It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that a sibling rivalry developed between DPMO and JPAC. The two organizations constantly schemed and skirmished over turf, influence, reputation, and funding, resulting in inefficiency, redundancy, and a failure to meet goals set by Congress for the recovery of tens of thousands of remains.22 It would take more than a decade for the Department of Defense to separate the squabblers, or rather, bring them together.
But while they squabbled, private, non-governmental organizations such as the Bent Prop Project, Pacific Wrecks, MIA Hunters, and History Flight were quietly stepping into the breach, setting the stage for a sea change in how America searches for its missing war dead.
SIX
FIRST LANDING
AUGUST 2010
I was thrilled when the day for my departure for Tarawa finally arrived. But soon enough, my excitement would turn to bafflement as I found myself caught in the crossfire of dysfunction that characterized JPAC.
As my plane rose from the runway at Denver International Airport on August 8, I found myself thinking about my grandfather’s much more convoluted journey to Tarawa: trains from Albuquerque to Phoenix to San Diego; sailing to New Zealand; first combat on Guadalcanal; steaming toward Tarawa; a gut-jarring ride on a rickety transport across lagoon and reef; and finally, sloshing through chest-deep water into a hellscape of smoke and flying ammunition. As my stomach churned with excitement and anticipation, I imagined those same emotions were among the many he felt during those last, tense hours before landing. He was, after all, a US Marine, and this was exactly what he’d been seeking when he left his comfortable life behind to fight the enemy.
More than twenty-four nearly sleepless hours later, I was pressing my face to the window of a creaky Air Pacific 737, peering down at the pale emerald waters of the lagoon surrounding the narrow necklace of Tarawa Atoll, surrounded by the dark cobalt expanse of the open Pacific Ocean.
Clusters of children and teenagers waved from the edge of the long, unfenced runway as we taxied to the terminal. Bonriki International Airport wasn’t officially “international,” lacking, among other attributes, anything resembling perimeter security. Whenever planes were not landing or taking off—which was almost always; the only traffic was twice-weekly Air Pacific flights from Fiji and arrivals and departures by Kiribati Airways’ island-hopping commuter flights every couple of days—kids played soccer, mobs of teenagers flirted, families picnicked, and dogs trotted across the convenient concrete expanse of runway.
During a seven-hour layover in Fiji, I had met two CNN journalists and an independent videographer who were headed to Tarawa to document the renewed search for the missing marines. CNN’s Ted Rowlands, tall and sandy-haired, with the mandatory chiseled good looks of a TV reporter, was skeptical and drily witty; his cameraman John Torigoe had the build of an outdoor athlete and frequently flashed a broad, white smile. Marc Miller, a videographer working for Los Angeles-based Rogin Entertainment, was dressed all in khaki, as if headed out on safari. Not eager to spend seven hours in the tiny, stuffy confines of Nadi International Airport for the flight to Tarawa, I persuaded Ted and John to join me in hiring a taxi to find a beach. At First Landing, a half hour from the airport, we watched the sun rise, swam, and ate a leisurely breakfast while bathing in a soft, warm, flower-scented tropical breeze.
Stepping off the plane on Tarawa some ten hours later was an entirely different kind of tropical experience. The brassy equatorial sun sizzled the top of my skull as we walked the short distance to the terminal, where a throng of smiling Kiribati people (they call themselves i-Kiribati, pronounced ee-KIDH-uh-boss) pressed against a chain-link fence, waving and shouting. Inside, slow-swooping fans did little more than stir the rank odor of sweating bodies; everyone stinks on Tarawa, but you quickly get used to it.
I shouldered my backpack as Ted, John, and Marc collected huge piles of equipment, then breezed through immigrations. Outside, children shouted, “i-Matang,” or “foreigner,” as I passed. The air, humid and soft, almost doughy, carried the scent of the sea, laced with dust, smoke, and the occasional whiff of a pigpen. Despite the heat, my skin prickled as I thought, I am the second Bonnyman ever to set foot on this place.
After Ted, John, and Marc had piled their equipment on the sidewalk, a beefy, bald i-Kiribati wearing a golf shirt, shorts, and a floppy yellow terry-cloth hat seemed to appear out of nowhere. Kautebiri Kobuti, History Flight’s local fixer, had the look of a retired Samoan football player. He introduced himself in choppy, but understandable, English, and directed the others toward a rental car and flatbed truck. I stepped up and introduced myself.
“Bunnymin?” he said, tugging a small notebook from his shirt pocket. “No . . . Mark say you coming next week—seventeenth.”
Mark Noah, through Kautebiri, had kindly made a reservation for me at the “King’s Hotel” on Betio after Steven Barber had withdrawn his invitation to find a place for me at the convent.
“No,” I said. “I’m here.”
As Kautebiri whipped out a cell phone and strode away from me, I pondered my options. I could try the convent myself; though a lapsed Catholic, I’d slept on many floors, cots, and beds at monasteries and abbeys around the world. Nighttime temperatures virtually never dropped below eighty degrees and my friend Kelle, who had served in the Peace Corps in Kiribati, had said crime wasn’t a concern, so if worse came to worst, I could probably shack up on a beach somewhere. But soon, Kautebiri returned and waved me toward the waiting convoy.
“Iss OK, iss OK,” he said. “You come with us.”
It was the first display of the man’s wizardly problem-solving abilities. Guess that’s why they call them fixers, I thought as I climbed into the back of Marc’s rented blue Toyota for the slow, bumpy ride to Betio. It was just ten miles, but it would take nearly an hour.
Seeking to escape the mildew-scented, semi-cool air blowing from the car’s air-conditioning vents, I rolled down the back window and thrust my face into a tropical breeze, mesmerized by the shallow, pellucid water stretching across a shallow reef toward foamy breakers. There were hints of the atoll’s less presentable side—scabby, skinny dogs trotting down the road, heaps of garbage baking in the sun, tires and other flotsam dotting the reef—but the downtown area of Bairiki, home to government offices and the president’s residence, was as colorful and charming as any Mexican seaside village I’d ever seen. It wasn’t until we were almost across the two-mile long Nippon Causeway between the islets of Bairiki and Betio—built by Japan in the 1980s; prior to that, most people walked across at low tide—that the smell of raw sewage and sunbaked rot punched a hole in my reverie.
“Phew! Roll up your window!” Marc barked from the front.
That smell was my introduction to Betio.
Marc paid the forty-cent toll (Kiribati uses Australian currency) and we continued along the eastern tail of the island—whose contours somewhat resemble a deceased parrot, lying on its back. We passed a park studded with Norfolk Island pine trees, where I saw my first, exhilarating reminders of the battle that took my grandfather’s life: the skeletal remains of two massive eight-inch British guns. Numerous concrete bunkers, pitted, stained, cracked, and choked with weedy growth, wallowed in yellow sand, slowly being reclaimed by the sea.
The “King’s Hotel” was named after its owner, a local Taiwanese immigrant named King Kum Kee, but the sign out front read “Betio Apartments.” Within a few years King would expand it into three-story blocks of rooms, rename it Betio Lodge, and open a second multi-story hotel down the street, Betio Lodge II. But for now, it was just a crushed coral courtyard shaded by coconut and breadfruit trees, with two long, wooden buildings containing five rooms each, and a broad, thatch-roofed patio with a microwave oven, television, and DVD player. My room was spacious and comfortable, featuring red-tile floors, an air-conditioning unit, a king-size bed, and a small kitchen. Despite a faint sulfurous odor and a trickle of deep-blue fluid bleeding from the base of the toilet, the bathr
oom and showers seemed more than adequate. Hell, I’d stayed in worse places in Wyoming.
Before he left, I reminded Kautebiri that I hoped to rent a bicycle.
“Bush bicycle?” he said (or maybe it was “push” bicycle; I was never quite sure). “Shuh, shuh, I bring you tomorrow.”
As the sun sank in the west, Marc Miller chauffeured the four of us back across the causeway to eat at Mary’s Hotel at the western tip of Bairiki, where the team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, was staying. It was, we’d been told, a decent place for dinner, and I was anxious to touch base with Maj. Ramon Osorio, the public affairs officer for the mission, whom I’d spoken to before leaving.
The menu at Mary’s featured simple entrees of white rice and chicken, fish, or vegetables in Asian-style sauces. Warned against eating local fish due to the presence of ciguatoxins in the water, which can cause vomiting, diarrhea, numbness of extremities, mouth and lips, chills and fever and muscle and joint aches—sometimes for months, with no antidote available—I went with vegetables.
As we waited for our food, clean-cut members of the JPAC team began to filter out from a two-story stack of cinder-block rooms. The young men nodded respectfully in our direction before dragging out black trunks that were packed with genuine American fare—Ruffles, Chips Ahoy, Milk Duds, Power Bars, Gatorade, Cheetos, and just about any other irresistible sugar, salt, or fat hit you might want. They spun up a DVD and started watching a Jean Claude Van Damme movie on the white wall.
After dinner we knocked on the door to Osorio’s room. Tall, slightly stooped, and paunchy, he answered with a towel wrapped around his neck and flecks of shaving cream clinging to pink cheeks. A round of hand shaking ensued.
“Now, who you’re with again?” he said, nodding at Marc Miller.
Marc produced a letter from the Osorio’s superior in Hawaii to his employer, Rogin Entertainment. But the major said he hadn’t been apprised of Marc’s visit.
“And you two are attached?” he said, wagging his chin at Marc and me.
Surprised that he’d forgotten, I reminded Osorio of our most recent phone conversation and reiterated that I was traveling, on my own, to represent my family and research a book about Sandy Bonnyman.
“Well,” the major said, “it’s my understanding you two are attached.”
For whatever reasons, Osorio was playing dumb: Just four days earlier his boss, Lt. Col. Wayne Perry, had emailed him to confirm that, “A Camera crew working with Mark Noah will be heading over on Sunday, as will Clay Evans, freelance author and family relative of Medal of Honor winner Marine Lieutenant Bonnyman. A CNN news crew from Los Angeles will arrive on Tuesday to capture a few days of activity for news reports.”1
“I just remember him looking like he had seen a ghost,” Marc recalled later. “Then he kind of backpedaled a little and told us to show up the next morning for a briefing.”2
My wristwatch buzzed me awake at five o’clock the next morning. After melting the small plastic coffee pot I’d brought with me—outlets on Betio run 240 volts, twice as hot as standard American juice—I pulled on a tank top, shorts, and a pair of running shoes in near throwaway condition, and headed east on the road toward dawn.
It was still dark, but the air was warm and humid. Unseen birds chittered in the trees and Tarawa’s ubiquitous “island cat” minibuses were already clattering along the bumpy, potholed road as I loped past the tollbooth and out onto the causeway. Once free of Betio, a breeze blew clean ocean air past my face, and by the time the red sun melted over the horizon I was crossing the lone small culvert through which water flowed between the lagoon and open sea. I was slippery with sweat and giddy with endorphins by the time I reached Mary’s Hotel on Bairiki.
Returning was less idyllic. As I approached Betio the breeze delivered the scent of burning plastic, sewer gas, and Betio’s dead and rotting reef to my nostrils. Trash-strewn weeds filled the spaces between squat cinder-block structures and makeshift shanties, and I gave a wide berth to an eager cluster of skinny dogs jockeying for access to a pitiful bitch in heat. Schoolchildren in colorful uniforms and women offered shy smiles as I passed, though the men’s faces were uniformly stony.
I didn’t realize it, but in less than an hour, I had experienced a microcosm of Betio, an island of indescribable beauty, shocking squalor, and warm welcome.
It was oppressively hot even in the shade at Mary’s when we sat down to watch a brief informational video about JPAC the next morning. The field team had already rolled out for the first dig site, located in a small, scruffy cemetery just up the road from our lodgings. Osorio ticked off our rules of engagement for the dig site: Stay away from the edges of holes, lest they collapse and compromise the soil profile; cameras and recorders must be turned off on request, no questions asked; and most emphatically, we were not to mention the name of any specific MIA.
“This process takes a long time,” Osorio explained. “We don’t want to cause any confusion for families back home.”
He paired the CNN team up with Lee Tucker, a civilian JPAC public-affairs officer, and sent them off to the site. Then he turned to Marc Miller and me to explain that we were free to follow, but would be restricted to a “designated area” beyond the perimeter. He also said that we would not be allowed to join the CNN crew that afternoon at a “turnover ceremony,” during which JPAC would take custody of two sets of remains found by locals. Between the CNN team, a videographer for the Armed Forces Network, and filmmaker Steven Barber—with whom, Osorio explained, JPAC had an exclusive contract3—there would simply be too many people to manage.
“For today, that’s the way it’s got to be,” he said, but promised to “get you guys offline so you can understand where your opportunities are going to be.”4
Puzzled, I asked the major what was going on, since he and his boss had told me just days earlier that I would have full access to the sites.
“I am a straight shooter, Mr. Evans, I’ll always look you in the eye and tell you the truth,” he said. “I don’t have any reason to think you are anything other than a fine, upstanding American. But it’s my understanding that you are attached to Mr. Miller.”5
In so many words, he was accusing me of lying. But he knew I was coming and knew Marc was filming for History Flight (which even I didn’t even know until Marc told me), so even if we had been “attached,” why would that have been a problem? It suddenly struck me how odd it was that Mark Noah himself wasn’t there, given that JPAC was excavating sites based on his organization’s expensive, painstaking research.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Does this have to something to do with Mark Noah?”
“Mr. Evans,” Osorio replied with mild exasperation, “I assure you this has nothing to do with someone else’s food fight.”
Marc took the snub with more aplomb than I did, counseling patience. As we drove back across the causeway I stared out across the jewel-hued lagoon, wondering if I’d come halfway around the world for nothing.
If you were to dig at random anywhere on Betio, chances are about ten-to-one that any bones you found would be of Japanese rather than American origins. Almost the entire Japanese garrison of more than 4,800 and their forced Korean laborers had been buried permanently on the island, compared to the four or five hundred American personnel that had been left behind.
The Japanese have never mounted an organized effort to locate and repatriate their fallen from Tarawa. The Kiribati government has turned over remains to Japan over the years, along with maps and other information about burial locations. On Tarawa, as elsewhere, when Japanese remains are unearthed from foreign battlefields, they are cremated and deposited in Tokyo’s Yasukuni Jinja Shrine, created after World War II to honor the spirits of those who died fighting for the emperor between 1868 and 1945.
Where Americans revere and lionize the likes of Audie Murphy, John Basilone, and Sandy Bonnyman for individual acts of courage and heroism, the Japanese focus more on the virtues of the coll
ective. Tarawa does not loom large in Japanese history books, but when the battle is noted, the entire Betio garrison is praised for its collective heroism, honor, and selfless devotion to the emperor; occasionally, Admiral Keichi Shibasaki, commander of Japanese forces on Tarawa, is singled out for mention.6
Despite the fact that the US Army Graves Registration Service (AGRS) officially closed its books on Tarawa in 1950, a steady trickle of American remains have turned up in the intervening years. British foreign-service officer Ron Summer dug up eight sets of remains in the 1960s while installing underground electrical cable, but was informed by US embassy officials in Fiji that “we have graves for these men in the states already.”7 British construction crews discovered thirteen sets of remains, including dog tags, in 1963; all but one were buried as unknowns at the Punchbowl in Hawaii. Australian workers in the 1970s unearthed several American skeletons, including one found in a buried amphibious assault vehicle; three were later identified, and the rest were buried as unknowns in Hawaii.8 Sewer-project supervisor Louis Eickenhout exposed two more sets of remains in 1979; Japan reclaimed one and he reburied the other at the site of the New Zealand Coastwatchers Memorial on Betio after being told by American officials that, “the US has accounted for its war dead.”9
Although at least ten other likely American skeletons were turned over to JPAC between 1999 and 2007, only one had been positively identified by 2010. In 2002, local workers installing a light pole on the north side of Betio came upon a virtually intact skeleton. A Peace Corps volunteer collected the remains, which were later taken back to JPAC’s Central Identification Laboratory on Oahu. But it would be another nine years before the agency identified the remains as those of Pvt. Herman Sturmer.
Bones of My Grandfather Page 7
