IN 1774, AN ARMY of Virginians met the Shawnee and their allies in a long and bloody firefight at Point Pleasant, on the Ohio River. When the carnage ended, the victorious whites couldn’t say how many of the enemy they’d killed; the Shawnee had carried off their dead as they’d dropped.
During the American Civil War, lulls in the fighting would see teams of litter-bearers take to the battlefield to remove the casualties, and safe passage was accorded this grim duty by both sides. Likewise, in Cuba, the Philippines, and both world wars, GIs saw to it that the bodies of their fellows were carted from the field.
For the bulk of America’s experience under arms, and for that of countries with far longer histories, the aim of such efforts was to accord the dead a decent burial. A trooper in the ranks had little expectation that if he were to die, his remains would wend their way back to his family; in the days before electric refrigeration, chemical preservation, and speedy transport, such honor was reserved for only a vaunted few. Romans carried only their leaders home on their shields; low-ranking martyrs to the empire were left behind. Lord Horatio Nelson, fatally wounded in the British victory at Trafalgar, was pickled in a barrel of rum for the voyage back across the English Channel and a demigod’s state funeral; his sailors, who died by the score, were simply weighted, wrapped, and thrown overboard.
The terms of the unwritten contract between fighting men and their governments guaranteed only that they would not be left to rot where they fell. So it is that oceans of Confederate graves stud the ground at Gettysburg, and of Union graves at Petersburg, and that a multitude of Americans lie in the unfamiliar soil of Flanders and Normandy. So it is that Australian thousands lie at Gallipoli, half a world from home, and Englishmen beneath Crimea’s valley of death and the grasslands of Natal. And so it is that the crew of a German U-boat, sunk by American ships and planes off the North Carolina coast in World War II, lies to this day in a cemetery in Hampton, Virginia.
On rare occasion, an effort might have been made in centuries past to return at war’s end in search of remains, but even then, rank had its privileges. Just after the U.S. Seventh Cavalry charged into disaster at the Little Big Horn, its 266 officers and men were given hasty burials on the battlefield. A year later, in 1877, the army returned to the site to retrieve the slain unit’s leader, George Armstrong Custer, and reinterred his bones—or, at least, what were believed to be his bones—at West Point. His horse soldiers were left where they lay.
It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that the United States opened a preamble to the expeditions now under way in Southeast Asia: For a few years after World War II, teams from the army’s Graves Registration Service wandered battlefields and island-hopped the Pacific in search of American bones. They weren’t out to account for every soldier who lacked a marked grave. They didn’t seek marines who’d been machine-gunned in the surf in the landings at Tinian and Saipan and a host of other far-flung atolls, and who’d washed to sea with the tide, nor the thousands of sailors who’d drowned aboard sinking warships and submarines.
Then came Vietnam, and, after the U.S. pullout, an ambition to achieve “the fullest possible accounting” of the lost. What brought the change? Technology may be part of the answer: For the first time, America had the means to undertake the mission. Political pressure surely played a role: The war was unpopular, seen as needless by a huge chunk of the population, and with that dissatisfaction came the view that an errant Washington owed its boys, at the least, the dignity of a burial on American soil. The Vietnamese style of waging war was a large part of the equation: Hanoi was maddeningly silent on the subject of what had become of men who’d disappeared on its turf.
But perhaps the biggest impetus was the simple truth that the United States did not control the battlefield at war’s end. Its unrecovered dead were beyond reach, in territory held by a former enemy.
The most compelling parallel to the anguish this produced can be found not elsewhere in the American experience but in mythology. In Homer’s Iliad, the Greek warrior Achilles slew the Trojan hero Hector in a fight outside Troy’s besieged walls, then desecrated his body by dragging it behind his chariot in view of Hector’s horrified comrades. Worse, he refused to turn it over to the defending army.
Everyone in Troy knew Hector was dead; just the same, retrieving his body and giving it a proper funeral was so important to his people that his grieving father, Troy’s king, braved a journey into the enemy camp to plead for the return of his son’s remains.
When America pulled out of Vietnam, there was little doubt about the fate of all but a tiny percentage of its unaccounted-for soldiers in Southeast Asia.
Yet here we are.
The agency placed in charge of the accounting effort was the Joint Casualty Resolution Center, a branch of the U.S. Pacific Command that was revamped and renamed Joint Task Force–Full Accounting in 1992. For the science and sweat involved in actually digging for the lost, both the JCRC and joint task force have relied on the lab.
The Central Identification Laboratory-Hawaii, usually referred to by its acronym, CILHI—pronounced “Sill-high”—is a young organization, descended from a tiny, ad hoc laboratory in Thailand at the close of the Vietnam War. At the time, it had one anthropologist, largely self-taught, and a staff consisting of a handful of soldiers, most of them 92-Mikes. Like all enlistees, 92-Mikes first endure basic training, then go to school to learn a military trade. At Fort Lee, and on field trips north to the Richmond city morgue, they learn how to recognize the 206 bones of the human body, how to tell human from animal teeth, and the rudiments of recovering and preparing remains.
In 1976, the fighting over, the lab was relocated to Hawaii. For its first several years at Hickam Air Force Base, in Honolulu, CILHI did little work in Southeast Asia, because the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian governments weren’t much in the mood to invite Americans back into their territory. CILHI teams instead ventured to Papua New Guinea, where hundreds of American fighter and bomber aircraft were lost to enemy guns and capricious weather during World War II. The lab’s transformation from seat-of-the-pants scholarship to respected scientific program thus occurred as it worked dormant cases two wars and four thousand miles removed from its raison d’être; by the mid-eighties, when recovery operations began anew in Laos and Vietnam, its single anthropologist had been replaced with a cadre of scientists with solid academic credentials.
It was not long after, in the early days of postwar cooperation between U.S. and Laotian officials, that work began on Case 1731.
In the autumn of 1988, America had conducted just four recovery missions in Laos with the help of the People’s Democratic Republic, and eager to get back into the bush, the JCRC fastened on the crash that had claimed Jack Barker and his crew as a particularly good candidate for a fifth: The Huey’s location was said to be on relatively flat ground and near highways—Route 9 was just a few miles to the north, and a smaller road, Route 92, branched off it to pass within a kilometer of the site. In a region of roadless wastes and seldom-visited mountains, these were rare attributes.
The Laotians concurred. They cleared the way for a visit, and a few weeks later, nearly eighteen years after the Huey’s demise, an Mi-17 loaded with Americans and their gear was choppering east along the Xepon. At the spot pinpointed by eyewitnesses to the shootdown they found wreckage, and a lot of it—big, recognizable helicopter pieces, an M-60 door gun, enough stuff that the team leader reported the chopper appeared “relatively undisturbed,” despite its setting among cultivated rice fields. The Americans grew even more excited when the senior Laotian on hand, one Major Khampheui, announced that bones had been seen there in the past, lying amid the piled metal.
Two weeks later, a U.S. delegation flew to Vientiane for another summit on future digs. Case 1731 was high on the agenda, the Americans urging that lab and Laotian workers together unearth the wreck as soon as possible. The Laotians again agreed; in the meantime, they said, they’d send technical experts to the site to prepare it for excavation.
In February 1989, Laos invited a lab recovery team to the wreckage of a CH-34 helicopter on the Xepon’s north bank, less than an hour’s walk from the 1731 site. An American recovery team flew into the valley expecting to dig up Jack Barker’s Huey at the same time, because of its “close proximity and potential to yield substantive results.” But although they knew the case to be an American priority—or, perhaps, because they knew it to be—the Laotians nixed an excavation at 1731.
Perhaps they refused simply because they could. The Laotians are hagglers, four million souls fond of ad hoc arrangements, their lives minus many of the organizational strictures without which the West would collapse. Book a ticket on Lao Aviation and you’ll find that your flight may not take off on the day you expected, let alone at the appointed time. Visit a Laotian market and the price of a pound of rice will vary by the moment and the customer, every transaction subject to negotiation, every negotiation undertaken as if it’s the first. Bus schedules, office hours, contracts—any arrangement that requires a particular behavior at a particular time—isn’t part of the cultural weave.
So it went with recovery missions in the 1980s. American teams were limited to a handful of people and ten days on the ground. They tackled one case at a time. Beyond those provisos, every detail of every dig was on the table for discussion. Every meeting was a study in reinventing the wheel. “The Lao have never before agreed to establish a year-round program of cooperation,” as one U.S. report put it, “having preferred to negotiate every step singly—and often painfully.”
Whatever its reasons for keeping the diggers away, the People’s Democratic Republic invited the Americans back in late May, and at long last a team headed to the Case 1731 site to bring its four soldiers home.
Little about that mission turned out as expected. Bad weather delayed its start by three days. When anthropologist Pete Miller and his team flew to the site, most of their gear lagged two days behind, on trucks bogged down on Route 9. Even so, Miller—who’s now sixty-three, still at the lab, and deployed on this mission as the anthro on RE-3—quickly found a shallow depression in the earth, marking the spot where the bulk of a Huey struck, and put his people to work scraping away at it. The “impact crater” was littered with shards of helicopter.
Within a few hours, the anthropologist’s spadework had transformed the crater into sharp-edged, stairstepped art, the sort of neat hole into which a ziggurat would fit if you were to turn one upside-down. Several hours into the dig, a worker pulled a key piece of evidence from the dirt.
It was a small rectangle of aluminum stamped with information about the helicopter to which it had once been affixed, including its tail number: “69-15505.” Unfortunately, it was the wrong tail number—not that of Jack Barker’s chopper, but another Huey shot down the same day. Pete Miller halted the dig. The team packed up. Nearly five years passed before anyone came back.
In January 1994, seven American investigators assigned to Joint Task Force–Full Accounting visited Ban Chen, a village beside Route 92, hoping to speak with locals who might give them leads on where next to look. A panel of elders “explained that there are six helicopter crash sites in the area,” the team later reported. “Four sites are located in the mountains to the west and the remaining two are located near the base of the mountains, within a kilometer of the village.” One of the latter pair, the villagers noted, had already been dug up in 1989.
The unexcavated wreck, a few minutes’ walk from Pete Miller’s dig, “was associated with a helicopter that crashed during March of an unrecalled year ‘during the war,’” the investigators reported. “This was explained to mean 1971, the year during which the most intense fighting in this area occurred.” Villagers told the team that they didn’t witness the chopper’s crash, because they’d fled the area; the combat was fierce hereabouts, and they’d holed up in mountain caves until it eased. They first reached the wreck two months after the fact, finding a partially burned hulk, painted green, its tail section and rotor blades broken off and lying nearby.
“They initially stated that no remains, personal equipment, or other crew-related items were seen at the site,” the team reported. Later in the conversation, the elders said they did recall seeing a shirt near the wreck, but figured it was long gone, destroyed when the fields were burned for rice planting. The villagers said they knew nothing of the men aboard the aircraft.
Most importantly, they said they knew of no other American crash sites or graves and were certain that if such things existed in the surrounding countryside, they’d be aware of them: The residents of Ban Chen hunted and raised crops along the escarpment and knew the land well.
The interviews completed, the team followed the village chief through a dense forest of bamboo to the lip of a large bomb crater, where they found “numerous small pieces of aircraft wreckage,” several chunks of plastic, and a portion of a zipper. There was no sign of an impact crater, nor human remains, nor personal effects. They found nothing crew-related, in fact, nor any wreckage bearing a serial number—which, as the 1989 dig had demonstrated, is key to telling one crash site from another.
“No witness information or wreckage recovered from the crash site supports a correlation to Case 1731,” the team’s leader concluded. “However, the possibility exists that the site surveyed is Case 1731.” Presented this lukewarm assessment, the joint task force opted not to excavate. It placed Case 1731 in a “pending” category, awaiting further evidence.
There it lingered for another seven years, until a new investigative team took up the search for Jack Barker and his crew. In March 2001, army captain David A. Combs led an expedition back to the same wreckage, with orders to further explore the place and to interview the residents of Ban Chen and a neighboring settlement, Ban Satum, about other possible crash sites.
Villagers in Ban Satum told the team that they knew of no sites besides those dug in 1989 and surveyed in 1994. The latter had been burned and planted every three years—at least four or five times since the war—and they’d never seen anything of interest there. About the only artifact of that crash that survived, they said, was a helmet, an American helmet. It was owned by a man who lived a half mile to the east in another village, Ban Satun Gnai.
Combs’s team revisited the crash site, picked over the little wreckage they found on the surface, and searched the surrounding woods. A couple hundred yards to the south they stumbled on the sole of a combat boot and a piece of U.S. Army poncho in the vestiges of a foxhole. While interesting, the finds seemed unrelated to the loss of Barker’s chopper.
When the team flew to Ban Satun Gnai, however, it hit pay dirt. There the Americans met Mr. Talin, who showed them his helmet. It was unmistakably U.S. Army-issue, the sort of flight gear worn by helicopter crews in Vietnam. Mr. Talin testified that he’d spotted it at the bottom of a crater while he burned a field in 1980. The field was the same piece of ground that the 1994 investigators and Combs’s own team had visited, the crater the same one that lay next to the site’s meager wreckage. Mr. Talin said he’d left the helmet in place until five years later, when he was working the field on a hot, sunny day and pulled it on to protect himself from sunburn.
More wreckage had once littered the field, he told his questioners. Among the articles he’d seen himself, within feet of the helmet, were pieces of flight suit and melted boots. Combs’s report of his team’s investigation ended with a recommendation: Excavate.
The joint task force wasted little time in putting together a new dig. To lead it, it chose a veteran of ten CILHI missions, whose intuition and attention to detail had helped close cases, sometimes against long odds, on three continents.
By the time she was assigned the excavation at 1731, thirty-three-year-old Gwen Haugen had overseen the recoveries, or partial recoveries, of nineteen lost men.
A procession of flatbed trucks pulls into camp shortly after we land. It has taken them twenty-six hours to haul our footlockers from Savannakhet, over ninety miles of two-foot potholes and washed-out asphalt, road-hogging water buffalo and blinding dust. The Chinese rigs lack discernable suspensions. Their drivers climb from the cabs with the pained hobbles of men whose spines have been pounded to jelly.
The camp greets the trucks like Christmas. Within seconds their tailgates are down, the tarps lashed across their loads are off, and Americans are passing the cargo to others below. We carry and drag footlockers through a strengthening rain to our tents, and for the next hour, Ban Alang quiets, as everyone unpacks.
My steamer trunk is crammed with eighty-three pounds of self-heating pasta meals, macaroni and cheese, Power Bars, granola, canned tuna, salsa, peanut butter, and clothes—quick-drying nylon shirts and trousers, six pairs of socks, T-shirts, shorts, flip-flops, and underwear of a miracle plastic that I can theoretically wear for days without self-loathing. I have a flashlight, a headlamp, and a dozen candles; shampoo, soap, and razor blades; a minidisk player and two dozen recorded albums; an alarm clock and a mosquito net; three paperback novels; sun block; forty-odd rolls of film; and two pairs of gaiters—waterproof leggings that strap to my boots and calves to keep leeches and worse from slithering up my pants. Once I’ve dumped and organized this load, I’m struck by how civilized my tent seems, and worry that I’ve been extravagant.
But on a stroll down Main Street, I realize that I might have the most Spartan quarters in camp. I hear a movie soundtrack as I pass Randy Posey’s tent; RE-1’s top sergeant has somehow managed to pack in a TV and VCR and a big library of videos. And that’s nothing: Some of my fellow campers have computers set up on their field desks, DVD players, Play Stations, complete stereos. They’ve brought workout gear, lawn chairs, and bed sheets and pillows. Veritable pantries of food. A captain on another team packed an assortment of board games. Haugen’s gear fills three footlockers nearly the size of coffins.
“As you can see,” she says over beers at Mama’s, “this place is technology central.” The restaurant around us is crowded with soldiers playing cards, chowing down on fried rice, gripping sweaty bottles of Beerlao, the national brew.
She takes a swig. Haugen’s circuitous route to a CILHI career was typical of the lab’s scientists, none of whom grew up yearning to exhume the nation’s war dead. She was raised by her mother in the St. Louis suburbs, where she played clarinet in her high school’s marching band. She earned a spot on the cheerleading squad of a neighboring all-boy’s school. When she left home for college, she planned to study marine biology.
After abandoning that major for journalism, and discovering she wasn’t cut out for newspaper work either, she switched her focus to physical anthropology, a choice born of much desperation and a bit of affinity—she’d enjoyed the single freshman anthro course she’d taken. Once she got into her new major, she was smitten. Here was a field that bundled hard science, law enforcement, and dime-novel mystery, that was equal parts methodology and intrigue.
Haugen obtained her bachelor’s from the University of Missouri and a master’s degree from Tennessee, and landed a post with a private lab that supplied anthropological services to big corporate clients. She had a nice office, an easy commute, decent pay—the measures of postgraduate success—but the job was miserable, more demographics than anything; she spent her evenings stuffing questionnaires into envelopes. Before long, she quit to take a part-time post, making less money, with the St. Louis County Medical Examiner.
It was at about that point that she started hearing from former classmates who’d signed on with a little-known military lab in Hawaii and whose assignments seemed more Edgar Rice Burroughs serial than the civil service. “When I was in Thailand, I did this,” they’d tell her, and “I was in New Guinea doing that,” and the more she heard, the more she grumbled: “I don’t do anything.”
So it was that Haugen went to work for the U.S. Army. She reported to the lab in June 1997, and three weeks later, was on her way to Vietnam. “Don’t you have some things for me to read?” she asked her new boss, the lab’s scientific director. “I’ve never worked with the military before.”
“Aren’t you an anthropologist?” he replied.
“Well, yeah, I’m an anthropologist,” Haugen said.
“Don’t you know how to dig a site?”
“Yeah, I know how to dig a site,” she said.
“Well, then,” her boss told her, “go out there and do it.”
Nothing about Haugen betrays those tentative early days as we sit at Mama’s. She leans against the back of her chair, beer in hand, showered, hair washed, digging clothes traded for shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops, relaxed and self-sure and at peace with the environment. “This is going to be a very strange mission,” she tells me.
“Stranger than most?”
“Definitely.” She takes a hit off her beer and fixes me with large brown eyes. “We have some very inexperienced people on this team, some very young people. The youngest ever.” Haugen herself was only two years old when Jack Barker’s Huey went down. Even so, she’s a relative old-timer here: One of RE-1’s 92-Mikes is just nineteen. Little more than a year ago, she was a high school senior working in her father’s Michigan video store.
“I can’t imagine coming over here when I was nineteen,” Haugen says. “I can’t imagine what a trip that would have been.”
I admire my beer bottle. Its logo is a ubiquitous feature of the Laotian landscape, and for good reason: Beerlao is a fine brew, despite the shortcomings of the country’s tap water. “What about the case itself?” I ask. “How’s it compare to the others you’ve had?”
“Difficult,” she answers.
“Because of how picked-over it is?”
“That’s part of it, yes,” Haugen says, with the slightest hint of a nasal twang. “But more than that, we’re at the hard sites now. The easy ones, where we had good information and lots of wreckage and knew right where to dig, they’ve all been done—and what’s left are the hard sites to put together, hard in the respect of: Are we digging in the right place? Are we at the right helicopter?”
“Do you think we are?”
Haugen tips back her beer. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’m sure Pete Miller thought he was at the right helicopter when he was here in ’89.”