by Bryan Bender
Their mission was to complete the excavation of a crash site where four crew members in a UH-1 helicopter had been shot down during the Vietnam War. JPAC previously recovered remains from the location, and the team’s job was to make sure no evidence had been missed. Their living quarters in the Ta-Oy district of southern Laos were even more spartan than the drab guesthouse in Boualapha. They huddled in two-person Denver tents erected on slabs of concrete and survived mostly on rice and noodles cooked in a hot pot and canned beans and soups they packed in their rucksacks. At the recovery site itself George felt a surreal connection to the missing crew they were searching for. UH-1s had been the Army’s workhorses in Vietnam, his father had flown them in the Persian Gulf War, and they were still in service even now. As an Army helicopter pilot, he could recognize many of the pieces of wreckage that his team was pulling out of the ground, including a metal chain from the tail rotor that was also used on the Kiowa and looked new enough to be fitted to one of the choppers he flew. The team worked quickly, and Dr. Benedix determined the excavation was complete in just over half of the thirty days allotted. But again, to George’s abiding frustration, no more remains were found.
However, George discovered that he drew unexpected inspiration from Sergeant Baldeagle. They seemed to work seamlessly together organizing the recovery team’s daily tasks. Both men were paratroopers and Rangers who had served in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. It also helped that they were both chowhounds. Baldeagle was the first to break bread with the locals, while George, too, would try most anything. They dined on chicken feet and water buffalo tartar, although George drew the line at congealed pig’s blood. They were kindred spirits in other ways, as they soon learned over heaps of chicken and rice. While they were rooted in very different cultures, they were both the progeny of long warrior traditions.
Baldeagle’s father, Davy, who was now in his eighties and still living on the reservation in South Dakota where he was chief of the Lakota tribe, had parachuted into France on D-day during World War II. Davy was tutored as a boy by Kili’s great-grandfather White Bull, a revered Lakota warrior said to excel in all the cardinal virtues of the Hunkpapa—or “head of the circle”—especially bravery. White Bull, who lived nearly a century before he died in 1947, had galloped into battle to defend tribal land in the 1860s and 1870s with a breech-loaded rifle and whip. He fought alongside his uncle, the great leader and warrior Sitting Bull, and his boyhood friend Crazy Horse, one of the most iconic Native Americans, who was later honored with a U.S. postage stamp. Though Baldeagle’s great-grandfather denied it to his death, it was the same fearless White Bull, after riding through a hail of gunfire and having his horse shot out from under him, who was credited with killing Major General George Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876—better known as Custer’s Last Stand.
Like the Eysters, the Baldeagles had bestowed a warrior ethos and tradition of military service through the generations. George and Kili both had close relatives who served in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War, while three of Baldeagle’s brothers were also soldiers and one of his sisters was an Army officer. But as they compared notes, it was clear that the traditions affected George and Kili quite differently. Baldeagle spoke animatedly about his Lakota warrior traditions. The spirits of his long-dead ancestors seemed to burn within him, and he was empowered by them, literally channeling them in his Lakota worship ceremonies. George’s experience was very different, he confided. He told Baldeagle that he often felt his father didn’t think he was capable enough to make the military a career and spoke of how he often felt weighed down by the burden of his name and his ancestry.
George longed for a tighter connection, a more meaningful affinity, with those who came before him—to draw strength from them, as Kili did from his ancestors. Baldeagle crystallized for George how much further he had to go.
After George’s team completed the excavation of the helicopter crash—and with two weeks left to go in the mission—the commander of JPAC’s Detachment 3, headquartered in Viangchan, handed George a new mission, one usually reserved for more experienced personnel.
He was to take a small group and locate half a dozen remote sites that might be ripe for future recoveries of MIAs. It was an unusual move. Such a task was usually reserved for the command’s specially trained investigation teams, not recovery leaders. But JPAC wasn’t going to waste the extra personnel, and the contract for the helicopter was already inked. George’s job was to survey six isolated locations that had not been investigated by Americans in years. He would have little information to go on other than a few rough coordinates and a brief description of what JPAC’s history section believed happened there. His best chance of a successful survey, he was told, was to identify a local elder who might be able to point them to a crash site or possible burial of American military personnel. He should expect any landing zones used by previous investigators to be overgrown and the map coordinates to be inexact or completely wrong, pinpointed before the advent of modern Global Positioning Systems.
George was given a crash course in how to conduct an investigation: Introduce yourself and your team to the village chief and explain why you are there. Remember you are not conducting an interrogation. Try to put the locals at ease. Ask permission to take photographs and be conscious of social customs. If possible, find witnesses to the crash or battle, or those who heard details of the incident from witnesses. Try to interview people individually if possible. Also, get as much of the story as possible so that another investigation team didn’t have to return. One tip sheet on field investigations circulated around JPAC at the time instructed the interviewer to imagine he was going to write a screenplay about the incident. What blanks would have to be filled in to do that? Another tactic considered crucial to JPAC’s mission was to ask about other incidents in the vicinity, not simply to focus on the particular loss and disposition of the Americans involved. Witnesses often had information about other burial sites or prisoner-of-war camps.
George’s investigation team consisted of a soft-spoken Laotian government official, Sergeant Baldeagle, and a Navy lieutenant and medical doctor named Andy Baldwin. Dr. Baldwin, an Adonis-looking triathlete who also happened to be a Navy diver, had been assigned to JPAC to provide humanitarian aid to the native population. Baldwin, who was later featured on the reality television show The Bachelor, was attached to George’s hastily created investigation team because it needed a medic but also because he would be able to keep up with two Army Rangers like George and Baldeagle. Then there was the pilot for Lao Westcoast Helicopter, which had been hired by the detachment in Laos. George knew him merely as Little Andy. Only in his twenties, Andy had been flying since he was a teenager herding cattle on his family’s mutton farm in New Zealand.
Early one morning in May they boarded the small AS350 helicopter and headed deep into the interior, armed with the list of possible MIA sites—each designated with a four-digit case number—as well as a stack of maps, radio equipment, a GPS, a camera, some medical supplies and rations, and a bunch of machetes and chain saws. None of them anticipated how physically demanding it would be or the surreal quality of some of the people they would meet and the wild and unsettled landscape they would have to traverse. Nor did George expect it would be so dangerous.
To reach one of the first locations, they had to slog for several miles through rivers and streams. When he emerged, George’s legs were covered in leeches. Dr. Baldwin painfully removed them, one by one, and then pulled a tool out of his backpack that looked like a soldering gun to burn the open wounds. When he was finished, George’s pant legs were drenched in blood. At another location, they found the wreckage of a U.S. Navy helicopter near a ramshackle village of thatched-roof huts and rice paddies. From a distance the village appeared to be hanging precipitously off the side of a mountain. After Little Andy set the chopper down in a clearing, a throng of children rushed to greet them. The first thing George noticed was that they w
ere all smoking cigarettes, including those who appeared little older than toddlers. As they got closer, he was struck by their physical features. Most of them were walleyed, their eyes set unnaturally apart, almost on opposite sides of their heads. Dr. Baldwin supposed it was the result of inbreeding; they probably rarely interacted with outsiders. How they came to have an ample supply of cigarettes was a whole different mystery. The Americans and their Lao guide were led on a short hike to the burned-out hulk of the Navy helicopter lying just outside the village. It had clearly been scavenged for metal, George could see, an ominous sign for a potential excavation. JPAC, he knew, treated every site like a crime scene. If pieces were moved, it would be far more difficult to know where to dig. George also noticed a crescent-shaped hole in the side of the helicopter, which struck him as odd.
The good news was that several of the more senior villagers maintained that no human remains had been removed from the wreckage since it crashed into the mountainside in a fiery fury nearly forty years before. George snapped photographs and recorded the grid coordinates on his GPS. He also wrote down the names and descriptions of some of the locals and made detailed notes of the surroundings, including what appeared to be several unexploded bombs. Before they departed, an older man identified as the village chief, who was stooped and graying around the temples, handed him a parting gift: a machete that George immediately understood had been cut out of the fuselage of the downed chopper, explaining the crescent-shaped hole in the side of the wreckage.
Each night after crisscrossing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in search of more clues, George and his small team returned to the base camp in Ta-Oy dirty, bloodied, and tired from hiking for miles through the mountains and traversing barbed thickets. He had barely enough energy to eat dinner before collapsing into a deep slumber in his tent. But after checking off another possible MIA site on his list, he rose the following dawn even more committed to reach every one, fueled by the knowledge that the information he was gathering might someday allow JPAC to bring home another missing soldier.
George had one more possible MIA site in Laos to survey, and he suspected it would be the most difficult: on top of a mountain, no nearby village, literally in the middle of nowhere. Potentially making it even more challenging was that it was not an aircraft loss. It was another “last known alive” case, this one involving four Special Forces soldiers whose remote observation post had been overrun by the Vietcong. The suspected location of their last radio transmission, according to the little information he had, was about five thousand feet up on top of a small ridge just a few dozen yards across with steep inclines on all sides.
It was mid-morning as they approached what they thought was the right ridgeline, the helicopter’s spinning rotor blades casting shadows on the valley floor below. When they got over the top, they saw there was nowhere to land. The ridge was covered with trees, some at least forty feet high, George guessed. Little Andy circled around to get another look, but there was virtually no open, flat ground. George quickly assessed the situation. What if Little Andy could bring the chopper in close enough to the side of the mountain and they hopped off the skids and hiked to the ridge? The perfectionist in him desperately wanted to be able to report back to the detachment commander in Viangchan that he had surveyed every site on the list. It was worth a try, he decided.
The most promising spot appeared to be about two thousand feet from the summit, where the mountainside was thick with beds of tall, swaying elephant grass, ideal for a soft landing if they could jump out, George thought. Little Andy maneuvered the bird at a slightly downward angle and as close as he could without striking the mountain with the rotors. George, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, was tense, sweat pouring down his face. He had watched with awe all week as Little Andy maneuvered the bird in and out of tight spaces. But now George watched warily as the blades spun less than ten feet from the mountain in front of them. Andy was masterfully holding the aircraft steady, but as a helicopter pilot himself George knew they were in an extremely precarious position. A gust of wind could blow them into the mountain. He peered at the landscape below. It was impossible to tell how high the elephant grass was and how far of a jump it would be. Little Andy shouted that he thought he might be able to inch a bit closer, but not much. Just then, George glanced back to see Baldeagle heave one of the chain saws out the side door.
“What the fuck is he doing?” George thought. “I’m going to have to account for that.”
Then, in a flash, Baldeagle jumped out after it. He disappeared with a whoosh into the tall grass below. George looked to see where he landed, but there was no sign of him. He felt a pang of nausea with the dawning realization that he might have just lost him. He recalled what Colonel Hanson had drilled into the recovery team leaders about how nothing JPAC did was worth losing a life. It would be his fault for taking too great a risk.
As George was nearing panic stage, he saw Baldeagle poke his head out of the grass and grin up at them with two thumbs up. They wasted no time. The rest of them threw out their chain saws, machetes, and rucksacks. As Little Andy hovered just feet from the mountainside, one by one they stepped off the helicopter into the swirling air kicked up by the rotors and landed on their feet in the tall grass. They quickly gathered up their gear as George recalculated their position. They soon began hacking away in the hopes of finding a path to higher ground.
It wasn’t long before George realized how badly he’d misjudged what it would take to reach the top, if they could even get there on foot at all. They ran into obstacle after obstacle, slashing away at the thick and thorny brush in search of a way upward. The Lao guide, to the Americans’ surprise, seemed the least encumbered by the imposing terrain, scurrying up the steep mountain. It was a lesson that George would remember later: if the locals say it is an hour hike, it is probably more like four hours for an outsider. The Lao guide’s eyesight was also far better calibrated for the surroundings. He took the lead and pointed out a cobra and then a viper, two poisonous snakes lying in wait along their path. They got turned around several times and had to stop so George could check his GPS and consult an old map folded up in his pocket. At one point, they temporarily lost radio contact with Little Andy, who had flown back down the mountain to the valley floor to wait for them. George kept his wits, but as the hours dragged on, they all became increasingly worried they had made a big mistake. They were in the middle of nowhere and might not be able to get off this mountain in daylight. They also had little confidence they were even in the right place.
In the late afternoon, after hiking for more than five hours, they finally reached the ridge. The sun dipped lower on the western horizon, and nightfall quickly approached. They would still have to hack out a landing zone to get off the mountain, so they moved speedily to inspect the area for any sign that American troops might have met their fate on this nearly forgotten ground. As Baldeagle began making preparations for a landing zone, the rest of them fanned out across the ridge searching for clues. George hunted for any sign they were in the right location and soon stumbled upon an M16 magazine, rusted and weather-beaten.
“We must be on the right path,” he concluded. “I don’t think anybody locally has a twenty-round M16 magazine.”
Soon they found spent rounds littering the ground nearby and, hidden beneath some tall trees, a series of indentations suggestive of shallow graves. George was immediately aware of the significance of what they had found. He imagined what might have happened on this godforsaken patch of earth before he was even born. He could picture four U.S. soldiers fleeing from a larger force of Vietcong, calling for help on the radio as they ran for their lives with virtually nowhere to turn. He wondered who they were, where they came from, and what loved ones they left behind. There was little time for such reflection, though. He snapped photographs of the suspected graves and scrawled detailed notes in his Army-issued green notebook. Their work here was done. They had freshened up another lead for JPAC. George then gazed out at the horizon
to see the thickening and ominous rain clouds of an approaching tropical storm.
Under Baldeagle’s direction, they worked feverishly to cut down trees and hack away the undergrowth so Andy could pick them up—George once again eternally grateful for those weary summers working for the forestry department in Georgia. Large trunks fell in every direction as they carved out an area large enough for the chopper to touch down to scoop them up. They made swift progress but were filled with disquiet that they might be stranded. During one interval, when the whine of George’s chain saw was silenced briefly as he moved from one tree to the next, the mountaintop was pierced by a strange sound that seemed to be coming from behind him. George couldn’t place it at first. He then recognized the high falsetto tremors of a Native American chant, a tremolo created by the technique of rolling the tongue on the roof of the mouth or placing fingers over it to force out the notes. It reminded him of the Indian war whoops in the battle scenes of old Westerns. He turned to see Baldeagle, bent forward with his arms splayed out behind him, dancing and chanting, the high-pitched warbling carrying across the ridge and out over the remote valley. The hair stood up on George’s neck and goose bumps traveled up his arms as he stood there, enraptured by the sight of his noncommissioned officer crying out to his ancestors high above the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Baldeagle chose a song written by a member of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana as a prayer for the salvation of the souls of American soldiers who never returned from battle. Chanting in a mix of English and his native Lakota, Baldeagle invoked the spirits both of his ancestors and of the missing Special Forces troops, in the hopes they would help the team get off the mountain and return safely to their comrades. “Soldier boy, soldier boy,” he cried out, drawing out each refrain in a high-pitched chant. “They’re home now, they’re already home.”