You Are Not Forgotten

by Bryan Bender

  “Nice and slow, we don’t want to get anybody hurt.”

  They rolled the tail section over, and it slid partway down the slope.

  O’Leary methodically opened a new grid for excavation and, after concluding it had been sufficiently excavated and screened, moved on to the next. Over the next several days JPAC personnel found more fragments of a pistol grip and what looked like a four-holed plastic button, faded and chipped—similar to the kind commonly used on coats, suits, jackets, caps, and other apparel supplied to military personnel by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps during World War II. Oddly, they also found a pecked and battered but relatively well-preserved glass marble with an orange ribbon at its core.

  Most important, they found what appeared to be human remains, including parts of a clavicle and a left humerus. They tried not to think about the macabre nature of what they were doing and instead relished the thought that each shovelful might bring another one of the missing closer to his long-overdue homecoming. Some of the local workers seemed to instinctively understand the importance the Americans attached to returning their elders to their native land.

  Twentysomething Gesling Mutumuy, who in his dreadlocks and T-shirt emblazoned with a marijuana leaf resembled the reggae performer Bob Marley, couldn’t care less about what was buried beneath his feet. But as he leaned against a tree branch chewing betel nut and watching the Americans—in awe of the small village of their own they had erected almost overnight in the middle of the jungle—he could see they were completing their own sacred ritual. The clans of the lost American warriors needed to know where their kin had fallen.

  But to determine that, and to maximize the likelihood of a positive ID, JPAC needed more evidence. While extracting DNA from bones that were exposed to the elements for a lifetime was increasingly possible with the advance of forensic science, it often couldn’t be accomplished—as was the case with the small amount of remains recovered years before.

  The team plowed through more grids as the local workforce swelled to nearly fifty. What George’s team found next was like striking gold: human teeth. There were nineteen in total, including maxillary teeth such as incisors and canines and some molars connected to part of a left mandible. Clearly visible on some were fillings, which could be compared to dental records.

  The team’s photographer, the twenty-two-year-old Army sergeant Kaily Brown of Salt Lake City, Utah, snapped images of some of the material before O’Leary placed the items in labeled evidence bags and locked them in a heavy-duty black case with two combination locks.

  Captain Bergstrom, the team leader, now understood why the cursory excavation that had been conducted at the crash site seventeen years before had found so little evidence. “They didn’t go nearly deep enough.”

  They pushed ahead. Under O’Leary’s watchful eye, the recovery team braved the heat and torrential downpours—now often accompanied by deafening thunder and dangerous lightning—to complete the excavation on schedule. Tarps were laid out across the completed grids and suspended from trees, while slit trenches were dug and lined with sandbags to try to keep the heavy rains at bay. The pump feeding the screening station conked out one morning and had to be replaced. A power outage in Kokopo that shuttered the local bank where George had deposited JPAC’s funds also delayed the scheduled payday for local workers on April 18. The team then lost a full day of work on April 23 when they arrived to the news that two locals had died in the area overnight and the villagers were in mourning. George didn’t ask any questions; he was afraid of the answers. Finally, after nearly three weeks, O’Leary determined they had done everything they could; in fact, they had recovered more biological evidence than they had hoped for. They cleaned the area, snapped more photographs of the scene, and broke down the screening station and other structures they had constructed. George arrived to conduct a final round of negotiations with the Wartovo clan to compensate them for the damage to their property.

  At the other recovery site, where the team was still searching for signs of Lieutenant Harrison, the frustration only grew. The team had recovered small bits of what appeared to be human remains as well as some possible “life-support equipment” suggesting that the pilot had gone down with his plane on February 11, 1944. But even as they dug deeper—in some grids more than three feet—they grudgingly came to accept that the lab would probably have very little to go on to close the case. George had another idea.

  JPAC records indicated there was another crash site not far away. It was believed to be the wreckage of an Army P-38 fighter that had been lost on January 20, 1944—on the same bomber escort mission as McCown. George wanted to reach the site and see if he could make arrangements to move Recovery Team 1, which was scheduled to wrap up in several weeks and return to Hawaii, to the adjacent area, and begin excavating for clues to another MIA.

  This P-38 was believed to have been piloted by Lieutenant Dwight Kelly, who had taken off with the B-25s from Stirling Island before linking up with the rest of the fighter escorts, including McCown, over Torokina. Testimony from a Japanese pilot who had been shot down the same day suggested that Kelly might have survived the crash and been subsequently killed, but no one knew for sure. The case, designated Missing Air Crew Report 1781, was still on JPAC’s list of recovery sites.

  The hike to the crash site near the village of Kadaulung took nearly an hour from the Harrison crash site, leading George through thick jungle and a thigh-deep river about 115 feet across. Along the way he identified two potential tracks that might serve as access roads, but upon closer inspection he concluded that only one of them, with some repairs, might work. He coordinated with some local village elders and arranged to have thirty workers available the following day to help make the necessary road repairs. But when he returned as planned, a man whose property bordered the jungle track demanded payment as well as a toll for all JPAC vehicles that would pass. The leaders of the adjacent villages of Waiware and Kolong became very angry with the man, telling George he had made similar demands of the district government, which was why the road had fallen into disrepair in the first place. They accused the recalcitrant landowner of preventing them from earning much-needed wages from JPAC and denying them an access road to deliver their crops to market. George decided it was too risky for JPAC to get in the middle of it. “My assessment of the situation was such that it was not in JPAC’s best interest to become embroiled in a community issue that would likely create further problems,” he reported to his superiors that night.

  With both of the Corsair crashes on New Britain fully excavated, the mission was nearing its end, and George sought to maximize the Americans’ time left in the country. The investigation team he was coordinating in the highlands on the main island of New Guinea had run into some severe weather that made travel by helicopter too dangerous, so George dispatched them to Lae, in the neighboring coastal province of Morobe, where the weather was more predictable and they would be able to investigate more crash sites on foot. But as George knew from his travels there earlier in the year, it wouldn’t be easy. He reported back to Hawaii that JPAC’s files covering the area were not uniform, making it difficult to determine which crash sites were already known and which were new discoveries. The investigators also found that so-called independent researchers—often the bureaucratic code for wreck hunters—had been to some of the crash sites. That made negotiating with local villages for rights to hack out landing zones much more difficult. JPAC simply couldn’t pay what the better-financed privateers could. In one case, the investigation team found what looked like the scavenged wreckage of a P-40 near the village of Kaiapit. The villagers living near the crash had a letter from a California man who had been there before and might have photographs of the tail number and more information about the case. By the first week of May the investigation team had surveyed more than a dozen crash sites for possible future recovery operations in Madang and Morobe Provinces as well as on Bougainville Island in the nearby Solomons. George kept the res
t of his soldiers busy the last several weeks by breaking up the two main recovery teams into smaller groups and dispatching them across the northern districts of New Britain to conduct site surveys in an effort to update JPAC’s files, search for clues, and follow up new leads.

  That left one last thing to do before returning to Hawaii.

  On May 15, after washing off the mud and the grime, nearly thirty members of JPAC donned the crisp and clean military uniforms they had brought with them and stood at attention in the small chapel of Murray Barracks, headquarters of the PNG Defense Force in Port Moresby. Representing all the branches of the U.S. military, they stood silently before two flag-draped metal coffins, known as transfer cases, to conduct a repatriation ceremony for their fallen comrades.

  JPAC would not know for some time whether it had accomplished its mission and recovered the remains of the missing Americans it had come for. That wasn’t the point. The evidence strongly suggested that both men—McCown and Harrison—had given their last full measure in the skies over Rabaul. Even if their remains could not be positively identified for burial, they would be given this well-deserved honor.

  To George’s surprise, the brief ceremony in the small military chapel was attended by nearly fifty people—including representatives of the PNG Defense Force, the British and Australian embassies, the deputy chief of mission from the U.S. embassy, and some local media. The speakers reiterated the importance to the United States of the MIA mission in Papua New Guinea, which was an ally against the Japanese and now helping to continue the search for fallen Americans.

  Then, in a carefully choreographed ceremony, each transfer case was slowly carried by four members of JPAC to the cargo hold of a military cargo jet waiting on the tarmac at the Port Moresby airport. As George looked on, he was struck by the thought that the young men and women under his command never knew the Marine pilots, who lived and died long before they were born. But just like the comrades they lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, they considered them their brothers. He smiled.

  The identification of human remains in the United States is covered by civil rather than criminal law, meaning the burden of proof is almost always the “preponderance of evidence.” U.S. military guidelines, however, dictate that when it comes to identifying war dead, that standard isn’t enough. Any mistaken identification of a loved one was undoubtedly very bad, but burying the wrong soldier in a family plot, as had happened in rare cases in the past, was one of JPAC’s biggest fears. The lab’s burden of proof, therefore, was to be “clear and convincing.” That meant maintaining a solid chain of evidence, which began with the chain-of-custody documents initiated in the field by anthropologists.

  The handoff of remains to the lab—JPAC called it accession—was a carefully orchestrated process overseen by the lab’s evidence manager, Ben Soria. A spectacled middle-aged Hawaiian with a master’s degree in chemistry, Soria was partial to baggy floral shirts and had been a fixture at JPAC for years. On countless occasions he had greeted an arriving cargo plane on the tarmac behind the lab. This time was no different. Soria, along with a required witness, took custody of the metal coffins when they arrived at Hickam Air Force Base with the personnel returning from New Guinea.

  Upon receipt, all the evidence was photographed and assigned a case number. Because the case of Bureau Number 02402 included remains recovered from a site where evidence had previously been found but not identified, the new material was incorporated into the previously assigned case number—CIL 1991-095-I-01, with 1991 referring to the year of the first excavation.

  The multifaceted laboratory analysis was assigned to a team of scientists. A forensic odontologist was responsible for completing a dental profile that could be compared with the dental record of the suspected MIA. Another person would study the material evidence—the equipment and possible personal belongings found at the recovery site—and compare it with similar items carried or worn by Marine Corps pilots in the 1940s. But while they had access to all the case files, the forensic anthropologist in charge of evaluating the skeletal remains did not.

  “The anthropologist is not told the circumstances of the loss nor told any details that might be known or suspected about the case until after their analytical report is written,” the lab’s science director stipulated at the time. “By following this policy of blind analysis, the anthropologist is insulated from any preconceived conclusions that might impart bias into his findings.”

  To further ensure the maximum level of scientific integrity, strict guidelines governed the investigators’ ability to interact with each other on the case. Dr. O’Leary, as the field anthropologist, was prohibited from participating in the lab analysis at all, a practice meant to ensure that “the field conclusions and the lab conclusions form separate and distinct lines of evidence.” All the analytical conclusions would also be peer-reviewed.

  Due in part to the lab’s high workload, it took several months before any tentative conclusions could be made. “Overall, the available evidence indicates CIL 1991-095-I-01 is male,” the anthropologist who analyzed the pieces of bone determined in September. It was also apparent to the laboratory staff that the remains were those of a person at least eighteen years of age.

  But making a successful DNA match with relatives was considered a long shot. Most of the skeletal remains were black-brown or grayish in color and appeared to have been exposed to high temperatures, some for a prolonged period of time. “The remains are in fairly poor and fragmentary condition,” one early draft of the lab report stated.

  The odontologist’s investigation on the collection of recovered teeth went much better. A profile of the dental remains was inputted into a special computer program called the OdontoSearch Combined Database, where it was compared with 37,955 records. The results, the Army dentist assigned to the case reported, indicated that the pattern of restoration in the teeth—the cavities that were filled—and a review of those that were missing but present in the war-era dental record were “rather unique.”

  She closed her report with a one-paragraph opinion. They were the words that the U.S. military had been seeking for a lifetime.

  “Due to numerous concordant features and no unexplainable discrepancies, it is my opinion that the dental remains of CIL 1991-095-I-01 are positively those of: Major Marion Ryan McCown, Jr., 0-9610, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve.”

  But that wasn’t the last word. JPAC sought another opinion from a member of the American Board of Forensic Odontology in Seattle, Washington. “The identification is established by the comparison of the dental record recovered from a site 15 km southeast of the Blanche Bay in Vunuakair Village, gazelle District, Eastern New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea, to the military dental records of Maj. McCown,” the outside expert concluded. Supporting the conclusion was wreckage consistent with the type of aircraft that Maj. McCown was piloting and the ID tag that had been previously recovered near the wreckage. Together, the information was “definitely adequate to establish the positive identification.”

  On September 29, 2008, sixty-four years, eight months, and nine days after Ryan flew his final mission, JPAC’s scientific director, Thomas Holland, signed a two-page memorandum making it official. Ryan McCown would finally be put to rest. But the only family member listed as next of kin in military records was his mother, Grace Aimar McCown, who had been dead for fifty-five years.

  In a modern redbrick office building in Quantico, Virginia, Hattie Johnson was at work in her maroon cubicle one morning in the fall of 2008 when the phone rang. Johnson, an outgoing and attractive African-American woman in her forties, was a fixture at the Marine Corps Headquarters’ Casualty Section, the office primarily responsible for arranging the details for the return and burial of fallen Marines from Iraq and Afghanistan. Hattie was the casualty officer in charge of handling a special category of cases: those who had been missing in action from previous wars.

  It was a job that required a natural empathy, and like so many others involved with the
MIA issue, she considered it a sacred trust. A clock displaying the telltale POW/MIA flag hung in her cluttered work space, while taped to her file cabinets were photographs she had received from grateful relatives across the country of Marines recently recovered in Korea and Southeast Asia. The quotation she added to the bottom of her e-mails gave voice to her abiding faith: “There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.”

  When Hattie answered the phone, a man on the other end politely introduced himself. He said his name was John Almeida, and he began to tell her why he was calling. One of his relatives had seen an article published on Memorial Day in the Boston Globe about the search for missing pilots in Papua New Guinea. The story mentioned a name very familiar to him.

  “McCown was my mother’s brother. I have his flight log, and I think I have a picture,” he told her, trying to contain his excitement. “My uncle has always been an inspiration for me. I joined the Marines partially because of him.”

  Hattie began scribbling notes and then asked him to please hold.

  Almeida was a retired Navy doctor. He had been commissioned an infantry officer in the Marine Corps and fought in Vietnam before entering the Navy Medical Corps, where he eventually became a pathologist. Now sixty-three, he had been born a year after his uncle was reported missing. But he grew up hearing endless stories about Ryan from his mother, Claudia, whose wedding Ryan had so regrettably missed the week after Pearl Harbor. Ryan’s beloved “Claudie” never stopped telling her boy about her big brother. For years after he was reported missing, she spoke of him in the present tense, as if he were still alive. Almeida had a picture of Ryan in his bedroom when he was growing up and had inherited his dress blue uniform. Even now, paintings of Corsairs decorated his den in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Almeida also never forgot the times he spent with his grandmother Grace. Though only eight years old when Gracie died, he understood that part of her had been lost with Uncle Ryan. John and his sister, Grace Emilie, whom Ryan had met that last Christmas before he shipped out, were the only close relatives on Grace’s side of the family who were left. John’s mother, Claudia, had died in 1993.