by Bryan Bender
Almeida heard the sound of shuffling papers in the background before Ms. Johnson was back on the line. She did not hide her excitement.
“We’ve been looking for you.”
This time it was the good news that spread fast. The details of Almeida’s call reached Jane McCown McKinney, Ryan’s only surviving sibling. Now sixty-five and living in Oxnard, California, she was the half sister of Ryan’s born in October 1943 as the Hell’s Angels were heading up the line. It was Jane’s daughter Blair, with her fair complexion and short red hair resembling Ryan’s, who had coincidentally been telling a friend about her uncle’s exploits in early September, prompting him to hop on the Internet, where he came across the newspaper article about the search for lost pilots in New Guinea that mentioned Ryan—just as the JPAC lab was nearing an ID of the remains.
Jane McCown McKinney never knew her older brother, but when she talked about him, it sounded as if she had. Her father, Ryan senior, had spoken often about his oldest child and namesake—in the early years at least, with a hint of hope that he might still be alive. But more often than from Dad, she heard about Ryan from her other brother, Vance. He had idolized him ever since visiting Ryan during flight training in Florida in 1941. Vance repeated over and over again his last memory of Ryan, when he visited the family in North Carolina to say good-bye before leaving for the South Pacific. The image was seared in the eight-year-old Vance’s brain of his older brother zipping up his leather flight jacket and pulling away from the house in Tryon on a motorcycle before disappearing around the bend forever. Vance had longed for answers to what happened to his older brother. Decades later, on a trip to Washington in the 1980s, he made his way to the Washington Navy Yard to see what more he could learn about Ryan’s fate. It was disappointingly little. Vance, who died in 1997, spent his final years in a wheelchair suffering from an ailment that required him to struggle to keep his joints limber. One way he did it was by constructing model airplanes—mostly Corsairs like his beloved brother’s.
Now the final preparations were under way to return Ryan to his family. On November 8, Ms. Johnson traveled to North Carolina to meet with Almeida and deliver JPAC’s final report on his uncle’s identification along with some paperwork for him to sign. Before leaving Quantico, she had contacted JPAC with a request: Could they send her the dog tag that was stored in the lab? She’d like to bring it with her to give to McCown’s nephew.
“Please make it happen,” JPAC’s scientific director, Thomas Holland, instructed Ben Soria, the lab’s evidence manager, when he received the request. “Believe me, you don’t want to make Hattie mad.”
Johnson arrived at the Almeida household on a Sunday. Jane McCown’s daughter Blair was also there on her mother’s behalf. Johnson presented them with the ID tag printed with the name Marion Ryan McCown Jr. that had originally been recovered at the crash site in 1991. She also gave them a bound copy of the final recovery report, including photographs of the excavation in New Guinea and the remains that were recovered, and the lab reports.
“It was absolutely fascinating,” Blair told her mother later that week. “It turns out that the dental records were such an exact match that they were what was used for the identification.”
The U.S. military, Johnson informed them, would also cover the travel expenses for three family members to attend the funeral, which Almeida decided would be in Ryan’s beloved Charleston.
“She has already booked the honor guard from Camp Lejeune to perform the full military honor ceremony,” Blair reported.
In January 2009, eighty-seven-year-old Helen Schiller was sitting in her sunlit kitchen in Summerville, South Carolina, reading the Charleston News & Courier. An article caught her eye. One of Charleston’s favorite sons, a World War II pilot who had been lost in New Guinea, would finally be coming home. She read on. The former Helen Miller then gasped.
“Oh, my heavens. It’s Ryan. They found Ryan!”
At the end of the article was a request for anyone who knew Major Marion Ryan McCown to contact the paper. Virtually none of the McCown relatives who had known him were still alive. The community was desperate to locate a living link to Ryan.
Helen slowly stood up, went to the phone, and started to dial.
CHAPTER TEN
COMING HOME
A chilly drizzle fell on Charleston on the morning of Sunday, January 18, 2009. Under a gray sky, aging military veterans, fresh-faced cadets from the Citadel, and kinfolk from across the Low Country and beyond lined Archdale Street. Some who had come were members of Rolling Thunder, the national veterans’ organization committed to the memory of POWs and MIAs, known by their telltale motorcycles. They had come to stand at attention before the wrought-iron gates of the Unitarian Church, clutching American flags and black-and-white POW/MIA flags imprinted with the slogan “You are not forgotten.”
As family members and congregants filed into the church in a stream of umbrellas, they were handed programs for the memorial service, with the words from “The Young Dead Soldiers,” by Archibald MacLeish, printed on the cover.
We were young. We have died. Remember us.…
Every pew in the cavernous sanctuary was filled, while more onlookers stood along the outer aisles in between the television cameras from local news crews. Still more people crowded in the rear of the church, which was silent save for the steady sound of the rain on the stained-glass windows etched with inscriptions from the Hebrew Bible. They had all come to bid a final farewell to a man most of them never knew—Major Marion Ryan McCown Jr., U.S. Marine Corps Reserve.
Escorted by a cadet from the Citadel military academy to her seat in the front row was Helen Schiller, the former Helen Miller, wearing a black raincoat, her hair elegantly coiffed to reveal a solemn but somehow thankful expression.
She had never forgotten Ryan, the evenings they spent together at the Fort Sumter Hotel, or when they saw Gone With the Wind. She remembered it all as if it were yesterday. She could still picture him in his Marine Corps uniform, leaning forward in a formal bow and with that infectious grin of his asking for another dance. “He was a true Charlestonian and a gentleman,” she had been saying all morning. For a time after he left for the war, she believed they would be married when it was all over. It didn’t turn out that way. She went on with her life, fell in love, got married, had children and now grandchildren. Ryan would forever remain twenty-seven.
Clutched between her fingers was the small box in which he had given her the pair of wings on the balcony of the Fort Sumter Hotel. She also held the humorous little handwritten note that had come with them: “Helen, you were always such a swell guy. Love, Ryan.”
Sitting almost unnoticed in the back of the church was Rosemary Hutto, a friend of Ryan’s from Sunday school. The two elderly women were among the few in attendance who had seen him alive and lived long enough to witness this day.
The Reverend Peter Lanzillotta, standing near the altar set that Uranie had donated in Ryan’s memory after the war, gazed down at the small mahogany box that held the remains recovered from the village of Vunakaur. He intoned: “You served your country with a full measure of your devotion. We shall salute you and say hail and farewell, good and noble Marine.”
The mourners read from scripture while the retired Navy captain John Almeida, who knew his uncle Ryan only through the stories of his mother, Claudia, and his hazy childhood memories of his heartbroken grandmother, Grace, looked out at the hundreds of faces packing the pews. “My uncle is much more than my imagination and much greater than my fantasies.”
Having gone off to fight in Vietnam in part due to Uncle Ryan’s example, Almeida now revered him even more, knowing that he had died fulfilling his duty that fateful day over Rabaul.
His uncle Ryan also managed to accomplish one last mission, bestowing a final gift from the grave. He reunited the McCown clan.
“He is the bond in the family that brought us all together.”
The last of Ryan’s siblings, who tra
veled from California to bid a final farewell to the half brother she never met, then spoke of what the family had lost in the jungles of New Guinea.
“At the time of his death,” Jane McCown McKinney said, struggling to steady her voice, “there were many that grieved for him.”
I was not one of them. Well, I was only three months old at the time. Our brother Vance had just turned ten, so he had very few memories of him. But as we grew older, we observed the grief of our father, Ryan senior, and that of our sister Claudia. And through their grief we came to a sense of the enormity of our loss. Neither Vance, Claudia, nor Daddy is here to honor Ryan or to lay him to rest. Most of the family that knew Ryan is gone, and most of us here today never knew him at all. But we do remember him and celebrate his life. We stand here for those who died before they could have the comfort of knowing that Ryan would be found and would be brought home to rest beside his mother, grandparents, and sister.
The funeral service for Ryan concluded with the reading of the “Navy Hymn,” with its appeal to the Almighty from the defenders not to safeguard their own lives but to protect loved ones back home:
God, Who dost still the restless foam,
Protect the ones we love at home.
Provide that they should always be
By thine own grace both safe and free.
O Father, hear us when we pray
For those we love so far away.
As a Marine honor guard stood at attention outside, a procession of Marine pallbearers carefully carried the small box with Ryan’s remains to the adjacent cemetery, where the wildflowers and grasses grew just as thick as on the evening when Ryan and Helen danced in the upstairs ballroom of Hibernian Hall around the corner.
Ryan’s half sister, Jane, his nephew John, and their families and friends gathered solemnly under a tent around a headstone engraved with the names Grace and Claudia, where a small patch of earth had been dug for Ryan. The reverend whispered a few final prayers. Two lines of Marines, wearing their dress blue uniforms, held an American flag taut between them before deftly folding it and presenting it to Jane. The honor guard, lined up on Archdale Street in front of the churchyard, lifted their rifles skyward and commenced a three-volley salute. Each shot, fired on command, rang out in the still morning, the sound ricocheting off the imposing eighteenth-century structure of the church. A bugler slowly played taps.
Finally, as the sound of the horn faded, a deep rumble built in the distance, faint at first. Within moments the churchyard was filled with the deafening sound of three Marine Corps Harrier jets roaring across the rain-soaked sky.
As the mourners gazed heavenward, their cheeks streaked with rain and some with tears, the pilots dipped their wings in one final salute.
EPILOGUE
Khost Province, Afghanistan, July 2010. George was hunched over the controls of a Kiowa Warrior, flying just above the treetops looking for signs of the Taliban smuggling weapons and reinforcements from Pakistan, just over the horizon. As he traced the crude network of roads and goat trails through the mountains, he was also keeping an eye out for the dreaded ZPU-1s and their 14.5- and 23-millimeter rounds. The Haqqani network, one of the most ruthless of the Pakistani terrorist groups allied with the Taliban, liked to fire the outdated Soviet anti-aircraft guns, usually mounted on the back of a pickup truck, at U.S. helicopters. The “technicals,” as the armed Toyotas were called, were exceedingly difficult to spot from the air in the thick forests below; they could usually be seen only after they opened up, at a velocity of up to a thousand meters per second. One of the armor-piercing rounds could blow a gaping hole through his chopper and out the other side.
George was back at the “tip of the spear,” as the Army called the front line, chasing bad guys and swooping in to aid American ground troops when they got into trouble. This time it was in Regional Command East, an area of eastern Afghanistan about the size of Pennsylvania that was once home to Osama bin Laden, whom George presumed might still be hiding somewhere in the vast wasteland he could see out the cockpit. His unit was part of the surge in American forces begun in 2009 that was designed to beat back the Taliban’s advance after nearly eight years of war.
“Greetings from Afghanistan!” he wrote to friends back in Florida from his new assignment, after receiving a boxful of cookies and brownies for his soldiers. “It is truly a morale booster to know that we are in the thoughts of so many back home.”
Afghanistan was the last place on earth he thought he’d be when he left Iraq at the end of 2005. But George believed in what he was doing, perhaps more than he ever had. At JPAC he finally understood why he wore the uniform. As his assignment there wound down, he was also determined to keep wearing it.
Before he left the island, however, he had some unfinished business. With Rick Huston as his sponsor, George became a fellow “traveling man.” He was inducted into Freemasonry, taking his rightful place in another family tradition that dated to before the American Revolution. Huston even bought him his Mason ring.
But what George cherished most of all from his time at JPAC was his relationship with Sandra Patricia, whom he first met via e-mail when he was working in Germany. Their first date was in the Hard Rock Cafe in Panama City, Panama—can’t get much cheesier, or more American, than that, he thought. But it was there they began a budding romance. Sandra Pa visited George in Hawaii, where he introduced her to some of his military buddies. He went to meet her parents in Bogotá and brought her home to Tallahassee to meet Ann.
By the time he left for a yearlong tour of Afghanistan in late 2009, they were deeply in love. Both Ann and Sandra Pa came to see him off at Hunter Army Airfield near Savannah, Georgia, when he deployed. They were also there—holding a big “Welcome Home, George” sign and a bouquet of red roses—when he returned. Just in time for Thanksgiving—and to ask Sandra Pa to marry him.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Virtually no human endeavor can succeed without the help and guidance of others. This book was no exception. Foremost I want to thank my parents, Linda Rubin and Norman Bender, and my three brothers, Adam, Joshua, and Aron, for their unstinting love, guidance, and encouragement. To my blessed daughters, Leila Carolina and Joanna Isabel, who like their mom endured a lot of absent days and nights during the writing: you are forever my inspiration, and I love you more than words can do justice. But a book idea is one thing. Finding the right publisher is another. The vision and wisdom of my literary agents, Sascha Alper and Larry Weissman, helped bring the project to life. My editor at Doubleday, William Thomas, believed in the story from the start and his passion and deft hand come through on nearly every page. Likewise, to his gifted team, including Coralie Hunter, Ingrid Sterner, and Bette Alexander: this book is as much yours as mine.
I am deeply grateful to my editors and colleagues at the Boston Globe, especially the former editor-in-chief, Martin Baron, who is now the top editor at the Washington Post, and throughout this endeavor provided more support than I probably deserved. Peter Canellos, the Globe’s deputy managing editor and former Washington bureau chief, encouraged me every step of the way, beginning with greenlighting my seemingly harebrained idea to make a reporting trip to Papua New Guinea in 2008, in search of lost Americans and the men and women looking for them. Christopher Rowland, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, let me disappear for the better part of a year to write the book, and I am lucky to count him and my colleagues in the Washington bureau among my personal friends. Special thanks are reserved for Michael Kranish, the deputy Washington bureau chief, who was a nearly endless source of advice, and my former Globe colleague Sasha Issenberg, who gave generously of his time and knowledge. My friend filmmaker Sigmund Libowitz provided invaluable feedback and helped me visualize the story from fresh angles. Others whose assistance was crucial with records research and expert perspective were Tim Brown, John Pike, Colonel Rick Kiernan, Glenn Solomon, Wofford Stribling, Cynthia Keiser, and forensic historian David Berry. I will forever be grateful to the late Dr. Jo
se A. Fuentes, my grandfather-in-law, for his sage advice on the original book proposal and for helping me decipher detailed dental records. The love and support of my in-laws, Jose Fuentes-Agostini and Crissy Fuentes-Gonzalez, were also there from the start. I also want to thank the leadership of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command for giving me the honor to be a part of their work, and for virtually never saying no to my requests for information. Especially helpful were Johnnie Webb, Major Raymond Osorio, Lee Tucker, Major Brian Desantis, and Christopher McDermott. This book also benefited enormously from the keen eye for detail and grasp of history of my colleague and dear friend Kevin Baron, who traipsed through the New Guinea jungle with me. Yoon Byun, the Globe photographer who was with us every step of the way, captured the scene in ways virtually no one else could.
As I was researching and writing the book I also benefited enormously from Dr. Gil Thorpe, whose brother Bob is still unaccounted for as of this writing. He helped me understand, even just a little, the sense of loss experienced by the families of the missing who have waited a lifetime for closure that has never come. I am likewise indebted to Navy Commander Brian Danielson, who never met his father, Ben, before he disappeared over Laos, but never let him go. Other families of the missing held my hand along the way. A special thanks to Hazel Nelson, who lost her brother Robert Marshall on the same mission as Ryan McCown, and to her daughter Betty Montgomery. I am grateful to call Donna Phillips Dunning my friend; she keeps her cousin, Lieutenant Allan S. Harrison III, alive despite frustratingly few answers about his ultimate fate at Rabaul. Others who generously shared their experiences in the South Pacific were Arthur May, Fred Tuxworth, and “The Professor” Russell Johnson. I consider myself among the luckiest to also call some of the few surviving members of the Hell’s Angels my friends, especially Vic Smith and Cosmo Marsh. I will be forever grateful for the trust they have shown in helping me to tell the story of their squadron.