You Are Not Forgotten

by Bryan Bender

  McDermott was finally beginning to see how this case might still get another chance. The fact that McCown and the pilot they originally thought was flying the plane—Lieutenant Landon of New York City—were lost the same day might have started the confusion years ago. He also learned that the bone and the McCown dog tag recovered in 1991 were stored in different places, possibly explaining why more research wasn’t done earlier. Based on what they had learned, it also seemed likely that both dog tags—the one recovered in 1991 and the one found by the Australian helicopter pilot in 2003—came from the same crash site on New Britain Island. Two dog tags would be more than mere coincidence. McDermott was now almost sure Marion Ryan McCown Jr. was lost in that crash and part of his humerus was sitting in the lab. The only way they could be certain would be to go back to the crash site in the hopes of finding more remains.

  George gripped the steering wheel, and his eyes darted at the daunting scenery around him. He was heading south along a rough mixture of asphalt and thick mud, with Sergeant Jackson and their escort from the National Museum in tow, a Mr. Polum. The white Toyota 4×4 steadily climbed into the mountains. The thick rain clouds hanging low in the sky grew closer as the vehicle wound hundreds of feet up into the jungle. George noticed that on both sides of the narrow trail the terrain dropped into the jungle abyss below. He made a mental note to fully brief his team leaders on the safety concerns. The slippery surface had no guardrails, making the journey painstakingly slow and nerve-racking. The route became particularly treacherous as it passed a small village perched on top of a mountain. There was little room to maneuver safely past without driving off the road and plunging into the rain forest below.

  After about half an hour the trail began descending steeply again. To pinpoint their location, George consulted his Global Positioning System, a Garmin 60CS receiving signals from six satellites. The spot they were searching for on the Military Grid Reference System, the geo-coordinate standard used by the United States and its NATO allies, was supposed to be in the village of Vunakaur, in the Gazelle district of East New Britain Province. Like any good Army Ranger, George also studied his map of New Britain, a 1976 edition plotted by the Royal Australian Survey Corps, the most recent that JPAC could find.

  He felt that they were getting close just as he looked up and spotted a group of barefoot children carrying machetes darting in and out of the thick banana trees beside the road. It seemed everyone in this country carried a machete, he thought—even just to go for a short walk through the bush. But George was growing a bit nervous for another reason. They were now in a pretty remote area, and he was concerned about just walking onto someone’s land unannounced. He knew that trespassing could be a severe violation of tribal rights. If he wasn’t careful, he might make enemies of the very locals whose help would be critical to a successful recovery operation.

  Off to his left he made out the outlines of a few structures set back in the forest. George pulled the white Toyota into a small clearing beside the washed-out track and slowly came to a stop. He checked the GPS again. This had to be it. They were just a few hundred feet off from the coordinates of the crash site, last recorded by a JPAC investigation team in 2006: 56M MA 05313 09248.

  The village of Vunakaur could barely even be classified as such. Situated about three hundred feet above sea level in a thicket of pungent banana and papaya trees, it was a collection of about half a dozen thatched-roof huts built on stilts around mud-packed courtyards and surrounded by small, neatly manicured hedges and vegetable gardens and strung with clotheslines. It looked more primitive than impoverished. The village, also referred to as Viveren in some JPAC records, was actually the homestead of the Wartovo clan. At the entrance was a small outdoor Christian shrine fashioned out of old World War II bomb casings etched with Japanese characters. The missionaries had apparently reached here too, George thought.

  Moments after the three men stepped out and walked toward the village, a middle-aged woman in a bright-colored native dress appeared, eyeing them warily. In pidgin English sprinkled with a few phrases in the local dialect, Mr. Polum greeted her and said that his two companions—George and Sergeant Jackson—were members of the same American organization that had visited the village some years earlier to search for a plane that had crashed during the war. They were hoping to speak to Mr. Enis Wartovo, he told her.

  “Poppa me,” the woman responded with a look of recognition. He was her father.

  She led them a short distance into the heart of the village, where chickens roamed between the thatched native dwellings, and fetched the old man while they waited.

  Enis Wartovo soon emerged from one of the huts clutching a walking stick. Scrawny and hunched over, he appeared to be well into his eighties—no one, including himself, knew his exact age. His sparse teeth and lips were covered in the bright red of the betel nut, the locally grown narcotic chewed by man and child alike. He had rough, leathery skin, a tuft of gray hair, and wide expressive eyes. One of his seven sons was now the landowner, they learned, but Enis was still the patriarch of the Wartovo clan, and his permission would be needed for JPAC to dig in their village.

  Wartovo greeted them warmly and told them he remembered when the Americans visited the village in the years before. George instructed Mr. Polum to ask him if he could bring a large team of Americans to the village from April 1 to May 15 to dig around the plane. George assured him they would be compensated for any damage. He also inquired of the man how much local labor might be available to help the recovery team.

  The old man told George that the clan would help them in any way they could and would provide up to several dozen laborers, men and women, to work for them. Wartovo had only one request: that the Americans erect some type of marker to inform future visitors about what happened here during the war. Apparently, over the years a fair share of wreck hunters and World War II aficionados had come looking for war relics, and the attraction of a crumpled American warplane had been a minor source of income for the village as a tourist site of sorts.

  George could see that the patriarch, whose elderly wife, Siel, soon joined them, understood why the Americans kept coming back here—and why George and the others were here now.

  “It is like what we do,” Wartovo said in a low whisper. “We do our best to bring them home and bury them in our cemetery.”

  Wartovo knew firsthand the scale of the losses that the Americans had suffered during the war. As a young man, he had been a forced laborer for the Japanese troops after they invaded the island, helping them scavenge for food to feed the soldiers and sailors who were living in the caves near Rabaul. He recalled one incident where an American plane had crashed and he and his friends removed the dead bodies and buried them. George made a note to ask more about that incident later.

  When the Japanese invaders were finally defeated, Wartovo recounted, he first thought that the Americans who soon arrived on New Britain were Germans, the white people the natives had the most interaction with in the early twentieth century. Many of the Americans then were searching for lost pilots, he said. George knew he must have been referring to the teams from the Graves Registration Service who scoured the region in the immediate aftermath of the fighting.

  Then Wartovo’s daughter took them to the plane. Hacking his way through the thick jungle foliage and vines, George finally came to the edge of a steep slope overlooking a small floodplain and a muddy stream, where stands of giant bamboo lined the water’s edge. Off to his left, nestled near where the locals cultivated banana, cocoa, papaya, pumpkin, and taro plants, lay the tail section and several other large pieces of wreckage, rusted and faded but still the telltale blue of a Corsair. George swiftly made his way to where the large pieces of wreckage lay. He glanced around, trying to imagine what might have happened in the final moments before the Corsair came to rest here. The aircraft probably ripped through the tops of the broad-leafed trees, shearing off the wings, before the cockpit section shot like a comet through the layers of v
ines and dense vegetation and gouged into the hillside in a fireball.

  Three months later, in April 2008, George’s temporary headquarters—in JPAC lingo the “command and control cell”—was room 303 of the Kokopo Beach Resort, a collection of wooden bungalows on the shores of Blanche Bay that were usually rented to traveling merchants and the steadily rising number of adventure tourists who came to dive for sunken ships and aircraft wrecks or scour the rugged peninsula for other war relics. By New Guinea standards, the accommodations were about as good as it gets. The sleeping areas, lined with three simple beds, were clean if spare and even had their own toilets and primitive showers. The electricity was decently reliable, and some rooms even had air-conditioning in the form of battered but workable window units. There was no hot water, but the lodgings were still light-years ahead of what many assigned to JPAC had experienced on other recovery missions, where jungle camps were common.

  On his survey trip in January, George worked out a deal with the middle-aged proprietor, a generous spirit who went simply by Dougie, who for a reasonable price agreed to provision George and his soldiers with staples like eggs and meat in the mornings and chicken and rice and fried potatoes following their long days in the jungle. Dougie assured George that there would also be plenty of South Pacific beer for purchase in the enclosed picnic area at the back of the main lodging building, where he could huddle each evening with his personnel. There was even dial-up Internet for them to check e-mail or surf the Web, though that proved to be almost totally unreliable. One drawback that was no fault of Dougie’s was the coughing fits and constant sinus irritation suffered by virtually everyone on the mission. There was simply no avoiding the film of volcanic ash that settled each day on the ground, on their vehicles, in the eaves, and on virtually every other outdoor surface from the belching volcano standing sentry across the bay.

  George spent most of his days—and often much of the evenings—crisscrossing the peninsula in the Toyota 4×4 to meet with local officials and police, secure additional supplies, and monitor the progress of the two recovery teams that would be heading out each morning to the pair of Corsair crash sites. As the officer in charge, he was also responsible for coordinating the activities of a small JPAC investigation team operating in the highlands of Madang Province on the mainland in search of new leads. For the few precious hours he could relax, George brought along an Xbox video game console and some of his favorite DVDs to watch on his laptop, including the Band of Brothers series and The Big Lebowski.

  On Saturday morning, April 5, already hot and sticky before the sunlight reflected off the Solomon Sea on the eastern horizon, George led a small team from Kokopo to the Wartovo homestead in the village of Vunakaur for a “leaders’ recon” of the first recovery site. When they arrived around 8:00 a.m., they followed Enis Wartovo’s eldest son, Walia, through the foliage on the edge of the village to the crash site, where more than twenty local kids were scattered around eagerly awaiting their arrival.

  George turned to his soldiers and the team anthropologist and signaled for them to get to work. The recovery team leader designated for Bureau Number 02402 was the thirty-year-old Marine Corps captain Bo Bergstrom, a tall and lanky combat veteran from Sheridan, Wyoming, with a wide grin. Bergstrom considered his JPAC tour a once-in-a-career assignment, almost too good to be true, and was eager to begin preparing the area for the excavation.

  But George knew that the man most likely to determine if this cold case would be solved was Dr. Owen Luck O’Leary, the tall and sinewy twenty-nine-year-old anthropologist from Bozeman, Montana, with a shaggy beard, who was the team’s forensic anthropologist.

  Drenched in sweat, with his baseball cap permanently flipped backward, the energetic O’Leary often spoke in the vernacular of one of his other pastimes: surfing. Like when he was describing what it felt like to successfully close an MIA case as being “stoked.” But when he was overseeing an excavation or working in the lab, O’Leary was singularly focused on the task at hand. He was keenly aware that the bits of bone and enamel that he had gingerly held in his gloved hands likely belonged to young men like himself—he often didn’t even know their names—who gave their lives for their country. He saw it as his special duty, often as the sole civilian on the recovery team, to conduct himself in the field with the utmost professionalism. This was his fourth mission in fifteen months, including to Vietnam, Laos, and now PNG.

  George and the advance team got to work recording the details of their surroundings. The remnants of the cockpit and engine and the rusted shell of the tail section rested on the upper portion of the hill, near a large pile of propellers and other aircraft wreckage. All around the area grew cocoa, taro, pumpkin, and papaya plants. Small vines covered the jungle floor, and a thick canopy of banana and mango trees shaded part of the area. Down the slope, on the floodplain leading to the small muddy river, lay part of a wing, probably strewn there by salvagers, they surmised.

  They recorded the key features of the topography, as every detail would have to be considered to ensure the safety of the team. There was a steep drop just a few steps away from the main aircraft wreckage, and the sloping terrain covering much of the area would likely become very slick during what they expected to be almost daily periods of tropical downpours. To reduce the potential hazards and ensure a steady pace of work, they decided the team would have to cut some makeshift stairs into the earth and lay sandbags in key places. O’Leary also noted the presence of “poisonous spiders and centipedes.”

  To the northwest of the wreckage were a series of small terraces cut into the hillside leading to a flat area at least thirty feet across that the Wartovo son told them was a ceremonial space for members of the local Togogomac clan. The team carefully sectioned the area off with engineer’s tape to make sure it wasn’t disturbed. The entire area where they would be digging had clearly been picked over by both man and beast since the Wartovo family first arrived there in the mid-1960s. The mud-packed trail that ran from the small village down to the river cut directly through the middle of the debris field. They were also told, to their dismay, that the tail section and the large portion of one of the wings at the bottom of the hill had been moved over the years. There were other disturbances that might affect their ability to find evidence of the pilot. The logging of large trees in the area had taken place periodically, villagers said, and every few years the river flooded its banks. The good news was that a large tree was growing right through the middle of the engine, a sign that it probably hadn’t been moved in decades, if ever. It was the surest indication that they should begin digging there. O’Leary decided they would fasten the engine to some nearby trees so they could safely excavate beneath it.

  Dr. O’Leary, trowel in hand, knelt down to take soil samples. The earth ranged from dark brown silt-like clay, which was moist and loose, to a yellowish-brown and light olive-brown loam that he described as “structureless.” He also found bits of metal and other “incident-related” materials. After a few shovel tests he concluded the sediment was suitable for dry screening. But due to the frequency of rain in the area, he told the others he was tentatively planning to use the nearby river as a water source for wet screening—the dirt was likely to turn to muck anyway. In order to avoid sediment runoff downstream to the next village, they would have to dig a settling pond to dump all the earth after they screened it for evidence.

  George again played the role of diplomat, ensuring that the Wartovo clan was in agreement with their plans. The local workers would be paid fifteen kina, or about five dollars a day, he confirmed, to be doled out individually in cash once a week. At the conclusion of the excavation he would negotiate compensation for any damage to the village’s crops or trees or other property. He also ordered the team’s medic to set up a temporary medical clinic for the surrounding villages to ensure goodwill.

  On April 6, with the help of some local laborers, George oversaw the off-loading of an Air Force C-130 packed with the final delivery of field
equipment. He now had the shovels, hoes, picks, buckets, ropes, tarps, hoses, chain saws, lumber, bottled water, medical supplies, and various other items large and small that he had anticipated the teams would need, drawn from a warehouse that JPAC rented near the docks in Port Moresby.

  “All teams are now prepared to transition to steady state operations,” he reported to JPAC headquarters.

  That same morning, O’Leary, an explosive-ordnance-disposal specialist, a life-support investigator, a medic, and several others arrived at the Wartovo homestead at 8:00 to begin identifying the size of the debris field around the wreck. Using metal detectors, they almost immediately located what appeared to be .50-caliber rounds of ammunition along with what O’Leary knew immediately was crucial confirmation that the pilot came down with the aircraft: projectiles from a .45-caliber pistol, just what Corsair pilots carried with them into battle.

  More pieces of wreckage, large and small, and other potential evidence from the crash appeared to extend from the upper section down the slope and almost out to the lip of the river—including material lying on the ground as well as some that had apparently settled beneath the surface over the years. Because the wreckage was believed to be that of a fighter plane rather than a bomber, there was no sign of large unexploded bombs, nor did they expect any. The only ordnance they were finding were lots of .50-caliber rounds. There was also evidence of oxidized aluminum, the result of the oxygen eating away at the aircraft metal, which after so many decades appeared as a bluish-white dust. It slowed things down a bit because it caused the metal detectors to go off in areas that didn’t necessarily contain actual wreckage, just remnants of the tainted soil from years of rain and flooding. Within a few hours, however, O’Leary determined the edges of the crash site using a standard of 12 feet without any metal “hits”—a total area about 140 by 125 feet.