by Bryan Bender
Technological advances in forensic science, transportation, and communications steadily made the recovery and identification of missing American soldiers more practical. New technologies could extract DNA from the smallest shards of bone. Fresh clues about the possible whereabouts of lost soldiers and missing fliers from as far back as World War II began reaching the military as never before. Opportunities also opened for the first time on battlefields that had seemingly been closed off forever. Like high up in the Himalayas, where a critical air route during World War II known as “the Hump” doomed more than thirteen hundred American fliers to icy graves on the roof of the world in China, India, and Burma. For the first time in 1994, an American recovery team crossed a Himalayan glacier on horseback to retrieve the remains of two U.S. airmen who were literally frozen in time.
Tips came in from farmers plowing their fields, from construction crews digging new foundations in European cities and towns, and by word of mouth. Before long, there were more MIA cases than ever before that had a real prospect of being resolved, even in places that didn’t see fighting during the war, like the jungles of South America. Early in World War II, American bombers headed for bases in North Africa could cross the Atlantic from the eastern tip of Brazil without having to stop to refuel, and some of them crashed on the first leg from the States to airfields in Brazil, where new information was emerging about potential crash sites. In rare cases, the MIA effort reached back before World War II. Even though the U.S. military did not actively search for missing soldiers from World War I, several remains from that conflict were identified, and by the time George arrived, anthropologists had spent years trying, as yet unsuccessfully, to identify the remains of two sailors recovered from the USS Monitor, an ironclad sunk during the Civil War.
Changing global politics also gave the search for the missing a boost. Beginning in the 1980s, even hostile nations such as North Korea began turning over remains from the Korean War and permitted a limited number of American recovery teams to investigate in the country. By the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain was pulled back to reveal new records of U.S. service members and intelligence agents captured and imprisoned in the gulags of Siberia. The United States and Russia set up a commission on the MIA issue in 1992, and investigators began interviewing prison guards and reviewing newly opened Soviet files.
When George arrived for duty, JPAC had grown to four hundred personnel. A growing focus of the command was on the eastern part of New Guinea and the series of adjacent islands in the Solomon and Bismarck Seas. More U.S. warplanes were missing in New Guinea than any place on earth; some of the most sustained air combat had taken place there between the Allied powers and Japan during World War II, and nearly two thousand Americans were swallowed by the forbidding jungle.
In those first few days of his JPAC orientation, George was jolted by an overriding thought: In every other assignment he was expected to be an instrument of destruction, to be prepared to inflict as much damage as possible on America’s enemies. This place was about putting things back together.
George’s orientation program at Detachment 4 began with a one-on-one session with the commander himself. In early January, Colonel Hanson summoned George to his office up on Camp Smith to discuss what he expected of him and what George, in turn, should expect of the men and women he would be leading in the field.
George would be relied upon to build his own recovery teams and plan and execute all of their functions in the field, Hanson told him. That meant he would have to be intimately familiar with all the key tasks required of an MIA recovery operation. Like all officers in the military, he was also expected to develop the noncommissioned officers and other enlisted troops under his command—to counsel them and, if necessary, show them how to accomplish their jobs. Physical training was considered a key requirement, and George was expected to ensure both he and his team were in top physical shape, which meant PT both in Hawaii and when they were deployed.
“Everyone on our team must be in top condition to endure the stresses of the mission,” Hanson told his new team leader.
But George’s paramount duty would be the safety of his soldiers. His job was to minimize the dangers inherent in the search for MIAs. The JPAC handbook warned that many recovery sites presented a host of hazards, from unexploded bombs left over from distant battles to treacherous terrain like the side of a mountain. Personnel were reminded whenever they showed up at JPAC headquarters of the potential dangers of the job. A memorial outside Building 45 was erected to the seven members of a recovery team who were killed in April 2001 in Quang Binh Province, Vietnam, when the Russian-built Mi-17 helicopter they hired crashed in the jungle. Some of the veterans at JPAC also still talked about the recovery team that had been held hostage in the Philippines in the 1980s.
“Nothing we do is worth risking a life or crippling an individual,” Hanson told George.
They also talked about George’s financial responsibilities as a team leader. The entire command had an annual budget of about fifty million dollars. By Pentagon standards that wasn’t much. It had to cover the headquarters and the lab, as well as four field detachments and their far-flung operations. George was expected to make the best use of taxpayer dollars in the field. For example, if he was contracting with a local helicopter pilot for transportation or compensating locals for damage to their property or crops, he had to keep expenses to a minimum.
“Plan and prepare to maintain low costs,” Hanson instructed.
George must also never lose sight of the bigger picture, his superiors instilled in him, and he had a responsibility to ensure his younger troops didn’t either. They had all been entrusted with a special honor to do the hard work necessary to give their comrades-in-arms a long-overdue homecoming. Day after day George and his team would be living in some of the most spartan conditions of their military careers and be required to do hard labor in stifling heat or bitter cold. They could all too easily overlook what they were there for. It would be George’s job to make sure they never forgot why they were doing this.
George would be putting it all into action sooner than he thought. Hanson informed him that Detachment 4 was down a recovery team leader for an upcoming mission. He was counting on George to take over. There was little time to prepare. In fact, the operations order from the general had been issued weeks before George had even arrived in Hawaii, and the departure date was quickly approaching.
“You’re going to Laos.”
As Grover Harms’s houseguest, George spent a lot of time his first month with his fellow team leader. Harms, a member of the Army’s Quartermaster Corps specializing in supply and logistics, was the son of a Korean War vet and a Japanese mother. He had a habit of wearing a Superman T-shirt on recovery missions. Grover had learned the universal S struck up an immediate kinship with the locals in far-flung nations.
When Harms first heard that a new team leader was arriving directly from a tour in Iraq, he offered his spare room in part because his tour in Hawaii was winding down and he was soon headed to Iraq for the first time. He was eager to learn more about George’s experience. He would share JPAC, he thought, and George could share Iraq.
Harms lived in a three-bedroom house just a few miles from the command in the suburb of Aiea, situated on a ridgeline overlooking the shores of Pearl Harbor. He showed George where to grocery shop, how to find the Navy Exchange at the end of Bougainville Drive, and how to get around the cluster of military installations in the area.
They quickly hit it off. Both in their early thirties and single, they were interested in meeting women and took excursions to some of Honolulu’s hot spots, swapping out their uniforms for polo shirts and shorts to soak up some of the island’s beachfront bars, dance spots, and restaurants in Waikiki Beach, Honolulu’s central tourist district. In between talk of sports and girls, the discussion often turned to George’s experience in the war. At first, he was reserved about his views. George barely knew Harms and was jus
t beginning a new assignment, where Harms was an experienced hand whom the boss relied on. But over time George opened up. Harms detected a sharp bitterness in his new housemate about his chosen profession. George seemed to have few, if any, positive memories of his experience “down range,” and it soon became clear that he was pretty disillusioned about the war. George told him bluntly that he simply couldn’t grasp what all the sacrifice was for. While he sounded genuinely grateful to be doing something so unique like JPAC, George was clearly down on the Army. Any remaining doubts about George’s view were removed when he confided that he thought this would be his last assignment.
George’s closest friend and confidante remained his mother, Ann, whom he often spoke to by cell phone several times a day.
The most crucial member of George’s first recovery mission was the laboratory anthropologist assigned to oversee the excavation in Laos. Though only in his mid-thirties, the bespectacled Dr. Derek Benedix had salt-and-pepper hair and a graying beard that made him look older. Benedix joined the laboratory staff in 2001 after completing a postgraduate fellowship at JPAC. By early 2006 he had already participated in more than a dozen MIA recoveries in Europe and Asia. In the aftermath of the Asian tsunami in late 2004, he was dispatched to Thailand to help the U.S. State Department identify victims’ remains. As George’s team anthropologist, Benedix would be calling a lot of the shots once the dig began, using his scientific expertise to determine where they should excavate and the overall pace and direction of the fieldwork.
At his first opportunity George phoned Benedix down at the lab on Hickam and introduced himself.
“Hey, I’m brand-new here,” George said. “Can I come talk to you?”
It was an unusual gesture in Benedix’s experience. No fresh team leader had ever reached out like that. Benedix traditionally met a new leader only after he was assigned to a recovery and the Detachment 4 commander convened a briefing for the senior members of the team. In truth, the relationship between the scientists working in the JPAC lab and the military officers who led the recovery missions wasn’t always smooth. They came from nearly opposite cultures—on one side a rigid chain of command that brooked little dissent and on the other an environment that encouraged questioning orthodoxy and asking tough questions.
When George and Benedix got together, over a cup of coffee in the small library across the hall from the lab, they immediately developed a rapport that was unique in Benedix’s more than four years at JPAC. George was eager to learn as much as possible from Benedix about the lab’s work, and Benedix could immediately see that George had special leadership qualities.
George quickly saw that behind Benedix’s professional exterior was a barely hidden mischievous streak and a full-blown sense of wanderlust. Benedix, who was fondly called “el mono” by those who worked with him for his love of monkeys, exuded an infectious energy for the work JPAC was undertaking.
To his surprise George even found himself opening up a little to his new colleague about where he was coming from.
“I have seen some crazy stuff,” he told Benedix of his recent tour in Iraq, “and I am ready for something different.”
New recovery team leaders at JPAC commonly led their first mission to Laos, where the hard-line Communist government strictly controlled the search for the nearly six hundred American military personnel reported missing in the jungles along the border with Vietnam. The host government insisted on controlling as much of the process as possible, dictating every movement by JPAC personnel. The American teams were chaperoned by Laotian officials during their stay and instructed where they could search and for how long. The government also determined the amount of compensation for local landowners and payment for local workers hired to assist in any excavations. The lack of independence translated into fewer responsibilities and fewer variables for the team leader, making it a good training ground for fresh team leaders. But rarely did anyone get assigned a recovery team so soon. George only had several weeks to prepare.
In one key measure, JPAC’s field detachments were no different from other military organizations: the more experienced sergeants and petty officers handled virtually all the day-to-day tasks of running operations, and the smart officers took their cues from them. George came to rely on one of them in particular, Sergeant Kili Baldeagle, a thirty-year-old combat engineer with a muscular build, close-cropped dark hair, and a large tattoo on his left bicep of a Lakota Indian symbol with a medicine wheel in the middle. Baldeagle was a graduate of the Army’s elite Sapper training course for combat engineers, where he had perfected a host of skills from mountaineering to spotting booby traps by noticing subtle differences in terrain. He also had a reputation for being able to solve some of the most intractable problems in the field with virtually no tools or supplies, earning him the nickname The Architect.
Under the tutelage of Baldeagle and others, George received a crash course in the mission tasks, beginning with how to operate the communications equipment to keep in daily, even hourly, contact with higher headquarters and the outside world and to send encrypted data, including video. The recovery team might need to consult with specialists back at the laboratory about possible evidence, need new instructions from top-level JPAC officials, or require help in the event of an emergency. One day George was taken down the hill from Detachment 4 on Camp Smith to the parade ground overlooking Pearl Harbor to run through the equipment.
At its most basic, the search for missing Americans requires a lot of digging in the ground. That means sifting through mound after mound of earth looking for signs of human remains. One of George’s early requirements was to attend “bone-screening training,” held outside Building 45, where he learned the difference between “wet screening” and “dry screening.”
The preferred way of sifting for evidence is through fine mesh screens attached to wooden trays a few feet long and a few feet wide. With the screen hanging at chest level, one person can stand on each end and break up the dirt, work it through his or her fingers, and push it through the screen, leaving behind anything larger than a tiny pebble. Rows of such screens would be set up at the upcoming excavation. Ideally, George was told, there would be a nearby water supply that could be piped through hoses to wet the dirt and loosen up the hard clumps before washing it through the screens—reducing the chances of missing something such as a small tooth or a tiny bone fragment. Lack of a nearby water source would make a thorough excavation more difficult.
Then, in late January, George was called down to Building 45 for a chat with JPAC’s top commander. Brigadier General Michael Flowers, who like George was both a Ranger and a Kiowa pilot, was eager to meet his newly arrived captain. He also recognized his name.
Flowers, a barrel-chested African-American whose father had been a career Army sergeant, had been selected to run JPAC the year before in part because of his experience dealing with foreign government officials in places as diverse as Egypt and Kosovo. He had also served in Grenada and Operation Desert Storm—and had once worked closely with George’s father planning a large-scale training exercise.
The general greeted George warmly and told him how sorry he was to hear about his father’s untimely death.
“It was a tragedy your dad passed away so young,” he told him.
Flowers, whose job often required sensitive negotiations in places where the command was operating, impressed upon George the importance of doing everything possible to strengthen JPAC’s relationships where it was searching for lost military personnel. The assistance from hosts, he stressed, spelled the difference between the success and the failure of a mission. The general, in his slow, methodical voice, also wanted to make sure George understood something else as he prepared to lead young soldiers in some very difficult conditions.
“It is one thing to just go out there and dig holes in the ground,” Flowers explained. “It is another thing to understand who we are looking for and what happened. It makes it a lot more personal and gives you a lot m
ore motivation.”
George was ready to get up to speed on the Laos case file. It was called a “last known alive” case, which meant it involved a missing American who was believed to have survived initial contact with the enemy and either radioed his position or was seen by a fellow soldier before all communication was lost. In the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, there were hundreds of such cases, further fueling the belief that some Americans might have survived and been taken prisoner.
He reviewed the details in the file, stamped with the case number 1535, which was compiled by JPAC’s history section, a jumbled set of cubicles and file cabinets in a secure room a few steps from the lab. The missing pilot’s name was Benjamin Franklin Danielson, captain, U.S. Air Force. George was mesmerized by the story of what happened to him—and how for three days after he was lost, a herculean effort was made to locate him, at terrific cost.
Captain Ben Danielson and Lieutenant Woodrow Bergeron Jr. had taken off from Cam Ranh Air Base in South Vietnam in their F-4C Phantom, call sign Boxer 22, at 9:00 a.m. on December 5, 1969. Their mission, along with another Phantom crew, was to drop Mk-36 antipersonnel mines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was alive with southbound traffic and heavy concentrations of enemy troops. The first jet made its run over the target, but when Boxer 22 released its weapons, it was hit by anti-aircraft cannons positioned in one of the towering limestone formations known as “karsts” that dotted the landscape. With seconds to spare before the plane crashed and exploded, both pilot and navigator ejected.
Bergeron, whose helmet was blown off in the windblast, descended earthward in the face of machine gun fire and came down safely on the river’s edge, which was shielded by a twenty-foot-high embankment behind him that led to the karst formation a few hundred yards farther east. Danielson’s parachute got snarled on a forty-foot-high tree on the opposite side of the river, just seventy feet away from Bergeron, and he came down in a Vietcong work area with an outhouse and well-worn paths leading to the river. Bergeron could hear small-arms fire coming from the nearby jungle.