Bones of My Grandfather

by Clay Bonnyman Evans

  But none of the sites yielded any notable remains.

  “I like Bill,” Mark Noah said. “But he hasn’t been on Tarawa since 1989. It looks a lot different than it did in 1943 or 1946.”4

  Earlier that summer, the ongoing scrutiny of JPAC that began in 2009—catalyzed by the lost marines of Tarawa—had become a full-blown public relations nightmare. The agency lost its fight to quash a damning 2012 internal study published by the Associated Press after it filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The report concluded the agency was “acutely dysfunctional” and possibly headed toward “total failure.” Its methods were corrupt, duplicative, and often “subjected to too little scientific rigor.”5 Anthropologist Jay Silverstein, who had alienated some of his colleagues with his advocacy for History Flight, had been the chief whistleblower, blasting his employer for using “poor methods” and failing to “conduct proper scientific work on numerous levels” on Tarawa. He accused team members of using improper excavation techniques, conducting leading interviews with a witness, wasting funds, and other alleged lapses.6

  The report lambasted the agency for developing too few investigative leads and wasting time and taxpayer money. On JPAC’s then-$100 million annual budget, the Central Identification Laboratory made just eighty identifications in 2012—a cost of $1.25 million per recovered body. Only thirty-five of those remains were the result of the agency’s own investigations; the rest were disinterred from US military cemeteries, or, as at Tarawa, discovered by locals or non-governmental organizations.

  The memo also had taken JPAC to task for prematurely declaring remains in Southeast Asia unrecoverable—an echo of Tarawa, six decades earlier—and failing to identify unknown World War II remains in its custody “when evidence suggested they could be identified.” Earlier in the year, the agency had declined to exhume and test remains discovered amid the wreckage of an American plane downed in France in 1944 and mistakenly interred in a German cemetery. The French and German governments later stepped up and positively identified the remains as those of Army Pfc Lawrence Gordon. It was yet another embarrassing PR lapse; one headline read, “The World War II Hero America Abandoned.”7

  Just ten days after the AP story was published, the US General Accountability Office released the results of an investigation that found JPAC and its sister agency, the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, were inefficient, wasteful, and burdened by ineffective leadership. Among other problems, JPAC and DPMO had for years wasted time and money skirmishing for turf and influence. “Disputes and a lack of coordination characterized the initial response of the missing persons accounting community to the increased accounting-for goal (200 per year),” the report found.8

  Perhaps most embarrassing, JPAC was forced to admit in October that its touching “arrival” ceremonies at Joint Base Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu—in which flag-draped coffins were solemnly unloaded from aircraft before the teary eyes of family members and other well wishers—were phony. Out-of-service planes were towed into position to pantomime the unloading of coffins that turned out to be empty, all for press and public consumption. Staff had long known about what they called “The Big Lie;” now the public did, too.9

  In response to all the problems, Congress directed the agency to begin identifying at least two hundred MIAs a year by 2015—and tripled its budget to $300 million a year (with that kind of “stick,” who needs carrots?).

  Still fighting resistance from many of the top scientists at JPAC, Mark Noah wondered if he could improve History Flight’s credibility by hiring experts known to JPAC who would rigorously adhere to the agency’s field and lab protocols. He quietly asked Silverstein and others to send any potential candidates his way.

  In September, Silverstein invited a young forensic anthropologist, Kristen N. Baker, to have coffee in Honolulu. Kristen had been a contract employee with JPAC from 2008 to 2012, where she had logged hundreds of hours in Vietnam and Papua New Guinea, but had found herself out of work due to the Congressional budget sequester.

  “He said, ‘Hey, Kristen, if you are looking to continue the type of work you did with us, I think I might know someone to talk to,’” she recalled.10

  Kristen’s resume in forensic anthropology went back much farther than her years with JPAC. Born in Athens, Georgia, in 1985, as a child she was an unusual combination of a nerdy bookworm, basketball and softball player, and rugged outdoors lover. Her father, a lawyer, died when she was nine, and she turned inward, focusing on graduating first in her high school class, attending a top-notch university, and becoming a doctor.

  “I wasn’t first, but I was in the top ten,” she said. “I chose to go to Tulane because it was far away and had a good medical school. Basically, it wasn’t Georgia.”11

  While taking pre-med courses, she decided to major in anthropology, with a focus on physical anthropology and forensics; she was still haunted by memories of how long it took medical examiners to officially determine her father’s cause of death.

  “It was bothersome to me that we had to wait that long,” she said. “I had a couple of mean cousins who would say he wasn’t really dead, that he’d just run off with another woman.”12

  Upon graduation in 2004, she decided to stay at Tulane to earn a master’s degree and study for the Medical College Admission Test. In the summer of 2005, she worked on a 1,500-year-old mass grave in Peru, where researchers recovered scores of decapitated, mummified bodies. Former Presidents Bush and Clinton spoke at her graduation in May 2006, as did a “surprise speaker,” Ellen DeGeneres.

  After working for a year in cultural resources management, searching Southeast landscapes scheduled for development or roads for historically significant sites, she took a job with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. She gained invaluable experience in forensic anthropology and met important contacts, but there was little chance for advancement and she didn’t like being stuck in a lab. So, shooting for the moon, she applied for a job with JPAC. She was thrilled when Belcher called.

  “When I was taking classes, they had been held up as hiring only the best and the brightest, the pinnacle of anthropology,” she said. “[Belcher] asked if I was more of a field or lab person and I said field. So I got an archaeology position.”13

  She joined the agency in 2008, and after passing a “mentored mission” with flying colors, spent much of her first year “camping in the woods” in Vietnam. She was later posted to Papua New Guinea, where the United States had lost more aircraft than in any other country during World War II. Kristen relished working out of high-altitude camps in the country’s rugged, jungled mountains during three forty-five-day missions.

  “PNG is a country of extremes. The lowlands were the hottest place I’ve ever been. In the mountains, it can be incredibly cold,” she said. “I really enjoyed that dichotomy, but it’s a really challenging environment to work in. You’re always on slopes and you’re at altitude for so long your immune system begins to suffer.”

  When not in the field, she began work on a doctorate at the University of Hawaii. Put off by the “ass-kissing” required in that academic environment—not to mention the fact that her adviser hit on her during a field expedition to Korea—in 2013 Kristen took Silverstein’s advice and contacted Mark Noah. The two met for coffee in Honolulu in September and two weeks later she was on a plane to Fiji with two other archaeologists hired by History Flight.

  It soon became apparent that Kristen was the only one of the three with the experience, skills, and critically, temperament required to work for the scrappy organization. One of the archaeologists was constantly stressed out and refused further exploration of the shipping-yard site, worried that he’d be electrocuted by cables encountered below the surface. The other was temperamental and openly anti-military and Kristen viewed her methodology as a relic from the 1970s.

  “She came over to one dig where I was working [on Betio] and said, ‘You’re just a kid. You don’t know what you are doing,’ and refused to help me. She
and [the other archaeologist] insisted I was just digging up Japanese remains,” Kristen said.

  She would soon prove them wrong.

  Several years earlier, I had contacted Vicky Reynolds-Middagh of Sausalito, California-based Valor Tours, Ltd., offering to be a leader for one of her company’s periodic trips to Tarawa. Started by her late father, World War II pilot Bob Reynolds, Valor Tours had been conducting tours to European and Pacific battlefields for more than three decades, including the 2003 tour of Tarawa I considered joining. By now, I qualified as an old Betio hand, and following my working trip in April, Vicky hired me to lead a ten-person group for the seventieth anniversary of the battle in November.

  I was ecstatic when my aunt Alix Prejean and her daughter Andra decided to join two American couples, an Ohio businessman, a Dutch World War II history enthusiast, and an Australian Vietnam veteran and his wife for the trip. Unlike on my previous visits, our accommodations were not great. The Otintaai Hotel, once the go-to spot for visiting government and non-governmental officials, was now falling down—in fact, half condemned. Worse, it was an uncomfortable forty-five minute ride on bumpy roads to Betio.

  When we arrived in late November, I was impressed by the Kiribati government’s efforts to spiff up the island in advance of the anniversary. There was considerably less garbage in the vacant lots and gutters and evidence of Betio’s sanitation problems had mercifully declined. And though I was busy working, it was old-home week for me on the island—Kristen Baker and Jeremy Shiok were there, as was navy veteran Kurt Hiete, who had helped pay for my first trip to Tarawa. I also got to meet JPAC anthropologist Jay Silverstein and geospatial analysis expert Anthony Hewitt.

  And despite three and a half years’ worth of emails and phone conversations, it also would be the first time I met Mark Noah in person. Mark had always been immensely helpful and supportive to me, and I was looking forward to shaking his hand.

  At the same time, I felt a little nervous. I’d learned from experience that he fiercely protected his proprietorship over History Flight’s work—understandable, given the various attempts at co-option he’d endured. Paradoxically, he was also curiously trusting, preferring handshakes to signed contracts, and the tension between those two instincts could result in misunderstanding and, on occasion, the abrupt reclassification of an erstwhile ally into a foe.

  Mark had high expectations of his team, and many who’d worked with him had been on the receiving end of a snappish late-night email or a semi-public takedown at one time or another. A brave few—marine veteran Katie Rasdorf comes to mind—learned that defending their arguments actually seemed to earn Mark’s respect.

  Tenacious as a bulldog, disinclined to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise, and prone to speaking his mind, Mark hadn’t developed the seamless, deferential relationship with JPAC that had served Pat Scannon and his recovery organization Bent Prop for decades.

  But maybe none of that mattered. Spending time with him, I found him cheerful, funny, opinionated, and generous to a fault. Before the week was out I’d had an epiphany: Mark Noah was exactly the right man, at the right time, to tackle a difficult, dirty, thankless job on Tarawa, far from the comforts of home—just like Sandy Bonnyman, seven decades earlier.

  Thanks to our local guide, Toka Rakobu (mother of Kantaake, whom I’d met in April), we were treated as VIPs and even invited to President Anote Tong’s home for a dinner reception. On our third day, we boarded a noisy Air Kiribati puddle jumper for the forty-five-minute flight to the island of Butaritari in Makin Atoll.

  Today a population of 4,400 lives amid pristine jungle and clean, sugary beaches constantly caressed by fresh breezes off the open sea. There are fewer reminders of the war than on Betio, but the people of Butaritari celebrate their 1943 liberation every year on November 20, and the only flag that flies over the village of Ukiangong is the Stars and Stripes.

  Arriving one day before the actual anniversary, our group was feted with dancing, singing, speeches, and lunch featuring fish, lobster, squash, rice, and fruit. At the end of the ceremony, a village elder bowed low before the three Bonnymans present.

  “We thank you for your father and your grandfather,” he said through a translator. “It is because of him that we are free.”

  On November 20, the anniversary commemoration was held before dawn, the usual time for outdoor gatherings on an island where the temperature quickly soars to ninety degrees as soon as the sun boils up over the horizon. The expatriate community, mostly Aussies and Kiwis, showed up in force, many with well-dressed children in tow. President Tong and First Lady Bernadette Meme Tong invited our group to sit with them for the short ceremony in the hardscrabble yard around the national sports complex (not as impressive as it sounds), where a simple granite spike remains the only official American monument to the battle. Citing a drain of resources from the embassy in Fiji due to Typhoon Haiyan two weeks earlier, the US government did not send an official delegation, though members of the JPAC team did arrive in dress uniforms.

  Beneath fluttering Kiribati and American flags, members of the Kiribati marines stood at attention while dignitaries spoke a few words and my aunt laid a wreath. Following refreshments, the president and first lady led attendees on a short walk to Red Beach 2, where a New Zealand aid program had recently built a wide concrete plaza with basketball hoops and a plaque expressing gratitude for the American liberation of the islands in 1943.

  As I talked to the president about his nation’s future, he said he was most concerned by threat of rising sea levels from global warming.

  “Our landmass will be reduced, based on the scenarios projected. And our underground (fresh) water will be contaminated with the rising seas,” said Tong, a graduate of the London School of Economics who was elected in 2003. “Unfortunately, that means Kiribati’s ability to sustain its population of around 100,000 also will be reduced.”14

  He applauded the efforts of Americans like Kurt Hiete to raise money for sewer, trash disposal, and other infrastructure, and noted that a World Bank-funded project to repave the main road and lay fiber-optic conduits was about to begin. But he cautioned that change on the islands would be incremental, at best.

  “We are making progress, but we have many difficult problems to overcome,” he told me. “We appreciate what the Americans are doing here, but they must have realistic expectations.”15

  Following the ceremony, Mark Noah invited us to walk a couple hundred yards to look in on an active History Flight dig site in a cluster of cinder-block houses built by the Taiwanese in “downtown” Betio. When we arrived, Kristen Baker was down in the hole, carefully brushing sand from three sets of skeletal remains, one of which she believed to be American—right where that older archaeologist had told her she was just a “kid” who didn’t know what she was doing.

  “From the (ground-penetrating radar) and cadaver-dog survey of the area it was clear there was something in that spot. The remains of two other US Marines had been recovered from approximately this area as well,” she said.

  At the end of the trip, the New York Times Magazine published a long piece by Wil S. Hylton, author of Vanished: The Sixty Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II, detailing History Flight’s long, unwavering efforts to recover the Tarawa missing and the oscillating relationship between Mark Noah and JPAC. The story ended on an optimistic note, with JPAC civilian administrator Johnie Webb forecasting a future in which the agency would work closely with private groups while maintaining the highest professional standards. The bottom line, Webb said, was that “there’s more work to do than we can get done.”16

  After I got home, I received an email from JPAC geographic-information systems expert Anthony Hewitt, whom I had met on Betio.

  “We wanted to show you our latest theory on where we thought Cemetery 27 might be located, but the time ran out and we were not able to meet with you,” he wrote. He attached a document showing an area of subsurface anomaly running underneath the traffic circle just
south of the copra mill. “We hope to test this theory on the next mission by having the recovery team put some test pits in the north end of the traffic circle.”17

  It was encouraging news, and I asked for more details. But our email exchange was abruptly terminated days later when, in a horse-already-out-of-the-barn effort to douse its mounting PR brushfires, JPAC put its entire staff under a gag order.

  SEVENTEEN

  LEFT BEHIND

  JANUARY-MAY 1944

  Having admired, even idolized, my grandfather my whole life, it was immensely satisfying to know that I was gradually becoming my family’s, even the world’s, foremost expert on Sandy Bonnyman. But my research also was forcing me, for the first time, to confront the sobering impact of his heroic death on his family, for my grandfather’s story did not end with his death on Tarawa.

  Unlike most Americans killed in World War II, Sandy came from a prominent, wealthy, connected family, and his death was noted on the front pages of newspapers in Knoxville, Santa Fe, San Antonio, and Atlanta, as well as in the National Catholic Register and the New York Times, Tribune, and Sun. There was even a story on the front page the Glasgow Herald (Scotland) about the sacrifice of “Kinsman of Glasgow Priest,” Father Peter Bonnyman.

  Within days after Jo finally received the telegram informing her of her husband’s death on December 29, 1943, the first of more than five hundred letters of sympathy began pouring into Bonniefield from friends, religious and political leaders, and most notably, marines who wanted to pay their respects to the Bonnymans.1

  “We fought at Guadalcanal and Tarawa together and believe me Mr. Bonnyman you should be the proudest man in the world,” Capt. Joseph R. Clerou, commanding officer of my grandfather’s Fox Company, wrote to Alex. “Sandy may be gone; but he has given us new life and inspiration through his leadership, devotion and courage. If any of us can do one fourth the job he has done, we will be true men.”2