Over the course of the next two years I continued to write and call the records center, always receiving the same Kafkaesque reply—no records—until I met Katherine “Katie” Rasdorf. Katie, a retired marine and master scuba diver from Virginia, had thousands of hours of archival research for Pacific Wrecks, Bent Prop, and History Flight, as well as JPAC and the DPMO, under her belt. Within a week of our first phone conversation, I received a fat FedEx envelope containing 275 pages of records from Sandy Bonnyman’s personnel file.
Evidently, the staff members who processed my multiple requests hadn’t bothered to check a special archive for PEPs—“persons of exceptional prominence”—where my grandfather’s documents were kept, by virtue of his Medal of Honor. I was utterly baffled that people paid to process public requests apparently didn’t know it existed.
“You have to understand,” Katie said, “most of the people answering requests at the NPRC are just minimum-wage workers. They have no idea what they are doing.”
Over the next few years, Katie Rasdorf would become indispensible in my efforts to fill the gaps in my grandfather’s story.
Almost as soon as I returned from Tarawa, the most remarkable sources of information began to open up, thanks to John and Ted’s stories on CNN. Men who’d been in the battle, or their relatives, contacted me to share their memories.
“My dad always spoke so highly of your grandfather, and they were good friends,” said George Clerou, son of Sandy’s commanding officer, Capt. Joseph Clerou. “He always talked about how he didn’t have to be there. He was there when (Sandy) died and he never forgot it. He was one of the men who recommended him for the Medal of Honor.”1
In waiting so long to undertake the quest to know my grandfather, I had lost the opportunity to interview many men who had fought beside him. So I was deeply gratified to begin hearing from men in their late eighties or nineties, members of the rapidly dwindling population of Tarawa veterans, who eagerly shared their recollections of the battle—and often, Sandy Bonnyman.
There were many over the years, including: Marvin Sheppard, a private in intelligence with Headquarters Company of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines (2/8, in shorthand), who had stood at the back of the bunker and cheered on the assault; Norman Hatch, the intrepid cameraman whose film footage became part of the 1944 Oscar-winning documentary, With the Marines at Tarawa; Ed Bale, tank commander; machine gunner Max Clampitt, long-time mayor of Hobbs, New Mexico; Japanese translator Robert Sheeks; Dean Ladd; Elwin Hart; Victor Ornelas; Roy Elrod; and others.
“He was just fearless,” said Sheppard, who said he, too, recommended Sandy for the Medal of Honor.2
I began to contact family members, seeking any and all documentary evidence of my grandfather’s life, and soon began receiving scrapbooks and letters. I mined my mother’s basement—an invaluable, if maddeningly disorganized, archive of trunks, files, and boxes—which yielded a steady stream of precious gems in the form of letters, photos, and newspaper clippings.
Fortunately, the Bonnymans were not only prodigious letter writers, but also dedicated savers of correspondence that illuminated every part of my grandfather’s life, from his childhood to his Princeton days, life in New Mexico, and the thirteen months he spent in San Diego, New Zealand, Guadalcanal, and Tarawa. I began reading dozens of letters sent by marines to the Bonnymans following Sandy’s death, a maddening paper trail of the family’s long, futile quest to learn the true circumstances of his death and have his remains brought home for burial.
Yet this rich vein of information raised as many questions as it answered: What really happened that day Sandy was killed? And what about the startling fact—I’d never heard it before—that he was initially awarded the Navy Cross, the second-highest honor bestowed on marines, despite being recommended for the Medal of Honor—and why was that decision later reversed? And of course, what really happened to his remains?
I had spent most my life content to know little about the grandfather I so admired. Now, the more I learned, the more I had to know. We might never recover his bones from the sepulchral sands of Tarawa, but I was more determined than ever to exhume him, his life, his story, from the tomb of legend.
Mark Noah wasn’t the kind of guy to let a bunch of bureaucrats interfere with his own quest to bring home Tarawa’s missing marines.
And in the weeks following my departure from Betio, JPAC had begun to backpedal from its inexplicable treatment of Mark while the team was still on Betio, going so far as to invite him to attend a September 20 repatriation ceremony in Hawaii for the remains recovered during the mission.3
At the same time, the agency soured on its relationship with filmmaker Steven Barber: “We are still on with Steven Barber but just enough to facilitate his end product. . . . Continue to stress that we are in no way affiliated with Steven Barber,” the public affairs office wrote, instructing staff not to interact with the filmmaker in any way.4
This swift reversal of fortunes led Mark Noah and others to wonder if the filmmaker had somehow been a factor in JPAC’s ill-advised attempt to freeze out History Flight. Certainly, the two men did not get along. Mark had granted Barber an on-camera interview years before, but publicly criticized the filmmaker when he posted video footage that not-so-subtly implied that he had conducted History Flight’s field work on Tarawa. In retaliation, Barber continually trashed Mark to JPAC and others, calling him “sick and disturbed,” “a certain deranged UPS pilot,” and worse.5
And JPAC couldn’t have been happy when it learned that Barber had surreptitiously agreed to film the agency’s 2010 mission on behalf of an MIA charity called Moore’s Marauders for $30,000.
“JPAC must think that I am on my own and totally independent of the Marauders, Mark Noah, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks . . . I AM STEVEN BARBER. . . . So let me make perfectly clear. I AM A MARAUDER!!! But I am a COVERT MARAUDER . . . A STEALTH MARAUDER . . . I will deny any involvement with the Marauders or ANYONE so I can film at JPAC headquarters and in the field!!” Barber wrote in an email to Ken Moore, leader of the group. “ . . . My LOYALTY is with the guy who writes the check—110%!!!!!!!!!!!!”6
In the first half of 2012, Paul Freeman, a freelance Hollywood writer/editor—basically, a guy who rescues projects in trouble—managed to mold Barber’s footage into Until They Are Home, a follow-up to Return to Tarawa that focused on the mission to recover remains. Narrated by former Cheers star Kelsey Grammer—Barber’s claim to “have (Matt) Damon on the hook” with Clint Eastwood “right behind” having evidently fallen through7—the film never found the audience of its more unexpected predecessor.
“It was better than I expected it to be but . . . in the end I was not moved,” said Marc Miller8, who saw the movie at a May 28 screening in Los Angeles (as did Maj. Gen. Stephen Tom and civilian administrator Johnie Webb, evidently shepherding JPAC’s ill-starred partnership with Barber to the bitter end). A reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter wrote, “It feels downright unpatriotic to criticize Until They Are Home, a well-meaning but pedestrian documentary. . . . Even with its scant 66-minute running time it feels overextended.”9 The New York Times called it “just plain boring.”10
As soon as he was back in JPAC’s good graces, Mark Noah got back to work on Betio. In February 2011, he assembled an eleven-person team to conduct History Flight’s sixth trip to the island, including geophysicists, historians, and two top archaeologists with expertise in clandestine grave detection, Jennie Sturm and Dr. Chet Walker. The team used magnetometry, ground-penetrating radar, and soil analysis to survey some fifteen sites around the island.11
Among the sites examined were the yard of Petis Tentoa, who had kept American remains in his home until turning them over to JPAC in 2010; the area around a housing project built by the Taiwanese government, where the two skeletons given to JPAC in the 2010 turnover ceremony had been found; the center of the campus for Kiribati’s Marine Training Center, where a historical map indicated that six bodies were buried; and an area believed to
be Cemetery 25 that had lit up History Flight instruments like nuclear Christmas trees.
Mark even agreed to try out a new member of the team: a big, friendly black Labrador retriever named Buster, trained in the detection of human remains.
“He was skeptical of the dog, so when we went down there he did some double-blind tests on us,” said Buster’s trainer and handler Paul Dostie, a former police investigator with the city of Mammoth, California.12
Mark observed while Buster sniffed around sites where bodies had been recovered and sites where there were known to be no remains. The dog didn’t miss a beat, dropping to his “alert” position on each site where remains had been found, and ignoring the others. Buster paid no attention to pig bones littering the subsurface soil.
“He was impressive,” Mark admitted. “We let him search where we knew there were remains and exactly where they were to test him, and he was dead on.”
Buster came to Tarawa sporting his own “bone”fides. Credited with solving numerous crimes, sniffing out some two hundred sets of remains, and sporting a thick portfolio of media stories, he was arguably the biggest celebrity on the team. Dostie first trained him to be an avalanche rescue dog. He later became interested in forensic work and began to train Buster in dilapidated Nevada cemeteries.
“Decomposing bones give off a unique chemical signature that rises up through the soil, and Buster can detect it even after they have been buried for decades,” Dostie said. “Most cadaver dogs are only trained to detect soft tissue, but I have trained Buster to alert to much older remains.”13
In his illustrious career, Buster had been brought in to search for Americans shot down in the Battle of the Bulge and victims of the Charles Manson family, and to search the home of a long-dead man suspected in the eerie, unsolved, 1947 murder of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, the infamous Black Dahlia.
On Betio, Buster alerted near a two-story, tin-sided building used to process copra (dried coconut), not far from the pier. Mark had interviewed locals who helped build the processing plant, who said they had dug up human remains, leading him to believe that Cemetery 27, where my grandfather was supposed to be buried, might be nearby. Buster sniffed out the whole area, alerting around a large cistern, east of the building, and even on the concrete pier, where the workers said they had deposited dirt containing human remains. All that was encouraging, but Mark gently reminded me that the odds against finding Sandy Bonnyman were immense.
“If we are ever able to excavate there at all, we might find a complete, forty-person cemetery, or we might find traces of a cemetery that was carved up and dumped into fill,” he told me. “Maybe your grandfather really is one of the unknowns buried in the Punchbowl.”14
In September 2011, Mark got a call from JPAC civilian administrator Johnie Webb, who wanted to know if a History Flight team might arrange to be on Betio October 5 and 6 because, as Mark put it, “Hint, hint, there might just be some important people from JPAC there at the same time.” Webb asked that the whole thing be kept on the down low.
“He was a real positive force. He realized that we knew more about where the graves are than they did,” Mark said. “He was interested in getting that information and doing it in a way that didn’t involve all the factions in the pointless battle constantly going on at JPAC. We said we’d be there, but I said, ‘Please don’t send Dr. Fox.’”15
They didn’t. Instead, they sent archaeologist Jay Silverstein. Silverstein earned his PhD from Pennsylvania State University and had been with JPAC since 2002. He was an expert in geographic information systems with a long interest in military archaeology and ancient Greco-Egyptian and Mesoamerican societies. As an adjunct faculty member at the University of Hawaii, he was co-leader of a team that discovered a 2,300-year-old temple built by Ptolemy II in Philadelphus, Egypt.
Silverstein had in recent years found himself on the wrong side of factional fighting at the Central Identification Laboratory and JPAC. He had been scheduled to lead the 2010 Tarawa expedition and met with Mark Noah in April to discuss possible excavation sites. But he returned from that meeting to find that he’d been replaced by Fox. Silverstein’s advocacy for History Flight’s work would have him in the doghouse with some higher-ups for years to come.
During the October 2011 mission, Mark, Chet Walker, Paul Dostie and Buster, and volunteer land surveyor Paul Schwimmer spent twelve to fourteen hours a day sweating under the merciless equatorial sun, trying to cram in as much work as they could in just a few days. They checked out a couple new sites and went back over sites JPAC never got to in 2010, including the area around the copra plant. Mark advised JPAC that he thought the area in a shipping yard on Betio’s north side, where the remains of Herman Sturmer had been found in 2002, was a prime candidate for exploration.
The joint mission left Silverstein determined to convince his skeptical colleagues that History Flight wasn’t made up of weekend warriors or unethical bone hunters, but rather, serious professionals. After making his case to JPAC boss Maj. Gen. Stephen Tom that the agency should send teams to work jointly with History Flight on two sites, including a possible location for Cemetery 27, he told Mark Noah that he expected it to happen by April 2012.
Despite Silverstein’s advocacy, JPAC still wasn’t giving Betio the attention it deserved. A group of children found a skeleton in an area just south of Betio’s “Bird’s Beak,” where the team unearthed a substantial pile of human remains in a trash pit. They turned the remains over to local police, where they languished for many months before they were finally picked up by JPAC; higher-ups nixed Silverstein’s request to further excavate the site.
The team also surveyed a site where a local man said he had dug up a skeleton in his yard, which he believed to be American, based on a canteen found with the remains. When they plotted GPS coordinates, they found the site was right in the center of the original Cemetery 25 location. The Army Graves Registration Service had repatriated dozens of remains from the area in 1946, but four marines listed as having been buried there were never found.
History Flight spent much of 2012 conducting successful recoveries in Europe. Mark had taken particular interest in the Hunconscious, a B-26 that went down in Belgium with a six-man crew that were still MIA, after reading The Dead of Winter by Bill Warnock. Mark sent a reconnaissance team in June 2011 to examine a crash site found by a German forestry worker in the forest of Ardennes. In April he led a team to excavate the site. They were a long, long way from the heat and squalor of Betio.
“We encountered rain, fog, ice pellets, and snow,” Mark said. “The guys wet-screening the debris wore heavy-duty rain gear. I thought wearing a leather bomber jacket would do, but I ended up contracting pneumonia.”16
The work yielded seven sets of remains, which were duly turned over to JPAC. But Mark was once more beginning to lose his patience with the agency.
“They’ve totally let the World War II ball drop. They spend four or five or six million recovering a fighter plane wreck from Vietnam, but when I asked them how many missions they’d sent to Europe, they said three,” he said. “And it literally took an act of Congress and political arm twisting to get them even engaged on Tarawa.”17
In October 2012 JPAC sent a team to Tarawa, led by anthropologist Dr. Bill Belcher, a fourteen-year agency veteran and one of its most respected archaeologists. Belcher earned his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a focus on the fishing economy and trade among ancient Indus peoples in southwest Asia. Since coming to JPAC he had led recovery missions in England, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea, Palau, and North Korea. By the time he first met Mark Noah on Tarawa, he had risen to deputy director at the Central Identification Laboratory.
Like most of his colleagues, Belcher had long been skeptical of non-agency personnel hunting for MIAs, especially when it came to World War II remains.
“I’m leery of people who aren’t trained to do forensic archaeology. There are a
lot of people out there who are basically ambulance chasers, who do it for the notoriety or because they think it’s a way to get a lucrative contract from Uncle Sugar,” he said. “Some are after artifacts to sell, and most of them don’t have the right training or the right perspective.”18
But like Silverstein, Belcher had concluded that History Flight fell into none of those categories. Mark Noah had not only raised more than two million dollars in private funding—$869,000 in 2010 alone—but also had sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money into the project. He was smart enough to know what he didn’t know, and, like the nonprofit organizations Bent Prop and Pacific Wrecks, paid top experts and professionals to do his fieldwork. After four years it was clear to Belcher that Mark wasn’t in it for fame, glory, or riches, and he wasn’t a grave robber bent on selling bones and artifacts on eBay.
The October 2012 joint mission looked like it might be the beginning of a beautiful relationship. JPAC recovered three sets of intact remains, as well as partial remains, beneath a pigsty in the area associated with Cemetery 25—right where History Flight’s research, and Buster’s nose, had predicted they’d hit pay dirt.
Belcher also conducted exploratory excavation at all five sites History Flight had identified as potential Cemetery 27 locations. His team found no indication of human remains near the copra plant, but three shallow trenches in the shipping yard, adjacent to where remains had been recovered in 2002, turned up human arm and hand bones, shreds of marine poncho, a spoon, and a canteen cup.
Mark was excited by the finds, but when he urged Belcher to “throw a wider blanket” and dig deeper, at least down to the water table, the archaeologist demurred. “There’s nothing here,” he said, according to Mark. “You’re just showing me empty holes.”19
Belcher “categorically” denied using those words.
“I was just saying, ‘There needs to be more (survey) work done here. Otherwise we are just chasing our tails,’” he told me.20
Bones of My Grandfather Page 11
