You Are Not Forgotten

by Bryan Bender

  The official reminders of what they had lost painfully continued. A month after Ryan was declared dead came a telegram informing Grace that she would soon be receiving his Purple Heart, as well as two medals for his service in the war and in the Pacific theater. Subsequent letters apologized that the medals were not ready to be issued as planned. Each time another envelope arrived from the War Department, Grace’s hands trembled as she opened it in nervous anticipation of what she might learn about her son’s fate—about how or where he died. Some were condolence letters from the top brass.

  In May 1947, she received a notice that Ryan was being posthumously promoted to major, with the commission certificate attached “as a token of the meritorious service of one of our most gallant and faithful Marines.” Another set of service medals and ribbons didn’t come until the summer of 1948, another not until the spring of 1949, more than five years after he was reported missing.

  By May 1949, distraught and growing more ill, Grace had had enough. The Marine Corps informed her it would like to send an officer to her home to finally present to her, in person, the medal for Ryan’s heroic actions on January 15, 1944, when he was shot down over Buka Passage—the medal she was told back in 1944 that the Marine Corps was holding on to in case it could bestow it on him in person.

  The Marine barracks at the Charleston Naval Base, which had been given the task to deliver the medal, reported to Washington that “presentation of this award was difficult due to the reluctance of the recipient to receive the award.” The thought of a military officer in uniform bounding up the steps to her front door on Ashley Avenue was apparently too much to bear. Grace’s brother Lucas served as her intermediary, and the medal was sent by registered mail to his home down on Trumbo Street, where Ryan had so many happy memories from his childhood.

  Part of Grace was now lost, too. Uranie’s goddaughter, young Meri Roberts, who lived down the street, kept asking why Grace always sat silently on her front porch. Her mother’s explanation was always the same. “Mrs. McCown’s son was reported missing during the war, but she never accepted the fact that he had died. She believed that if she waited and watched, he’d eventually come home.”

  Grace’s grandson, Claudia’s little boy, John Almeida, had few memories of his grandmother Gracie—only that she treated him to Reese’s peanut butter cups and that the few times he stayed with her, she awoke startled in the middle of the night. As illogical as she knew it was, Grace couldn’t help but think it might be her “inquisitive little blue-eyed boy.” But of course Ryan never came.

  In 1950 the Marine Corps finally returned Ryan’s tattered aviator’s flight log. The small brown canvas and cardboard cover revealed, in his neat script, every one of his flights, beginning as a cadet. The only exception was the last entry, for January 20, 1944, which was filled in by a fellow pilot back at the Torokina base in the Solomons—“missing in action, Rabaul area.”

  More tragedy befell Grace in December 1952, when she received word from Texas that Uranie, who had married a police officer and was known as “the beloved little doctor of the hill’s country,” was killed in a shooting ruled accidental, though some in the family suspected something more sinister. By the following year, Grace was gone, too. Whether it was from heart disease or heartache, no one could really say. Probably both. She was sixty years old.

  Claudia buried her mother in the cemetery of her beloved Unitarian Church on Archdale Street. The inscription etched on Grace’s tombstone was a mother’s final testament to her lost children, from the poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “And if God choose I shall but love thee better after death.”

  PART FOUR

  Should you get blown off course, look for the stars, take a reading, and get back on course.

  Brigadier General George S. Eyster, 1945

  CHAPTER NINE

  REDISCOVERY

  By the summer of 2007, George had been leading recovery teams in Southeast Asia for nearly a year and a half. He was now considered one of the more experienced officers at JPAC. He was also slated for promotion from captain to major, and it was time for him to take on more responsibility. Like others before him, he anticipated being transferred from Detachment 4 down to JPAC headquarters to work in the operations directorate planning new missions to Southeast Asia. Instead, George was unexpectedly tapped for another job.

  While the search for the missing had been fueled by the Vietnam War, only a fraction of the eighty thousand MIAs recorded by the U.S. military fell on the battlefields of Southeast Asia. More than eight thousand were listed as missing in action from the Korean War, between 1950 and 1953, while the vast majority had been lost in World War II, the first truly global conflict waged on land, on sea, and in the air on virtually every continent—all told, more than seventy-four thousand. At the end of the war in 1945, Graves Registration teams traveled to far-flung battlefields in Europe and Asia to try to recover remains and locate crash sites. They also gathered clues about the possible whereabouts of men who might have been captured alive and held in prisoner-of-war camps. Nearly half of the World War II missing disappeared at sea in the great naval battles of the war, making their recovery next to impossible, yet tens of thousands were buried where they fell. But the U.S. military’s ability to account for them was bound by the limits of technology, the vast distances in between, and notoriously incomplete or inaccurate records and battle reports about their last reported positions.

  By the time George arrived at JPAC, however, that was no longer the case for thousands of them. Even a lifetime later, the search for the missing from World War II was becoming more practical with advances in forensic science, field excavation methods, and communications. It was an especially exciting time at JPAC as opportunities to recover MIAs were opening on battlefields that had seemingly been closed off forever.

  Working out of a cubicle in one of the trailers across the parking lot from Building 45, George was now a “worldwide planner,” which meant he was responsible for planning recovery missions all across the globe, from India to Indonesia. His new boss was a burly former Army sergeant with a sizable paunch and thinning, close-cropped gray hair. At first glance Rick Huston looked like a typical bureaucrat perched behind his desk in a corner office in one of the JPAC trailers. But the native Montanan and Vietnam veteran was a legend in the MIA community. Now approaching sixty, he personally carried hundreds of dead comrades off the battlefield in the Vietnam War before joining the Central Identification Laboratory when it was established in Hawaii in 1976. Huston had spent more than thirty years trekking through Southeast Asia, up and down the Korean Peninsula, across the plains of Europe, and hopping between the islands of the South Pacific searching for more missing comrades. No one would have begrudged him if long ago he had taken his Army pension to carve out a more relaxed existence. But he considered the work a sacred calling.

  “These men went to war for our country; they gave up their life for our country. We owe it to them to bring them back to American soil,” he explained when asked why he stayed at it so long. “This mission gets in your blood.”

  For Huston, as for so many others at JPAC, the search was about more than keeping a pledge to lost comrades and their families. It was also about sending a message to the young men and women currently risking their lives on behalf of the nation in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a host of other places where the U.S. military had been sent by the American people.

  “It tells these guys that if we’re gonna send you in harm’s way, and should something happen, we’re gonna come get you,” Huston said. “We’re not gonna leave you.”

  By the time George reported to Huston in the summer of 2007, the decades he had spent in wearying conditions in remote corners of the globe were beginning to show on his pockmarked face. But behind his wire-rimmed glasses the twinkle in his eyes for their mission still glowed as brightly as it had when he first earned his reputation as a fiercely committed young soldier who could swill more beer than anyone. One place on JPAC’
s list made him especially animated: Papua New Guinea, or, as it was referred to around headquarters, PNG.

  Little appreciated outside JPAC and often overlooked in the histories of the war in the Pacific was a figure that nearly obsessed Huston: twenty-two hundred. That was how many Americans were missing in the forbidding jungles and treacherous mountains of New Guinea or had disappeared over the remote islands in the neighboring Solomon and Bismarck Seas. Indeed, there were more Americans missing in New Guinea than almost anywhere else.

  The initial focus of the MIA command in the 1970s was almost exclusively Southeast Asia. But when the Communist governments were stonewalling American efforts to account for the missing from the Vietnam War, the command began looking elsewhere. Beginning in the late 1970s, then-Sergeant Huston participated in a handful of recoveries on New Guinea, where there were stories of cannibals and even American and Japanese survivors still alive in the jungles. With Southeast Asia temporarily closed off, New Guinea in some ways saved the MIA effort, which at the time consisted of only a dozen or so permanent personnel. What they discovered on the mysterious island back then was staggering. Many of the crash sites remained completely undisturbed. In New Guinea’s superstitious culture, the heaps of bones and metal with American or Japanese markings were treated as shrines to be worshipped or, alternatively, as bad luck and to be avoided altogether. At the time the country was still largely unexplored and still so primitive that the first wheel some inhabitants ever saw was the landing gear of a fiery warplane crashing near their village.

  After those early missions to New Guinea, attention soon returned almost exclusively to the search for MIAs in Southeast Asia. The men lost in New Guinea were once again mostly forgotten. Not until two decades later did the equation change. In the 1990s the mad rush began to tap New Guinea’s natural resources. The rate of environmental destruction was staggering; logging in Papua New Guinea was estimated to be three times faster than the forests’ ability to yield new growth. Therein lay a stark irony. The steady destruction of the rain forest meant that new information on missing aircraft was flooding in as never before. But the pace of development also meant that the crash sites were at greater risk of being disturbed. Tampering with them could foreclose on JPAC’s one final chance to find the remains of the men who were lost. Mining or timber crews could damage or destroy evidence, making it far more difficult, if not impossible, to conduct a forensic investigation. If the sites remained undisturbed, the chances were far higher that JPAC could find signs near the wreckage that the crew had come down with the plane instead of bailed out—such as a parachute strap, a boot, a belt buckle, or a dog tag. If the aircraft was moved down a hillside or dragged to a dump in a nearby village, JPAC teams would have to rely on often conflicting memories of locals to surmise where to dig.

  On top of the daunting forces of nature and fellow man that stood in JPAC’s way was another group of searchers: the so-called wreck hunters, the well-financed bushwhackers hired by vintage World War II aircraft collectors to locate rare planes and parts. Some of the missing planes, if they could be restored, fetched millions on the open market. JPAC soon learned that those hunting for “warbirds” in New Guinea had little interest in finding out who had been flying the planes. On nearly every visit to New Guinea, JPAC was finding at least one crash site that had been disturbed this way. Some planes, with their original tail numbers, were showing up in the United States registered to aircraft brokers or wealthy collectors like the P-38 Lightning crash-landed on January 18, 1944, by Lieutenant John R. Weldon, who was still listed as MIA. JPAC had recently all but written off the case of another Army Air Corps pilot, Lieutenant Marion Lutes, whose P-47 Thunderbolt disappeared over New Guinea on April 29, 1944. In April 2003, the command learned, the mostly intact wreckage was hoisted off a mountainside and now sat in an aircraft hangar in Australia.

  For men like Huston the pull of the remote island in a far corner of the world was irresistible. The flurry of new aircraft sightings and field investigations were reviving MIA cases that had been dormant for decades. But the command was facing a herculean task to tackle them before the evidence was lost forever.

  “If we don’t get off our keister,” he often exclaimed, “we are going to lose our chance.”

  To illustrate what was at stake, Huston would often recount what happened on “Black Sunday,” April 16, 1944. More than three hundred Allied planes returning from a bombing mission against Japanese bases on the western part of New Guinea ran into a fierce tropical storm over the Finisterre Range in the Owen Stanley Mountains. Large swaths of the area had never been charted, and many maps that did exist contained inaccurate elevations or simply designated large stretches of the geography with the words “No Data Available,” as one survey map depicted at the time. Thirty-seven planes never returned from the bombing mission, making it the largest noncombat loss in the history of the U.S. Air Force.

  “They are all in the Owen Stanleys near Lae!” Huston would insist to anyone willing to listen. If JPAC simply canvassed all the villages in the area, he was convinced, they would find some of the crash sites—maybe even all of them. “Every site is known by at least one village!”

  By the time George came to work for Huston, JPAC was tracking more than three hundred crash sites in New Guinea for nearly one thousand missing Americans—almost half of all the missing in and around the island. Already, nearly half of all the World War II missing recovered since 1976, when the lab was first set up, had been found on New Guinea.

  But for JPAC planners, a harsh reality remained. New Guinea was still one of the most difficult and dangerous places to operate—and not simply because it was so remote and its climate and terrain so inhospitable. When George arrived to work for Huston, JPAC operations had been suspended on the island for nearly a year because a local radio station in one of the provinces falsely reported that American soldiers had arrived not for missing airmen but for the island’s gold. In a country with so little infrastructure or modern communication, it was breathtaking how far and wide the rumor spread, greatly undermining the command’s ability to guarantee the safety of recovery teams. JPAC had been working closely with the American embassy to try to undo the damage and convince provincial and tribal leaders that the only treasure they were seeking was their fallen comrades. As George reported for his new assignment, the command was eager to return.

  Huston quickly identified George as an officer who had taken the MIA mission to heart and could be given greater independence than most officers. From his cubicle a few steps away from Huston’s office, George dived into the work.

  The role of the operations directorate was to make the best use of JPAC’s limited resources in the field. With input from the lab staff and the historians, mission planners ranked MIA cases in order of the most likely to be solved with a full excavation at a suspected burial site or crash scene. These were cases where material evidence, such as dog tags, personal gear, or actual human remains, had already been found by JPAC investigators or discovered by locals. When George began his new assignment, the operations directorate was planning missions in countries as diverse as Germany and India.

  Within days he was managing plans to mount the search for soldiers missing in Germany from World War II. He was responsible for virtually every aspect of the planning process, including coordinating with the host government, assessing the research and recommendations of other JPAC sections, and identifying the private contractors whose help in the field would be crucial. George also soon learned this would be more than a desk job. He would have to lead an advance team to Germany and, when the recovery teams arrived, run the command and control cell overseeing the entire effort.

  By the late summer of 2007, George was humping through the Hürtgen Forest near the German-Belgian border. He had come to the scene of the longest battle in the history of the U.S. Army, where JPAC was hoping to locate some of the estimated 150 American GIs who were never recovered from the fierce fighting in the fall and wi
nter of 1944–45. George’s guide was a retired German Army sergeant major and amateur historian named Bernd Henkelmann, who in the 1980s had served as the German Army’s liaison at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Henkelmann operated a small museum in the town of Vossenack, near where the battle took place. The fifty-seven-year-old Henkelmann knew where local farmers, backpackers, and war enthusiasts had come across artifacts from the battle, and in some cases human remains. He soon had his American friend spellbound as they retraced some of the battle lines of the five-month struggle that took place in an area of just fifty square miles. With copies of some of the original field reports in hand, thanks to JPAC’s history section, once again George was energized by the deep sense of purpose he felt and the fresh connection he was making to his own lineage. It was during the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, which proved to be the last gasp of the German Army in World War II, that his great-grandfather George S. Eyster Jr. was serving as the chief of the operations branch in General Dwight Eisenhower’s European headquarters.

  Also while he was in Germany, George struck up a friendship with Sandra Patricia. He was introduced over e-mail to the soft-spoken and doe-eyed Colombian girl, who was living and working in her native Bogotá. George had mentioned to a mutual friend from Florida State that he had wanted to improve his Spanish. It turned out that Sandra Pa, as her friends and family called her, was eager to improve her English. They were both single, and before long the two of them—the shy and intellectual U.S. Army officer and the petite and demure South American professional—hit it off and were sharing photographs of each other. After a few weeks, George mentioned that when he got back to Hawaii, he wanted to take a fishing trip to South America. Sandra Pa was planning to visit a friend in Panama. They decided to meet in person.