You Are Not Forgotten

by Bryan Bender

  On Monday, January 21, 2008, a creaky turboprop touched down in the capital of Papua New Guinea, and George, Rick Huston, and two others from JPAC’s operations directorate emerged into a blast of sticky equatorial heat. Wearing polo shirts emblazoned with the POW/MIA logo, they lugged their backpacks and laptop cases across the tarmac into Jacksons International Airport, the austere two-story terminal serving Port Moresby. After waiting in line to get their visas stamped by an immigration official, they hustled past throngs of passengers—some donning flowery native headdresses and bright multicolored garments, others in western T-shirts and jeans—who were waiting to board flights to outlying provinces, places with names like Wewak, Madang, Lae, and Rabaul. As George and the others headed to meet a waiting van dispatched by the U.S. embassy, he paused in front of a sign with a big red arrow: “Traveling Passengers All Weapons and Ammunition This Way.”

  “Is it any wonder they’ve got problems?” he thought.

  George had been assigned as the chief planning officer for JPAC’s upcoming recoveries in New Guinea. It was a testament to the command’s growing trust in him. They would mark the first excavations since the false rumors spread about American soldiers searching for gold forced JPAC to halt recovery efforts back in 2006. In fact, that last recovery effort in New Guinea was considered a near disaster. The trouble began when some of the local workers JPAC hired demanded more money and the team leader refused, not wanting to set a dangerous precedent. The villagers grew angry and, JPAC concluded, spread the story that U.S. troops had invaded the area to mine for gold. It made it more difficult to work in PNG. The upcoming missions, George knew, would have to be carefully orchestrated. They would require him to rely on all the diplomatic and negotiating skills he could muster—and make up his own rules along the way.

  George had spent much of the previous fall back at headquarters overseeing all the arrangements of what would be an immense undertaking, even by JPAC standards. He reviewed dozens of cases on the main island of New Guinea as well as a series of large and small islands to the north and east that had also been the scenes of fighting during the war. He arranged the cases by province, each designated as either a primary or a secondary site, based on multiple sources of information and JPAC’s assessment of the evidence. He rated their priority levels by the likelihood that remains could be found, and he grouped together cases by location in an effort to maximize the work of multiple recovery teams. For example, if one site was completed early, was another nearby where a recovery team could get to work on another excavation? Cases that would require the least amount of resupply by helicopter also floated to the top. These missions could get very costly very quickly, due to the demand for private helicopters from timber and mining companies. Some cases he simply recommended for further study by future JPAC investigation teams after concluding there wasn’t enough information to justify sending one of their limited number of recovery teams. Ultimately, George identified four crash sites and one location where they had reason to suspect a missing American pilot was buried. But first he had to go to New Guinea to mount a “pre-deployment site survey.”

  In addition to Huston, the survey team that arrived in Port Moresby included Alvin Teel, a civilian who joined JPAC in 1999 after a twenty-six-year career in the Air Force, and a twenty-eight-year-old Army staff sergeant and logistics specialist named Tremaine Jackson. The four of them planned to crisscross the country to lay the groundwork for multiple MIA recovery teams that would deploy from Hawaii for six weeks in April, when New Guinea’s version of a dry season would begin. They would visit the most promising MIA sites, enlist the help of provincial and tribal officials in the area, scope out the available local labor, and make a host of preparations to ensure the recovery teams could be adequately supplied—and secured—in the field. As the senior military officer in the group, George was in charge of its safety.

  It would prove to be a full-time job. Despite its stunning beauty—including fifteen-inch-wide butterflies and countless varieties of orchids—for the uninitiated Papua New Guinea was harsh and unrelenting. The mountainous jungles literally reached into the clouds, some as high as thirteen thousand feet; one nineteenth-century explorer remarked it was easier to climb a Swiss Alp than an ordinary hill in New Guinea. If you stepped just a few feet off the jungle path, you might lose all sense of direction, the rain forest so thick in places one could pass within feet of another person and never know he was there. “Just be sure you take a compass and leave a Hansel and Gretel trail behind you,” one experienced visitor warned, adding with only a bit of exaggeration: “If you don’t, you will die.”

  Other hazards George had only read about in fairy tales or adventure stories, like herbaceous swamps—quicksand—bloodsucking leeches, insects the size of your hand, and wild animals ranging from scorpions, bats, and baboons to anteaters, boars, and crocodiles. The threat from malaria, dengue fever, scrub typhus, and many other tropical diseases, meanwhile, would keep his medic plenty busy when the full JPAC team arrived.

  Then there was the heat, which was nearly unbearable. Temperatures rarely dipped below the mid-nineties in a climate so humid it was one of the few places on earth where water evaporated more quickly on land than over water. The almost daily torrential rains simply turned to steam. One American soldier who had come before him memorably remarked, “If I owned New Guinea and I owned hell, I would live in hell and rent out New Guinea.” Another who was brave enough to navigate through the interior put it in biblical terms, saying at first blush New Guinea appeared to be Eden and then “Eden run amok.”

  Yet even more labyrinthine than the terrain were the seven hundred documented native tribes of Polynesians and Melanesians, each with a distinct language, dialect, and superstitions virtually unchanged from when European explorers first landed in the sixteenth century. Many, their faces painted with lime or donning ornate shell necklaces, flowery headdresses, and colorful garments, were still subsistence farmers on the land of their primitive ancestors.

  Some natives were friendly to outsiders, welcoming them in their bastardized form of English known as pidgin, where “my country” comes out as “kantri-belong-mi” and where the Lord’s Prayer begins, “Papa bilong yumi Istap Antap.”

  Other tribes, however, were deeply suspicious of outsiders. Property was considered sacred and even treading on someone’s land without permission a terrible taboo. Villagers were especially wary of the recent flood of fortune hunters and international conglomerates that had come to stake a claim to the untapped riches deep in the rain forest, from gold and copper to timber and natural gas. Like George, many of them were white men, too. There were still rumors of cannibals if you ventured far enough into the interior. Even the harmless could be jolting, like the sight of the natives chewing betel nuts, the local narcotic that turns the teeth bright red and makes a person’s gums appear as if they are hemorrhaging.

  George knew New Guinea was more unpredictable and potentially dangerous than anywhere the command operated—with the possible exception of North Korea. In the search for missing American aircraft and their crews, it was quite possible for JPAC to inadvertently walk into the middle of a tribal war, as Rick Huston did on a previous mission when one of the villagers where his team was working was murdered, setting off a round of bloody recriminations with a neighboring clan. A few years earlier, a fight over territory between the Ujimap and the Wagia tribes northwest of Port Moresby left hundreds dead. Subsequent clashes in the capital and nearly half a dozen other provinces claimed scores more. Since JPAC’s last mission in 2006, a state of emergency had been declared in one southern province due to the lawlessness. JPAC didn’t want to be caught in the middle of a tribal clash. Though most of the tribes were still wielding primitive weapons such as machetes and bows and arrows, one advisory warned that “the advent of modern weapons … has greatly magnified the impact of this lawlessness.” Huston, who had more experience in PNG than most of the embassy staff, knew firsthand that the only real la
w here was “an eye for an eye.”

  If George and his survey team weren’t careful in their dealings with the natives, especially when it came to land rights, they could spark a conflict themselves. The arrival of so many foreigners to exploit sacred tribal land for mineral riches had only made a bad situation worse. Mysterious deaths were reported of villagers who were panning for gold near Chinese- and Australian-run mines, while other deadly skirmishes had broken out between miners and local villagers. Thousands were being displaced by the violence.

  The central government’s ability to maintain order was almost nonexistent. Officially at least, officials in Port Moresby had authority over the complex maze of ancient tribes on the main island and the neighboring archipelago to the northeast. But their allegiance, as demonstrated by the fractious 109-member parliament, was to tribe or clan, not national unity. The entire PNG Defense Force consisted of little more than three thousand soldiers, while local police were often outgunned by warring tribes. Indeed, a majority of the firearms in circulation were believed to be pilfered from the defense forces and the police, a by-product of rampant government corruption, which was further fueled by the influx of foreign investment. The few laws to protect the environment and the rights of local landowners were seldom enforced, and illegal logging added to the chaotic situation.

  When George arrived, Port Moresby, a city of 250,000 perched on a spit of low-lying hills on the Coral Sea across from Australia, appeared to live up to its dual reputation as both impoverished and uncontrollably violent. On the ride from the airport George’s driver weaved around a seemingly endless trail of potholes while trying to avoid the mess of zigzagging early-model automobiles in the series of traffic circles that made even the bravest among them a little jittery. They passed makeshift “settlements” of shanties with names like Kila Kila and Sabama that had sprouted up on the outskirts of Town, as the center of the city was called. Port Moresby itself was mostly a hodgepodge of rickety markets and cheap wooden and cement-poured dwellings, dotted with a handful of modern buildings that ringed the port.

  The gritty capital was commonly listed among the top five murder capitals in the world. Crime was so rampant that Australia, which relinquished control of its former colony in 1975, had recently returned to police its streets. Bandits—known as raskols in pidgin English—roamed freely in search of prey. Sightseeing advice for visitors was simple and direct: “After dark, don’t walk anywhere.” The Wall Street Journal rated Papua New Guinea one of the world’s least livable places. Indeed, just as George arrived, local newspapers were reporting a spike in murders linked to black magic. As many as half of all murders were blamed on sorcery.

  When George and his companions reached the corner of Douglas and Hunter Streets, the driver pulled the van through a towering security gate into the Crowne Plaza, the city’s only decent hotel. After settling into their rooms and sharing a meal in the hotel restaurant, the foursome reviewed their schedule for the next ten days, went over some of their planning files, and sipped a few South Pacific beers in the lounge on the top floor of the hotel, with its view of the harbor and wharves.

  PNG had an otherworldly feel about it, George thought, almost like the bar scene in Star Wars. The hotel guests were an eclectic collection of Chinese, South African, and other international businessmen and prospectors, mixed with some backpackers from Australia who had come to fulfill a rite of passage Down Under: hiking the Kokoda Track. The trail began north of Port Moresby and wound over the spine of the Owen Stanley Mountains to the northern side of the island—a landscape in which countless Australian and American soldiers were lost amid miserable conditions in 1942. There were also a few more mysterious characters hanging around the Crowne Plaza—rugged-looking men with mostly Australian and New Zealand accents, and a hodgepodge of mercenary types who kept mostly to themselves. Or perhaps they were the wreck hunters come to recover World War II airplanes for wealthy benefactors.

  Early the following morning, George and his compatriots were shuttled a few blocks west on Douglas Street toward the harbor, passing low-slung shops and market stalls that appeared to be filled with as many beggars as shoppers. Where the street came to a T, across from a hillside bungalow that once served as General Douglas MacArthur’s wartime headquarters, they pulled up to a barricaded structure of concrete blocks and iron bars. This was the American embassy, serving Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

  They were quickly ushered through security and into an upstairs conference room decorated with native art and intricately carved masks representative of some of New Guinea’s myriad tribes. For the next few hours they huddled with Leslie Rowe, the American ambassador to Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, and her staff. After hashing out the team’s plans, the embassy personnel relayed a few warnings. The provincial governor of Morobe and Madang Provinces, which included the town of Lae on the island’s eastern coast, remained deeply suspicious about JPAC’s intentions and was being decidedly unsupportive. They might want to reconsider going there. Another potential complication was recent volcanic activity close to several MIA sites on New Britain Island. Thick plumes of volcanic ash were disrupting air travel.

  George and his team requested that the embassy staff contact the local officials near Lae to inform them that they were planning to survey the area. They also requested that the embassy contact officials on New Britain Island to let them know they were going to try to get there later in the week. George was quickly learning that there was no such thing as too much advance work in PNG. A seeming lack of coordination with the embassy and the disorganized structure of local governing authorities already posed “significant operational challenges,” he recorded in his notebook. It appeared that he was now planning to operate in at least two regions of the country where local officials had no idea that they were coming.

  Their next meeting was with a major in the PNG Defense Force and a technical adviser from the National Museum, which had jurisdiction over war relics and materials and would be advising them in the field. George requested that the country’s armed forces and Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary be enlisted to provide security for the unarmed JPAC recovery teams scheduled to arrive later in the year.

  Their final meeting of the day was with the governor of East Sepik Province, located in the north of the island, and a member of parliament representing its provincial capital of Wewak, where the four of them planned to begin their survey operations. They were relieved to hear the officials pledge their full support for JPAC’s efforts and offer to assist in any way possible.

  That left one additional task before embarking on their survey trip: lining up helicopter transport. The next morning, George and Huston found themselves in a dusty office near the airport haggling with an Australian pilot from Pacific Helicopters, an outfit that operated out of Port Moresby and Lae on the eastern coast. It didn’t go well. They couldn’t agree on a reasonable price or secure sufficient guarantees that the company’s services would be available in an emergency. The company’s fleet was in high demand from mining and timber companies, as well as a fair amount of adventure seekers. The meeting was swiftly growing confrontational when in an instant the pilot’s gruff demeanor melted away. He noticed the ring on Rick Huston’s finger bearing the symbol of a square and a set of compasses—the universal symbol of Freemasonry.

  “Are you a traveling man?” the pilot inquired of George’s boss.

  It was a traditional way of determining whether a stranger was a fellow Mason.

  Huston nodded that he was. In a flash this common bond washed away the distrust.

  Suddenly it was as if they were old friends, and a deal was struck.

  Freemasonry was yet another enigmatic piece of his heritage that George thought he might like to learn more about. He knew that some of his soldier forebears had helped to found Masonic lodges in Pennsylvania and Maryland. On several occasions in recent years he removed from its scabbard the saber of a 32nd-degree Freemason he
had inherited, running his fingers over the polished metal trying to imagine the men who had owned it and its purpose.

  George made a mental note to get his boss and friend, Rick Huston, to tell him more about Freemasonry.

  George studied the tattered map of New Guinea, with the place-names written in German, hanging above the bar. He was sitting in the Kaiser Wilhelm, a run-down watering hole in the provincial capital of Wewak festooned with swords, pistols, and other memorabilia from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the northeastern part of New Guinea had been a German protectorate. He had come to the area once known as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, in honor of the German monarch. He was struck by how the competition for New Guinea’s spoils was intertwined with New Guinea’s modern history.

  Different parts of the island were discovered by various explorers between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The Portuguese explored the region in 1512, naming it Ilhas dos Papuas, meaning “Land of the Frizzy-Haired People.” Soon there followed Spaniards, Englishmen, Dutchmen, and Germans, each European empire annexing different parts of the territory to extract coconuts, rubber, coffee, and—with only modest success—gold and copper. It was the Spanish explorer Yñigo Ortiz de Retez who, in 1545, called the island Nuevo Guinea, possibly due to the resemblance of its inhabitants to those in Guinea in West Africa. But not until the 1870s was the coast of the island accurately charted. Even now, much of the interior remained unexplored by outsiders.

  The town of Wewak was a small commercial center on the shores of the Bismarck Sea, at the foot of the Prince Alexander Mountains. One person JPAC recently consulted about it bluntly advised that accommodations were “generally disgusting and the town continues to fall apart.” But the area was high on George’s list. It had been the scene of fierce fighting in World War II, beginning in 1942, when the Japanese established an air and naval base. Driving through the town earlier in the day in a rented pickup, George saw the remnants of the bunkers and tunnels that the Japanese had constructed to withstand American and Australian bombing attacks. But it was what took place on the small barrier island of Kairiru, which after some difficulty he finally located on the old German map, that brought him here—and the enduring mystery of what happened to a twenty-one-year-old Army Air Corps pilot from Rhode Island with a slender face, kindly eyes, and a toothy grin.