“The fact the we found and identified Alexander Bonnyman is going to open up the possibility of finding many more—not hundreds, but thousands—of MIAs simply because his history is so spectacular,” History Flight archaeologist Chet Walker said at the 2016 meeting of the American Society of Forensic Odontology. “He shows that this is possible—and that it is deeply personal.”5
After more than seventy years, the marines of Tarawa had won a battle of a different kind, and once again, my grandfather had played a crucial role.
I told Mark I’d handle media about the Cemetery 27 recovery, which would without question attract attention from around the globe. But as the end of June approached, we’d still made no public announcement and I was starting to feel impatient.
Long before going to Tarawa in May, I had decided to “thru-hike” the 486-mile-long Colorado Trail from Denver to Durango. I had initially planned to depart in mid- to late June, but thanks to weeks of heavy late-spring precipitation, the higher sections of the trail—which averages more than ten thousand feet in elevation—remained impassable. Now the snow was melting and I was eager to head down the trail.
Mark had granted me permission to put the word out on the Bonnyman telegraph in advance of an annual family get-together at a mountain lodge in North Carolina. Inevitably, word was beginning to get out beyond the family, and one cousin in the military reported that he’d heard about the find from friends in the Marine Corps. I urged Mark to pull the trigger, and I finally sent our press release on June 29, a month after my grandfather’s exhumation.
For the next seventy-two hours, Mark and I juggled interviews, sat in front of cameras, and Skyped with journalists around the world, talking about the remarkable discovery of Cemetery 27. Stories aired on ABC, CBS, NBC, and local affiliates in Tennessee, Hawaii, Colorado, New Mexico, California, and beyond. News organizations from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser to the Washington Post, Santa Fe New Mexican, and Agence France Presse ran stories. The story was broadcast on National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as well as radio stations in New Zealand, Australia, and Japan.
Soon, I began receiving congratulations from around the world. Some people expressed disappointment that Sandy would not be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, but there had never been any doubt that he should come back to Knoxville.
“God knows after all these years he may never be found. But if he is, I would love nothing better than anything in the world than to have his remains back in Knoxville; he is the only one (of his family) not there,” my aunt Alix had said in 2010. “If he’s buried on Tarawa forever, that’s okay. But if he’s found, he belongs in Knoxville.”6
We decided as a family that he would be laid to rest, at long last, on September 27, next to his parents, sisters, and brother.
“They all died without knowing the truth,” I told the Washington Post. “I’m not a woo person. I don’t believe in ghosts or whatever. But I still feel like I’ve been able to play a little part in closing the circle for the family. And I feel great about that.”7
More than one reporter asked if we planned to have the words “BURIED AT SEA” removed from beneath my grandfather’s name on the back of the Bonnyman monument.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “It’s a beautiful irony. It’s part of the story.”
On July 2, head swirling with everything that had happened in the last three months, I abandoned the world for the trail. For the next three and a half weeks my life was reduced to its most basic elements—walking, finding water, making sure I had enough to eat, making and breaking camp, and walking again, interrupted only by brief trips into town for resupply (and the occasional media interview).
Like many other first-time thru-hikers—the name for people who hike the world’s long trails from end to end—I wondered how I would fare in body, mind, and spirit while walking mostly alone through the wilderness. Every day on the trail brings some kind of physical discomfort, a new blister or swelling, painful chafe, stiff muscles. Successful hikers just keep walking.
Though I often walked for eight or ten hours without seeing anyone, I was never alone. Watching the last few sparks of a dying campfire rise into a perfectly still, moonless night, or gazing in awe over some vast mountain valley, I recalled my grandfather’s passion for the outdoors and tried to imagine the trials he’d experienced on Guadalcanal and Tarawa, so far removed from anything I might face in the wilderness. At times, thinking about him woke me from mindless rage at rain, stinging chafe, a swollen ankle—If you’re never uncomfortable, I imagined him saying with a grin, how much of an adventure can it really be?
Walking the trail step by step with my grandfather’s memory, I considered the life I’d led. Like him, I’d always sought adventure, loved the outdoors. Like him, I’d been impetuous, thoughtless, and reckless. I’d even abandoned my own Ivy League education and run off to work as a cowboy, just as Sandy had gone to the mountains of Virginia to, well, learn to blow stuff up.
Like Sandy, I’d always had a hard time sitting still. I was ever on the hunt for that next great adrenaline rush or endorphin high—riding bucking horses, skydiving, running ultramarathons, mountain climbing, surfing, night diving with sharks, hiking five hundred miles, dangling from the roof of a twenty-two-story dormitory just to prove to myself I wasn’t afraid. Indignant at the thought that there were any limits on how I chose to live my life, I made scandalous choices that shivered the branches of the Bonnyman family tree. Yet I can honestly say that I did it not to rebel, but out of an almost irresistible compulsion to seize every thrilling moment of life, which, I knew, could be taken in an instant.
Of my grandfather at twenty-two, I remembered, a family friend had written, “There will always be much of the boy and a sheer joy of living in him.”8
Walking for hundreds of miles through bristlecone pines and flickering aspen groves, along windblown rocky ridges, shielding my face from torrents and tempests, or blissfully ambling across high mesas through bright asylums of mountain flowers, I reveled in every part of myself. I was strong, resourceful, determined, stoic, flexible, friendly, compassionate, generous, and creative—but also petty, angry, judgmental, self-centered, and prideful.
When my grandfather died, a friend wrote, “I don’t mean that he wasn’t intensely human, but I’ve always thought of him as ‘good’—in the best sense of the word.”9
Having spent all those years searching for my grandfather, I came to the conclusion at last that while I was no hero, maybe we weren’t so different after all.
Lost in the wilderness, I missed Mark Noah’s ultimate vindication: On July 26, he received the title of Honorary Marine from the US Marine Corps, joining fewer than 100 figures—including such notables as Gary Sinise, Chuck Norris, and former US senators Max Cleland and Daniel Inouye, not to mention Bugs Bunny and Jim Nabors—for his contributions to the corps. I sent a letter in support of his nomination a year before, describing a man who, though he had not served, perfectly represented the determination and grit that has for so long characterized the US Marine Corps.
“He is so damn smart and determined,” said retired Marine Col. Michael Brown at the ceremony. “He doesn’t want accolades. He just looks at it as mission accomplishment, and there is nothing more marine than that.”10
Five years had shown me that anything could happen in the recovery business, and it wasn’t until my grandfather’s flag-draped casket rolled off Delta Airline Flight 1292 into the waiting arms of six marines on the rain-soaked tarmac at Knoxville’s McGhee-Tyson Airport that I could finally exhale: Home at last. It was four months since we’d seen that first glint of gold.
More than a hundred members of the Patriot Guard Riders led the way and countless well-wishers braved a three-hour delay along rain-washed Alcoa Highway and Kingston Pike as the procession wound from the airport to Berry Highland Memorial funeral home, less than three miles from where Sandy had grown up. There was not a dry eye among the usually stoic Bonnymans in
that limousine as we watched children waving flags and veterans saluting our passing cortege. At the funeral home, the fire department had hoisted a twenty-foot-high American flag from the end of a hook and ladder.
By the time bagpiper Kay Irwin began to play “The Marine Corps Hymn” the following afternoon, the rain had passed. Smoky autumn sunlight infused the East Tennessee Veteran’s Memorial plaza in downtown Knoxville, where my grandfather’s casket had been brought to lie in honor. Hundreds of people turned out for the ceremony, including Lt. Col. James Michael “Mike” Sprayberry, a Vietnam-era Medal of Honor recipient who had driven 200 miles from Alabama.
“If a guy can wait seventy years to be back on native soil,” he declared, “it’s the least I can do.”
I spoke briefly, reading from my great-grandparents’ letters.
“This is where he belongs,” I said. “I’m glad he’s home, and I’m glad Tennessee’s glad he’s home.”
I reserved the pub-like top floor at Armada Craft Cocktails in downtown Knoxville for that night, inviting anyone and everyone to come and toast Sandy Bonnyman and History Flight. It was exactly what I’d hoped for: a free-wheeling, boisterous celebration of a hundred or more, including two Tarawa veterans, C.J. Daigle and Elwin Hart, DPAA chief Mike Linnington, Mark Noah, Kristen Baker, Hillary Parsons, John Frye, and a dozen other people from History Flight who had worked on Cemetery 27, along with assorted Bonnymans, friends, members of the Alexander Bonnyman Detachment of the Marine Corps League, active-duty marines, and even a framed photo of Buster the cadaver-detecting canine, who, though invited, wasn’t able to attend.
It was a hell of a party. Sandy would have loved it.
Marine Barracks Washington, better known as 8th & I, is the oldest Marine Corps unit in the nation. Founded in 1801 by President Thomas Jefferson and Lt. Col. William Ward Burrows, third commandant of the corps, it is home to the famous Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon, Marine Corps Drum and Bugle Corps, Marine Band, the official Marine Corps Color Guard, and the Marine Corps Body Bearers. The unit’s official duties are to support “ceremonial and security missions in the Capital.”
But early in the morning of September 27, 2015, for the first time in recent memory, members of 8th & I left Washington to honor the burial of a marine five hundred miles away in Knoxville, Tennessee. At noon, led by Maj. Gen. Burke W. Whitman and Col. Robert A. Couser, who had escorted Sandy Bonnyman’s remains from Hawaii, some eighty-five marines in full ceremonial dress—red for members of the band and drum and bugle corps, blue for the drill team, bearers, and color guard—followed the casket on a custom-made, horse-drawn caisson (built by a local nonprofit reenactors’ group, Burroughs Battery) for a solemn, half-mile journey to the highest point at Berry Highland Memorial Cemetery, where the ten-foot-long marble Bonnyman monument has stood since 1949. A remarkable end to a very long journey.
Hundreds of citizens, including retired Army Col. Walter Joseph Marm, Jr., awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in Vietnam, gathered atop the hill as four Marine Corps Cobra helicopters thudded overhead, one peeling off in the famous, heart-rending “missing man” formation. Rev. Dr. Robert McKeon and Rev. Anne Bonnyman, nephew and niece of the deceased, led a brief service, followed by a twenty-one-gun salute and “Taps.”
Just as three pairs of white-gloved hands removed the flag from the casket and began to fold it, a cool breeze rolled across the hilltop, breaking the heat of that perfectly clear, blue, autumn afternoon. A few golden leaves twirled down from high branches, one settling into the folds of the flag. Gen. Whitman—tall, blond, and blue-eyed, he bore a resemblance to my grandfather—solemnly received the flag from the bearers, walked over and knelt before Fran Bonnyman Evans, now eighty-one.
“On behalf of the president of the United States, the United States Marine Corps, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your father’s honorable and faithful service,” he said quietly, eyes glistening.
He laid the flag on my mother’s lap, clasped her spotted hands in his, and leaned in to whisper words I could not hear.
At long last, someone had come to console the little girl with a broken heart.
AFTERWORD
All told, History Flight, Inc. teams recovered thirty-six sets of intact remains and seven sets of partial remains, including one skull, from the Cemetery 27 site on Betio, making provisional identifications on twenty-eight. In 2016 History Flight turned over another twenty-five sets of remains found on Tarawa to the DPAA.
History Flight teams continue the search for America’s World War II MIAs, not only on Tarawa, but also in Europe, the Philippines, and other locations. As of 2017, the organization had recovered intact remains of some seventy Tarawa MIAs and partial remains of scores more. To learn more, go to historyflight.org.
As of March 2018, DPAA’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii had identified the following men recovered from Cemetery 27 (listed by rank, name, and hometown; all are marines, unless otherwise noted):
1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Santa Fe, New Mexico
2nd Lt. George S. Bussa, F Van Nuys, California
Navy Pharmacist’s Mate 3rd Class Howard P. Brisbane, Birmingham, Alabama
Navy Pharmacist’s Mate 3 Howard P. Brisbane, Birmingham, Alabama
Pfc. Anthony N. Brozyna, Hartford, Connecticut
Pvt. Robert Carter, Jr., Corvallis, Oregon
GySgt. Sidney A. Cook, Hemlock Grove, Ohio
Cpl. Walter G. Critchley, East Norwich, New York
Pvt. Fred E. Freet, Gary, Indiana
Pvt. Dale R. Geddes, Grand Island, Nebraska
Pfc. Ben H. Gore, Hopkinsville, Kentucky
Pvt. Palmer S. Haraldson, Los Angeles
Sgt. James J. Hubert, Duluth, Minnesota
Pfc. James B. Johnson, Poughkeepsie, New York
Pvt. Emmett L. Kines, Grafton, West Virginia
Pvt. John F. Lally, Holyoke, Massachusetts
Pfc. Wilbur C. Mattern, Oelwein, Iowa
Pfc. John W. MacDonald, Boston
Pfc. James F. Mansfield, Plymouth, Massachusetts
Pfc. Elmer L. Mathies, Hereford, Texas.
2nd Lt. Ernest Matthews, Dallas
Sgt. Fae V. Moore, Pine Ridge, South Dakota
Cpl. Roger K. Nielson, Denver, Colorado
USN Pharmacist’s Mate 1st Class Warren G. Nelson, Lakota, North Dakota
Pfc. Charles E. Oetjen, Blue Island, Illinois
Cpl. James D. Otto, A 3/8
[Los] Angeles
Pvt. Frank Penna, Canastota, New York
Pfc. John F. Prince, New York
Pfc. James P. Reilly, New York
Pfc. Larry R. Roberts, Damascus, Arkansas
Pfc. John N. Saini, Healdsburg, California
Pfc. Roland Schaede, Maywood, Illinois
Pfc. James S. Smith, Liberty, Mississippi
Pvt. Donald S. Spayd, Los Angeles
Pfc. George H. Traver, Chatham, New York
Pvt. Harry K. Tye, Gallagher, West Virginia
Pfc. Roland Vosmer, Denver, Colorado
Pfc. James O. Whitehurst, Ashford, Alabama
In addition, as of March 2018, the DPAA had exhumed and identified eighteen Tarawa MIAs previously buried as “unknown” at the Punchbowl outside Honolulu.
Buster, the friendly black Labrador retriever who played a key part of History Flight’s success on Tarawa, died in February 2015 at the age of twelve.
On September 2, 2017, my aunt Alix Bonnyman Prejean, her daughter Andra Prejean, and I buried a few small pieces of material evidence collected from Sandy’s grave—the soles of his boondockers, buttons, a broken belt buckle—and a small piece of bone in an unmarked grave on the property where he operated his copper mine near Santa Rosa, New Mexico.
My mother, aunt, and I always agreed that Sandy should be buried in Knoxville alongside his parents and brother, who had tried so hard to bring his remains home. But like my grandfather, we all love New Mexico, and wanted to
commit a small part of him to the Land of Enchantment, his final home on earth.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people helped make this book a reality. The manuscript has changed radically over the years, and their contributions may not be explicit in this published version, but I am grateful to them all for their kind assistance.
History Flight: Eric Albertson, Kristen Baker, Drew Buchner, Corinne D’Anjou, Paul Dostie and Buster, John Frye, Harlan Glenn, James Goodrich, Ed Huffine, Reid Joyce, Kautebiri Kobuti, Marc Miller, Hillary Parsons, Glenn Prentice, Katherine Rasdorf, David Senn, Paul Schwimmer, Rick Snow. Above all, Mark Noah.
Tarawa veterans: Ed Bale, Max Clampitt, Leon Cooper, C.J. Daigle, Roy Elrod, Elwin Hart, Norman Hatch, Allen E. Heminger, Dean Ladd, Victor Ornelas, Robert Sheeks, Marvin Sheppard, Karol Szwet.
Other World War II veterans: Bill Bower, Edward Wood, Jr.
Tarawa MIA and veteran family members: Carol Bryant, George Clerou, Jim Crue, Patricia Donigian, Rick Gilliland, Paul Govedare, Jr., Michelle Guy, Pat Hallin, Lulane Harrison, Ron Harrison, Michael Heminger, Michael Hibner, Leroy Kisling, Jr., Robert Kossow, Ken Lally, Cory Maupin, Katherine Moore, Alan Leslie, John Murphy, Kenneth Oetjen, Frederick F. Penna, John Ratomski, John Saini, Theresa Schaede, Jennifer Sheppard, Jane L. Shumate, David Silliman, Kirk David Stewart, Ellen Stoll, Jennifer Torgerson, Rick Voorhees, Garret Vreeland, Robert Zalesky.
Family: Margot Atkinson, Alexander “Al” Bonnyman, Anne Bonnyman, Brian Bonnyman, Gordon Bonnyman, Jr., Jean Webb Bonnyman, Isabel Ashe Bonnyman, 1st Lt. Norman Bonnyman (Army National Guard, First Troop, Philadelphia City Cavalry), Frances Bonnyman Evans, Catherine Evans Lambert, Margot McAllister, Hugh Nystrom, Alexandra Bonnyman “Alix” Prejean, Alexandra “Andra” Prejean, Alexander “Sandy” McKeon, Robert McKeon, Brooke Stanley, Jr., Isabel Bonnyman Stanley.
Bones of My Grandfather Page 25
