But Sandy had never liked—and never would like—sitting at a desk, and in 1930 he was summoned to the dean’s office to account for his poor grades.16 We’ll never know whether he really sealed his fate, as legend has it, by punching the dean, but when they heard that their captain was being booted out of school, the rest of the Tiger players converged on the dean’s office to protest, en masse. Their ploy didn’t work, and that was the end of my grandfather’s college career (though Princeton now proudly claims him as a member of the class of 1932).
Having failed out of college, but leery of working for his father, Sandy found mining and construction work in the mountains of Virginia, where he gained real-world experience in demolitions, carpentry, surveying, mechanics, and engineering. Eventually, if a little reluctantly, he accepted a job with Blue Diamond, and his father put him in charge of one of its principal mines in Virginia.17 But it wouldn’t last long.
Though grooming his son to take over the company some day, Alex had, for the present, no intention of relinquishing the slightest control. And despite the prospect of rich rewards for continued obedience, Sandy Bonnyman simply wasn’t cut out for the role of dutiful son. By 1932, he’d had enough. He handed his silver spoon back to his father and headed west to seek his own fortune.
“He was a restless spirit,” his father would later admit ruefully. “He always had to have adventure.”18
FIVE
RENDER UP THE BODIES
2500 BC-AD1992
Although most people who heard about my upcoming travel to Tarawa were intrigued, many were puzzled that the US government would spend tens of millions of dollars to retrieve the earthly remains of men who had lain undisturbed, and mostly forgotten, for so many decades. Some found the whole enterprise distasteful.
“May they rest in peace and not be disturbed as a result of political posturing by stupid members of the Congress of the United States of America,” said the late Col. Ed Bale, who as a first lieutenant on Tarawa commanded the medium Sherman tank China Gal. “I just think after all the years let ’em lie where they are buried. I think if I were among them, that is where I’d want to be.”1
Bale had good reason to be skeptical. He had personally buried two marines after the battle, and while serving as a marine recruiter during the Korean War was assigned to inform families in person when a family member had been killed.
“So many of them felt they should not be shipped back to the US. It would open wounds that were just beginning to heal,” he said. “I can specifically recall two men who were shipped back and whose families regretted it later.”2
Ed’s views were also informed by a chance meeting in 1948 with the caretaker of a British military cemetery at Souda Bay on the Greek island of Crete, where sailors from a cruiser and two destroyers sunk during the recent war were buried.
“He said, ‘You know, we British never ship our dead home. The first thing is, we don’t have all this land like you Americans do. The policy has always been, we bury them where they fall,’” Ed recalled. “I like that. I think remains should be left to rest in peace.”3
Katherine Davis Moore, widow of Navy Lt. Cmdr. Kyle Moore—my grandfather’s teenage tennis partner—who went down with the USS Indianapolis in 1945, wanted her husband’s remains to be left sleeping in the deeps.
“When the people who discovered the Titanic went off to the Pacific to find the Indianapolis, oh, my heart was so torn,” she said at age ninety-five. “The Indianapolis is down in the deepest part of the Pacific, at fourteen thousand feet, where I hope nobody ever finds it.”4
(On August 19, 2017, a team sponsored by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen located, mapped, and filmed the Indianapolis lying 18,000 feet deep; Katherine Moore died November 14, 2015, at the age of one hundred.)
“Leave the guy alone,” Robert Kossow, ninety-three, said of his cousin, Pvt. William Edward Rambo, a marine reported to be buried in the same trench as Sandy Bonnyman. “Let him rest!”5
And as the search for Tarawa’s missing began to ramp up in 2010, even my mother was ambivalent about the prospect of finding her father’s remains.
“I know my grandparents would have adored having him returned,” Fran Evans said. “But sixty-five [sic] years is a long time. I have no illusions about how wonderful it would be to find him. But since people are going to all the trouble, it would be nice, I suppose, to be able to find some of his remains.”6
But such doubters are in the minority. Most family members I contacted on behalf of History Flight were thrilled about the possible recovery of long-lost relatives—occasionally brothers, but because most of Tarawa’s dead were too young to have families, most great-uncles and remote cousins. Many embraced the solemn duty of closing a painful chapter, not for themselves, but for people long dead.
“It was always my grandmother’s and my mother’s wish that he be brought back home, probably to be interred next to his parents in Chatham, New York,” said David Silliman, whose uncle, Pfc. George Harry Traver, was killed on the first day of fighting at Tarawa and recorded as interred in Cemetery 27.7
There was never any doubt how Sandy’s parents felt. The Catholic belief in the physical resurrection of the body has long inspired pilgrims to travel thousands of miles to venerate a splinter of bone believed to be the earthly remains of a saint. Until 1963 Catholics were even banned from choosing cremation, which the church deemed blasphemy against the doctrine of physical resurrection. Alex and Frances Bonnyman wanted nothing more than to bring their son’s body home for burial.
“I do want my son’s remains returned to Knoxville, Tennessee. . . . If any further or additional request or advice is needed to insure (sic) his remains being returned to me here, I shall appreciate your writing to me,” Alex wrote to newly minted Marine Commandant Lt. Gen. A.A. Vandegrift just days after receiving news of his son’s death.8
Many governments in the Western world now routinely invest tens of millions or even billions of dollars on bringing lifeless bones home for burial. As of 2016, the US Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) had a $300 million annual budget to locate and repatriate any and all missing war dead (technically classified as MIA, missing in action, though most were confirmed dead). Germany’s War Graves Commission now spends some $45 million a year on recovery efforts and has repatriated 30,000 sets of remains from two world wars, driven by public demand. Even Great Britain now offers families the choice of repatriation instead of letting soldiers lie where they fell.
Reverence for the dead, especially those slain in battle, is a universal trait of human cultures, expressed in the world’s oldest and most enduring literature, from the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh to the writings of Thucydides and Homer. Yet for purely practical reasons, the world’s great empires, from Greece to Britain, found it too expensive and unwieldy to repatriate every imperial soldier killed on a faraway battlefield, choosing instead to bury or cremate them where they fell.
For most contemporary Americans, the idea that the federal government has an obligation to account for and return all overseas dead seems unremarkable.9 But in post-Enlightenment Europe and North America, the kind of attachment to physical remains that would drive a grieving king between clashing swords to retrieve his lifeless son—as in Homer’s Iliad—was seen by many as a distasteful, even ghoulish, pagan obsession.
Writing in the April 15, 1921, New York Times, Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, pondered the gruesome realities of exhumation: “Out of these holes were being dragged—what? Boys whom their mothers would recognize? No! Things without shape, at which mothers would collapse.”10
Americans were long content to leave their war dead buried far from home, and many churches vocally opposed exhumation of battlefield remains, deriding it as a “costly pagan venture” and “a basic misconception of our rapidly changing bodies, which on earth have been but the vehicle or vestment of immortal spirits.”11
But something began to shift in the wake of the mechanized mass slaughter of World Wa
r I. British Maj. Gen. Fabian Ware, appalled by hasty burials and the neglect of British graves overseas, established the Imperial War Graves Commission in 1915. Soon, investigators were venturing boldly beyond the trenches and into the blasted, haunted moonscapes of no-man’s land to painstakingly record the identities and burial locations of British war dead, thus saving them from becoming “known only to God,” a phrase coined by Rudyard Kipling, whose own son John’s remains were never found.12
After the war, the United States mounted its own campaign to locate dead and missing soldiers from cemeteries and hastily dug graves across Europe. Nearly a thousand investigators eventually identified an astonishing 98.8 percent of the 116,000 Americans who died in the war. Once identified, the dead were reinterred in fifteen cemeteries in France to await the War Department’s decision on their final disposition.13
But where upper-crusters like Wister and former President Teddy Roosevelt—who publicly declared his wish that his own son Quentin “continue(s) to lie on the spot where he fell in battle”—a wave of plainspoken, grieving mothers begged to differ, making their case in letters to military officials, politicians, and newspapers.
“You took my son from me and sent him to war. . . . My son sacrificed his life to America’s call,” one Gold Star mother wrote to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, “and now you must as a duty of yours bring my son back to me.”14
Undertakers, unsurprisingly, soon organized the Purple Cross to lobby for—and cash in on—the return of the dead.15 Finally, on October 29, 1919, the War Department announced that it would pay to bring the dead home for burial upon request. In the end, the families of forty-six thousand World War I dead—nearly sixty percent—opted for repatriation.
Having abandoned its historic reluctance, the United States would eventually become the worldwide leader of a post-post-Enlightenment attachment to, even veneration of, the remains of war dead and extravagant, expensive efforts to bring them all home.
With a tally of some 407,000 deaths, American losses in World War II were greater than those of any other conflict in American history except for the Civil War. But compared to much of the rest of the world, they were slight. Just 0.32 percent of the nation’s population died in the war, compared to an astonishing fourteen percent in the Soviet Union, eight percent of Germans, four percent of Japanese, three percent of the Chinese, and nearly one percent of the British (not counting colonial fighters).
By the 1940s, the US military had developed more efficient strategies to keep track of its dead. Even while the fighting raged, the Army Graves Registration Service swept in behind the troops, doing its best to locate, identify, and temporarily inter the dead with the intention of exhuming and repatriating them after the war.
Even so, due to the truly global nature of the conflict and high numbers of air and naval casualties, perhaps seventy-eight thousand personnel—nearly twenty percent of all Americans killed in action—remain technically missing in action more than seven decades later, and another ten thousand are still identified only as “unknown.” Around half of the missing are believed to rest in Davey Jones’ locker, leaving some forty thousand that are potentially recoverable.
Within weeks of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, hundreds of teams were roaming quiescent battlefields across Europe, Asia, Africa, and countless islands dotting the Pacific Ocean. Eventually, they would recover and identify seventy-five percent of those killed in the fighting.
The World War I policy allowing American families to choose whether they wanted remains interred in overseas cemeteries or returned home for burial in a national or private cemetery remained in place. Yet only about a quarter of families elected to have a son, brother, or father’s body exhumed and brought home for burial, less than half the rate from the 1914–18 war.16 The establishment of resting places that were virtual works of art, such as the 170-acre Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, with its green grass and nearly ten thousand gleaming white crosses and stars, and the equally well-tended Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, home to some seventeen thousand dead, surely persuaded many families that their loved ones were truly resting in peace. There also had been a smattering of coverage, mostly in the disapproving foreign press, recounting the grisly realities of forcing young soldiers, many of whom had seen comrades die during the war, to engage in what amounted to an officially approved form of grave robbery.
“Everywhere we searched we found bodies, floating in the rivers, trampled on the roads, bloated in the ditches, rotting in the bunkers, pretzeled into foxholes, burned in the tanks, buried in the snow, sprawled in the doorways, splattered in the gutters, dismembered in the mine fields, and even literally blown up into the trees,” the writer Paul Fussell quoted one World War II graves-detail grunt as saying.17
Faced with such challenges, in the autumn of 1947 the Army Quartermaster General established the Central Identification Laboratory at Schofield Barracks on Oahu, Hawaii, or CILHI, for short.
“Our government has undertaken to return the recoverable remains (approximately 300,000) to American soil, should such be the desire of the next of kin,” wrote Mildred Trotter, a Washington University (St. Louis) School of Medicine anatomy professor who took a leave of absence to work at CILHI from 1948–49, where her duties included sorting out the remains of sailors recovered from the USS Arizona. “If the next of kin wishes interment overseas, the remains are interred in American-owned cemeteries in Holland, England, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Tunis, the Philippine Islands, Hawaiian Islands, Alaska or Puerto Rico. When a remains [sic] is exhumed and positively identified the next of kin is notified and given a choice of disposition; either burial in a private cemetery or in a National Cemetery.”18
But by the end of the 1940s, the government’s efforts to recover the dead were rapidly petering out. By the mid-1950s, there was just one Graves Registration team assigned to the entire Pacific region.19
Perhaps not surprisingly, America’s most divisive war since Appomattox supercharged the nation’s appetite for recovering war dead. Vietnam created a political and cultural shift that would result in the expenditure of billions of dollars to reclaim the missing.
Having won concessions from North Vietnam at the Paris peace talks in 1973 that would allow the United States to search for remains of missing soldiers, the Army set up a branch of the CIL in Thailand. But the program went off the rails after several team members were killed in an ambush in North Vietnam, and appeared doomed until an American military transport plane carrying Vietnamese “war orphans” to the US for adoption (Operation Babylift) went down in South Vietnam in 1975, killing 78 of the 243 children aboard. Media played up the fact that remains were taken for processing to the lab on the Thai coast, igniting public support. A year later, the CIL’s mission and budget were expanded to recover remains from all previous wars, not just Vietnam.
Just as important, perhaps, was the arrival of Johnie Webb to supervise the laboratory immediately following the Operation Babylift disaster. The former Army colonel led the nation’s first effort to find World War II remains in New Guinea in 1978 and began to add expert historians, archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, and odontologists—specialists in identifying dental remains—to the staff.
Politics also played a crucial role. Following the end of the war in Vietnam, many Americans, from hawkish veterans groups to President Richard Nixon, accused the victorious North Vietnamese Communists of holding thousands of American captives.
Despite repeated Congressional investigations that found no basis for the claims—“No Americans are still held alive as prisoners in Indochina,” a House committee concluded in 1976—the rumors continued to gain steam, creating a thriving industry of hucksters pitching tales of live sightings, phony dog tags, and doctored photos purporting to prove that Americans were still being held prisoner. And to date, the silver screen is the only place living American POWs have ever been found, in films such as the hugely popular Rambo: First Bl
ood Part 2, Uncommon Valor, and Missing in Action.20
These movies portrayed the effort to recover “forgotten” POWs as a middle finger to an ungrateful public that turned against not just the war, but also the soldiers themselves. In Uncommon Valor, Col. Cal Rhodes, played by Gene Hackman, tells his men, “You are thought of as criminals because of Vietnam. You know why? Because you lost. . . . That’s why they won’t go over and pick up your buddies.” John Rambo asks before going in to take care of the problem all by himself, “Do we get to win this time?”
While the movies catered to the idea that living Americans were still being held captive, the now-familiar black flag featuring the silhouette of a blindfolded prisoner in front of a guard tower over the words “You are not forgotten” was emblazoned not just with the letters POW, but also MIA—missing in action. The term applies to all unrecovered remains, even in cases where the subject is known to be deceased. On the heels of Ronald Reagan’s highly successful effort to revitalize public support for the military following Vietnam, Congress gave its official imprimatur to the POW/MIA flag, still the only banner to be so recognized besides the Stars and Stripes.
In 1992, Congress created the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF-FA), specifically to focus on Vietnam. A year later it authorized the creation of the Defense POW/MIA Office (DPMO), to provide “centralized management of prisoner of war/missing in action (POW/MIA) affairs within the Department of Defense.”21 The CIL and JTA-FA were merged in 2003 as the Joint POW/Accounting Command (JPAC).
There was never any mistaking that Vietnam catalyzed all this renewed attention. Despite the fact that MIAs from World War II and Korea outnumber those from Vietnam by twenty to one (not even including those believed lost at sea), most of the attention was focused on the latter conflict. Though tasked with accounting for the missing from all of America’s wars, as of 2013, JPAC had identified 0.6 percent of the thirty-five thousand remains deemed “recoverable” from World War II and 2.9 percent of those from Korea, compared to 16 percent of MIAs from Vietnam.
Bones of My Grandfather Page 6
