After six days at Mele Bay, the massive convoy of troop transports, destroyers, support vessels, minesweepers, and carriers known as Task Force 53 steamed away from the New Hebrides. Even then, the marines knew only that they would be attacking a strongly defended atoll, and rumors that they were going to retake Wake Island spread like a virus throughout the convoy. They were gung-ho about that mission, relishing the chance to avenge Maj. James P.S. Devereux and the rest of the marines who had valiantly defended the island before surrendering to the Japanese on December 23, 1941.
Had anyone bet on the actual destination, a tiny islet named Betio on an unheard-of atoll called Tarawa, his wallet would have been fat indeed on the eve of battle. “Wake,” journalist Johnston wrote, “might have been easier, at that.”20
But after nine months of boredom interrupted by bouts of malaria, loneliness, and an embarrassing arrest, Sandy Bonnyman was eager to get back into the fight. Lt. Ed Bridgeford, a navy corpsman sailing aboard the Heywood as it zigzagged along a northwesterly course toward Tarawa, “had never seen Sandy so happy or more excited and there was never a more enthusiastic Marine. . . . He raved over the Corps, his three blondes, and Santa Fe.”21
Roy Holland Elrod, who would later retire from the Marine Corps as a lieutenant colonel after a long career, was a first lieutenant with the 8th Marines weapons company who got to know my grandfather during their twenty-six days together on the Heywood. At twenty-four, Elrod was also considered an “old man” by most of the marines.
“We were both sort of outsiders, so we fell in and did a lot of talking,” Roy said at age ninety-six. “I found out he roamed around northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, and so had I. We’d even been to some of the same Navajo turquoise mines. . . . He told me he was a real, old-time prospector.”22
Sandy was hopeful that the coming battle might be the Second Division’s last before respite in Hawaii and maybe even a trip home for Christmas. Navy Capt. Harry Price, a doctor and family friend from Knoxville who had visited my grandfather in the hospital that summer, had assured him that officer rotations all but guaranteed him a trip home within three to six months.23
“I am counting like everything on Christmas ’43 at home and can already taste that ham and hominy,” my grandfather wrote his Mumsie.24
On November 14, Navy Adm. Harry Hill sent a message to the transports in Task Force 53: “This is the first American attack of a strongly defended atoll and with northern attack and covering forces, the largest Pacific operation to date.” The transmission included maps of a bird-shaped island, code-named Helen, with landing beaches designated Red Beach No. 1, Red Beach No. 2, Red Beach No. 3, Green Beach, and Black Beach.
Five days later, Sandy took Communion and made his last confession on the decks of the Heywood. While they lay on their bunks late that night, he told his friend 1st Lt. Tracy Griswold that “a lot of shooting” had shown him that he “hadn’t been as good as possible to all his family.”25 After the war, he said, he was going to change his life.
“Baby, there is a day coming when we can make up for the unnatural lives we have been living,” he had written to Jo, “when we can relax and really feel some deep emotions besides hate, fear, anger.”26
“I can’t imagine . . . that Sandy ever did a mean thing in his life, but then, we all have our moments of remorse,” wrote Griswold27 (who was to become a tiny footnote to history years later, when a researcher offered evidence purporting to show that he had exhumed the bones of Amelia Earhart on Saipan).28
The first shift for the marines’ pre-battle “breakfast”—by tradition, steak and eggs, though that wasn’t always the case for everyone—arrived at ten o’clock on the night of the nineteenth, and there was little time for sleep. At 0320 on D-day, marines aboard the twenty transport ships of Task Force 53 anchored a mile beyond the narrow channel into Tarawa’s lagoon assembled on deck. They descended hemp nets to waiting Higgins boats and LVTs as another seventeen fire-support vessels prepared to move into position.
Since November 13, heavy bombers from bases in the Ellice Islands, carrier-based fighter planes, and light bombers had been doing their best to “soften up” Betio’s defenses, dropping some six million pounds of explosives on a square kilometer of sand.29 Many marines were relieved to hear their officers’ assurances that the engagement would be over quickly: “Before we started it was great fun. We grinned and chortled. We said, ‘There won’t be a Jap alive when we get ashore.’”30
“The Navy . . . made it sound pretty simple, so many tons of naval shells, aerial bombs, straffing [sic], Destroyer support and so on,” Griswold recalled. “The night before we landed I can remember our tactical meeting in the wardroom and Col. Bill Amie [sic; Amey, commanding officer of 2/2] telling us that he’d see us across the island in three hours after the landing.”31
First Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr. was eager to fight the enemy he’d seen coming from a decade away, get back home and turn over a new leaf. With the brilliant spray of the Milky Way overhead and the Southern Cross tilting on the horizon, my grandfather swung over the edge of the Heywood and climbed down to a Higgins boat bobbing on the black sea below.
TWELVE
BONE SHOW
APRIL 2013
After Bill Belcher declined to further excavate the site Mark Noah had considered most promising in his quest to locate long-lost Cemetery 27, Mark initiated excavations at his number-two site, the copra plant west of the shipping yard.
Mark was willing to try anything to find Cemetery 27, which some described as the “holy grail” and “lost ark” of Betio’s many mysteries, because, alone among the island’s numerous named or numbered cemeteries, no trace of it had ever been found since 1943. Mark even requested a sample of my mother’s hair, for use in an experimental “episio-electric” device that Arpad Vass of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory—a well-known but controversial figure in forensic circles—claimed could detect a DNA match to any subsurface human remains.
“It was pure science fiction,” Mark said later.
For more than five years, Mark Noah had rigorously maintained public deference and cooperation with JPAC officials, in the firm belief that the surest way to find the missing marines and bring them home was to stay in the agency’s good graces. But he didn’t have a true advocate at the agency until he met JPAC anthropologist Jay Silverstein in 2011.
“Mark had put together a crack team,” Silverstein told the New York Times. “They were innovative. They were open to new ideas. Tarawa is one of the most complex battlefields we have, and Mark was using the right composite of scientific members to piece together that puzzle.”1
But Silverstein’s efforts to bring JPAC together with History Flight for a full-scale recovery effort on Tarawa only managed to put him on the outs with more senior members of the agency, including Thomas Holland, then-scientific director of the Central Identification Laboratory.
Believing that Belcher, deputy director of the CIL, had promised to involve him the next time JPAC worked on Tarawa, Mark was surprised to learn in early 2013 that a JPAC team had been conducting excavations on Betio. After an exchange of testy emails, Belcher ended a heated phone conversation by telling Mark never to contact him again.2
Long frustrated by the agency’s glacial pace and lack of progress, inept public relations skills, internecine squabbling, and reluctance to give credit where due, Mark Noah finally decided he was done playing the good soldier.
“The CIL is so far away from the objective, and our experience dealing with them had been so negative, we finally decided there was no point to trying to work with them,” he said. “We decided, ‘Hey, we have this great opportunity, let’s not waste it.’”3
He quietly converted a small room behind the Betio Town Council hall into a lab, stocking it with shovels, picks, five-gallon buckets in Home Depot orange, wheelbarrows, and enough lumber and hardware to build sand screens. He then began approaching owners and heads of households of property on Betio
where anomalies had been detected, offering to pay them $50 a day for permission to dig, ten times the average daily wage on South Tarawa. He hired archaeologists Drew Buchner and Eric Albertson from Memphis, Tennessee-based Panamerican Consultants, Inc.; flew in willing grunts like Glenn Prentice and Harlan Glenn, a Los Angeles-based researcher who advises film companies on World War II artifacts; and recruited local men to do heavy labor. Crucially, he also persuaded the New Zealand High Commission on Tarawa, which has considerable influence with the Kiribati government, to give him a letter of support in exchange for help in locating the seventeen Kiwi and five British coastwatchers beheaded by the Japanese in 1942.
History Flight’s gang of archaeological outlaws started working in February 2013. Working ten- to twelve-hour days, seven days a week, the team failed to uncover any significant American remains for the first several months. But there were plenty of other items of interest, including a buried bunker containing Japanese remains and hundreds of small human bones and war-era artifacts.
Once the operation was up and running, Mark called and asked if I wanted to come down back to Tarawa and get my hands dirty. Of course I did.
I had more than my fill of archaeology’s apparently negligible thrills and chills during all those hot, dull hours hanging around JPAC digs in 2010. The antidote to such tedium, I learned not long after returning in April 2013, was working the end of a shovel, hauling buckets of wet sand, and endlessly shaking crude sifting screens beneath a relentless tropical sun. The work was exhausting, filthy, sweaty—and deeply satisfying.
By the time I arrived, Drew and Eric systematically gridded out and conducted the excavation of several neatly carved “units” in a 500-square-foot sandy yard between two ramshackle family compounds. This was the former site of Cemetery 25, just a few feet from where JPAC had recovered three marines the previous fall, based on History Flight research.
Sporting marine-like camouflage pants, an olive drab t-shirt, rough-out boots, and a camouflage boonie hat, Harlan Glenn spent most of his time in the lab cleaning up artifacts and remains. And videographer Marc Miller was back for the first time since 2010, hired to shoot video of History Flight’s outlaw excavations.
Ted Somes, a seventy-two-year-old US Coast Guard veteran, also stopped by to help for a couple of hours each morning. He had come to Betio to pay respects to his cousin, Pfc. Arthur D. Somes Jr. Somes’s helmet liner had been discovered inside the remains of an amphibious vehicle unearthed by Australian sewer workers in 1979, along with the remains of three marines, none of whom turned out to be Somes. Ted’s family had long ago buried remains identified as his cousin’s at Arlington National Cemetery, learning of the helmet lining only years later from a newspaper story. Now Ted had come to Tarawa, courtesy of a grant from Wish of a Lifetime, to fulfill his dream of playing “Taps” for his cousin.
“I had a feeling of closeness to my cousin that I had never felt before,” he said later. “Maybe it was because I was on the ground where he fought and died. Maybe because there were some of his bones still there. Maybe his spirit needed a family member to come and say thank you, that we care and are not bitter about his death but want to remember his life and sacrifice.”4
(Arthur Somes is in fact buried at Arlington, according to JPAC. His helmet liner was, for unknown reasons, associated with a skull subsequently identified as that of Pfc. Thomas Scurlock.5)
Through Ted I met Kantaake Kerry Corbett, a Tarawa native who was serving as his guide, driver, and honorary granddaughter for the duration of his stay (tired of Westerners pronouncing her softly lyrical name Kentucky, she introduced herself as Kerry). Then twenty-eight, Kantaake is a rare dual American-Kiribati citizen, daughter of an itinerant California surfer named Chuck Corbett and Toka Rakobu of Bikenebeu village on South Tarawa. I would learn a lot from her in my next couple of trips to the islands.
Every morning our crew would meet History Flight’s steadfast local labor crew, four young men named Aman, Titang, Eru, and Katerak. As soon as we started working, crowds of cheery children would gather from around the densely packed neighborhood and the pervasive odor of pig manure, fish guts, and burning garbage seared our nostrils all day long.
Many days we shoveled and sifted literally hundreds of tons of wet sand (3,200 pounds per cubic yard) and endured the misery of hacking away at indestructible waste in buried trash pits, only to find nothing. But sometimes, things got interesting. Beneath what turned out to be metal-pipe fencing that had bordered Cemetery 25, we came upon five American helmets, blackened and encrusted with coral sand after seven decades in the ground. The surrounding earth soon yielded scores of small hand and foot bones, left behind when Army Graves Registration Service removed remains in 1946, as well as spoons, olive-drab plastic toothbrushes, glass bottles filled with oily brown insect repellent, ammo clips, and countless pieces of rubberized canvas ponchos.
One morning, Drew let loose a rebel yell and shouted, “We’ve got a dog tag!” Children, both naked and clothed, joined in our celebratory eruption.
The perfectly legible stainless steel dog tag had belonged to a Lt. Col. D.K. Claude. Back at the lab, Harlan delved into the literature and called on a satellite phone to read a brief passage from Joseph Alexander’s Utmost Savagery: “Japanese machine gunners killed one observer, Lt. Col. David K. Claude as he accompanied the 2nd Marines scout-sniper operations against inland strong points.”6 In addition, Time-Life journalist Robert Sherrod had noted Claude’s burial place in his 1944 book, Tarawa: A Battle. It was the most significant find in months of hard labor, a tangible connection to the battle, a name, a history.
“This is the best day I’ve ever had down here, man,” Drew said that evening, holding a dripping can of Fiji Gold as we took our accustomed sunset beach stroll.
One afternoon while sloshing back to shore after exploring some of the grounded vessels on the reef, I spotted a local man spearfishing. As he towed a jury-rigged processing float, his goggled face periodically popped up out of the water. As I waded closer, my shirt damp from a gentle squall that had drifted quickly over the sapphire waters, I eyed his makeshift barge. The man stood up and gave me a huge smile, tugging the mask to his forehead. The salty pungency of blood rose from a stack of gutted silver bonefish, a couple of puffers, and a beautiful green-and-orange parrotfish that lay fading in the sun.
“Where you house?” he said.
“Uh . . . my house? I’m from America.”
His grin spread even wider in recognition as he pantomimed digging.
“America?” he said, clapping his hands. “Bone show! Bone show!”
I don’t think most of the people on Betio understood what we were doing, or why, but the coconut telegraph was buzzing with our presence.
“This is the runway,” Kantaake shouted, waving a smooth brown arm toward the tarmac of Bonriki International Airport, where a scrum of kids kicked at a soccer ball in the rain. “You want to drive down it?”
“Absolutely!” I hollered from the back seat.
“Wait!” Ted Somes yelped. “How do you know no planes are coming?”
“Don’t worry, my American grandfather,” Kantaake said, batting her dark eyes at Ted before swerving to the right.
We were on our way to Tabon Te Keekee, a placid, simple resort owned by Kantaake’s family on the islet of Abatao, just north of the airport. Ted was in the front seat and I was hanging my head out the back window, face upturned to the warm rain. The History Flight crew, scheduled to leave the next morning on the same flight as I, was in another car behind us. After a week of sweat-intensive digging at Cemetery 25, we were all ready for a break.
Tabon Te Keekee is one of several businesses owned by Kantaake’s entrepreneurial family, including Kiribati Holidays travel agency and the Chatterbox Café near the village of Bikenebeu. The café was a welcome alternative to waiting in the stifling confines of the airport lounge, offering Wi-Fi, excellent coffee, luggage service and check-in, and shuttle rides to departing Tarawa visit
ors.
At ebb tide, the resort is a five-minute walk across smooth, algae-covered sand from the end of the road on tiny Buota. When the tide is flowing, the channel fills with emerald water and your only options are hitching a ride on a motor-powered outrigger canoe or swimming.
Here, just eighteen miles from Betio (with a local driver like Kantaake, an hour’s drive; results may vary), Tarawa is more Gilligan’s Island than noxious hellhole. Tucked away in the crook of the atoll’s elbow, Abatao is lushly jungled, sparsely populated, and surrounded by warm lagoon waters and crashing, deep-blue Pacific waves. There are no cars, feces, or twining columns of toxic smoke; all you smell is jungle and warm sand. Leaf-thatched shelters for lounging and eating and hammocks for sleeping dot the meticulously swept sandy ground in the shade of tall pandanus, coconut, and breadfruit trees. The dogs on Abatao sport shiny coats; some are even neutered.
Driving back to Betio after dark, Kantaake told me about the time she’d spent living in Reno, Nevada, when her expat father, Chuck Corbett, went home for medical treatment after severely breaking an ankle in a surfing accident. Her sister Annie came along, as did the sisters’ four young children. Annie stayed, but Kantaake brought the children back to Tarawa after about a year.
“In the US, I could get a job and make money,” she said. “But then I would have to leave my children in day care and that would almost be as expensive as the money I could make in my job. And I wasn’t raising my own children. Here I have family all around me to help. I don’t have to worry about them or pay for child care.”
She was also saddened by the insecurity and unhappiness she saw in citizens of the wealthiest, most powerful nation in history.
“They are always so afraid what will happen to them when they are old, that they will not have enough money. Here, I don’t have to worry about whether I will be taken care of when I am old. I know I will be. That’s how we are. You never have to worry,” she said.
Bones of My Grandfather Page 14
