ONCE IN VIETNAM, Jack Barker reported to the Third Radio Research Unit in Saigon. The outfit was a cover for the Army Security Agency, a secret organization that sought to disrupt the Viet Cong’s operations in South Vietnam by severing its communications, using direction-finding gear to pinpoint enemy radio transmitters. It had started as a ground operation, but in December 1961 the unit had learned that using short-range radio gear to seek the hidden and highly prized transmitters risked American lives; the first U.S. Army soldier killed in the war was a direction-finder for the Third RRU, ambushed that month on a road outside the capital. The army’s solution was to mount direction-finding equipment in aircraft, and it was as a pilot in these unarmed DeHavill and Beavers and Beechcraft Seminoles that Barker joined the unit, nicknamed “TWA” for “Teeny Weeny Airlines.”
The Beaver lacked any inertial navigation system or global positioning gear, both standards today; its pilot had to rely on ground landmarks to figure his position and the locations of the transmitters he detected. His effectiveness was only as good as his flying and sense of direction. The twin-engine Seminoles were more advanced, but in any plane the work was dangerous: Missions invariably called on the unit’s pilots to fly low and slow over hostile terrain and to loiter there while his passengers homed in on the Viet Cong.
Barker, as usual, gave the assignment his all and proved a standout. He was awarded the Air Medal twenty-four times, along with the Bronze Star. His fitness reports were almost tedious in their praise.
“This officer’s performance of duties while serving in the Republic of Vietnam has been truly outstanding,” one commander wrote. “In a mission characterized by the need for technical knowledge, the association with highly classified material and of vital importance in the counterinsurgency effort, [he] was without peers in his accomplishments.”
Just how good Barker proved to be is suggested by a letter he received from his boss’s boss’s boss after an April 4, 1966, flight. “The quality of your performance,” Col. Clayton Swears wrote, “is clearly demonstrated by the fact that the exact, measured, unquestioned results of your mission on that date exceeded the results by any aircrew on any of the hundreds of similar missions previously flown by members of this command.” His company’s executive officer offered perhaps the highest accolade: “I would gladly serve again in combat with this officer.”
Barker was promoted to captain in May 1966 and a month later transferred to the 146th Aviation Company as a platoon commander. Just before Thanksgiving, he rang up Dee, who was still in Atlanta. Telephone calls from Vietnam to the States used military phone lines and radio patches; connections were spotty and monitored by an operator, and callers had to use radio lingo.
“Will you marry me, over?” Jack Barker asked his girlfriend of three years.
“Yes,” Dee replied, “I will. Over.”
For an hour after RE-1 lands back at Ban Alang, the LZ throbs with incoming choppers; Squirrels touch down, disgorge their passengers, and spring skyward again at such a pace that when the last sortie’s done, and the last turbine shuts down, the camp seems suddenly blanketed in an eerie quiet.
I head to Mama’s with Pat Reynolds, who marches across Main Street with such carefully measured steps and arm swings that at first I take it for a put-on. As we near the restaurant I realize the explanation is simply that the man’s a jarhead. Until Reynolds, army captains always led recovery teams, but these days interservice cooperation is a priority among military leaders struggling to trim budgets and manage expensive new technologies and match America’s fighting prowess to the world’s changing threats. The lab has not escaped this cultural shift; while “U.S. Army” remains part of its title, it’s going “joint.” Reynolds is symbolic of the lab’s future.
Not that he planned it that way. Reynolds joined the Corps hoping to someday lead a rifle company, but instead wound up in logistics—not an altogether swashbuckling line of work but one that gave him the skills to deploy people and equipment in the middle of nowhere. They were the same skills developed by the army’s Quartermaster Corps, of which Mortuary Affairs and the lab are a part. The call went out for CILHI’s first marines when he was up for a new assignment, and not only did he seem a good fit but the nature of the lab’s work intrigued him. It sounded like good duty, important duty. A peacetime job that mattered.
We get a table, order beers, pore over the menu. The big Beerlaos arrive. That Reynolds joined the marines at all was an unexpected development. His parents were Irish immigrants in the Bronx, and barkeeps; all of his living paternal forebears, in fact, owned or worked in taverns—which, considering his father was one of thirteen kids, meant the Reynoldses were well represented in the New York hospitality industry. An only child, he spent his days in Catholic schools, where he was “reprimanded highly,” and many an evening in his parents’ establishments.
It was the navy that fascinated him as a boy. His folks would take him to Fleet Week each year to see an armada of warships pull into New York Harbor, and he’d thrill to the carriers, cruisers, and destroyers that lined the wharves or anchored just offshore, pennants flying, sailors lining the decks in their whites. His enthusiasm faded as he got older; by the time he settled into his classes at Manhattan College, he had no intention of pursuing a military life. He instead majored in finance and information systems, planning on a corporate career. He rowed crew. He fell for one of his female teammates, started thinking about marriage and family.
But in his junior year he came across an advertisement for the marines, and for reasons he can’t explain it entranced him. Maybe it rekindled something in his genes: His dad had been a medic in the U.S. Army, even as an Irish citizen. Perhaps it was just the Corps’s bravado: Think you’re hot shit? Think you’re good enough to be one of us? OK, the marines said, let’s see you prove it.
The recruiters wouldn’t even talk to him at first. Despite all his rowing, Reynolds had ballooned to a stout 235 pounds when he wandered in to see them six years ago. “Come back when you’ve lost twenty pounds,” they told him. He went home and lost the weight, and they told him to lose another ten. When he did that, they let him in.
We’re joined by Ray Walsh, the camp’s doctor, a veteran of the Peace Corps in East Africa who signed on with the air force to help pay for his medical schooling. Every joint field activity in Laos includes an MD, whose primary duty is to provide care to locals living near the digs and any who might come calling at base camp. Before long, Haugen and Pete Miller pull up chairs, as well. Miller, among the seniormost CILHI scientists, the overseer of the 1989 dig for 1731, sits to my right. He’s wearing a T-shirt from some past dig emblazoned “Low Priority.” His hair, longish and gray, is lank with sweat. We all take long pulls from our Beerlaos.
RE-3’s team leader sits down with a brand-new Trivial Pursuit game. We split into pairs—Haugen and the newcomer, Reynolds and Doc Walsh, Pete Miller and me. My partner is a good one, with a fantastic memory of the arcane, and we rapidly earn two wedges while the others skip luckless around the board. Between turns I scan the other tables at Mama’s. Eagmin and three female soldiers from RE-1 are playing cards at one. Members of the IE are seated at another. The camp’s linguists, minus Krueger, are at a third.
The scene poses a stark contrast to the amenities on most of the lab’s missions. On a July 2000 trip, I camped in Vietnam with a team excavating a helicopter that had broken up in mid-flight. The group’s ridgetop landing zone was ringed by high peaks and swathed in clouds that marooned the diggers for days at a time, and its members slept and ate in a camp they built in the gloaming of a teak and mahogany forest. It looked like something out of Swiss Family Robinson: They lashed bamboo into tent platforms and porches, into showers, tables, even into a sectional sofa they arranged around their campfire. They didn’t play any board games, though, and at night they heard tigers growling in the trees.
The accommodations get a lot more primitive than that. In March 2001 I visited a team working on a giant limestone massif in Laos’s Khammouan Province, about an hour’s flight from Ban Alang. Just approaching the place, I had to shut my eyes: My helicopter performed an aerial ballet to reach the only practical landing spot, a boulder peaking from the jungle canopy, barely large enough for the chopper’s skids. The closest thing to a campsite on the mountain was a sloping shelf of leech-infested, rocky dirt, so uneven and thick with trees that wall tents wouldn’t fit. The team and its Laotian escorts lived for weeks in tiny backpacking tents, every one of which was tipped uphill or down, each too small for all but the most essential gear. Water was flown in when the weather allowed—which is to say, just often enough.
Randy Posey found himself at one remote excavation in central Vietnam where it rained so hard and for so long that over the course of a month his team spent four days actually digging. The weather kept resupply and rescue choppers away, too, leaving him no choice but to hunker down, soaked and thirsty and bored witless in the jungle gloom, praying no one got hurt or snakebit.
CILHI files are busy with that brand of low-grade misery, and worse. Another team was excavating a World War II crash site on a mountaintop in Papua New Guinea when a storm moved in, grounding its helicopter at the mountain’s foot. Its members stayed put for a couple of days; then, low on water, out of food, and with the weather showing no improvement, they decided they had to hike out. Guided by native tribesmen, they stumbled a thousand feet down the mountain, hit a dead end, and climbed back up, at which time the natives abandoned them to a cold, rainy, tentless night on the mountainside. Had a sergeant on the team not packed extra clothes in her duffel, they’d have been in deep trouble.
Even on missions on which the teams commute to work by road or air, the lodgings are rarely up to Ban Alang’s standards. Many a digger has shared his or her rural Vietnamese “guest house” room with lice, leeches, rats, and cockroaches big enough to brand. Hot showers are unattainable luxuries. The toilets, at their best, are porcelain holes in the floor, over which one has to balance to complete one’s task; at worst they’re the same without the porcelain, and sweltering and unlit and swarming with bugs, to boot. One whiff of the air percolating from their grim depths and you’ll opt for the woods, snakes be damned.
So this little outpost of comfort in the Laotian jungle is an anomaly, at the cusp of weird and familiar, East and West, danger and safety. Lucky is the soldier who camps here, particularly if he or she is new to CILHI and without experience in the Third World.
Our game crawls into its second hour. Exhausted, we alter the rules so that any correct answer earns a wedge. Grow up in a family of bar owners and you absorb sports; within a couple of turns, Reynolds and Doc Walsh have left us behind. Somehow Haugen and her partner, who in the early going looked hopeless, storm past us, too.
“So, Pete,” I say to Miller, as we wait for our turn, “we went out and saw your 1989 excavation at Gwen’s site.”
Miller has overseen more excavations than any of his peers at CILHI—he reached the fifty-case mark two years ago and has ventured regularly into the field since. He nods, a wistful smile forming. “Oh, yes,” he sighs. “That’s one I remember well.”
“It was pretty amazing to see how well-preserved it was, after thirteen years,” I say. “You could still see where you’d built steps going down the sides of the hole.”
“Oh, it was a beautiful little excavation,” he says. He swallows a mouthful of beer. Hours after sundown, our resting arms leave sweaty spots on the table. “And this TV crew shows up. And we found a radio with a data plate, and OK, there we are, on national TV, the cameras rolling, when we find it, and everybody’s excited, and we look at the numbers and realize it’s the wrong helicopter.” He shakes his head. “On national TV.”
Luckily, it was Laotian national TV; the indignity Miller suffered was only so big. That first 1731 dig came four years after Miller’s first in Laos, in 1985, but three years before Joint Task Force–Full Accounting arrived on the scene. The restrictions in place back then were far more stringent than those of today; for one thing, the People’s Democratic Republic permitted teams into its territory for only ten days at a time.
“That’s all you needed,” Miller says. “Ten days was plenty of time, because back in the eighties, we had nothing but good cases, easy cases. All the sites were intact, and we knew exactly where they were. Every time out, you recovered remains.” He shakes his head. “Those were the days.”
“Not like now?”
“Nothing like now,” he says. “Now we’re into the hard cases. We’re into the isolated burials, and sites where there’s just nothing left.”
That’s just as true of Vietnam; the pickings are getting slim. Haugen has a .500 record—she’s found remains on five of her ten digs—and it’s that good only because she’s worked in Europe, where crash sites are protected from looters. The last JFA in Laos saw three teams digging and not a bone recovered. The mission before that, one team in three found remains.
The experience of Dingman, sitting at a table across the room, is typical of many rank-and-file members of the lab staff. His first dig, in the summer of 2000, took him to two sites in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, just across the border from where Jack Barker’s chopper went down. The first was a blind hunt for a GI who’d fallen from a Huey during an extraction. The odds were long, so it didn’t surprise anyone when the team found nothing.
The second site was a burial, and at first, it looked to be a bust, as well. They were about to give up when a witness told them they’d passed right over the grave, that they simply hadn’t gone deep enough. Sure enough, they found remains in the center of their grid. He was one for two.
He returned to the field later that year for a dig along northern Vietnam’s rugged coast. The team found lots of aircraft parts but no remains. One for three. Six months before coming to Laos, he went to Vietnam a third time, to the “Money Pit,” a particularly complicated aircraft crash site that had seen American digs before, and would see others after. His team found nothing. One for four.
In April 2001 came his oddest trip yet, to Korea. He and Posey were part of a small team that ventured into the DMZ to excavate a spot where a roving South Korean patrol had stumbled on surface bones. Propaganda blared from gargantuan loudspeakers on both heavily armed frontiers, and they dug with the knowledge that the North Koreans were watching them through gunsights. They found remains, however. Two for five.
“Nothing like now,” Miller says again. When we wrap up this JFA, he’s scheduled to spend eight days home in Hawaii before he leaves again for Vietnam, to do advance work at the point where a jet is said to have “lawn-darted” vertically into the ground. The rear of the plane, the portion closest to the surface, was supposedly scavenged by locals years ago, but its forward portion, including the cockpit, was left deep in the soil.
“Ten meters down, eight meters, whatever,” Miller says. “But what’s bad about it is that a salt-processing plant was built years ago on top of the site, so we have to tear up this plant to get to it.” He swallows a mouthful of beer. “Buildings have to be moved.”
Jack Barker shipped home in December 1966. He sang “How Great Thou Art” at his father’s funeral within days of his arrival, and sang “The Lord’s Prayer” at his own wedding a few days later, on January 14, 1967. The latter ceremony, at the Methodist church in Dee’s South Carolina hometown, was also a sendoff: In March, the newlyweds moved to Hanau, Germany.
Just north of Frankfurt, Hanau was home to Fliegerhorst Kaserne, a former World War II Luftwaffe airfield, where Barker occupied an odd niche as a fixed-wing pilot in the leadership ranks of a helicopter battalion. As always, the sharp, squared-away young officer attracted the attention of his superiors. “Extremely dependable and completes his assignments with zeal and forcefulness,” one wrote. “One of the finest officers of his contemporary group,” judged another, adding: “His dependability and skill in overcoming obstacles are unmatched.” His commanders underlined their pleasure by nominating him for the Army Commendation Medal.
Between kudos, Barker toured Europe with Dee, took square-dancing lessons, and—more good fortune—started a family. The couple’s first son, Bryan Lamar, was born in Frankfurt, and when they left Germany in June 1969, Dee was pregnant with their second, Michael Winfield. He was a doting father to the boys: He woke for their 2 A.M. feedings, bathed them, read them stories, took them to the doctor.
He and Dee had talked about his leaving the service. They missed their families, and friends who never stayed long before the army snatched them away to Vietnam or some other far-flung duty station. They longed to establish roots, a real home. But as the end of Barker’s tour approached, the army issued him orders to the Infantry Officer Advanced Course at Fort Benning—a plum for an officer who’d entered the service through ROTC and who’d remained in the active-duty reserve, rather than the regular ranks. It tagged Barker as a real up-and-comer.
So he stayed in. He and Dee bought a house in Columbus, Georgia, and he entered the school in September 1969. He made major the following month, far ahead of the standard advancement curve, and when he was graduated from Benning in June 1970, his instructors rated him suited to someday command a battalion.
He was immediately accepted into the Rotary Wing Qualification Course, or “Q Course,” at Rucker, an assembly line that churned out helicopter pilot officers in eleven down-and-dirty weeks. The four Barkers kept their house in Columbus, renting a trailer in Alabama and driving home on weekends. When Barker was graduated, he was qualified to fly the Bell OH-13 Sioux—a bubble-enclosed, two-seat trainer—and the Bell UH-1 Iroquois, the army’s ubiquitous “Huey,” a workhorse used as troop transport, gunship, freight hauler, and ambulance.
Then new orders arrived. The major was to report to the 101st Aviation Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division, as second-in-command of an assault helicopter company. The unit was based at Camp Eagle, a sprawling airfield complex south of Hue, in northern South Vietnam.
Dee had befriended the wife of another Rucker student while Barker was in class. The woman’s husband was headed for Vietnam at the same time, and she invited Dee and the boys to stay with her in Phoenix. Dee took her up on her offer, moving the family to Arizona when Barker left for Southeast Asia.
He arrived at Camp Eagle on October 20, 1970. His new unit, Bravo Company, also known as the Kingsmen, was a rowdy bunch accustomed to combat. Their quiet, religious new executive officer had been out of helicopter school for less than a month.