You Are Not Forgotten

by Bryan Bender

  “Dear Ma,” he began in his flowing cursive, and the words just kept coming:

  Cuss it all—if somebody doesn’t get on the ball pretty soon and bring us some mail in here, I’m going to start my own private little war. Still we haven’t gotten any mail except that batch last week in which I didn’t even get a letter from home. Of course there is nothing you or I can do about it except wait and hope. I’ll wait and you hope!

  In spite of the reputation the Oriental has for a “dead-pan,” I’ve decided they have nothing on the American way of hiding emotions and feelings. It seems to be our nationwide credo to hide all emotion, softness, or human feeling really, under a tough outer shell. This, I’ve also decided, is all to the good—but it can be carried to too great a degree. Maybe you remember the line of The Fool’s Prayer that went something like “The word we had not thought to say, Who knows how grandly it had rung?”

  At this stage of the game, I don’t really think I need to express my unlimited appreciation for everything you’ve done for me (and Uranie and Claudie), the way you brought us up, the ideals that you instilled in us, the channels through which you guided our thoughts, the desire you gave us for clean living, clean speech, clean thoughts, the abilities that you gave us and then encouraged until they came through. I don’t really think I need to express my admiration for you in these things. The time at least 22 years ago when you all forgot your keys to the old house and pushed me through the front room window to let you in. “You’ve got it to do,” you told me. I always remembered—now more than ever. “You’ve got it to do.” It must be that you know (and if I sound stuffy, you don’t really have to read all this) that “All that I am and all that I hope to be, I owe to my Angel Mother” (Angel, in this case, being a term of endearment). But—even if I am sure you know all this—I satisfy myself by putting it in writing.

  As you’ve guessed, there was an action, an incident, that has inspired this. I’ll tell you about it in the future of non-censored letters. I had a thrilling time. At the same time, don’t be alarmed. At the time of this writing, it is something that is past and that I’m back safely from—much better off and a lot wiser than I was.

  I’ll never worry about being in good shape again. Boy I’m in good shape!! Remember the five miles swim from the Cooper Bridge to the Ashley Bridge? Drop in the bucket, they were. A mere drop in the bucket!

  —and while I think of it, thanks for making me at home in the salt water and a good (enough) swimmer.

  Yers Trooly,

  Capt. M. R. McCown

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A NEW PATH

  George fidgeted in the passenger seat as the pickup wound its way up to a bluff high over the Pacific Ocean and was waved through the gate by Marine guards onto Camp H. M. Smith. In front of him stood the majestic-looking headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command with its multi-inclined roof, reminiscent of East Asian architecture. Surrounded by tall, thin Cook pines and beds of tropical flowers, the perch offered a breathtaking view of the gleaming waters of Pearl Harbor and Honolulu beyond.

  George arrived in Hawaii a few days after Christmas 2005. Captain Grover Harms, a chiseled thirty-two-year-old West Point graduate, had volunteered to be his guide and offered him his spare bedroom while he got settled. George met a few of the other captains he would be serving with but hadn’t officially reported for duty, nor did he have a chance yet to meet his new boss. Harms had already warned him about what to expect from their commander, and George now felt a little anxious to meet him.

  Harms led George across the main parking lot toward a large boxlike white structure of concrete surrounded by fence and barbed wire. This was the home of Detachment 4, the largest field unit of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC—and George’s new assignment. On a patch of grass just outside the entrance, a group of noisy soldiers were grilling hamburgers and steaks next to an outdoor pavilion lined with picnic tables and vending machines. Harms pointed out Lieutenant Colonel James Hanson IV, the detachment commander, among the throng of soldiers enjoying a rare holiday season “organization day.”

  Hanson was hard to miss. Tall and in top physical shape, the forty-two-year-old infantry officer and Army Ranger from California had a shock of blond hair and deep tan that gave him the look of a world-class surfer. But he was anything but laid-back. The son of an Army officer who was also married to one, Hanson was previously chief of staff for a brigade of 5,000 paratroopers in Afghanistan and before that commanded 570 soldiers in Iraq. Now he oversaw 150 personnel from all branches of the military, including eighteen recovery teams, three investigation teams, and three sections of linguists. He was in charge of planning nearly a hundred missions each year worldwide in the search for missing soldiers from previous conflicts.

  Always in high-speed motion, Hanson had a vibrant, excitable personality that demanded much of the men and women under his command. He wasn’t afraid to let them know how much—often at a high decibel level and in salty language. He counseled his team leaders: “Don’t be offended by my sometimes explosive, dramatic, and theatrical feedback.… Understand my technique: it trains the masses rather than the individual.”

  George stepped through the throng milling around the charcoal grills and over to Hanson.

  “Sir, Captain George Eyster,” he said, saluting. “I am your new team leader.”

  The first thing Hanson noticed was the insignia of an Army Ranger on George’s fatigues. He was expecting an aviator and was intrigued that his new officer was also wearing the coveted Ranger tab.

  “You’re a Ranger, I see.”

  The extra attention always made George feel a little uncomfortable, and he shifted his stance slightly before clumsily recounting how he transferred out of the infantry to become a helicopter pilot.

  “Do I make you nervous?” Hanson interjected.

  “No, sir,” George replied as confidently as he could.

  Hanson held his gaze for a few extra moments before shaking his hand.

  “Welcome to Det. 4.”

  At the far end of a vast runway at Hickam Air Force Base, beneath the deafening whine of jumbo jets, Mamala Bay Drive winds past Hope Street, a narrow lane that disappears into the thick brush. Just beyond it, facing the aquamarine waters of a lagoon, is a cluster of buildings that look like little more than storage sheds and trailers. The largest—a one-story beige structure with dark trim and a sloping roof—is designated simply Building 45. Its purpose is evident only by the black-and-white flag emblazoned with the image of a bowed head set against barbed wire and a guard tower, with the phrase “You Are Not Forgotten.”

  The first time George arrived at the JPAC headquarters, a short drive from Detachment 4 on Camp Smith, he didn’t really know what to expect. At first glance, Building 45 contained the drab-looking offices, cubicles, and conference rooms he had seen on every other military base. There were the leadership offices housing the commander, a one-star general, and the command’s top civilian. Only when he was escorted to the other side of the building, where visitors were required to sign in and out, did he realize he was in a wholly different setting.

  Down a windowless corridor with more offices, display cases lining several of the walls were arranged with some of the personal effects recovered in the search for the MIAs over the decades. There was a tattered wallet with a faded photograph of a special gal; a small pocketknife; a letter that a soldier folded inside his helmet; a pair of twisted wire-rimmed glasses; a pocket Bible; a rusty, dented canteen.

  The hallway led to a series of large, glass-enclosed clean rooms set off from the main office spaces. Here, in the most geographically isolated spot on the planet, was the Central Identification Laboratory, one of the largest forensic skeletal laboratories in the world, totaling 11,500 square feet. Above the main entryway hung a bank of clocks depicting the local time in Hawaii as well as in Washington, D.C., Vietnam, Thailand, and South Korea.

  In the glass-enclosed clean room, laid out neatly on more than a doz
en examination tables, were human bones. Some were merely fragments, others aligned into skeletons. Nearby lay bits of clothing, helmets, boots, and other artifacts, everything carefully tagged or placed in evidence bags. Anthropologists and technicians in white coats moved gingerly around the specimen tables, conferring in hushed tones. Along one side of the main lab space were a series of workstations with high-powered microscopes. On the other was a smaller interior room marked “X-ray.” A separate glass enclosure was the autopsy room, where full-scale computer models of the human skull were created using just a few shards of bone. At the rear of the laboratory complex, where the rumble of jet engines was even more pronounced, was a set of double doors that opened onto the apron of the air base’s busy runway. That was where remains recovered on far-flung battlefields were unloaded by lab staff—day or night—from the cargo hold of arriving military aircraft.

  The words painted above the laboratory lent expression to the subdued, almost funereal atmosphere, where lab staff liked to say every day was Memorial Day.

  “We write no last chapters. We close no books. We put away no final memories,” the words of President Ronald Reagan reminded them. George was especially struck by another quotation, for both its powerful message and its relatively obscure source, President Calvin Coolidge: “A nation that forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.”

  JPAC kept records on more than eighty thousand soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines listed as missing in action. The vast majority were lost in World War II, followed by Korea and Vietnam. The lab was also trying to untangle a thicket of unsolved cases in the form of almost a thousand boxes of unidentified remains either turned over by foreign governments or recovered in remote corners of the globe. In an effort to capitalize on cutting-edge advances in technology, the lab had recently begun disinterring some of the eight hundred unknown soldiers from the Korean War who were buried just a few miles away in the so-called Punch Bowl, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. To assist in its efforts, the JPAC lab was building one of the largest DNA databases in the world, collecting genetic material from the families of the missing—that is, when they could be found or came forward. Working closely with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology based in Washington, JPAC’s lab was pushing the limits of forensic science, even searching for ways to extract the more elusive nuclear DNA, which comes from both parents, as opposed to the more commonly analyzed version known as mitochondrial, which is passed down from the mother. It was research driven by the uniqueness of the mission, where remains were often commingled. An estimated 8 percent of Caucasians share mitochondrial DNA that is too similar to positively separate one from the other; in effect, they are genetic cousins. The challenge was confronted when trying to identify soldiers buried together on the battlefield or bomber crews that crashed—especially in the 1940s and 1950s, when most units consisted of all white men. Nuclear DNA might be especially useful in Korean War cases because of the 1973 fire that destroyed many of the personnel records from that conflict—including dental records. By the time George arrived in late 2005, JPAC was identifying roughly eighty missing soldiers a year, on average more than one per week.

  Outside the main headquarters building and the lab, much of JPAC’s work took place in nearly a dozen trailer-like buildings situated across the parking lot from Building 45, where in a rabbit warren of cubicles there were offices designated for operations, intelligence, and public relations—and where the mood was decidedly brighter than the somber atmosphere of the lab. That is where George met some of the command’s more colorful characters.

  Military personnel assigned to the command usually spent just a few years before moving on to another assignment. So the continuity flowed from a handful of ex-soldiers whose nearly religious belief in the MIA mission led them to stay on as civilian employees after leaving the service. One of them was Bob Maves, a small and sinewy ex-soldier with wire-rimmed glasses and a ruddy complexion who bustled about the complex planning new missions with the energy of a man half his age. His cluttered corner office in one of the trailers often more closely resembled a college dorm room than a military planning cell, with cases of beer from his many travels since joining JPAC more than a decade earlier stacked in one corner and two caged guinea pigs in the other. Gregarious and salty-tongued, Maves was also the command’s unofficial social planner. Behind his office trailer, hidden behind a clutch of palm trees, he was overseeing the construction of “the sanctuary,” an outdoor watering hole of bamboo, fish ponds, and secondhand furniture—a perennial work in progress fashioned from donations and surplus lumber where, after long hours, the JPAC staff could relax with a few cold ones.

  Behind Maves’s outgoing exterior was a laser-like recall of the case numbers and pertinent details of scores of cases the command had worked to close over the years. His singular focus was evident by the POW/MIA flag covering the wall above his cluttered desk and the copies of two names etched on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington clipped to his file cabinet. For many veterans of JPAC like Maves, the Vietnam War was their touchstone, their generation’s call to arms. It was also when the search for missing soldiers began in earnest.

  Families and veterans’ groups concerned that some of their loved ones might still be alive and in captivity led to the establishment of organizations like the National League of POW/MIA Families. Indeed, it was the wife of a missing soldier from the Vietnam War, a young woman named Mary Hoff, who came up with the idea of the POW/MIA flag that would quickly become a national emblem. It is the only flag other than the Stars and Stripes to fly over the White House.

  A milestone came in 1973, during the American withdrawal from Vietnam, with the creation of the Central Identification Laboratory in Samae San, Thailand. The lab, which fell under the command of the Army, was responsible for searching for and identifying the remains of the estimated 2,489 service members missing across Vietnam and neighboring Laos and Cambodia. In 1976, when the lab was moved to Hawaii, the effort consisted of merely twenty-nine military personnel and thirteen civilians.

  But the Communist victories in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in 1975 virtually halted U.S. recovery efforts in the region. In the decade after the war Vietnam returned a few remains of missing Americans, but it wasn’t until 1988 that John Vessey, a retired U.S. Army general, convinced the Vietnamese to allow the United States to actively search for remains throughout the country. The government in Laos slowly opened up beginning in the mid-1980s, while the ruling Khmer Rouge in Cambodia didn’t give search teams access until the 1990s. The effort to account for the missing in Southeast Asia, as men like Maves knew all too well, was often stymied in other ways. In the 1980s the most common tip about a possible MIA in Southeast Asia came in the form of what became known as “dog tag” reports—nearly four thousand of them on individual soldiers. In most of the cases, residents of Vietnam claimed to possess the remains of American service members and provided as proof their dog tags, data copied from a dog tag, or other personal identification documents. About 90 percent of the reports, however, turned out to involve soldiers who had served in the war but returned home safely. Another 6 percent had been killed in combat and their bodies recovered. That left only 4 percent that actually involved a potential MIA. “Years of investigation and analysis have shown that the dog tag reports have been instigated by elements of Vietnam’s government in an effort to influence and exploit the POW/MIA issue,” a Department of Defense report concluded in 1990. “Nevertheless, each report is carefully analyzed to determine its validity.”

  Over a few cold beers and clouds of cigar smoke in Maves’s sanctuary, the discussion often turned to plans to return for more of their missing comrades in Southeast Asia. Soldiers’ remains that had already been recovered but were still in the lab awaiting identification—some of them for years—were given special attention. Maves and his merry band did not use their names, of course, not until the lab could make a final determination. But as they gestured across the park
ing lot in the direction of the lab, the pending case numbers were uttered as if they were proper nouns, merely old friends who would be sprung any day now to return to their families. All it would take was one more mission to collect additional evidence at the crash site where they died or on the remote battlefield where they had fallen.

  Long before the Vietnam War, the U.S. military sought to account for its losses on the battlefield and to search for those left behind when the guns fell silent. Though it was haphazard, some officers in the Revolutionary War filed reports on the number of soldiers both killed in battle and missing. Pressed by soldiers’ families, Congress passed a law in 1846 directing the secretary of war to compile the names and hometowns of soldiers missing from battles in the Mexican War. During the American Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, the government actively sought to identify and bury its war dead in registered graves. After the Spanish-American War, in 1898, U.S. service members who had been buried in battlefield cemeteries overseas were systematically disinterred and returned for permanent burial in the United States. During World War I, the Graves Registration Service was established to recover and identify American war dead.

  But countless soldiers were buried where they fell, and the U.S. military’s ability to account for them was bound by the limits of technology and the lack of information on their whereabouts. That began to change dramatically in World War II, the first high-tech war that introduced radar and other modern navigation aids that helped to pinpoint where some troops fell. At the end of the war, Graves Registration teams traveled to far-flung battlefields in Europe and Asia to recover remains and try to locate crash sites. They also gathered clues about the possible whereabouts of those who might have been captured alive and held in prisoner-of-war camps.