Col. Bill Bower, one of the pilots who bombed Tokyo with Jimmy Doolittle’s Raiders in April 1942, was a surrogate grandfather to the kids in the neighborhood where I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. He helped us build and launch Estes model rockets, fixed our bicycles, and always had a Jolly Rancher candy if you stopped by. We all knew “the colonel” had done something in the war, but Bill wasn’t one to push his stories, and we didn’t ask.
I saw him last in August 2010, right after my return from Tarawa. I had hoped to hear his thoughts about heroes and heroism, but by then he was suffering from advanced dementia and offered only a wrinkled brow whenever I spoke. Later, however, as he dozed in a wheelchair in the shade of a ponderosa pine, Bill suddenly opened his eyes and spoke to me as lucidly as when I’d been six years old.
“I didn’t do anything heroic,” he whispered, blue eyes bright and watery. “The real heroes are the guys who raise a family. The men who stick by their families.”
Those were Bill Bower’s last words to me. He died a few months later at ninety-three. When I told his son Jim about his last words at the funeral, he told me something I never knew: Bill’s father had abandoned his family.
Sandy Bonnyman did not abandon his family; he is not responsible for the terrible tragedies that befell his daughters. But in coming to know my grandfather, I’ve come to believe that we must never allow tales of “perfect” heroes, legends, or bright, shining lies distract us from the brutal realities and consequences of war. As Hemingway wrote, “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”6
“Your grandfather deserves to be honored for his extraordinary deeds, as do a lot of other people,” US Army Special Forces and Vietnam combat veteran William T. Hathaway told me in 2011. “But that should always be coupled with the thought, ‘What about his family? What about the little girls who had to grow up without a daddy?’ You grew up admiring that mythical hero on the wall and there is nothing wrong with that. But there are costs. There is a downside when the hero story is told in isolation, used to whip up emotions. We should remember that.”7
Whether, like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Jimmie Russell took up with my grandmother to gain access to her young daughters, will never be known. But I will not judge family members who knew he was abusing Sandy’s little girls, yet did nothing. My great-grandmother Blanche Bell felt such terrible shame about the situation that it prevented her “from looking even into the face of God and praying.”8
But it was a different time.
As they grew older, my mother, Fran Bonnyman, and her younger sister Alix, showed some of their father’s pugnacity, going so far as to confront their abuser at the dinner table one time. Russell did not deny the accusations, but my grandmother, alcoholic and suffering from neglect and emotional abuse in her marriage, refused to believe them.9 She was, sadly, not equipped to protect her children.
Fran, the oldest of Sandy’s three blondes, had a stubborn streak a mile wide that her stepfather did not appreciate. Surely that’s one reason she was packed off to St. Mary’s Hall, a girls’ school in San Antonio, at age fourteen. She felt bad leaving her sisters, but, possessed of a childlike acceptance of things she could not change, she made up her mind to “just have fun in life.”
Courtesy of her father’s careful planning, Fran lived well, traveling to Europe and being toasted on social pages from Knoxville to San Antonio. Kicked out of Connecticut College for Women for “partying too much”—she was, after all, her father’s daughter—she eventually graduated from the University of New Mexico, where she met and married my father, Clayton Anthony Evans. He later graduated from the University of Colorado School of Medicine and they raised my sister, brother, and me in Boulder.
Sandy’s youngest daughter, Alix, attended Santa Fe High School before also being sent to St. Mary’s Hall, and graduated from the University of Arizona. She, too, traveled, but also spent much of her young adulthood caring for my grandmother and my aunt Tina, whose addictions she attributed to neglect and abuse by Russell.
“Jimmie stifled my mother. He had such a terrible reign over her. He wouldn’t let her do the things she always loved to do, ride or go skiing. He made her perform like a circus pony in front of their friends,” Alix said. “She became alcoholic after she married him.”10
My aunt met her late husband, Carroll Prejean, a true-blue Cajun and marine veteran from Lafayette, Louisiana, in the jungles of Ecuador, where she was teaching and he was working as an oil roughneck. They bought a ranch in Hackett, Arkansas, where they raised Peruvian Paso Fino horses, Beefmaster cattle, and their daughter Alexandra, and in the 1990s, moved to the remote paradise of Hana, Maui. Tough, irrepressibly social, and insistently affectionate—she takes special delight in doling out hugs to presidents, generals, and marines—Alix is, like her older sister, a survivor.
Sandy’s middle daughter Josephine, my Aunt Tina, was not. Mocked by her mother for her neediness as a child, she was to become “Jimmie’s favorite,”11 and—not coincidentally—seemed destined for alcoholism from the moment she took her first drink as a teenager. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, and was a ski bum in Taos before she married and had a daughter. But drinking led her into dangerous situations and away from motherhood. She was also a lot of fun; as a boy, I loved watching Outer Limits with her and visiting her mountain A-frame cabin.
Eventually, she was placed in a mental institution in Galveston, Texas. There, in a gambit for freedom, she married a male nurse, an abusive former Nazi paratrooper. Sandy’s shy “curly blonde” was just forty when she died. Her husband, who once shouted, “I’ll kill you just like I killed those Jews!”12 while choking her, had my aunt cremated immediately. Her daughter is not the only family member who considers her death suspicious.
My grandmother Jo also drank too much, and suffered years of cruelty and neglect as the wife of Jimmie Russell. They finally divorced in 1964, and Russell married a former high school classmate of Alix, then 24. Russell managed to win the lion’s share of the assets. While he continued to live in their spacious home in Santa Fe with his new wife, Jo lived the rest of her life in a small apartment across town.
Jo got sober late in life, but for my sister and me, it was too little, too late; we told my mother we didn’t want to see “Mimi” again after she refused to allow our three-year-old brother to enter her home. She died during abdominal surgery in 1976 and is buried in Santa Fe. More than any other person, except perhaps my Uncle Gordon, I wish I’d had the opportunity to talk to her about my grandfather. Whatever their difficulties, and despite her weaknesses, I believe she knew him better than anyone and loved him fiercely. Given her propensities and deep insecurity, I suspect she, too, may have experienced abuse as a child.
James Hobart “Jimmie” Russell lived a charmed life. His 1999 obituary omitted his age, date, and city of birth (ninety-seven; September 9, 1902; Fairland, Oklahoma) but described his many accomplishments, including his role in the formation of the Santa Fe Opera, the fact that he had “almost” been drafted by the Republican Party to run for governor, and his role in creating the New Mexico Film Commission. “He was,” according to the tribute, “a good friend and advisor to many people for the seven decades that he resided in Northern New Mexico and a generous contributor to variety of community organizations and charities that in turn have recognized and applauded his warmth and generosity.”13
The obituary did not mention his two-decade marriage to my grandmother, his friendship with local hero Sandy Bonnyman, whom he had “loved . . . as a younger brother,” the three blonde girls who grew up under his roof, or his involvement with the Guadalupe Mining Company.
Perhaps that tragic history is the real reason for the curious silence about my grandfather I encountered while growing up. My sister and I spent time with our Granny Great at Bonniefield each summer until her death in 1968, swimming in the same pool where Sandy had made his daring dives, eating homemade blackberry ice cream and gr
its under the watchful eye of a British nanny. We loved roaming the estate’s remaining ten acres, catching lightning bugs, and exploring the woods, just as our grandfather had. Granny continued to tell stories about her beloved son, but never to my sister or me; perhaps we were just too young to understand.
We also spent time around our great-uncle Gordon who was stern, but kindly; we were fascinated that he’d trained his hunting dogs to ride in the trunk of his car. The simple fact is, Gordon Bonnyman succeeded in every way that his famous older brother had failed, graduating from Princeton, enduring his father’s difficult tutelage before taking Blue Diamond to new heights (annual revenues soared to $12.5 million dollars during his tenure, well beyond $100 million in inflation-adjusted terms), and marrying a beautiful girl from a prominent, respectable Knoxville family. Gordon’s military career was no less outstanding: He earned a Silver Star and Bronze Star while serving with Merrill’s Marauders in India and Burma and retired from the US Army as a major.
Given that, I was surprised and saddened to find many letters in which his father compared him unfavorably to Sandy and bluntly described him as lacking in imagination and unexceptional. My great-grandfather even (wrongly) judged that his younger son’s “work was not spectacular” during his time overseas.14
Yet family members never heard Gordon utter a bitter or resentful word about standing in his brother’s shadow. In his final years, Sandy was much on his mind.
When interviewers from the University of Tennessee Veterans’ Oral History Project asked him to talk about Sandy, he spoke just a few sentences, ending with “and then he got killed at Tarawa.” The interviewers then turned off the recorder to give him time to compose himself. There was no more talk of Sandy after they restarted the interview.15
And in the days leading up to his own death in 2004, George Gordon Bonnyman experienced visions of only one person: the beloved older brother he’d tried so hard to bring home.16
TWENTY
TENDER HANDS
MAY 28-JUNE 1, 2015
Even as Kristen Baker pronounced the word we’d been waiting to hear, we all saw the telltale glint in that burnished jaw beneath her brush.
I should have steadied my hand and kept the video camera rolling. Instead, my body yielded involuntarily to a sudden, powerful yearning to freeze everything around me so I could experience that instant fully, for as long as I desired. I found myself thinking—as I often do—about Tolkien’s great quest story, The Lord of the Rings, thinking that this was how Frodo and Sam must have felt at the end of their own seemingly impossible quest, the world collapsing around them.
But time didn’t stop. Keenly aware of all those eyes upon me, I instinctively donned the inquisitive armor that had served me so well in my long career as a journalist: I turned to Kristen and asked what she was feeling.
“I really don’t know what to say in a situation like this,” she said haltingly.
I knew exactly how she felt.
A couple minutes later John Frye called the two of us out of the hole. He handed cold bottles of New Zealand Tui beer to Kristen and me, as well as Paul and Aman, Titang, Eru, and Katerak, our incredibly hard-working local crew. John toasted Sandy Bonnyman, Mark Noah, Kristen, and everyone else who had made this possible.
And then Kristen got back to work. Per protocol, she turned her attention to the remains in grave #16. The skeleton (eventually identified as Pvt. Emmet L. Kines) lay on its back, shrouded in poncho, face to face with my grandfather, his left arm beneath my grandfather’s shoulders, a bony embrace that had lasted seventy-one years.
Meanwhile, Paul turned the tables—and camera—on me. I rambled for eleven minutes, struggling to keep my emotions in check.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t make more effort twenty-five years ago, when a lot more of the Tarawa veterans were alive,” I said. “But this alone is a five-year odyssey and it’s thanks to Mark Noah.”
Yet the man responsible would miss this astonishing moment by just one hour. In continual contact with him by satellite phone, Kristen had advised him that team was fast approaching grave #17. He arrived at the site shortly before noon, having driven straight from the airport.
“There’s number 21,” John said, pointing to grave #16 (Kristen began numbering individuals with first row, not the main trench), “and right there next to him is Alexander Bonnyman.”
Mark laughed.
“No. I’m not kidding,” John said. “That’s him.”
“Super. Super nice,” Mark said. “Wow.”
Instead of returning to duty at the lab, where I would have been far more productive, I remained at the site for the rest of the day. Having found my grandfather, I was now reluctant to leave his side; I even mused out loud about camping out in the unit that night, but came to my senses when I remembered the shipping company always kept a guard on duty. By late afternoon, the remains of Pvt. Kines had been safely delivered into Hillary’s hands. Tomorrow was going to be quite a day.
Later that night at the Betio Lodge, Paul said he was surprised that I hadn’t shown more emotion.
“I felt it; you saw me choking up on the video. But I had to shut it down,” I said. “I wasn’t about to start blubbering in front of two special-forces guys.”
“Believe me,” Paul said, “when guys lose a friend from their outfit, they show their emotions.”
“Of course,” I said. “But that’s different; I didn’t risk myself like my grandfather did and I just couldn’t . . . I don’t know. I just had to keep a lid on it.”
“Well, just remember,” he said, shaking his head, “that’s on you.”
The next day the crew began removing sand from around my grandfather’s skeleton, meticulously brushing away a few grains of sand at a time, as if his bones were made of delicate crystal. His were just the third set of remains in the main trench not to be wrapped in a poncho, and where other graves had yielded everything from grenades and helmets to watches and a pack of cigarettes, Sandy had been buried with almost nothing by his side. The hard rubber soles of his boots were still pressed to the bones of his big feet and we recovered numerous corroded metal buttons and the shards of his metal belt buckle.
More intriguing, we found a lump of sand-crusted metal in the area that would have been his left front pants pocket, which turned out to be an astonishingly well preserved Zippo lighter on which Sandy had scratched the initial “B,” fused to a heavily corroded medallion I hoped was a dog tag. Mark would go so far as to send it to specialists at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, but it was beyond restoration and we never knew for sure what it was. (My mother said he might have been wearing a St. Christopher medal which, it’s worth noting, did not show up a list of personal property returned to Jo after his death.)
The fact that there was so little material evidence with my grandfather’s remains made sense. Buried less than twenty-four hours after his death, my grandfather’s remains were likely fairly intact, allowing his burial detail to remove anything useful and place him in the trench without a poncho.
Late in the afternoon, as the team began removing rib bones, they found two tiny, unused morphine syrettes (mini-syringes), their small wire caps still in place, in the area of his right breast pocket, and a third, uncapped syrette, adhered to a rib, its tip slightly bent. The syrettes would provide an interesting clue in the mystery of how he died.
Like most of the men in Cemetery 27, Sandy was face down. His left cheek resting on the sand, his arms were crossed beneath his chest, and his right ankle crossed over his left leg just below the knee. His bones were as solid and sturdy as any History Flight had found on the island, except for a small portion of his upper right thoracic area that had been in contact with poncho material in grave #18.
Even without the rock-solid evidence of his gold dental work, my grandfather was pretty easy to identify. His bones were long and strong; his hands and the feet his daughter remembered so well led Kristen to pronounce, “He was a big man.”
As th
e afternoon wore on and the team placed his remains into evidence bags, Kristen and John saw no immediate sign of skull trauma. There was, however, abundant evidence of apparent shrapnel wounds on the right side of his torso and right hand.
Until that moment, I had never considered that my grandfather’s remains could shed light on the mystery of what really happened atop the bunker. I suddenly realized that here was hard physical evidence to set against all the words ever spoken and ink spilled about his death over the last seven decades. No more hearsay: We had the goods.
Sandy’s remains were in Hillary Parsons’s hands by four o’clock. Mark Noah felt strongly that, as a family member, I shouldn’t take part in the processing of the remains, so I just lurked around the edges of the examination table as Hillary and Kristen went into full forensic-geek mode.
They huddled together over the remarkably well-preserved maxilla and mandible bones, matching all the gleaming gold to dental records. Hillary carefully cleaned the mandible and Kristen gently brushed sand from the cranium as evening fell, and they refused to be distracted even by offers of beer and wine from Paul. I’m sure they would have worked until midnight, or through the night, but once it got dark, John insisted they knock off.
“Don’t worry,” Hillary said, finally accepting a glass of white wine. “I know you’re leaving Monday, but we have this on the fast track.”
Upon careful examination the next day, Sandy Bonnyman’s remains provided indisputable testimony that he had not been shot in the head or spine. It remained conceivable that he died from “gunshot wounds”1 to soft tissues that left no trace on his bones—say, in the neck. But it was clear that Harry Niehoff’s memory of him being shot in the head and dying instantly were not accurate.
What’s more, the trauma to his torso and hand intriguingly pointed to a grenade or mortar shell as the proximate cause of death.
Bones of My Grandfather Page 22
