You Are Not Forgotten

by Bryan Bender

  The rest of the team designated for the recovery site arrived at 10:15 a.m. after collecting their gear from a warehouse in Kokopo where George had arranged for it to be stored—just in time for a nearly three-hour downpour that turned the entire area into a mud bog.

  When the weather finally cleared, leaving in its wake a thick, steamy mist and ankle-deep mud, the team began clearing the debris field of all low-lying vegetation, leaving the banana and taro trees standing. They also cleared an area along the riverbank to construct the screening station and set out to fashion a set of stairs with sandbags running down from the village to help ensure operations wouldn’t grind to a complete halt each time the heavens opened up, and to prevent injuries. They also dug a hole for a latrine that they shielded with tarps, including a long piece of bamboo sticking out of the ground where the men could urinate. They cut logs and strung together some bamboo for a covered break area with stout and thick logs placed upright as stools, as well as a makeshift rack to hang their backpacks. For the next several days, relying on the help of between twenty and twenty-five local workers, the team battled the moisture and the muck to complete the site preparations. On April 7, they had to quit at noon because “the rain had made the site very unsafe and the scientific integrity was compromised,” O’Leary recorded in pencil in his field notebook. The team’s engineer decided to dig artificial gullies to help deal with the runoff. Captain Bergstrom, the recovery team leader, also got the go-ahead from George to begin arriving an hour earlier each morning to get a head start before the daily downpours.

  Finally, by the end of the fourth day, everything was mostly in place. Using ropes fastened to stakes in the ground, they sectioned off the debris field into forty-seven grids, each roughly twelve feet square. The area was treated like a crime scene, where every person’s movements were closely tracked and recorded. With the help of some team members standing at the four corners of each grid holding a prism, O’Leary used laser survey equipment to create a digital map of the recovery scene.

  They also completed the screening station, which was fed from the river by seventy-five feet of garden hose leading to smaller black rubber hoses dangling over the sifting screens. A tarp-lined trough running beneath the screens would carry the brackish water to a nearby drainage pit. A zip line running down the slope from the main wreckage was erected to efficiently deliver buckets of earth to the screening stations. The team also practiced its evacuation drill by simulating carrying a wounded person on a stretcher up the steep slope to the village to be transported off the island in an emergency.

  O’Leary was happy to report that they would open the first grid on April 9—and from there “follow the evidence.”

  “A wreck a day” was how George came to describe New Guinea, where it seemed nearly every outing by JPAC personnel turned up a new potential lead. He barely had to step out of his bungalow in Kokopo for the leads to find him.

  One night a local man named David Atomo showed up at the lodge with what he said were the remains of an American pilot and a basketful of rusted and mangled aircraft parts that came from an American plane that crashed during the war in the village of Makurapau. George and some of the others more familiar with World War II aircraft inspected the gear. One piece looked like the remnants of an electrical motor, stamped with “Dynamotor DM-28C - Signal Corps US Army - RCA Manufacturing Co. Inc. Camden, N.J.” Another, which resembled an aircraft magneto like those used during the war, was stamped with “American Bosch Corp. Springfield, Mass.” It also had the date of manufacture and a serial number. The potential human remains were placed in an evidence bag and carefully labeled.

  They weren’t sure what to make of all this. Mr. Atomo, dressed in western attire of pants and a T-shirt and apparently in his thirties, could simply be seeking to make a buck from the endless scraps of metal and chunks of lead—American, Japanese, and Australian—that littered the island but were not necessarily tied to an MIA case. Or his information could be a new piece of the puzzle. George peppered him with questions. Atomo stated he knew of eight crash sites in the Kokopo and Rabaul area. George jotted down some notes and logged on to his laptop. He pulled up a list of known crash sites in the area to try to cross-reference the information with previously investigated ones. No matches were apparent. George pointed to the basket of aircraft parts and asked if the man knew how many engines the plane had. Two, he was told. A quick search of his database confirmed that at least twenty two-engine planes had been reported missing in the general area during the war. George decided he would try to visit all the sites in the coming days with Atomo as his guide.

  Another site reported by a local, near the village of Karu, was especially intriguing. It was said to involve a plane that crashed about 160 feet offshore in a lagoon sixty feet deep. The aircraft could supposedly be seen below the surface at low tide. The locals said they were told that most of the crew were killed in the incident and buried beneath some coconut trees just off the beach. One survived, or so the story went. But when George arrived in the village, he heard conflicting tales of the circumstances. One person said that one of the pilots swam to shore and was captured by the Japanese; another that the pilot never got out of the aircraft. All the information “was oral history passed down from parents, relatives, or community members,” George wrote in his daily report on April 18. “Locals stated that they thought there was no one left alive in the area that would have firsthand knowledge of the event.”

  He received more promising news from the investigation team working on the New Guinea mainland. They requested that he contact the history office at JPAC headquarters and ask them to search the records for a .50-caliber machine gun with the serial number 10873805, which had been turned over by a village chief. Locals said the story passed down from elders was that it came from a burning aircraft that circled twice during the war before crashing into a tree. No parachutes had been seen, they said. The investigation team also found a section of a fuselage, believed to be that of an Army Air Corps P-47 Thunderbolt, that possibly had the last two ID numbers of either 05 or 09. They also found two wrecks that appeared to be Army P-38s. One had an engine block printed with the number 42903, along with “SER3853” and a “sideways eight stamp.” The other appeared to contain the tail number 2667×9—the x for where a hole in the tail section had blown away the second-to-last digit.

  Just after 8:00 a.m. on April 9, under sunny skies, Dr. O’Leary gave the go-ahead to open up the first grid, designated 516N 504E, adjacent to the engine with the tree growing through it. The team began swiftly but methodically digging up the earth, shoveling it into plastic buckets and then sending them down the zip line, where they were carefully set aside to be screened by pairs of American and local workers. Thirty-five local workers were on hand to complement the team of a dozen Americans, which made sure each bucket was hosed out above the screens to ensure as little soil was missed as possible before it was passed by a bucket line back up the slope to the main crash site.

  O’Leary’s instructions for the screeners were simple and direct: “Anything in the screen that is not naturally of the forest will be pulled out—metal, plastic, glass, bone, teeth—including a candy wrapper from yesterday or a cigarette butt.”

  The process was repeated like a well-oiled production line. Before long, the entire area was a hive of activity. Buckets, filled little more than halfway to avoid spillage, whooshed down the rope line. They were off-loaded and carefully passed to the screeners and dumped onto the screens. The soil, drenched by the black rubber hoses dangling above each wood-framed screen, was broken up by hand before being pushed through the wire mesh. All the American screeners wore thick canvas gloves to avoid coming into contact with the soil, which was high in tetanus. O’Leary kept track of where exactly the dirt was being pulled from in the grid—in scientific parlance its “provenience”—down to the depth where the soil was removed.

  Senior team members monitored each step of the process, periodically giving orders
to the more junior ones, to ensure the integrity of the excavation. Due to the sweltering heat, breaks were ordered every hour to drink water and replenish bug repellent and sunscreen. Smoking and chewing of betel nut were prohibited in the work areas.

  It didn’t take long. After a few hours of digging and sifting, O’Leary was called down to the screening station. He was handed a small fragment that came from the first grid less than twenty centimeters below the surface. He held it between his thumb and his forefinger and tentatively concluded it was “osseous material”—a tiny shard of bone that appeared to have been burned. After digging deeper in the grid, they found what looked like buckle fasteners and fragments from a pistol grip. They also found bits of glass and what looked like a section of piano wire—perhaps from a gearbox, someone proposed. Then they pulled from the screens a parachute locking cone and grommet, a hook that could have been used to latch a small pack, several buckles of different sizes, and a rusted and bent steel key they knew was designed to open a can of rations.

  To whom the remains belonged, of course, remained a mystery. Natives had been living in the area for thousands of years. It was also a big question mark whether the identity of the remains could even be learned; like the other fragments, they appeared to have been badly burned. But O’Leary—and the rest of the team—were “stoked.” So was George.

  “RT 1 currently making steady progress,” he reported to headquarters during the second week of the mission, referring to Recovery Team 1. “While only a small percentage of area has been excavated they have been very successful. Believe they are operating at a high tempo and will begin to make a large impact on their overall area in the next few days.”

  Things were not progressing as well at the second excavation George had organized—where they hoped to find the remains of another Marine Corsair pilot who was lost a few weeks later in 1944.

  Like all of the MIAs, it was another heartbreaking case. Lieutenant Allan S. Harrison, from Houston, Texas, was an only child, whose distraught parents, Cora and Allan, desperately waited for answers that never came. A month after he was lost, they wrote to the Marine Corps that “this boy … is all we have in the world—we’ve lived the best part of our lives for him.”

  George made multiple trips—several hours up and back—to check on the progress and huddle with the team leaders. The site was located in Kadaulung Settlement to the northwest on the territory of a well-off landowner who was very friendly and cooperative. The journey required driving on a mixture of washed-out roads, over a rickety plank bridge, and down several primitive jungle tracks barely wide enough for the Toyota to pass. Along one of them George had previously overseen the laying of logs and sandbags to make it passable. The excursion finally ended after hiking through a thicket of banana trees and cocoa plants where some of the native women regularly emerged to hand him large and prickly melons to show their hospitality. “Thank you, Momma,” George would reply in the best pidgin twang he could muster.

  The team searching for signs of Harrison had to slash, cut, and clear a large swath of a thickly forested valley where comparatively few pieces of wreckage were strewn over a great distance—requiring a tremendous amount of backbreaking work even before any excavation could begin. It was clear that the site had been heavily scavenged for metal; very little of the wreckage previously documented by JPAC investigators could be located. An earlier JPAC excavation of the site had not included an anthropologist, so there were questions about the scientific validity of the information in the files. Nearby villagers reported that the pilot’s skull might have been buried some years after the crash at the far end of the site, but numerous tree roots in that area slowed the work. The nearest water source was more than sixteen hundred feet away, so the less preferable dry screening was the only option. To make matters worse, the rains turned the area into a “big mud pie,” making it decidedly unsafe and difficult to maintain the scientific integrity.

  Another reminder that the safety of George’s men and women remained job one came when one of the second team’s rented vehicles slid off a muddy track into an embankment after the driver tried to negotiate a series of small gullies awash with rainwater. One side of the van was smashed in, but luckily no one was injured. The accident, George reported to his superiors, was “due to difficult conditions and not negligence.”

  The security of the team’s equipment was also a concern at the second recovery site. One night the armed guards George had hired caught five men trying to sneak into the area, hog-tied them, and turned them over to the local police. As if he needed another reminder of the Wild West nature of New Guinea, the district police official informed him without any hint of emotion that the security guards had permission to shoot potential poachers on sight. George made it clear that he did not support such extreme measures.

  The second recovery was going more slowly—and with far less success. Even when the team began excavating, they found nothing. Grid by grid they dug and sifted, but there was no sign of remains or other evidence of Lieutenant Harrison.

  When George negotiated the terms with the Wartovos, the family patriarch, Enis, deferred the details to the eldest of his seven sons, Walia. But Walia did not live on the land. His younger brothers did. That soon spelled trouble.

  At 3:00 p.m. on Friday, April 11, the steady hum of the work came to an abrupt halt with a series of shouts. One of the locals standing near the bottom of the zip line began throwing bucketfuls of dirt, hitting another in the face. Half a dozen buckets were dumped on the ground before the man stormed up the hill toward the village.

  The troublemaker was one of the younger Wartovo brothers who lived on the land. He apparently had not been consulted by his older siblings and was upset about the damage being caused by the excavation. Another brother confronted the team leaders and accused them of ignoring two requests by a third brother to stop digging.

  Captain Bergstrom, the recovery team leader, decided to stop all work for the day to let the brothers talk it over. The last thing the Americans needed was to spark a family feud that could end the mission just as it was getting rolling—and possibly cause bad blood that would prevent JPAC from returning in the future. George would come to the site the following morning to talk to them, the brothers were told.

  All the spilled dirt was collected and screened before they packed up and headed back to Kokopo.

  George arrived at the Wartovo homestead before 8:00 a.m. on Saturday, April 12, to try to salvage relations. He brought with him a wad of cash he withdrew from the JPAC account he’d set up at the Westpac bank in Kokopo; for security he enlisted two local policemen to go with him to make the withdrawal. He was calculating that the weekly wages might help break the impasse. The representative from the PNG National Museum in Port Moresby, who had accompanied George on his first trip to New Guinea, acted as translator. The brothers, once they learned George would pay the workers their first weekly wages, told him the excavation could continue. George was relieved. It appeared the delay in recovery efforts would be brief. But after the local workers were paid—a process that took more than an hour as the kina were doled out to each individual on a daily roster kept by the team sergeant—there was more trouble. Another Wartovo brother arrived on the scene and demanded more compensation on the spot for the damage to the land—something George had previously agreed they would work out after the team closed the site the following month.

  George had to make a quick decision. If he changed the original terms he had agreed to with the eldest son, Walia, there was no telling where the demands would end. His funds were limited, and he had to do everything in his power not to set a bad precedent that could imperil future recoveries in Papua New Guinea. The island may have been primitive, but he knew from Rick Huston that word—not to mention rumors—spread far and fast through the countryside.

  “No,” he said and walked away, abruptly ending the discussion. Then he ordered the team to pack up and head back to the coast.

  The gambl
e appeared to pay off. The brothers said they would come to Kokopo later in the day to continue negotiations. A few hours later one of them arrived with a letter of apology. There would be no more problems, George was assured. The brothers had settled their differences. The Americans could resume their work on Monday.

  No one worked on the Sabbath in New Guinea, so the recovery teams took the day off out of respect. George had budgeted a little for what the military dubbed “morale, welfare, and recreation,” or MWR. His teams deserved some fun. He rented some beat-up motorboats through Dougie at the hotel, packed up cold beer and soda, and took them out to an idyllic deserted island named Little Pigeon a few miles off the coast. In the shadow of the volcano, they went swimming and snorkeling and had a pig roast.

  George spent more time with the first recovery team to make sure good relations were maintained with the Wartovo clan. For good measure, he offered to drive the village’s barefoot children to their school-house, sparing them the long trek each morning along muddy tracks in sweltering heat.

  Dr. O’Leary, meanwhile, continued to follow the evidence. As the second week was drawing to a close, he concluded that the recovery scene was smaller than he first thought. A test grid opened down near the river turned up no suspected human remains. The crucial discoveries were concentrated around the engine, leading in the direction of the grids near the partial tail section a short distance away. It was time to flip it over so they could dig underneath.

  “Watch the sharp edges. You don’t want to get cut,” the thirty-six-year-old Army staff sergeant Jimmy “Big Poppy” Bonilla from Beacon, New York, instructed as he led a group of Americans and locals in lifting the hulk that had once been the aft section of an F4U Corsair, now flaking with rust and rotted through in several places.

  The team sergeant, Bonilla, a tattooed infantry soldier with a scar in the middle of his forehead, repeated the warning.