Kain dashed his hopes, saying he believed the cross was strictly memorial and closing with, “I can assure you the cemetery is well kept.”39
Eventually, even Gordon gave up the search. Perhaps embittered, he told some of his children that Tarawa’s dead had simply been “bulldozed into the sea.”40
Amid all the heartache and disappointment in the winter and spring of 1944, my grieving family was able to hang on to one bit of solace. In the weeks following news of Sandy’s death, the Bonnymans began receiving letters from marines who had fought at Tarawa, as well as one from an official in the Roosevelt administration, reporting that my grandfather’s actions were so extraordinary that he had been recommended for the nation’s highest military honor.41 In March the Princeton Alumni Weekly and the Knoxville papers published stories about rumors of a pending Medal of Honor, making it seem all but certain.
In my research, I found accounts of several marines who reported recommending Sandy for the medal: Harry Niehoff, John Borich, Joseph Clerou, Marvin Sheppard (who said “the other kid” who helped him remove the body from the bunker did likewise), and Col. David Shoup, who described Sandy as “one of the officers whose supreme valor won the battle of Tarawa for us.”42 Sadly, their recommendations either were not written down (Niehoff recalled that he and Borich made spoken recommendations), no longer exist, or remain hidden from even the most-skilled researchers in the deepest recesses of some Washington archive.
Maj. William Chamberlin, attesting that that he had personally witnessed Sandy’s actions, made the official recommendation for the award in a December 27, 1943, memo to Maj. Henry P. “Jim” Crowe. Gen. Julian Smith, commander of the Second Marine Division, approved it on December 29, followed by Gen. Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, Commanding General of the Fifth Amphibious Corps, on January 19, 1944. On February 8, Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, signed off on recommendations not just for Alexander Bonnyman, Jr., but also William Bordelon and William Deane Hawkins. Marine Corps Commandant A.A. “Archie” Vandegrift added his signature on March 1 and forwarded the paperwork to the Navy Department Board of Decorations and Medals. The board considered all three cases, as well as a separate Medal of Honor recommendation for Shoup, on March 9.43
In early May, the families of Hawkins and Bordelon received notification that the two men had been posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor; Shoup’s nomination was delayed for further consideration. And Jo Russell received a letter in Santa Fe informing her that “There is being forwarded to you this date the Navy Cross with Citation posthumously awarded your husband.”44
Without explanation, and despite the exact same endorsements, the board had not deemed my grandfather’s actions worthy of the medal given to Hawkins and Bordelon. I was shocked when I first read that letter; nobody had ever mentioned this to me.
Still, the Navy Cross was nothing to sneeze at, and news that Sandy had received the nation’s second-highest honor was reported from New York to New Mexico, Texas to Tennessee; letters of congratulation poured into Bonniefield. The Bonnymans were as always gracious, and grateful that their son’s sacrifice had been so recognized.
But after five months of assurances that he would receive the Medal of Honor, they were privately disappointed.45
Even before Jo married Jimmie Russell, her relationship with the Bonnymans had been fraught with tension. She continued to send the girls to Knoxville each summer, but began accusing their grandparents of letting them regress into filthy, rebellious, wild animals. Fran, who one summer broke her elbow in a tumble down a waterfall, looked “horrible . . . pale . . . her finger nails have been chewed down to the quick. . . . I don’t see how any living creature could have experienced what Fran did and not forever have scars on more than her body,” Jo sniped. The girls’ stepfather, she wrote, “detested every minute (they) spent with you and they have returned home each time spoiled and difficult for me to manage.”46 She continually threatened to curtail their visits to Knoxville.
But the feuding came to a screeching, if temporary, halt in October 1946 when Jo received a letter in Santa Fe from Marine Corps Commandant Gen. A.A. Vandegrift, requesting that she return the Navy Cross and contact his office to discuss arrangements for a formal presentation of the Medal of Honor “to your eldest daughter, Miss Frances B. Bonnyman,” Sandy’s next of kin.47
Again, no explanation was given.
“While I knew Sandy had been recommended by his Colonel (Shoup) for the Medal, it had been about three years, and when it did come it came unexpectedly,” Alex told a friend.48
After so much difficulty and heartbreak, the Bonnymans were overjoyed that their son would now ascend to the loftiest ranks of American military honor. Even my grandmother, who had so quickly put her previous life behind her, was elated. Jo informed Vandegrift that she would take her daughter to Washington to receive the medal, rather than attend a ceremony in Albuquerque or Santa Fe.
The presentation was scheduled for noon on January 22, 1947. The Bonnymans’ guest list included family and friends, priests, bishops, and cardinals, railroad and mining barons, and Alex’s friend, Attorney General Biddle, who said he would lobby the man who had signed the citation, President Harry S. Truman, to make the presentation in person. Jo’s list included friends and business associates from New Mexico.
On a cold, cloudy day in the nation’s capital, twelve-year-old Fran, wearing matching wool coat and hat, loafers, and white gloves, received the medal from acting Navy Secretary James Forrestal. Photos of my mother, flanked by her mother, grandfather, uncle, and Forrestal, went out over the wires and appeared in newspapers around the nation, from the Washington Post to the Duluth News-Tribune and Santa Fe New Mexican. The autographed photo of young Fran standing between two living Medal of Honor recipients, Shoup and Vandegrift, would remain her private treasure.
The semantic differences between the Navy Cross and Medal of Honor are subtle. The Navy Cross is awarded to those who have shown “extraordinary heroism and intrepidity” in battle, while the Medal of Honor for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty.” But the numbers tell a different story: Fewer than 1,100 Medals of Honor have been awarded, compared to about 20,000 service crosses since 1918, when the latter were first awarded.
Thus, the moment my grandfather, 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr., received the nation’s highest military honor, he was instantly elevated from a man honored among family and friends to one who would be revered by generations. Finding him was truly no more important than locating any of Tarawa’s hundreds of missing. But he was the only one of the battle’s Medal of Honor recipients to remain unaccounted for, and it was all but inevitable that his grave would become the “Holy Grail” of Betio’s many mysteries.
EIGHTEEN
STRIKING GOLD
2014–2015
For seven years, Mark Noah had endured sabotage, slander, shunning, and scheming by everyone from a US military agency to the Kiribati government. But with every slight, he only grew more determined to bring Tarawa’s MIAs home.
By 2014 History Flight had recovered more than thirteen thousand American bones and countless artifacts. But Mark’s ardor puzzled even the New York Times, which reported that he “couldn’t fully explain” why a private citizen with no connection to the military would be willing to endure so much frustration and financial drain to pursue long-forgotten bones.1 I, too wondered, but Mark had always waved off the question when I asked about his motivations. So I was equally surprised and intrigued when he contacted me in February 2015 to say he was ready to talk.
He told me his earliest interest in World War II was spurred by an uncle who served in the First Marine Division and showed him artifacts brought back from Peleliu and Okinawa, sites of two of the most gut-churning Pacific battles to follow Tarawa.
Though he never served in the military himself, he’d been deeply affected by violence. While living in the People’s Republic of China during the 19
80s (his father worked for the US Department of State), some of his young friends in the pro-democracy movement disappeared during the government’s brutal 1989 crackdown. Some later turned up dead, but Mark was even more haunted by those who had simply vanished, their fates unknown.
His own initiation into violence came during his years of running with a “punk-rock” street gang, when he learned to be a street fighter and enforcer of a violent code of ethics.
“I saw a tremendous amount of street violence and bloodshed in Atlanta and LA,” he told me. “I saw friends screaming out to God to save them when they knew they were going to die, and they knew there was no salvation.”2
Memories of those dead and disappeared friends, which he told me he’d never even shared with his wife, would later inform a kind of spiritual motivation for finding Tarawa’s MIAs.
“A lot of these beard-stroking academics and PhD anthropologists approach this work as if they are more interested in themselves than helping other people. They act very nonchalant and cavalier around deceased people, with not even a semblance of dignity,” he said. “But I have something they don’t have: They’ve never been there when a ‘forensic event’ happened, they’ve never been violently injured themselves.”3
Mark outgrew his violent youthful diversions to become a responsible husband and father of two, and that punkish pugnacity evolved into a marine-like tenacity in the face of adversity.
“One of my strongest points is that I’m hard as nails, and I’ve never taken shit from them [JPAC]. They tried to undermine me every way they could. They started their big slander campaign, and it blew up in their faces,” he said. “But they didn’t know me very well, and every time they pulled anything, we doubled down and made our efforts even more successful.”4
So here’s Mark Noah: an adventurous, driven, stubborn, sometimes impetuous son of privilege, ever ready—even eager—for a fight.
Now who did that remind me of?
In 2014 Mark Noah added a new member to the History Flight team, former Army Special Forces medic John Frye, whom Kristen had met while both were working on JPAC missions in Korea and Vietnam. John’s expertise in field medicine would prove a valuable asset to History Flight’s work on Betio.
“At JPAC they couldn’t care less about my experience. They wouldn’t listen to me if I’d tried to stand on somebody’s desk and shout, because I wasn’t a forensic anthropologist,” he said. “But I’ve seen a few people blown up and shot, so I know a little about what those injuries do to the body.”5
On Memorial Day that year, History Flight announced the repatriation of partial remains of “at least forty individuals” recovered between January and May, mostly from the Cemetery 26 and 33 areas, and invited six Tarawa veterans—Wendell Perkins, C.J. Daigle, A.J. Bowden, Jim Morrows, Dean Woodward, and Dean Ladd—on a tour of Betio and Wellington, New Zealand, where they had been stationed before and after the Second Marine Division’s time on Guadalcanal.
Finally, after four years of sporadic effort, JPAC recovered its first set of Tarawa remains without any input from History Flight in October 2014. Following up on a tip from a Betio resident, a team led by anthropologist Jay Silverstein zeroed in on the grave by overlaying a historic photo on a modern aerial image of the island. A dog tag bearing the letters “RED” was the first clue in the eventual identification of Pvt. Jack Redman, who was killed on the last day of the battle.6
JPAC also had officially identified the American remains unearthed at the Taiwanese housing development by Kristen Baker her first weeks on the job. Pfc. Randolph Allen of Watseka, Illinois, was one of just nine marines killed on the final day of fighting on Betio. (The other remains recovered at the site were Japanese.)
Both discoveries, along with their subsequent funerals, drew attention from the media, and casual observers might well have concluded that the score was JPAC 1, History Flight 1. But things were about to change in a big way for the agency and the nonprofit alike.
On March 31, 2015, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced a major reorganization of the nation’s efforts to identify and recover the estimated 83,000 missing American war dead around the world. Three agencies tasked with those duties, JPAC, DPMO, and the Central Identification Laboratory, would be merged into the new Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA, “a single accountable organization that has complete oversight of personnel accounting resources, research and operations” under the oversight of a director in the Pentagon.7
Meanwhile on Betio, Kristen Baker was poised to make the discovery of a lifetime. Kristen, like Mark, had never lost her interest in thoroughly exploring the crushed-coral yard at Kiribati Shipping Services Ltd., believing that CIL deputy director Bill Belcher had ignored JPAC’s own protocols by failing to further excavate the site after finding small bones and American artifacts in 2012.
But numerous hurdles, both logistical and political, had prevented History Flight from conducting a more systematic search of the area. The cramped yard was hemmed in by two hulking post-World War II Quonset huts, a dilapidated two-story office building, a twenty-foot high tin-sided warehouse, and the boat basin, rendering it all but impossible for the company to conduct regular business around a large hole in the ground.
But in late November 2014, Kristen noticed that the company had begun tearing down the Quonset huts. If they weren’t replaced, there might enough room for both commerce and archaeology. But when History Flight fixer Kautebiri Kobuti made inquiries, the manager declined to grant permission to dig in the yard.
After spending the holidays in Hawaii, Kristen and John Frye returned to Tarawa in January. But a destructive “king tide”—a perigean spring tide, the precise opposite of the weak high tide that doomed so many marines during the battle—battered the island, smashing one of Betio’s myriad hulking reef wrecks through the seawall on Red Beach 2 and waterlogging the island, making it impossible to work at their current site, Cemetery 26.
Kristen used the delay to press for access to the shipping yard. By then, the shipping company had a new general manager, Tamana Natanaera, who green-lighted the project, provided the team stopped working when the company’s fifty-six-foot inter-island transport Butimari was in port.
“I’m amazed to this day at the way everything suddenly came together so perfectly,” Kristen said.8
On March 15 Kristen, John, and volunteer Rick Snow, founder of Knoxville-based Forensic Anthropology Consulting Services, Inc., opened up an exploratory trench east of the lamp pole where Herman Sturmer had been found in 2002. Within hours, the team encountered American remains some three to four feet beneath the surface (later identified as belonging to Cpl. Roger K. Nielsen of Denver, killed on D-day).
“That was all the confirmation we needed,” Kristen said.
The excavation process was slow and painstaking. Once the local laborers—Aman, Titang, Eru, and Katerak—had broken through the layer of crushed coral, the team gently “shovel shaved” a half inch of soil at a time and dumped it into five-gallon plastic buckets for sifting. As soon as a shovel struck anything solid, Kristen called a halt to the digging to examine the find. Once they hit human remains or artifacts, she, John, and experienced volunteers would use spades, brushes, and small wooden tools to fully expose the remains. Each individual would take up three days to expose, document, and remove.
Though painstaking, this kind of archaeology absolutely was a spectator sport, as the team discovered four more complete sets of American remains as well as a torso on a stretcher. Through dental comparisons and artifacts, Kristen was able to provisionally identify three of the six marines as Nielsen, Sgt. James J. Hubert, and Pvt. Robert Carter Jr., all of whose casualty cards listed only memorial graves at Cemetery 33.
Carter’s hand was literally a couple of inches from the telltale remains of JPAC’s exploratory trench—“almost like he was reaching out to Bill Belcher,” Kristen said.9 But none of three identified marines seemed to be associated with Cemetery 27. Had the team stumbl
ed onto a completely different site? Kristen numbered the remains as “individuals” 1–6 (including one found to the west of the pole), tentatively labeled the trench “Row B” of Cemetery 27, and began digging exploratory trenches in search of the mother lode.
“If you are looking for something that is running east-west, you dig north-south,” she said. “Otherwise you can dig all day long and miss what you are looking for.”10
When they found only “sterile soil” to the south, they began digging to the north, toward an anomaly identified through ground-penetrating radar in 2012. Once beneath the hard upper layer, the first shovel cuts revealed the distinctive soil profile Kristen now recognized as a bulldozer trench. She laid out a grid for a large unit and in short order the team had unearthed an intact set of remains.
Back at the lab—a tile-floored, three-room suite at the Betio Lodge II—a dog tag and dental comparisons led Kristen to make a strong provisional identification of Pfc. Charles E. Oetjen. Killed on D-day, Oetjen was recorded as having been buried in “Grave #6, 8th Marines #2, Central Division Cemetery”—Cemetery 27. It was a tantalizing clue, but Kristen wanted more data before making any sweeping conclusions.
Digging west, the team recovered five more sets of remains over the next couple of weeks: Pvt. Frank Penna, an unknown later identified as Cpl. Walter Critchley, Pvt. Palmer Sherman Haraldson, and Pvt. Fred Evert Freet, whose casualty cards indicated that they were buried in grave numbers 6 to 2, respectively, and an unknown later identified as Cpl. James D. Otto, whose arm was partially exposed in the western wall of the unit and recorded as occupying grave #1.
Bones of My Grandfather Page 20
