Now there could be no doubt.
“We knew we’d found Cemetery 27,” Kristen said.
(It’s worth noting that the location was about fifty yards southeast of the coordinates “at or very close” to where Bill Niven originally predicted the trench containing my grandfather’s remains would be found.11 Close, but definitely no cigar; I had learned that in archaeology, missing by an inch is as bad as missing by a mile.)
After carefully exhuming twelve sets of remains in under six weeks, Kristen flew back to Hawaii on May 1 for a scheduled ten-day break. But she couldn’t wait to get back to Betio to solve the puzzle of Cemetery 27.
“When we came back,” Mark Noah said, “we began to dig east and the burial feature began to yield an eerie similarity to the historical record that we had recreated.”12
And according to that record, my grandfather would be found in “grave” #17, less than six meters to the east.
Mark first called me in mid-March to say that his team may have finally located Cemetery 27. I forced myself to tamp down expectations. How many times, after all, had we agreed that finding Sandy Bonnyman was comparable to searching for the proverbial the needle in a haystack? And by now I knew the vagaries of Betio all too well. Who knew if locals had backhoed through the part of the trench where my grandfather should have been, or dug up his remains while digging a trash pit, or if his grave was otherwise disturbed, even removed? Still, knowing that Kristen had identified marines whose names appeared on that monument next to my grandfather’s went far beyond any previous tantalizing hints.
Over the next few weeks, Mark continually updated me on the good news. Finally, in May, I got the call I’d been waiting for: “You need to get down there. And bring a video camera.”
To my surprise, conditions on Betio and South Tarawa in general had not fully relapsed into pre-seventieth-anniversary squalor. Whether due to seasonal conditions or some human effort, the air seemed less infused with the corpse-like odor of the reef and residents were now making use of green plastic garbage bags emblazoned with Kiribati te Boboto or “Keep Kiribati Clean.” For the first time ever I saw dogs wearing collars and sporting shiny coats, even one running happily alongside a boy on a bicycle.
Or maybe I was just seeing the place through Sandy-tinted glasses.
Responding in part to a cultural-resources management proposal drawn up by History Flight, the Kiribati Board of Tourism had scraped away the junk and overgrowth around Admiral Shibasaki’s bunker and strategically placed wrecked cars and rusty sheet metal around Bonnyman’s Bunker in an effort to discourage residents from using the top as a latrine. There also was profusion of new “restraunts” and curious offerings of consumer goods for sale, from blow-up Santas to Mylar balloons and shiny new bicycles.
All those changes were due, in part, to a bevy of internationally funded projects that had brought an influx of Australian and Kiwi workers. These included various initiatives funded by the European Union, the United Nations, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, including a major road-improvement project funded by the World Bank and managed by New Zealand’s McDowell Construction, which also had put up razor-wire fencing around the airport for the first time.
By the time I walked over to the dig site that first day, the sun was high and hot. Kristen and John had fully exposed the remains in grave #8, carefully removing and wrapping every bone, fragment, and piece of material evidence—the rubber soles of boondockers, the standard-issue marine combat boots; shreds of sock; ammunition clips; and more—in aluminum foil before placing it into large plastic evidence bags.
Like three-quarters of the remains that eventually would be recovered from “Row A”—which was, in fact, Cemetery 27—those in #8 were wrapped in a green, rubberized canvas poncho. Like all but three of the marines buried in Cemetery 27, Pfc. James Mansfield was killed on the first day of fighting but wasn’t buried until several days later. Given the advanced state of decomposition, burial details simply wrapped remains in ponchos, apparently making little or no effort to remove gear or personal items.
Exhuming poncho-covered remains day after day, Kristen Baker was seeing the fascinating effects of the moisture-retaining microenvironment, which had preserved a host of typically biodegradable materials, including leather, hair, even a pack of Camel cigarettes. But the moisture inside the ponchos also made many bones porous and fragile.
“Things fall apart,” Kristen murmured down in the hole, quoting Yeats.
I had seen bits and pieces of human remains in my previous work with History Flight, as well as the skeletons of Randolph Allen and four Japanese at Cemetery 26, but that was the first time I was able to get in for a closer look. The soles of Mansfield’s boots seemed so human and awoke me to the reality of what lay before me.
“Jesus, I don’t want to die alone,” Johnny Cash sang mournfully from Kristen’s boom box on the edge of the hole.
Kristen worked assiduously to follow and even surpass the standard operating procedures she learned at JPAC. When a JPAC team recovered three sets of remains from Cemetery 25 in 2012, they didn’t bother collecting every tiny toe or finger bone or fragment of rib, but Kristen was intent on preserving even the smallest grain of evidence, right down to sock threads that fit on the tip of her little finger.
“They have good standards, but I tend to go above and beyond,” she said. “It’s a matter of respect, too. These guys deserve the best treatment we can give them.”13
Based on solid provisional identifications of remains whose grave locations neatly corresponded with casualty cards, Kristen was confident that we were on track to find Sandy Bonnyman in grave #17. When we did—if we did—his teeth would provide virtually instant confirmation of his identity: Kristen had practically memorized my grandfather’s dental chart, which revealed extensive work and multiple gold restorations. Upon examining each successive set of remains, Kristen took to pronouncing, “No gold.”
“Gold was very expensive and unusual at the time, and there weren’t very many people, particularly in the marines, who had gold bridges and fillings,” Kristen said. “In the forty people buried here, only maybe three or four had any gold fillings at all.”14
After all these years of anticipation, my mind refused to share her confidence, and in my jittery state, I constantly imagined nightmare scenarios: “Unfortunately, it looks like there’s been extensive disturbance after #15 . . .” or “There’s a trash pit where your grandfather should be . . .” To combat the constant fluttering of butterfly wings in my gut, I kept myself busy shooting video and photos, chipping in with screening or digging, walking to the store to buy cans of Pringles for the crew. I was unspeakably grateful that I happened to share most of Kristen’s musical tastes—Creedence Clearwater Revival, Johnny Cash, Metallica, Rise Against, the Black Keys, Lynyrd Skynrd. It would have driven me around the bend to have my butterflies flapping to bad country or disco.
When I first arrived, each set of remains was taking two to three days to expose, document, and remove, including time for Kristen to make highly detailed in situ sketches of all remains. My wife Jody and I had agreed that I would stay on Betio as long as needed to either find Sandy, or confirm that he was not buried here, but I was feeling antsy. After a couple of days, I got up the nerve to ask Kristen if it would save time to make the drawings later, based on photographs. Had she told me that would violate best practices, I would have understood; after all, where I was focused on one particular grave, it was her job to give her utmost professional attention to every set of remains. But after giving it some thought, Kristen thanked me for suggesting the idea. After she made the change, it generally took between one and two days to fully process each set of remains.
Mindful that the shipping company’s inter-island cargo ship Butimari was due to dock within a couple of weeks, the crew also stepped up their already grueling work schedule, working straight through rain squalls and staying “in the hole” from seven or eight o’clock in the morning un
til six in the evening. Kristen drove herself so hard that she suffered a relapse of chikungunya, a debilitating, mosquito-borne viral disease recently arrived from Africa. Though sore and exhausted, she refused to take a day off, even when John suggested it.
With the team now processing a new set of remains nearly every day, a huge backlog of lab work began to mount. Once removed from the ground, all remains had to be carefully cleaned, dried, cataloged, and photographed, and a full report (typically ten or more pages) had to be written for each individual set. All that work had literally ground to a halt upon the departure of forensic anthropologist Rick Snow (one of Kristen Baker’s early mentors) before I arrived. On Snow’s recommendation, Mark hired a PhD candidate from the University of Tennessee—home to one of the country’s top forensic anthropology programs—to pick up the slack.
Hillary Parsons had completed her coursework and was now living in her hometown, Bozeman, Montana, working at a whiskey distillery and completing her dissertation. To speed things up in the lab, I began assisting Hillary in the lab after visiting the dig site and capturing video and photos each morning. I had ulterior motives for helping out: The lab was air conditioned and scrubbing bones—not to mention lots of banter—kept me blessedly distracted and my mind (mostly) free from its usual doom-and-gloom chatter.
Little did I know that working in the lab would come to resemble a mini-seminar in forensics—call it bones for boneheads—courtesy of Professor Parsons. As I carefully brushed and washed away grains of sand, she answered all my questions, gave me the name of even the tiniest bones, pointed out clues to determine age, sex, ancestry, and cause of death.
Hillary also let me play Watson to her Sherlock Holmes. After cleaning up a brass watch found with the remains in grave #3, I noticed that “PSH” and “C-1-6” had been scratched into the cover. Guessing that these were the marine’s initials and unit number, I flipped through History Flight’s research on the missing and discovered that a Pvt. Palmer Sherman Haraldson, with C Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, had been killed on D+3. After a dental comparison, Hillary was able to confirm that provisional identification with a high degree of confidence.
“You need to be there now. All the time,” Paul Schwimmer advised me one night after dinner at the Betio Lodge II. Paul, a US Army Special Forces veteran, had been doing pro bono survey work for History Flight for years. “This is Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I’m telling you, we are coming closer and closer to the ark.”
The next morning I woke at five o’clock and ran to Bairiki. As the sun rose I found myself staring up at the clouds, remembering my first trip to Tarawa, and CNN reporter Ted Rowland’s fruitless attempts to wring some tears from me.
Back then, the idea that we would actually find my grandfather had seemed little more than a fantasy. Now, the team had exposed grave #15, less than a meter from where my grandfather lay. There had been no glitches so far, just one set of intact remains after another, day after day, and no reason to think that would change.
Jogging along the causeway, I felt myself . . . untethered. I no longer feared that we wouldn’t find my grandfather, but that we would—or rather, what I would feel in that moment. I once told CNN cameraman John Torigoe that going to Tarawa had divided my life into before and after. But the after had really been a kind of limbo, a liminal state that I never really expected to end. Now, as I tried to imagine the once unimaginable, I saw myself collapsing, going mad, drifting away.
Suddenly I was overcome with sadness—for my grandfather, my mother and aunt, my great-grandparents, for all Tarawa’s dead and all their families, too. I stopped atop a culvert on the causeway; stripped off my shirt, socks, and shoes. Plunging into the blue current rushing below, I rode it seaward, my tears swallowed up by the mighty Pacific.
When I got to the dig site at eight o’clock, the team had shovel-shaved down to a bench about two feet deep, exposing the butt of a green, World War II-era Japanese beer bottle in the south facing wall. At mid-morning, sand began to trickle into a small, oval void below the beer bottle. Kristen, sporting one of her trademark skull bandanas, pulled on blue latex surgical gloves and gently palpated the hole.
“It’s the edge of a helmet,” she said. “There is a cranium inside.”
Over the next few minutes, she carefully brushed away sand, keeping it level and smooth. As I looked over her shoulder, something else came into view: a small, smooth patch of brown just a few inches from the helmet. My heart began to thud faster.
“Another cranium,” Kristen said evenly.
She continued to expose the area, singing along with Shinedown’s rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man”: “Boy, don’t you worry, you’ll find yourself/Follow your heart and nothing else . . . And be a simple kind of man/Oh, be something you love and understand . . .”
I’d always seen a little of myself in the song, but now I thought of my grandfather: “Take your time, don’t live too fast/Troubles will come and they will pass.”
Goosebumps prickled my skin in the tropical heat and I raised the camera to my eye, focusing on Kristen’s hands. I held my breath, trying to hold steady. From behind me, I heard John say, “Yup.”
“Gold,” Kristen said a split second later.
Then I dropped the camera.
It was 10:49 in the morning, May 28, 2015—seventy-one years, six months, five days and perhaps twenty hours since 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr., Sandy, Bonny, my grandfather, had taken his last breath.
NINETEEN
RIPPLES
1946-PRESENT
Even as the memories of World War II began to fade into the past, the world never stopped remembering and honoring my grandfather for his singular courage, self-sacrifice, and indomitable spirit in battle.
On November 21, 1948, combat correspondent Robert Sherrod, who accompanied the marines at Tarawa, sent Alex Bonnyman a telegram to say that “A few of us gathered tonight and drank a toast to a thousand brave men who died five years ago. We especially remembered Alexander Bonnyman, Jr.”1
A gold star bearing my grandfather’s name adorns the window of his former dorm in Blair Hall at Princeton University; I’ve had active-duty marines from Camp Lejeune, NC, approach me to say they enjoy drinking a beer or two at the Bonnyman Bowling Center; you can drive across the First Lt. Alexander “Sandy” Bonnyman Bridge on the Pellissippi Parkway west of Knoxville; and the Maersk Line’s 1st Lt. Alex Bonnyman plied the high seas as a marine pre-positioning ship until it was decommissioned in 2009. Marines born thirty, forty, even fifty years after Sandy’s death know his story; people who recognize the Bonnyman name sometimes approach his descendants, right down to his twenty-something grand-niece, to ask for an autograph or handshake.
But before he left for the marines in July 1942, my grandfather was a black sheep in his prominent Southern family. Stubborn and rebellious, he had a habit of drinking too much and picking fights, and proved less than reliable when it came to other people’s money. And as romantically appealing as his story has been to those crafting the legend, Sandy’s appetite for adventure and danger led him to make choices that were not always in the best interests of his young family. Gordon Bonnyman dearly loved, admired, and missed his older brother, but he always said leading men into battle suited him better than leading the life of a husband, father, and businessman.2
A legend is a story that grows over time with embellishments, exaggerations, and, just as often, strategic editing. In my grandfather’s case, irresistibly dramatic details were being offered within weeks of his death through second- or third-hand accounts—the flamethrower, the hand-to-hand combat, that final, stoic smile.
A more-subtle shift also began to take place, as his rougher edges were smoothed away and his life was gradually reduced—and that is the right word for it—to only those truths that seemed to suit a hero. Embalmed in legend, my grandfather was enclosed in a suit of silver armor, placed upon a white charger, and placed behind glass, forever frozen within a spotless diorama
.
“He became the great mythic hero of the family,” said his nephew Robert McKeon, a Catholic deacon. “But when we idealize people, we overlook the reality that all human beings are very complex.”3
Bonnyman family members, spanning generations, have described Sandy as everything from “spoiled” and “impetuous” to “fearless” and a “rock star.” He was all that, and more. But where the historians, authors of legend, and propagandists have always had the luxury of ignorance, only those who most loved Sandy Bonnyman—his children, wife, parents, and siblings—had to live with the shattering consequences of the valor for which he is so justly admired.
“The nation glorifies World War II; it was called the Great Crusade, and we now idolize the men of the Greatest Generation and immortalize the dwindling legions of these heroes constantly in film and in literature,” writes historian David P. Colley. “In so doing we have lost touch with the immense pain and suffering caused by the war and the ripples of sorrow that still flow across America from that devastating conflict. We know little of the men who gave their lives and nothing about the struggles of their families.”4
Encouraged by politicians and generals, many Americans—certainly a great majority of those with no close connection to the mere half-percent of the population that serves in the all-volunteer armed forces—today view all things military with sentimentality and uncritical admiration, unburdened by the harsh realities of war borne not just by those who fight, but also their families.
I met US Army Capt. Don Gomez Jr. not long after I returned from my first trip to Tarawa. He served two tours of duty in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne Division before stepping out to earn a degree from the London School of Economics and get married. He re-upped in 2011 and redeployed to the Middle East in 2014.
“Sometimes I think my decision to go back into the military is very selfish. I’m doing it, frankly, because I like the lifestyle. I think it’s exciting and fun,” he said. “But I’m married now. What happens if you get hurt? How heroic are you then? What if I’m permanently injured and my wife has to take care of me?”5
Bones of My Grandfather Page 21
