unsolved Mysteries to look into the case? And why did Tommy’s mother live the rest of her life in a state of emotional limbo, refusing even to talk about Jimmie,
and keeping his letters secret? The easiest explanation for the rumor was still the most shocking one. What if it was true?

  When Maldangesang reached the dive site, he shut off the engine and dropped anchor. Scannon grinned at Tommy: “Ready?”

  “I guess I am,” Tommy said.

  They stretched into neoprene suits and scuba vests while Nancy peered over the edge at the shimmering blue water. It seemed to flutter from turquoise to indigo to ghostly white, and she strained her eyes for a glimpse of what lay below, but it was impossible to see, impossible even to believe that the plane could be so near. The nose was only forty feet down, closer than the tips of the live oak tree in her yard, and the tail turret would be just seventy feet away, the length of her house.

  After a routine buddy check, Scannon gave Tommy the nod to splash in, and he felt the warm sea swish around him as he began to drop through darkening water. As Tommy drifted down, he saw Joe Maldangesang drop in, swimming to his side to take his elbow and guide him to the bottom. Tommy glanced up at the pinprick of sunlight on the surface. He was already deeper than he’d ever been in Texas, with nothing but a veil of blue above, below, and all around. The only familiar sight was Maldangesang; even the other divers were too far away to see. Tommy pinched his nose to blow the pressure from his ears and tried to steady himself in the water. He fixed his gaze on Maldangesang, who stared back as they fell toward the bottom. Suddenly, in the corner of his eye, Tommy saw a shadow. He turned and the water lifted like a shade to reveal the massive underwater mountain of coral littered with mangled metal. Tommy felt his pulse shoot up. Maldangesang gestured for him to follow, and they swam around a bend in the coral, past fragments of aluminum dancing with fish, until all at once through the faint blue haze the fuselage came into view. It was as long as a five-story building and still mostly intact, a wide tube of airplane leaning against the coral.