Mark Noah had always been intrigued by that 2002 discovery, because it had been recovered from general area of the island where Cemetery 27 had been located (and lost). After History Flight board member Paul Dostie posted an inquiry on a Facebook page for former Kiribati Peace Corps members, someone sent him a photo not just of the 2002 Peace Corps volunteer, but also the local workers who had dug up Sturmer’s remains. Mark gave the photo to Kautebiri, who tracked down the locals, who led him to the exact spot where they’d dug up the skeleton, in a shipping yard some one hundred feet from the boat basin. Comparing a Google map of the location with a post-battle aerial photo, Mark realized that the remains had been found in the vicinity of a long-gone monument listing the forty dead buried in Cemetery 27.
Mark immediately flagged the area as the most promising location of the long-lost burial trench where my grandfather had lain buried for more than sixty-six years.
Lt. Col. Perry in the JPAC public affairs office had told me the team would be digging on the north side of Betio, where my grandfather was buried, during my visit. But archaeologist Gregory Fox had instead set up the first dig in the dowdy little cemetery on Betio’s south side, in the shadow of a shiny steel memorial honoring twenty-two British and New Zealand coastwatchers beheaded by the Japanese on April 15, 1942 (reportedly in reprisal for strikes by an American warship and planes10). That’s where Australian worker Louis Eickenhout had told Mark Noah he’d reburied the American remains he found in 1979, even providing a photo of himself standing on the exact spot.
By the time Marc Miller and I arrived that morning, the team was busy shoveling out a neat, five-foot-deep trench in the wet, heavy coral sand. Crewmembers took turns shoveling and sifting the sand through makeshift screens. Anything anomalous was tossed into a galvanized steel bucket to be examined by Dr. Fox, the scientist in charge of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command’s first full-scale mission to Tarawa.
The archaeologist looked more like an aging Deadhead or North Shore beach bum than a member of a military recovery team. He wore grimy cargo pants; sodden, threadbare t-shirts; and a sweaty do-rag to restrain his profusion of thick, red-gray hair. He had the ruddy complexion of a man who has worked outside for much of his life.
Fox served in Vietnam as a member of the US Air Force from 1971–75. He earned a master’s degree in anthropology in 1982 from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Missouri-Columbia ten years later. He spent the first part of his career working as a cultural-resource management specialist for the National Park Service’s Western Archeological Center in Tucson, Arizona.
Fox began working as a contractor with the Department of Defense on Southeast Asian recovery missions in 1995 and in 2000 formally joined JPAC’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. In his thirty-seven-year career he had led recovery teams around the world, from the deserts and Great Plains of North America to Germany, Belgium, and remote battlefields in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, Kwajalein, and Alaska.
Of all the places he’d worked, Fox found Tarawa to be one of the most challenging. With some twenty thousand residents crammed onto less than four hundred acres of coral sand, the island of Betio is one of the most densely populated areas of the world. There are numerous dwelling places and businesses, and a loop of paved, rutted road, but much of the island is covered with low shanties assembled by island residents from bits of flotsam gleaned from the beach or ubiquitous trash piles, covered by thatches of grass and dried breadfruit leaves.
“We haven’t worked in this kind of confused, busy landscape out here. And we don’t even know how deep (any remains) may be,” Fox said while working at the team’s second dig site on the island.11
And, he noted, every one of the possible locations of Cemetery 27—where my grandfather and thirty-nine other men were believed to be buried—near the port on Betio’s north side posed even greater challenges.
“One is in a yard that is extremely packed down,” Fox said. “One has a concrete slab on top. One of them is on the road into the pier. And one is at an intersection of roads in a back neighborhood.”12
From the moment I met him, JPAC’s team leader seemed doubtful that this much-publicized mission would locate anything other than what he called “dry holes.”
The activity at the first dig site drew a huge crowd of mischievous kids dressed in cast-off Western t-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops, though some sported only a shirt, or nothing at all. Boys dangled like mischievous monkeys from the branches of a spreading breadfruit tree, a maneuver that allowed them to violate the carefully patrolled perimeter while dangling well above the annoyed Americans. Some wriggled in beneath orange hurricane fencing to snatch empty plastic water bottles, shouting in triumph and receiving high fives whenever they successfully completed a mission. High palms swayed in the sultry morning breeze while a boom box thumped alternately with hard rock, country, and Christian contemporary music.
Although Osorio had assured me that I would be “postured in order to get some decent material,” there was little to see from outside the barrier and nothing to hear but murmurs as Ted Rowlands interviewed Fox on camera. But Lee Tucker, the other public affairs officer, took pity, motioning for Marc and me to step inside the perimeter. We could stay, he whispered, so long as we remained well back from the hole and didn’t talk to the team.
Fox spent much of his time perusing detailed maps tacked up between two slender palm trees, cigarette in hand. Any time a shovel struck an anomaly in the hole, everything stopped until the archaeologist could climb down and have a look. Fox would carefully brush away sand until he could determine if the target was “osseous material” or an artifact of interest. Mostly, the items weren’t significant—pig bones, nails, lumps of encrusted black metal—though the team did accidentally exhume the remains of a local woman who had been buried in a long-decayed wooden coffin.
As much as he tried, Fox could not conceal his irritation at being in the media spotlight and, especially, his disdain for any outsider who got up in JPAC’s business.
“We encourage people to provide us information. In fact, we have an area on the website [for that]. We just hope that is as far as they go. Looking around is no big problem, but any excavation has the potential to compromise evidence,” he said.13
He seemed particularly prickly on the subject of History Flight.
“The work of Mark Noah is a starting point,” he snapped. “That’s all.”14
JPAC’s third leader on the ground on Tarawa was Marine Capt. Ernest “Todd” Nordman, who commanded a team of nine men who did the hard labor: US Navy Medic Jeff Cavallo; Army staff sergeants Jordy Anthony and Tyler Green; and six marines, Staff Sgt. Adaeus Brooks, Sgt. Andrew Pateras, Staff Sgt. Kurtis Witt, Cpl. Joe Mejia, Cpl. Svyatoslav Nemenko, and Lance Cpl. Matthew Nesting.
Short, fit, and businesslike, Nordman, twenty-eight, proudly hailed from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, hometown of conservative talk-radio superstar Rush Limbaugh, and had worked as a counselor at a Young Life Christian camp in Colorado. He served one tour in Iraq before coming to JPAC in 2009.
Nordman expressed admiration for the men who took Tarawa, as well as doubt that his fellow marines would have the discipline and toughness to win that kind of brutal, bloody fight today. Today’s corps, he said, is “coddled,” thanks to political correctness. The team under his command here, he said, were mostly “voluntolds” who had been sent to JPAC as “diggers” after underperforming in previous assignments.15
Nordman was clearly unenthusiastic about Betio, the armpit of all assignments. At least when searching for Vietnam-era remains, teams got periodic R-and-R in Bangkok, which still shimmered with decadence and the ghosts of legendary Vietnam-era escapades. Tarawa, a hot, stinking, crowded atoll overloaded with poor people, pigs, and stray dogs, offered little in the way of drunken revelry or close encounters with the exotic human offerings of Bangkok’s notorious Patpong Road.16 (Though Tarawa, like anywhere, isn’t immune
from prostitution, as I learned early one morning when a couple of drunken, giggling working girls mistakenly banged on Marc Miller’s door.)
The only member of the team who approached me was Navy Petty Officer First Class Justin Whiteman, who was filming the mission for the Armed Forces Network. He introduced himself, shook my hand, and said he’d read about Sandy Bonnyman.
“I hope for your family’s sake that your grandfather is found,” he said.
In mid-afternoon, a small, blue sedan pulled up next to the dig site. A short, brush-haired guy with a shadow of fashionable stubble tumbled out the passenger door. Whipping out a flipcam, he stepped over the hurricane fencing and made a beeline toward the trench. A tall guy in shades emerged from the driver’s side, stretched, and drifted over to the perimeter fence. He introduced himself as Matthew Hausle, a cameraman working for Steven Barber, the filmmaker hired by JPAC to document the mission, whom I had alienated when I refused to be “embedded” with him.
When Barber finally spotted me a half an hour later, he immediately launched into a litany of complaints about JPAC. He and Hausle had hitched a ride from Hawaii on military transports, but a pallet loaded with his gear had not been transferred from a C-17 on Kwajalein to the C-130 continuing on to Tarawa, and it was now back in a hangar in Honolulu. John and Ted from CNN took pity and let Barber borrow memory cards and other equipment, though they soon regretted the impulse, later complaining to JPAC that the videographer had treated them, “as disposable fools to be utilized as a free resource whenever he had problems.”17
The crew knocked off early that afternoon so they could go back to Mary’s and clean up for the turnover ceremony at 1600 hours. Tucker agreed to let me to tag along, so long as I didn’t take any pictures or notes, but Marc Miller was still a no-go.
The ceremony was held in an air-conditioned government office building on Bairiki that looked like any other cubicle warren around the world. The crew, wearing clean khakis and shirts emblazoned with the JPAC logo, crammed into a small room alongside smiling Kiribati officials. One official stepped forward and peeled back a black sheet to reveal a box containing a crisscross of white and brown human bones recovered by local residents. Nordman spoke a few brief words, signed some papers, and it was over. Marc hadn’t missed anything.
“Well,” Ted said when we reached the parking lot, “at least now we can say we saw some bones.”
It would turn out to be the high point of JPAC’s two-month mission, and though I didn’t know it at the time, they had History Flight to thank.
When we got back to the hotel I found a pink-and-white ladies’ bicycle tilted against a coconut palm in courtyard.
“Sweet ride,” Ted said.
“Hey,” I replied, “wheels are wheels.”
SEVEN
DISILLUSIONMENT AND DOUBT
AUGUST 2010
Dr. Fox declared the first dig site a “dry hole” on the third day of digging and ordered the excavation refilled. The rest of the team moved up the road to begin digging another site where History Flight researchers had detected sub-soil anomalies that might indicate the presence of human remains.
Halfway across the world, Mark Noah was going crazy. He could see from photos transmitted by Marc Miller that the team was digging outside the concrete border of the coastwatchers’ monument, despite the fact that Louis Eickenhout had buried the remains he found in 1979 inside the border, immediately adjacent to the monument itself. Mark also believed that the second site was likely to turn up empty, due to a potential discrepancy in the respective GPS systems used by History Flight and JPAC. He frantically emailed JPAC headquarters in Hawaii to notify them of the problems, but either the message wasn’t conveyed to Fox, or the archaeologist simply didn’t care.
I didn’t know any of that at the time, though I was becoming ever more curious about why Mark wasn’t there to help. After all, he was the person most familiar with the History Flight data JPAC had relied upon to identify its six potential dig sites. When I asked about Mark’s absence, Marc Miller said he’d heard he couldn’t get off work. That seemed ludicrous to me, given the time and money he’d sunk into this venture already. Something was rotten on the island of Betio; I just didn’t know what.
Later that day, as I yawned with boredom while watching the team dig the second hole in front of a low-slung blue house, a shiny new SUV rolled up behind me. Ray Osorio rolled down a window, his eyes concealed behind aviator sunglasses. He called me over.
“Mr. Evans, I’d like to remind you of the ground rules,” he said. “There’s to be no mention of any names in relation to these MIAs.”
“Yeah, I haven’t forgotten.”
“Well, it’s my understanding that you’ve been throwing your grandfather’s name around,” he said.
“What? I literally haven’t even mentioned his name to anyone on your team except your cameraman, and he was the one who asked me about him,” I said. “If that’s ‘throwing his name around,’ you guys have some crazy high standards.”
Osorio gave me that PR-guy smile of his.
“I’m just relating what I’ve been told by headquarters. So, if you would, just remember our ground rules moving forward,” he said. Then, sliding his sunglasses down his nose, he ticked his chin to my right. “That’s a pretty nice bike you’ve got there. Did you have that shipped down here from home?” Someone snickered in the back seat.
“Yeah, Ray,” I said. “I had my pink ladies’ bicycle flown eight thousand miles because I just can’t bear to be away from it for a week.”
In hindsight, I should have been grateful for Osorio’s snark, since it led to an epiphany that saved my first trip to Tarawa: Archaeology is not a spectator sport. I hadn’t come halfway around the world to be treated like an enemy spy, take juvenile insults, and watch people digging holes all day. These guys were just grunts doing a dirty, tough job in a place they hated; I was here by choice, on a deeply personal quest to find the grandfather I had admired my whole life. I didn’t need JPAC and I owed them nothing. I wasn’t on anybody’s leash and I had a whole island to explore on my pink ladies’ bicycle.
Demonstrating his seeming superpower for perfect timing yet again, Kautebiri Kobuti, History Flight’s local agent, pulled up in his car to the second dig site moments after Osorio drove away. He wanted to know if Marc Miller and I would like to meet the two local men who had unearthed what was believed to be an American skeleton earlier in the summer.
We certainly did. I climbed in Marc’s car and we followed Kautebiri north on Betio’s looping main road.
During my stay, I had noticed that the JPAC team seldom interacted with the local population. Other than going to work or venturing out, en masse, to a restaurant for dinner, the team sequestered itself inside a mini green zone where they ate American snacks and watched American movies.
History Flight took a different approach.
“Our most promising source of information is talking to locals,” Mark Noah had told me. “We get all kinds of potential leads from the local population, which knows so much more about the location of skeletons. Sometimes they’ve known about a burial site for years, having dug up bones by accident and thrown them away.”1
We pulled in behind Kautebiri on a dirt road leading into a cluster of small cinder-block houses, not far from the island’s west-facing beaches. Marc and I followed him into a yard where a large sow grunted contentedly. A skinny young man dressed in saggy black slacks and a pit-stained button-up shirt emerged from the house, followed by a man with watery blue eyes, short-cropped silver hair, and a face deeply etched with wrinkles. They were Temoana Tabokai, twenty-three, and his father, Tekinaa. The old man languidly smoked a reed-thin local cigarette as his son pointed toward a slight depression in the yard, speaking rapidly. That’s where the men had been digging a hole for garbage when they found the bones. They’d been certain the remains were American.
“When people die in Kiribati, we put them in a coffin. We found no coffin here. A
nd we knew this is a marine, because this bone,” Temoana said, tapping his thigh, “Japanese shorter. I-Kiribati shorter. Americans much longer.”2
The old man was the first person I’d met on the island with direct experience of the battle. He didn’t know when he’d been born, but recalled that he was nine or ten when the Japanese came to Tarawa, so he was probably in his late seventies.
The Japanese takeover was frightening to the inhabitants, he said. They mostly left the people alone until August 1942, when they forced the women, children, and elderly to abandon Betio and walk across the reef to Bairiki. Able-bodied men, including Tekinaa’s father, were pressed into unpaid labor clearing the jungle for the airfield, digging trenches, and hauling heavy supplies and tools for the construction of bunkers.
A few people made friends with the Japanese, Tekinaa said, but most feared them because they carried guns and entered houses uninvited to take whatever they fancied.3
“The Japanese were very cruel,” Tekinaa said. “They whipped the men and said they not work hard enough. They threatened them but they did not kill them.”4
When construction was complete, most of the men were sent across the reef to Bairiki to rejoin their families.
The islanders were both elated and terrified when American planes began bombing Betio in isolated raids starting in September 1943. When the final battle commenced on the morning of November 20, they watched in awe from Bairiki’s western beaches. Tekinaa remembered the sun rising into a sky choked with thick gray smoke, the smell of burning rubber and metal, ear-shattering explosions, and the crump of shells as they smashed craters into the sand and reef. The sickly odor of burning flesh drifted all the way across two miles of water to where they stood.
The people were fearful of what might happen next, Tekinaa told me. But the Americans were different, promising to pay the men who helped them rebuild the battered airfield. Tekinaa remembers that his father returned from his first day of work and told his family the marines were not their enemies.
Bones of My Grandfather Page 8
