Vanished

by Wil S. Hylton

  Schumacher fell. Miyazaki turned. He called for a second prisoner—none of the kempei knew which of the enlisted airmen was Moore and which was Vick—and he ordered Nagatome to force the prisoner to his knees. Then Miyazaki turned to the syphilis-ridden Kazuo Nakamura. “Behead him!” Miyazaki shouted, and Nakamura raised his service sword high, lashing it down on the airman’s neck and slicing through the soft tissue and bone in a fatal stroke.

  Miyazaki watched the man fall into the hole, then ordered the final airman brought forward. This time, he turned to Chihiro Kokubo, who was standing several yards away, clutching his friend’s ashes. “Miyazaki gave orders to me, ‘Sgt. Major Kokubo, do it!’” Kokubo said later. “I handed the remains of Ikushima to Sgt. Hongama and placed myself in position. As I hesitated, Lt. Nakamura scolded me, saying, ‘Do it quickly.’” Kokubo drew his sword. He held it high, as Nakamura had. “To give myself courage, I shouted, ‘This is for Ikushima!’” he recalled. He slammed the sword into the airman’s neck, but not hard enough. “The depth of the wound,” another kempei said later, “was about the width of the sword blade . . . one third of the neck. Miyazaki said, ‘It is not cut,’ and fired one or two shots and killed him with his pistol.”

  It was done. Miyazaki barked, “Bury the bodies,” and marched back to his car, where he lit another cigarette and waited for the men to emerge. “When we got out of the jungle,” a division guard recalled, “the CO of the kempei-tai said, ‘You may return now. When you return, tell Chief of Staff Tada that the execution was done.’ We went back together in the automobile. Upon returning to headquarters, I relayed what I was told by Colonel Miyazaki to Colonel Tada. Colonel Tada didn’t say anything, but just nodded.”

  —

  WHILE MARK SWANK sorted through the war crimes documents, Eric Emery prepared for his third trip to Palau. This time he would have six weeks on the site, but he knew they would be his last. Underwater recovery was too expensive to justify more than three years of work.

  As Emery’s transport jet unloaded on Babeldaob, he watched the Navy divers piling their equipment on trucks. A few of them had been with him the year before, but they knew Emery was a distant figure and merely nodded hello or stopped briefly for a quick handshake. There were nearly three dozen men in total, and they had been traveling ten hours in the gaping cargo hold of the KC-135, where a deafening roar and wildly fluctuating temperatures kept them from sleeping. Now that they were on the ground, they would begin a full day of work.

  The lead diver on the mission this time was a man named Rod Atherton, who had been assigned to the job at the last minute and knew virtually none of the men under his command. Atherton was a huge, roguish figure, given to blunt assessments. Like any master diver, he could recite long swaths of diving literature, including lengthy passages from the Navy dive manual, though he was quick to admit that he believed some parts were mistaken, outdated, and dumb. He was also, in the manner of any good leader, somewhat fluid with the rules.

  To begin the mission, Atherton wanted to get a sense of his men, and he gathered a handful of the most experienced divers onto a small boat, guiding it to the coordinates of the wreck. When he had positioned the boat, he stood to face the men. “Here’s what I want to do,” he said. “I’m gonna stand back and let you dive.” He pointed to a man in his thirties named Paul Wotus, whose rank was just a notch below his own. “I want the chief to supervise. I’m gonna see how you do.”

  Atherton sat down and Wotus stood.

  “Chief Wotus has the side,” Atherton shouted.

  “Chief Wotus has the side,” the men called back.

  “Okay,” Wotus said, pulling a spiral diving handbook from his pocket. He flipped to a pre-dive checklist and began working his way through the items. Had anyone dived that day? Did everyone feel okay? Had they brought all their equipment? Were their tanks and regulators attached? When Wotus had completed the checklist, he instructed two divers to suit up and he inspected their gear, then gave them the okay to splash in.

  Atherton stood again. “Now,” he said, sounding irritated. “How long did that take you?”

  Wotus looked surprised.

  “It took you twenty-two minutes,” Atherton said. “It should take you seven.” He grabbed the spiral notebook from Wotus. “This is you,” he said, burying his nose in the pages. “Mah mah mah wah wah. Reading into the book. Next time I’m gonna take the book.”

  “Okay,” Wotus said.

  “It doesn’t matter what the book says,” Atherton continued. “You have to know which part is important.”

  Wotus stared down.

  “What was the weather forecast this afternoon?” Atherton asked.

  Wotus shook his head.

  “It’s supposed to rain,” Atherton said. “When is high tide?”

  Silence.

  “Is it coming in or out?”

  Nothing.

  “I’m not trying to bust your balls,” Atherton said finally. “It’s the first dive and all that. But I’m gonna get you sharp on this trip. We’re gonna work it out.”

  Atherton sat down and the boat was quiet until one of the divers emerged from the water and climbed on board. Atherton checked the volume of air in his tank and splashed in to see the wreck for himself. He was gone for only a few minutes, but by the time he returned, all the other divers had agreed: being supervised by a hard-ass like Atherton for six weeks, having every move second-guessed, and being untaught the rules of the Navy dive book, was purely a stroke of good luck. There was no greater currency in the Navy diving program than hard, fast experience, and Atherton was the embodiment of it.

  When the barge arrived at the site, Atherton climbed aboard, pacing the deck to help his men set up their gear in designated areas. One region would serve as a medical station for the unit physician, Andy Baldwin. Just a few months earlier, Baldwin had completed a season as “the bachelor” on ABC’s reality program of that name, but among the divers this was regarded as little more than folly, and Baldwin showed no more sign of his television experience than he did of his status as an officer. After he had set up his medical equipment, he grabbed a broom and began sweeping rainwater from the deck into the sea. Nearby, another group of divers was organizing a container with wetsuits, masks, and fins, while at the far end of the barge, Emery’s friend Rich Wills, who had first told him about the lab a decade earlier, assembled a small group of divers to inspect the mooring lines. Emery himself moved easily among the men, pitching in periodically to help, but every few minutes he would return to the edge of the barge and stare down into the water with his face drawn and tight. When at last all the equipment was ready, he called for the men to join him, pulling a folded scrap of paper from his pocket.

  “Before I left I got an email,” he said. “I’m going to read part of it to you, so you understand what you’re doing here. This is from a football coach whose father was on this plane.” Emery unfolded the paper and began to read. “Eric, looks like this is going to be the year that you will finish the excavation. Whatever we find out, we will always be grateful to you. Of course, our first concern is for your safety and for that of your team of divers. You are, and will continue to be, in our thoughts and prayers. Please give our best to your team. Tell your parents that we are thankful to them for raising such fine men.”

  As Emery refolded the paper, the deck was hushed. Most of the men studied their feet and Emery let the moment linger. Finally, Atherton broke the spell. “Okay,” he snapped, “let’s bring these boys home!”

  And soon the baskets were rising, buckets pouring into the wet-screen station to be sifted.

  In the days ahead, as divers moved through the cockpit and nose turret, they would pull up a handgun, a necklace, a gold ring, and a dog tag stamped with the unmistakable word: DOYLE.

  SEVENTEEN

  CLOSURE

  The rolling hills of Arlington National Cemetery sweep abo
ve the Potomac River overlooking Washington, DC. On a cool, clear morning in April 2010, the families of the Big Stoop crew gathered at the end of a long grassy field to bury the remains of their dead.

  After two years of extensive DNA testing, the lab in Hawaii had found a match for five men: Jimmie Doyle, Jack Arnett, Earl Yoh, Robert Stinson, and Frank “Big Stoop” Arhar. The remains of those five had been returned to their families and buried in local cemeteries. In Ohio, Earl Yoh’s brothers laid him to rest in a grave site their parents had chosen six decades earlier, while Earl’s childhood friend, the Reverend Paul Miller, presided over a ceremony of twenty-one guns. In Florida, the Arnetts came together in the courtyard of a small church where Jack’s brother Marvin, who had flown over the islands in search of his brother, sat in a wheelchair without expression. His mind was fading and he no longer recognized most of his family, but Scannon had arranged for a vintage bomber to fly overhead, and when it roared across, Marvin Arnett snapped upright, pulling his arm into a crisp salute. In Texas, the plane carrying Jimmie Doyle also brought Casey, serving as the formal military escort for his grandfather’s final flight. After a short service in Snyder the next morning, the Doyles spilled outside for the thirty-minute drive to Jimmie’s grave site in Lamesa, only to discover that the streets were lined all the way: men and women who’d read about Jimmie in the newspaper, waving flags with their children, and girl scouts standing with hand on heart, and the men of the VFW at attention.

  Now those families and the other three were gathering at Arlington. This time they would bury all the bones that could not be identified. They would all be laid to rest together under a large gray headstone marked with all eight of their names, and on the green fields of the national cemetery their families would come together for the first time.

  They drew in close around a small opening in the ground as bagpipes played against a light wind. In the distance, six white horses pulled a flag-draped casket up the winding road. When the caisson reached the edge of the field, military pallbearers lifted the casket and marched toward the grave. The sun was high and glaring as they lowered the casket into the ground, then turned to face the families. Tommy and Nancy Doyle were there, squinting into the light, and the nieces of Johnny Moore and Jack Arnett, and the president of Palau, Johnson Toribiong, who sat motionless in a tailored gray suit beside the High Chiefs of the islands. Master Diver Rod Atherton had flown in from San Diego, standing shoulder to shoulder with Dr. Andy Baldwin. In the front row, Diane Goulding perched in a small chair, her soft white hair gleaming above an uncertain smile.

  They had come to bury not only the dead, but the mystery and wonder. They had come to lay down the stories, rumors, and fear. Some of their mysteries were still unanswered, but that was just the point. They would never know why Tommy’s uncles believed his father survived, and they would never know why Jack Arnett led the men on their final mission. Maybe he’d been ejected by his crew, or maybe he’d come forward to volunteer when Norman Coorssen couldn’t fly. What the families finally understood was that it didn’t matter. It had only mattered for so long because there was nothing else to grasp. Without answers, the mind searched for patterns and clues, for constellations in the stars.

  No man’s fixation on the plane was more emblematic than Eric Emery’s. He had no personal connection to the airmen, and was still unknown to most of the families. Since delivering the final round of remains, he had even withdrawn from the Doyles. Yet his attachment to the plane was deeply also personal. It represented the fulfillment of his quest to build an underwater program, and to deliver for other men and their families what Jon Faucher had given him. Emery saw his personal commitment to the plane as a kind of weakness. He had been trained to keep emotional distance from his work, and he took pride in his ability to do so. Now that that the operation was complete, his professional impulse pulled him back. He would never speak with another family connected to one of his sites; he had not come to Arlington, citing a previous obligation; and within a year, he would no longer work for the military lab—taking a job instead at the National Transportation Safety Board, where he spent most days behind a desk. He had found his own kind of closure in the 453.

  As the Arlington ceremony drew to a close, a bugler played taps. The families stared forward in silence at the edge of the grave. Only Pat Scannon stood back. He watched from across a long expanse of grass, in a neat black suit. His hands were clasped behind him, holding a weather-beaten BentProp hat. The 453 would always be with him. It was the plane that launched his search, and that, for years, brought him back to the islands. But he was already leaving it behind.

  He had just been to Palau with Mark Swank. For three weeks, they rooted through the underbrush with a team of nine volunteers, searching for a sign of the kempei jungle camp. Finally, as they tromped through ankle-deep mud one afternoon, along the bank of a small stream, they spotted a fragment of white porcelain near the top of a tree, and, recognizing it as a wire insulator, followed it to a second, then a third, chasing the trail downstream until they reached a clearing pitted with foxholes.

  The clay of Babeldaob, as always, had preserved the Japanese trenches, and as Swank scrambled between them, he was flooded with recognition. Each contour of the earth aligned with the maps the kempei had drawn. It was the same camp where Allied bombs killed Chihiro Kokubo’s friend, and where Kokubo burned his remains and tucked the ashes in a wooden box. It was the camp where, a few days after that, division soldiers arrived with Schumacher, Moore, and Vick, and where the execution party piled into the truck. Swank and Scannon had traced the route the convoy followed, and in a few months Scannon would return to continue looking for the mass grave. In his mind, he was already drifting back to the islands and the low, moldering aroma, the poison trees, the bats and caves, the gleaming turquoise water.

  There was a spot on the water just north of Peleliu that always caught his eye. It was a tiny splash of brilliant green that glowed against the cerulean sea, and it sometimes seemed to Scannon like an eye that gazed back at him from the water. He hoped to have his ashes scattered there one day. His friends could throw them into the air and watch them settle upon the surface, lingering briefly before drifting down through filtering sunlight. When they reached the bottom they would blanket the sand and merge with the coral seafloor, so that in his final place he would be one with the islands, forming a bed to cradle the men that he had never found.

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