“The Japanese threatened us and we hated them. We feared them. But my father wanted to help the Americans because he knew they were our friends,” the old man said, turning to me. “We were very grateful. We saw that marines gave their life to save the people of Kiribati. So I thank you for your grandfather.”5
Over the next days, I conducted myself on a grand tour of Betio. I started with the broad, fringing reef on the lagoon side, hoping to gain some perspective on just how far the marines had been forced to walk into withering Japanese fire that first day.
When I reached the crumbling seawall west of the pier, the pale, mucky reef lay exposed at low tide, littered with tires, tangles of fabric, diapers, mangled appliances, and distant hulks of grounded vessels. Just offshore, children played around the turret and barrel of the medium Sherman tank Cobra, remarkably well preserved but still jammed into the shell-hole where it foundered during the battle.
As I prepared to walk out to the farthest edges of the reef, a young guy wearing a golf shirt, shorts, and Keen sandals approached, obviously an American.
“What brings you here?” he asked.
I gave my well-practiced thirty-second elevator speech.
“Wow. You’re Bonnyman’s grandson.”
He introduced himself as Jeremy Shiok, a thirty-four-year-old writer from Alaska. Like me, he was trying to trace his grandfather’s steps during the war. Two grandsons of Tarawa marines had come to walk the infamous reef at the same moment, wearing the same shoes and even sporting the same camera. We scrambled down the seawall and began sloshing through the hot, ankle-deep water.
The reef at low tide looked and smelled as dead as it was. The only visible life were humps of sickly brown seaweed, a few small, drab fish, sea cucumbers coated with muck, and a handful of starved-looking white birds.
About twenty minutes later, we were standing in hip-deep water about thirty yards from where the reef dropped away into deeper, darker water. It had been a hot, slow slog in sandals and shorts; how much worse it must have been to slosh through chest-deep water wearing heavy herring-bone cotton twill utilities and lugging fifty pounds of gear while being raked by fire from machine guns from six hundred yards away.
Walking back to the beach, I learned that Jeremy had been completely unaware of JPAC until he’d checked in to Mary’s. Since then he’d been eating, drinking, and hanging out with the team, and Major Osorio had given him carte blanche to visit dig sites and take photos. I told him my reception had been a little different, so far. He also told me that when he’d asked Dr. Fox about the possibility of locating the remains of my grandfather, the archaeologist barked, “Fuck Lt. Bonnyman. I’m not out here to find a Medal of Honor winner.”
“I can see where you’d be pissed off at being treated like you’re some kind of outsider or suspicious plant,” he said. “You’re a family member of someone whose remains are still buried on the island somewhere; they should treat you like one.”6
The truth is you can see just about all the interesting remnants of the battle in a day’s wandering around Betio. But I took my time, walking every beach, climbing atop the big guns, and snooping out three surviving steel pillboxes and the remains of amphibious vehicles. I started to enter several concrete bunkers, including Admiral Shibasaki’s command post, but quickly abandoned my exploration when it became apparent they were used as a public latrine. I even went out to the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart convent. Mother superior Sister Margaret Sullivan, who has lived there for fifty-six years, showed me wartime letters from nuns and the ominous warning to locals posted by the Japanese when they arrived in 1941.
“You’ll have to sign our book before we eat,” she said. “Now we can say that Bonnyman’s grandson came to visit us. People know that name, you know.”7
All that was interesting, but from the moment I decided to follow my grandfather’s footsteps on Tarawa, there was no doubt what I most wanted to see: the enormous concrete blockhouse where he’d been killed, which was known as Bonnyman’s Bunker. John and Ted from CNN wanted to be there to capture my words and expressions as I explored, so we drove there one evening before dinner.
In November 1943, it stood about thirty yards inland from the lagoon, perhaps three hundred feet east of the Japanese pier. Fifty-six feet by forty-nine feet, its three-and-a-half-foot-thick, steel-reinforced concrete walls were fifteen feet high. The entire structure had been shored up with coconut logs and railroad ties, then covered over with hundreds of tons of sand, turning it into a nondescript mound that betrayed no hint of what might lie beneath to passing Navy bombers. Only after the fighting did the Americans discover it housed the island’s main power generator.
Today, thanks to landfilling, the blockhouse lies about a hundred yards from the seawall. Its sand covering and other fortifications long gone, the lichen-blotched walls jut straight up from the coral sand, so it appears far more imposing than it did during the battle. A seven-foot-wide passageway runs the length of the east-facing wall, leading to a heavy iron door, behind which lie the huge, high-ceilinged generator room and two smaller administrative rooms on the north side. There are no windows, but a ragged hole gouged from the west wall, now covered with a heavy metal grate, was the conduit for cables that delivered electricity throughout the Japanese fortress on Betio. The building was never intended to house troops, but by the third day of fighting, some 150 desperate Japanese rikusentai, many injured, had taken refuge inside while battle raged outside.
Today, if you don’t know where to look for it, you might never know it’s there. It lies hidden in the shadow of a sprawling breadfruit tree behind a tidy blue building housing a Betio Police substation. Before Ted had even come to a complete stop, my door was open and I was tumbling across the street, my heart racing.
“Wait!” John shouted. “I have to get the camera.”
With John on my tail, I monkeyed up a twisted fichus tree on the north side (too impatient to realize that there was a much easier way to get on top, at the bunker’s western wall). The top was covered with sand, scrubby grass and spindly trees, not to mention a good deal of garbage and many unpleasant splotches of human feces. John trailed along behind me, camera rolling, as I went from corner to corner and peered over each edge, craving, maybe even expecting, some visceral sense of my grandfather.
(Bill Niven, who was a key catalyst for JPAC’s 2010 mission, had mounted the bunker during his only visit to Tarawa in 1989, also hoping to encounter some resonance of the battle. It was much harder to climb back then, and he had to stand on his guide’s shoulders to get on top. Once there, he found what he said were casings from strafing US Navy Hellcats and .30-caliber shells from M1 marine rifles, along with many footprints in the crusted sand. Climbing up had been so difficult that Bill believed he was the first person to walk there in more than forty-five years: “I can’t prove it, but I believe those boot prints in the sand had to come from the marines who were up there during the battle,” he told me.8 Chalk it up to wishful thinking; rain and wind would have erased all traces of the marines within weeks, or even days, of the battle.)
If I found the top of the bunker disappointing, the interior was even more disheartening. There was little light, but I could see that it was being used as a dump of sorts. Reams of office paper spilled across the floor and plastic buckets teetered in stacks of forty or fifty between cobweb-draped bicycles and spears of rusted rebar that had fallen from the crumbling ceiling. A faint, foul order drifted out from the shadows. There was nothing here to illuminate what had happened the day my grandfather died.
When we emerged from the passageway, a smiling young woman in a checkered police cap was waiting for us. She politely inquired about our interest in the bunker, in excellent English. I zipped through my elevator speech.
“Oh yes,” Constable Mareta Hinokua said excitedly. “I know this story. Your grandfather killed one hundred Japanese. He went inside and shot them all.” It was the first of many Rambo-amplified versions of the legend I would
hear from local residents over the next several years.
Then, as casually as if she were offering us a glass of water, the constable said she’d be happy to show us some “American bones” they’d been keeping at the station, if we were interested. We certainly were. A few minutes later, we were peering down at a jumble of brown, white, and gray bones—femurs, ulnas, vertebrae, pieces of skull. Mareta informed us a man and his son had come across them while digging a trash pit a couple of months earlier—these were the remains discovered in July by Temoana and his father, Tekinaa. The police had been expecting the Americans to collect them for weeks, but they had not come.
“Perhaps you would like to take them?” she offered sweetly.
I briefly imagined the thanks I’d receive from the JPAC team as I handed them over before coming to my senses. They already thought I was—what? A spy, a plant, a meddling interloper?—and I could just imagine what Ray Osorio would make of my gesture. I told Mareta that I’d report the remains to JPAC, and surely they’d pick them up in no time.
Before we left, we walked out to the concrete seawall, perhaps not far from where Sandy Bonnyman came ashore. The eastern sky was now deepening to purple as wind-driven wavelets rolled in from the turquoise lagoon. John quietly lifted the camera to his shoulder and Ted asked if I could sense anything of my grandfather’s presence, here or at the bunker where he’d been killed. I really wanted to, but what had I expected? A ghost?
“No,” I said. Then, after a pause: “I do keep thinking about what it must have been like for all of them, not just my grandfather, as they plowed toward the island under heavy fire and hunkered down by the seawall . . . But you can’t know what that’s like, unless you live through it. There’s no way.”
It wasn’t going to make CNN Headline news, but it was the truth.
That night, we arrived at Aboy’s Chinese restaurant in beautiful, downtown Betio just as the JPAC crew was leaving. I told Lee Tucker about the bones at the police station, and he led me over to a new SUV so I could tell Capt. Nordman and Dr. Fox in person. They weren’t exactly appreciative.
“We know already. We’re working to coordinate with the police for transfer,” Nordman said tersely. “Please just leave this to the team.”
“For fuck’s sake,” I fumed as they drove away. “How was that not ‘leaving it to the team’? And who needs ‘coordination’? I could walk over there right now and they’d ‘transfer’ those bones to me, no questions asked.”
“Sorry about that. I don’t know why they acted that way,” Tucker said. “But you did the right thing.”
I learned later that History Flight also had done the right thing: When Kautebiri heard about the bones through the coconut telegraph, he reported it to Mark, who instructed him to take them to the police. He promptly emailed JPAC to let them know the remains were waiting for pickup and provided GPS coordinates for the gravesite. “Thought you would want to know about it before they disappear like so many others have,” he wrote, alluding to remains he’d had to rescue from a local resident’s porch.9
He offered to have Kautebiri show the team the exact spot where the bones had been found, as well as the location where Mark had found two skeletons in April.
JPAC waited until near the end of the two-month mission to collect the bones from the police station. The team never sought out Kautebiri or laid an eye on the sites where three sets of likely American remains recently had been unearthed.
As my time on Tarawa began to dwindle, Lee Tucker approached me to apologize for the way I’d been treated, which he blamed on what he called “bad intel” from headquarters in Hawaii. “Someone,” he said, had given his superiors the impression that I was working “undercover” for Mark Noah.
“But why would Mark Noah need a spy?” I asked.
Tucker said he couldn’t say anything more.
Mark Noah and JPAC had, so far as I knew, enjoyed a cooperative relationship. But I would soon learn otherwise.
Mark had met with officials from both JPAC and DPMO in March, April, and June to discuss History Flight’s research in advance of the August-September mission. During a June meeting with civilian administrator Johnie Webb and archaeologist Gregory Fox, Mark had raised concerns about a possible “9-meter range of error” in his coordinates, due to discrepancies between the different GPS systems used by History Flight and JPAC. With the agency’s blessing, he obtained the necessary permits from the Kiribati government and planned a June trip to resurvey his sites on Betio.10
But shortly thereafter, the Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs abruptly revoked the permits.11 Mark was put on a “no land” list and he was told that if he showed up, he would be forced to return to Fiji.12
“I cannot see the point of having a private organization meddling with our procedures saying they should be here because they prepared an outstanding report,” a Kiribati official wrote in an email.13
But History Flight was hardly “meddling.” Mark had dutifully respected JPAC’s authority for years, openly sharing the fruits of his privately funded research. History Flight had repeatedly protected remains found by locals, turning them over to the government until JPAC could collect them. And less than a week before my departure for Tarawa, Mark was receiving emails from a JPAC scientist proposing that they co-author a paper for presentation at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in February 2011.14
Then, inexplicably, he had been declared persona non grata and banned from the island, and JPAC’s public affairs office began seeing plots where there were none. Ironically, it was only after Osorio declared his suspicions to me that I began to email Mark Noah about what was happening.
Mark did not go gently into exile, and unbeknownst to me, he had been emailing JPAC leaders, demanding to know why Osorio had made things difficult for Marc Miller, whom they’d approved to film the mission, and why they’d decided to treat a family member of a Tarawa MIA—me—as some kind of suspicious intruder. He also wanted to know why Dr. Fox had allegedly barked, “Fuck Lt. Bonnyman,” in response to a question from Jeremy Shiok. (JPAC did not respond to several requests to interview Fox, but other staff members have told me that he made the remark.15)
Mark’s emails, in other words, not anything I said, had somehow been interpreted by JPAC as me “throwing around” the name of my grandfather.
After two months on Betio, the JPAC team flew back to Hawaii with the remains received at the August 11 turnover ceremony and the bag of bones from the police station, all previously reported to JPAC by History Flight, and a skeleton unearthed by Betio resident Petis Tentoa in his garden, which he’d lovingly stowed inside his thatched-roof home for more than a year. (“To us,” he said, “he was like family.”)
With little to show for the reported $500,000 mission, Osorio publicly blamed an unnamed “private group” (History Flight) that had provided faulty site coordinates.16
Mark Noah wasn’t the only one to wonder if JPAC had actually wanted the mission to fail all along, to shake off a pesky “avocational”—professional archaeology’s term for non-professionals who dabble in the field—and escape unwanted attention from Congress and the media. CNN reporter Ted Rowlands initially accepted JPAC’s claim that History Flight’s research was not up to snuff, but later came to see the whole mission as a farce, perhaps even a deliberate misdirection.
JPAC, Ted said, was “spending millions of dollars a year flying around looking for jawbones in Cambodia when you’ve got this gold mine on Tarawa. . . . Why wouldn’t they go for the mother lode? I’ll tell you: They didn’t like the congressional mandate, being told what to do.”17
Ted also believed that JPAC had violated Mark Noah’s constitutional rights.
“They absolutely prevented him from entering the country while they were there. The net ramifications are that taxpayers spent millions (sic) on that trip, which yielded nothing, just because they didn’t want him there to take credit,” he said. “But they were happy to use (History Flight’s 2009) report, i
ncluding the GPS coordinates, even as they went out of their way to . . . take away the rights of a U.S. citizen.”18
JPAC may have hoped that a high-profile failure to recover American remains from “several sites publicized by History Flight”19 would be enough to discredit and discourage Mark Noah. But they just made him mad—and more determined than ever.
I enjoyed that first trip to Tarawa. But what I’d seen of JPAC left me feeling disillusioned and doubtful that the lost marines of Tarawa would ever be found.
EIGHT
ROUGH AND READY
1930–1942
Having jumped the silver-plated tracks of an Ivy League education and the lucrative career his father had prepared for him, my grandfather went in search of action and adventure.
On December 8, 1931, he passed the entry examination for the US Army Air Corps, and on June 28 the following year he was enrolled as a cadet in pre-flight school at Randolph Field outside San Antonio, Texas. Sandy had always been what we now call an “adrenaline junkie,” and learning to fly military aircraft in 1932 offered plenty of thrills and danger. That year, 50 fliers, most of them trainees like Sandy, were killed, and 89 were injured in 423 crashes.1 Still, as one family friend remarked, Sandy was “so steady of nerves that he ought to make a grand pilot.”2
But adventure was only part of what drove him to become a pilot.
“I joined the Air Corps because I thought we were going to fight the Japs,” he wrote in 1943. “Everyone thought I was crazy to say in 1932 that such an insignificant people would dare tackle the mighty United States. . . . Ten years preparation and if we had had to do this job at all we would at least be able to see the end of it in sight.”3
But less than two months after beginning his training, Sandy was busted back to civilian ranks. According to oft-repeated family legend—it’s the kind of tale that’s just too good not to be true—he was dismissed from the Flying Cadet Detachment for “buzzing the towers” during training flights. “He was,” wrote Joseph Alexander, who repeated the story in Utmost Savagery, “too free a spirit.”4
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