POPULAR CULTURE’S best-known reference to the search for unaccounted-for Americans is a shoot-’em-up action picture released in the mid-1980s. In Rambo, Sylvester Stallone, portraying a Medal of Honor recipient credited with “fifty-nine confirmed kills” during the war, sneaks into the Vietnamese boonies to discover long-abandoned Americans sharing a bamboo cage with spiders and rats. Double-crossed by his own government, and armed only with steely resolve, a compound bow, and his trusty K-Bar knife, the shirtless Rambo shoots, stabs, blows up, beats up, electrocutes, and immolates a legion of Vietnamese and their Russian advisers; commandeers a Russian helicopter in mid-flight; destroys the camp; frees the prisoners; and flies them across Laos to freedom.
The American operation actually under way in Southeast Asia doesn’t rely on such heroics. The team I’ll join on the search for Jack Barker and his crew is led by a former high school cheerleader, a licensed cosmetologist, and a Marine Corps captain born after the war’s end. Most of its thirteen members, seven women and six men, are army sergeants trained as “92-Mikes,” the military occupation code given to Mortuary Affairs specialists—soldiers trained at Fort Lee, Virginia, in the basics of physiology and in the science of preparing their dead comrades for shipment home.
We assemble in the barn beside the mess tent just after the meeting, everything beyond the glow of its lights dark and busy with sawing crickets, the air cloying with rain and heat. Water drips from the shed’s corrugated metal roof and splashes in puddles at our feet. “OK, y’all,” a smoky-voiced black man says, “we got a lotta work to do tomorrow, got a busy day.” Sergeant First Class Randy Posey runs his tongue over the bottom of a thin mustache, regards his fellow soldiers with slightly bulging eyes. Posey is the team’s senior noncommissioned officer, and rides herd on its ten enlisted members. At forty-four, he is among the oldest Americans at Ban Alang, and after just two years at the lab, he is among its most trusted sergeants—steady, reliable, fair-minded, kind. He peers at a stocky, beetle-browed young man with a “high and tight” haircut, the sides of his head nearly shaved. “Sir, you have anything you need to say?”
Marine captain Patrick Reynolds, twenty-seven years old, is the team’s official leader, and Posey’s boss. He scans the dimly lit faces around him. Half of his team is older than he is, and most have far more experience than he does: This is Reynolds’s first day in Laos, and his first recovery mission. “Let’s get an early start in the morning,” he says. “We’ve got a job to do. Let’s work together. Let’s get it done.”
“What time you want everybody here, sir?” Posey asks him.
Reynolds ponders the question for a moment. “We start flying at, what, oh-seven-thirty?”
“Yessir,” Posey says. “Usually something like that.”
“Very well,” the captain says, “let’s have everybody meet here at oh-seven-hundred.”
Posey nods and turns to an athletic young woman, fine-boned and pretty, her blonde hair tied into a pony tail and threaded through the back of a faded St. Louis Cardinals ball cap. “Ma’am?”
Gwen Haugen is the team’s anthropologist, its scientific leader. Reynolds and Posey command people; she commands the work. “We’ll take just a few people out to the site tomorrow,” she says. “We just need to have a look around, to see how we’re going to set things up. I don’t expect it to take very long. We won’t work a full day out there.”
“OK, you heard the doc,” Posey says, eyeing the rest of the team. “Some of y’all will go out to the site. Some are gonna stay here to help get things squared away. Either way, be here at seven o’clock.”
The members of Recovery Element One, or “RE-1,” venture into the night. On my way to my tent, I see other teams huddled in brief powwows outside the mess tent and in the middle of Main Street—Recovery Element Two, assigned the task of finding the remains of a navy pilot lost aboard an attack jet shot down in 1968; the thirteen members of Recovery Element Three, who will seek two aviators killed when their observation plane crashed in a box canyon to our south. The balance of the Americans in camp, huddled around the barbells and benches of the open-air gym, are attached to an Investigative Element, or IE, which will tour the countryside looking for leads on where Joint Task Force–Full Accounting should send REs in the future.
Once in my tent, I plug in my light, pull a chair up to my field table, and open a packet of papers the joint task force has prepared for me, a primer on this last mission of the Vietnam War.
Of the 2,583 servicemen who were unaccounted for when Saigon fell in April 1975, a quarter were next to impossible to find from the start: They were aviators who crashed in deep water, GIs vaporized in artillery blasts. In the years since, investigators have hit dead ends in their search for nearly as many more, which, hoping for new leads, they classify as “deferred.” Over the same time, more than one in five of the missing have been found and sent home for burial. Another one in ten have been recovered from the field, but have not yet been identified. That leaves 23 percent of the lost, fewer than six hundred, open and active candidates for recovery missions.
In the Pentagon’s shorthand, Jack Barker and his crew are collectively known as “1731,” the reference number affixed to their case file. Every unrecovered soldier, sailor, airman, or marine from the Vietnam War has such a file, numbered according to when he was lost. Thus, a man last seen in January 1961 will have a number beginning with three zeros; a soldier missing in mid-1966 will have a number in the 0300s; those lost later in the war, like the four aboard the Huey, will have four-digit numbers beginning with “1” or “2.” Some defense analysts have devoted their entire careers to working Southeast Asian MIA cases, and know the histories of each so well that at a mere mention of a “REFNO,” they can rattle off the names of the missing, the circumstances surrounding the “incident of loss,” and the efforts made to close the case since.
They’d recall, for instance, that the men of 1731 were highly decorated: Between them the four earned five Purple Hearts, three Silver Stars, at least two Bronze Stars, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, and one Distinguished Service Cross, a recognition of valor second only to the Medal of Honor.
They’d recall that the shootdown claimed a commander: Jack Barker was his company’s CO, and an up-and-coming major who seemed destined for the army’s high ranks.
They’d recall that Bill Dillender was only nineteen years old, and that John Chubb, a few months older, had been in Vietnam for just twenty-eight days when he died.
They’d recall that the Huey’s pilots were among their company’s least experienced. Barker, a short, stocky Georgian two days shy of his thirty-second birthday, had been flying for less than six months. Capt. John Dugan, the twenty-three-year-old New Jersey redhead beside him in the cockpit, was technically the bird’s senior aviator—but was so unschooled himself that he didn’t yet command his own chopper.
They’d recall the flight as “basically a suicide mission.”
And they’d recall that the four are surrounded by other Americans, for many of the missing have geography in common. Disappearances in Vietnam tended to occur in the country’s slender waist, in what are now its central provinces—Quang Nam, Quang Tri, Quang Binh, Thua Thien. Throughout what the Vietnamese call the American War, these were the provinces closest to the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Vietnam, and they were home to some of the fiercest fighting. Most of the 584 men unaccounted for in Laos at war’s end were last seen near the border and just west of the DMZ, not far from Ban Alang.
The jumbled landscape hereabouts was a vital component of the North Vietnamese strategy: Faced with the challenge of supplying its guerillas deep in American-occupied South Vietnam, and knowing any troops, food, weapons, or ammo convoyed through that territory would be intercepted, the Hanoi government pulled an end run—it snuck them into Laos, down the Laotian panhandle, then back across the border behind the lines. Westerners nicknamed this back-door route the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The peaks of the Annamite Cordillera, the craggy highlands forming the thousand-mile border, aren’t high by mountaineering standards—the tallest mountain in Laos rises 8,694 feet, a summit that would be lost in the Rockies—but they create their own weather; steep-sided, split by deep river gorges, they attract cloud cover and hold it fast. Cloaked in this soupy air and the jungle’s thatch, protected by the border’s chaotic topography, North Vietnamese caravans drove, bicycled, and backpacked a steady flow of soldiers, weapons, and rice to their comrades-in-arms.
The American brass recognized the route’s importance early in the fighting and ordered its almost continual bombing. One day’s strikes might wreck a piece of it; the Vietnamese would reroute the trail around the damaged section. When another strike took out the new stretch, the Vietnamese would move it again. It wasn’t long before the trail was a web of a thousand strands weaving through the dense Laotian bush, in places twenty-five miles wide.
The American effort to disrupt the southward march constituted the longest continuous mission of the war. It called on aircrews dispatched on bombing runs, commandos on the ground, electronic warfare specialists—the Pentagon employed all sorts of clever gizmos to combat the supply network, including sensors that detected the footfalls of troops on the move, overheard conversations, even sniffed the odor of human flesh. Nothing worked for long, however, and U.S. losses in stanching the traffic were significant. Case 1731 is among dozens here.
My dossier includes a summary of the case prepared by Bill Forsyth, a joint task force analyst. It is lean on details about the Huey’s loss. “On 20 March 1971, the four-man crew of a UH-1H helicopter was attempting to extract an Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) force from the area of Landing Zone (LZ) Brown,” it reads. “The first helicopters that attempted to land were driven off by heavy ground fire. The pilot of the case aircraft attempted to land, but the aircraft was hit. . . . Four other UH-1 aircraft were lost near the LZ on that day and the extraction was suspended.”
Forsyth goes on to describe the site where the excavation will take place. It is 5.7 nautical miles southeast of Ban Alang. The wreckage is scattered over an area measuring fifteen meters square. It will require forty to fifty people, working for thirty days, to dig it all up.
He judges RE-1’s odds of success as “possible.”
Late at night the rain returns. As I lie in my cot, listening to its tattoo on the canvas overhead, the soil around my tent turns to pudding. Sometime around three the wind kicks up, the tent’s stakes tear loose, and I jerk awake to a loud, hollow pop—the sound of a light bulb bursting. I sit up and peer into the blackness, can make out the toppled center pole lying on the floor a couple feet away, frosted glass in pieces beside it, the light socket still duct-taped to its middle. A moment later, the tent’s sodden roof collapses onto my face.
So I’m not looking or feeling my best when six of us take off for the site shortly after 7 A.M. Gwen Haugen wants to keep the group small; today will offer her only opportunity to examine 1731’s wreckage before it’s crowded with people, and before those people start changing it. She, Sergeant Posey, and RE-1’s linguist, air force senior airman Clint Krueger, crowd into a Squirrel with a pair of Laotian escorts for the first lift. Fifteen minutes later, the chopper is back for Pat Reynolds, me, another couple of officials, and the team’s medic, navy chief hospital corpsman Arielitho “Art” Artillaga.
Our pilot is a New Zealander who works for Lao Westcoast Aviation, an Australian outfit under contract to Joint Task Force–Full Accounting to ferry American teams in Laos. The company’s six-seat helicopters are small and agile enough to thread their way into tight jungle landing spots, and its pilots veterans of the Laotian bush, New Zealand’s Antarctic camps, and logging operations throughout Oceana. The rotors are turning as we climb into the Squirrel’s left side, Artillaga and I crowding in the back with our escorts, Reynolds taking the front seat. Snug and spry, its cockpit wrapped in Plexiglas, the Squirrel is a sports car to the Mi-17’s school bus. We rise to a low hover, spin 180 degrees, and with our nose tilted downward, skim fast from the camp and out over the trees and five hundred feet into the air.
Little more than an hour after dawn, there’s no sign of last night’s storm. The sky is clear, the temperature already climbing through the high eighties, and as we fly eastward, we have an unobstructed view of the landscape below. It is a flat-bottomed valley four miles wide, the same broad furrow that Jack Barker’s helicopter traveled in its final minutes. In its depths, the Xepon River runs a jagged course of right-angle bends and squarish loops, white flecks advertising the rocks and low cascades in its path. Off to our left, north of the river, I can make out Route 9’s straight cut through rosewood, banana, and bamboo, and beyond it, a chain of round-topped highlands that occupy the nexus between mountain and hill.
Close off our right side rises the massive escarpment toward which Barker and company flew. Its upper half is pink stone streaked and stained with grays and browns, a few tenacious shrubs bristling from its clefts. Lower are the escarpment’s shoulders, where the valley’s bottom climbs steeply to meet the vertical rock, crisscrossed with narrow footpaths, sprinkled with a few lonely huts standing guard over bright green rice fields. And everywhere—along the river’s banks, among the wild banana trees sprouting like asterisks at the escarpment’s foot, across fields and forest—everywhere are craters.
Four miles from Ban Alang the escarpment, which for most of its length runs east-west, veers sharply to the south. The Squirrel banks around the promontory this bend creates—a mammoth ship’s bow pointed to the northeast—and on rolling ground a mile ahead, a patch of bright blue appears.
We set down in a clearing ringed by two dozen crouching villagers, the Squirrel’s rotor kicking up a swirling cloud of dust, twigs, and dead leaves. The spectators have little experience with helicopters and don’t know to shield their faces against the blast; as we jump from our seats, several are rubbing their eyes and spitting dirt from their mouths. One is a leather-skinned woman about four feet tall, topless and nursing a naked infant. She’s also smoking a pipe. Another is a skinny teenager in a black Metallica T-shirt. I pass a knot of smiling little girls in bright gold earrings and long, colorfully woven skirts, and little boys whose heads are shaved save for oval tufts of hair over their brows. One, maybe ten years old, is smoking a cigarette.
Our destination lies forty yards from the landing zone, at the end of a broad path. An advance team has cleared a great circle of vegetation from the excavation site, leaving a scene resembling photographs of the wartime Somme or Verdun, more postapocalyptic than suggesting science is afoot. Dragonflies flit over stumps of bamboo hacked into evil-looking points and termite mounds chest-high and hard as cement built on what, a few days past, was dark forest floor. The ground is muddy and puddled and ugly in its nakedness.
Some of the cleared bamboo has been lashed into the frames of three large, open-sided tents roofed with nylon tarps. In one, at the clearing’s southwest edge, thinner poles have been fashioned into a platform for gear storage and two picnic tables, one long and one short. This will be the break area for us Americans. We’ll dig for the helicopter with the help of hired villagers, who will rest in another tent of about the same size, fifteen yards away; the third shelter will serve as a rough clinic during visits by the mission’s American doctor.
I dump my knapsack on a picnic table and stride among stumps and puddles, boots squishing, to the clearing’s middle and the lip of a bomb crater thirty-five feet across and fifteen deep, with sides that dive into an opaque brown pool. Just beyond it, on the site’s east side, the ground drops steeply into a still-wooded and shady ravine. I can hear a stream burbling down there, though it’s invisible behind piles of bamboo chopped down to create the clearing and dumped onto the gully’s bank. A second bomb crater, about half the size of the first, is punched into the slope at the clearing’s northeast edge. A third lurks in the brush behind the American break tent.
The escarpment looms over the bush to the west and south, its cliffs glowing warm in the morning sun. I eye its uneven top edge and think: Somewhere up there, beyond view but withina few hundred yards of where I stand, Landing Zone Brown lay. I look around. Haugen and Reynolds, our marine captain, are crouched at the edge of the big crater. Sergeant Posey is walking the clearing’s western fringe. Clint Krueger, the linguist, is talking to a small group of villagers with our chief escort, a Laotian army captain named Somphong Sangkhisisavath, who’s wearing camouflage sneakers with his jungle fatigues, and another Laotian officer representing the district—something akin to an American county—in which we’ve set down. He’s a tall character wearing a camo ball cap that bears the embroidered legend “US POLO,” and a rough facsimile of the Stars and Stripes.
Only one thing is missing: the Huey. There is no wrecked helicopter here, nor any obvious sign of one—no burned hulk, no broken rotors, no mangled engine. I stroll over to Haugen, who is still at the crater’s edge picking at something on the ground. When I bend down beside her, I see that it’s a candy-striped piece of electrical wire. A couple feet away, a button lies beside a tuft of grass.
Next to it is a thin ribbon of aluminum, maybe three inches long.
A small triangle of broken Plexiglas.
Shards of what seem to be porcelain, a half-inch thick and bright white—as if a bathroom sink has been smashed and scattered over acres of the Laotian bush.
With a start I realize that this is the helicopter, that I’m standing in it, that this is all that remains of a machine almost forty-two feet long and fourteen and a half feet tall, a complex marriage of aluminum, steel, and glass that weighed two and a half tons. “I don’t get it,” I tell Haugen. “Where’s the rest?”
She looks up at me. Haugen has spent four years as an anthropologist with the Central Identification Laboratory. This is her eleventh mission. She doesn’t seem much fazed by our surroundings, nor the dearth of wreckage. “An awful lot of them are like this, when you have an explosion and fire,” she says calmly. She stands and pulls off her gloves. “Then you’ve got secondary burning from farmers clearing their fields, so a lot of these sites have been burned twice—once in the incident and later by the locals. And these farmers use gasoline. It’s a hot fire.”
“Yeah, but surely fire didn’t do this.”
She chuckles softly. “Well, no,” she says. “Not all of it. But this is pretty typical.” She looks around the clearing, then at the splinters at our feet. “There’s been a lot of scavenging by thirty years after an incident.
“Have you seen their machetes?” She nods toward a group of local boys perched in deep squats on a nearby termite mound, their knees level with their shoulders, rumps hovering an inch off the dirt. Several hold machetes—in Lao, bria—with crude, square-ended blades. “Look at the metal on them,” Haugen says. “A lot of times, it’ll look suspiciously like aircraft.”
Visit other parts of the world, and a half-century after a plane crash, the wreckage will lie relatively intact, untouched by the locals, who regard it as a tomb, a place worthy of respect or inhabited by spirits. Not so in Southeast Asia, where metal is snatched up not only at decades-old wartime crash sites but at the scene of contemporary accidents, sometimes before they’ve even had time to cool.
True story: On October 19, 2000, a Lao Aviation commuter plane carrying fifteen people smacked into a mountaintop in northeastern Laos, not far from where a recovery team led by lab anthropologist Greg Berg was working a site. The Americans joined the rescue effort. While Berg helped bandage the injured, he noticed that most of the more than one hundred villagers who’d gathered at the crash were clutching pieces of wreckage, and realized that in their zeal to salvage metal, the locals had started to dismantle the plane even as the survivors lay pain-racked and helpless around them.
Haugen’s marking the location of each piece of surface debris with little orange flags on wire stalks when Randy Posey approaches from across the site, perspiration beaded in his mustache and dripping from his chin. Posey had never heard of 92-Mikes when he joined the army eleven years ago, after a first career as a schoolteacher. He wasn’t even aware the job existed; he meandered into it after holding down another military occupation specialty—field artillery, with a unit stationed in upstate New York. The climate at Fort Drum came as a rude shock after more than thirty years down South, and the work was a lot harder than anything he’d experienced in the classroom—so hard and so unpleasant that after four years he told the bosses he couldn’t take it anymore. They asked him: You want a job where you just sit at a desk all day? Posey said, Yeah, I’ll take that one. They shipped him to the Mortuary Affairs company at Fort Lee. Three years later, he was at the lab.
Some army assignment officer somewhere has probably been laughing ever since. Posey works harder on the lab’s missions than he’s ever worked in his life. His T-shirt droops with what must be five pints of sweat. His white tube socks, pulled up over the hems of his fatigue pants to keep out poisonous critters, are soaked through.
He stops a few feet from Haugen and gazes over the debris field. “Not much to it, ma’am,” he says quietly.
“No,” she replies. “The only wreckage I’ve seen is over here.” She points to the scant evidence at her feet, then to a trail tamped into the muddy grass that angles up the ravine, passes through the debris field, and skirts the big crater. “There’s this little path running through here, so once we get this gridded, we’re gonna want to keep the villagers from using that.”
Posey nods as a steady procession of locals climbs the trail from the ravine’s bottom. Haugen watches them come. “I can see it’s going to be difficult,” she says. I notice that while the sergeant is practically puddling sweat, the anthropologist appears dry, fresh, unaffected by the heat.
Posey wanders off. Haugen returns to our conversation and to picking at the ground with her trowel. “Sometimes you think the heavier items, like the rotor assembly, they wouldn’t be able to get out,” she says. “You’d be surprised. They just pick it apart over time.”
She looks up at me. “We’re only a kilometer from a village,” she says. “This is pretty much their Home Depot.”
Late in the morning, a wiry Laotian with a bushy tangle of graying hair appears at the edge of the clearing, wearing a khaki safari shirt, nylon swimming trunks, and mismatched flip-flops, the left one yellow, the right, blue. In one hand he holds a red, floral-pattern umbrella. Mr. Talin is the chief of a nearby village. More importantly, he’s the owner of a war souvenir, the one intact artifact of the helicopter that came to rest where we stand. Haugen turns to Clint Krueger. “Ask him to indicate where he saw the helmet,” she says. At the same time, she hands Mr. Talin a wire flag.
Krueger utters a few words in Lao, pausing between phrases to search for the right wording. The chief promptly strides to the crater, surefootedly descends its side, and splashes through the knee-high muck at the bottom. He plants the flag in the hole’s northwest corner, then looks up at us.
“Does he still have the helmet?” Haugen asks. Krueger haltingly relays the question. Mr. Talin nods.
“Would it be possible tomorrow for him to bring the helmet, so we could take a picture of it?” she asks. Krueger hesitates. Captain Somphong jumps in to translate. The man says he could do that.
“Could you ask him whether, when he farmed here, he saw any more pieces of airplane?” the anthropologist asks. She’s looking at Krueger, but it’s the captain, evidently impatient, who poses the question in Lao. Mr. Talin shakes his head.
Haugen points to the trail through the debris field. “People walk through here,” she says. “Did people maybe pick up big pieces and take them to the village?” We haven’t been to Ban Satun Gnai or any of the surrounding villages. For all we know, pieces of the helicopter have been incorporated into house construction, a common Laotian practice. The captain translates the question. Mr. Talin stares. Haugen tries a different tack: “Are there any other large pieces, possibly with numbers, that they might have in the village?” Mr. Talin says that could be. Possibly.
“Yes, because it would be very helpful if we could have pieces with numbers,” Haugen explains. “Many helicopters were lost here, and it would be very helpful to have a number.” Captain Somphong translates. Mr. Talin rattles off a lengthy reply. The captain turns back to Haugen. He has a thick head of longish, wavy black hair, a mustache, and an air of friendly insouciance. “Sold,” he says breezily. “So he could live.”
Haugen sighs. “OK. I understand.” She smiles grimly. We all look at each other for a minute, during which Mr. Talin climbs out of the hole. “He didn’t see the helicopter crash?” she asks. The chief nods, pauses for a moment, then says well no, not personally.
Haugen purses her lips, thinking. Captain Somphong and the chief eye her expectantly. Of the many burdens facing an anthropologist in Laos or Vietnam, the language barrier ranks among the toughest. Any successful interview relies on developing a certain rapport with the person questioned, with the establishment of common ground, however small. It’s a tall assignment when one’s questions are passed through a third party, and the answers received the same way. Haugen’s exchange with the chief, like most between recovery teams and their Southeast Asian hosts, has been a stilted, formal affair, and has yielded what one might expect: a polite, superficial conversation uncolored by body language or nuance, a painting of broad strokes in primary colors.
She tells Captain Somphong she’s out of questions, asks him to remind the chief that she’ll need to see the helmet, and returns to the debris field at the edge of the crater, where she leans onto what resembles a slender post-hole digger, twisting its handles, driving it into the earth. When she pulls it back up, the tool’s chrome bit is packed with a narrow cylinder of earth, a cross-section of the ground beneath our feet.
“There’s some good news,” Haugen murmurs, as she studies the sample. “It doesn’t appear that the villagers have been digging around.” Below the debris field, and the villagers’ trail, lies a layer of disturbed soil about ten inches thick—disturbed by man, by an event like an air crash. “Nice, disturbed soil,” she says. “Which tells me we just might find something. It might be good.”