WHILE RE-1 AND THE MISSION’S two other recovery teams shovel holes in the jungle, the investigative element is going where no Westerners have gone before, humping it up mountains and whacking into the jungle, dodging snakes and relishing discomfort, and keeping a tally of how many leeches they’ve had to pry from their bodies in the course of a day.
IE members tend to keep to themselves, eating together at Mama’s, tenting up in a cluster at the camp’s western edge, killing time together at the Ping-Pong table and workout area. This is partly a byproduct of their jobs—these guys are trained in interviewing techniques and data analysis, not anthropology—and geography probably has something to do with it, too: They are joint task force employees, and have little opportunity to mix with the lab’s staff between trips overseas.
But a lot of the team’s remoteness is self-imposed. The IE cultivates an image as Ban Alang’s cowboys, tougher and crazier than the rest of us. I don’t know how much of this is mere self-promotion, so with RE-1 settled into stupefying routine and finding little, I climb into a Squirrel with Capt. Dave Combs and his army linguist, Master Sgt. Souriyan Collins, and take off to the west, along Route 9, to find out.
Our task is to visit a village down the Xepon where two sets of witnesses are scheduled to tell us about a pair of wreck sites. The joint task force’s records suggest neither site has been visited by past investigators. What we don’t know is whether the wrecks are “operational losses”—planes that went down after their crews punched out, and which are therefore of zero interest to the U.S. government—or tangles of metal that might entomb unaccounted-for Americans.
We follow the highway for a few miles, our path slicing through the necks of its loops and bends; veer from the blacktop and drop in low over the Xepon, swollen with rain and foaming through rapids of gray rock; then lean hard into a turn over a riverbank village of thatched huts and tin roofs. We carve circles so tight that the starboard-side windows look straight down on coconut palms swaying in our wash, canoes lining the river’s edge, and a knot of people at the settlement’s center, peering up at us. We settle slowly, palms and blowing hardwoods rising all around us, a long, tin-roofed building looming close on our left. A schoolyard. Barefoot kids scatter laughing and shrieking as the skids touch.
We’re on the ground just long enough to pick up a district official, who strides from the encircling villagers with a swagger, then gingerly rise back through the trees and wheel downstream. Another village peeks through the trees on the river’s far side, and in it, we can see a Lao Westcoast chopper already on the ground, rotors slowing, red stripes gleaming, other IE members standing beside it. We park nearby and clamber from the Squirrel under the gaze of squinting old men and topless mothers and naked babies.
They all move in close as Sergeant Collins confers with a clutch of Laotian officials. The discussion centers on whether the witnesses we need to speak with, and the wrecks they have visited, are in Xepon District. This is the sort of bureaucratic question to which the joint task force and the lab have grown accustomed over the years, for in both Laos and Vietnam, U.S. teams go nowhere without representatives of the national government, the province in which they wish to work, the district of that province, and often the relevant subdistrict, village, and hamlet. This protocol makes for crowded helicopters and is rarely relaxed: Should an IE have plans to visit a site in Xepon District and the weather interferes, the team can’t simply fly to an alternate site—not, at least, if such a diversion takes it into another district, which in the States would be akin to crossing a county line. Lining up the necessary permissions and escorts can take days.
One official waves around a handwritten document decorated with ornate stamps in red ink. Another man, apparently the subdistrict representative, speaks in sage tones while wearing a Carolina Panthers ball cap. Whatever the issue, it’s resolved quickly: One set of witnesses is waiting, the village chief tells us, and leads the way through a shady grove of thick-trunked hardwoods to his house. It is on stilts, as all homes in this part of the country are. A ladder scales the six feet to a bamboo porch that divides it into two thatch-roofed rooms. We climb the ladder, wrestle off our boots, and duck inside.
It is dark, the only light seeping in through a few narrow, glassless windows, and surprisingly cool. A couple of sleeping mats are folded in a corner. Otherwise, the room is empty of furniture. We sit in a circle on a floor of bamboo split and flattened into thin planking, on top of which the chief has laid a rug of bamboo matting. A Lao army major introduces us to our host and two barefoot witnesses, one an exceedingly thin man no older than thirty, the other in his mid-forties and wearing what looks like most of an army uniform, minus its patches and pins. The older man’s right eyeball is bright red around an oozing ulcer.
Baskets and bamboo poles are stored in the exposed rafters overhead; beyond them, I can see the roof’s thatching, which like every other component of the place is made of bamboo, split into a stiff straw and tied into bundles. Clothes hang in plastic shopping bags from pegs in the room’s frame. The air smells of wood smoke.
The major turns the meeting over to Collins, who is cross-legged to my left. He looks to our analyst, Adam Pierce, a fit, gung-ho, smiling young Georgian to my right. “OK,” Pierce says, “ask them about any wrecks they know about.” The junior witness reports they know of a crash site and points the way. Combs checks a tiny compass on his watchband. “I have that as southeast.”
“Ask how far,” Pierce says. Collins questions the men. The younger one answers. “They say it takes about four hours to walk there, from the village.”
“Ask them if they found the site or were taken there by someone else.”
Collins: “They say they are the first ones.”
“Ask them what they saw.”
Another exchange in Lao. “They saw glass. Broken. Pieces, about that big—see how he’s doing?” The men hold their hands a foot apart.
“Are those pieces of metal he’s talking about?”
“No,” Collins says, “I think they’re glass. A canopy, maybe, it sounds like to me.”
“Ask them whether the glass was flat or curved.”
More conversation. “Curved. It was curved.” Throughout the exchange, the older witness has spoken only to other Laotians in the room. The young guy now tells Collins they saw the wreckage about three years ago.
“What color was it?” Pierce asks.
Collins: “It was green.”
“Green. Could he mean the metal, not the glass?”
Collins, after checking: “No, it’s glass.”
“And it’s green?”
“Ah. The frame is green, the frame.”
“Ask him if he saw a chair anywhere in the area.” By “chair” Pierce means an ejection seat. If the men have found just a canopy, rather than an entire aircraft, the seat should be nearby, because it means the pilot punched out. The plane itself might be miles off.
“No,” Collins reports.
Pierce scribbles in his notebook. “Did they move it?”
“They left it in place. Right now, he says, there’s high dirt, so no one can see.”
Captain Combs leans forward. “Mind if I ask a few questions?”
“Go for it,” Pierce says.
“Was the wreck up on a mountain or down in a valley?”
The witness tells Collins it was in the fork of a river.
“Could they find it again?”
Yes, the younger man says. Probably. There’s a clearing, big enough for a helicopter to land, fifteen to twenty minutes’ walk from the site. “He says that if we land where he says, he thinks he can find it,” Collins says.
Combs suggests that we hire the guy to go find the wreckage and mark the LZ, so that the IE can fly there tomorrow, adding: “I don’t want to spend the day walking around in the weeds.” Collins takes this up with the witnesses. They agree to try to find the site today from the air. If they fail to do so, they’ll hike to the clearing they mentioned and light a fire to mark it. Either way, the IE will be able to reach the wreckage.
Combs smiles and thanks them. “I don’t want to lead them too much,” he tells Collins, “but explain to them that whenever you find one of these, a chair and a parachute are usually located nearby, and ask them if they know of anybody in the village who has told of finding that.”
The locals eye Combs as he speaks. I wonder what they make of the captain, who led the past IE that recommended excavating the Case 1731 site, and who sports a haircut that would rate attention just about anywhere on the planet: He is shaved bald save for a short-cropped strip of hair on his crown. The result is fierce; Combs looks like a Mohican about to charge into battle. Collins translates his question. The witnesses say they’ve heard of no chair, no parachute. The younger man asks whether the Americans will be angry if he can’t find the crash site from the air. No problem, Collins tells him.
At this point the Laotian major announces that there’s been a misunderstanding—the village chief apparently knew the team wanted to conduct an interview but not that it wanted to visit a site today. He has problems with that.
“Tell him we can go by ourselves,” Combs bluffs. “We know right where it is.” As Collins translates, Pierce chuckles quietly. “Great.”
The chief backs down. The witnesses will be allowed to fly over the place they found the canopy. We all stand to leave, the hut trembling beneath us, and pull on our boots. Collins, Pierce, and the witnesses head for a chopper. I stroll through the village.
Ban La-o Khao is twenty-odd huts scattered among groves of palm and gnarled shade trees and linked by trails worn deep and wet in the sandy soil. Children run, laughing and squealing, around me. Roosters crow. A water buffalo wanders by, the bell around its neck clanking. Black-spotted pigs root in the brush at the settlement’s fringe and lounge in the cool gloom under raised floors. At the intersection of two main paths I find a twenty-foot aluminum canoe made from a warplane’s empty belly tank. Villagers have sawed it in half lengthwise and fastened the ends to create a flat-bottomed, round-chined boat with seating for six.
The Laotian major sidles up beside me. “Boat,” he says. I smile at him, expecting him to make note of its pedigree, but he doesn’t, and I’m reminded of something one of Pierce’s fellow analysts mentioned. The IE has walked into villages and found wreckage recycled into tools and building materials, only to be told by the locals that they know of no crash sites in the surrounding woods. It’s not dishonesty, but a reflection of how the Laotians define what they see: “You’ll ask a villager, ‘Do you have any wreckage from a crash site?’ And he’ll say, ‘Oh, noooo,”’ the analyst told me. “And you’ll point to a piece of a wing on his roof and say, ‘Well, what about that?’ And he’ll say, ‘That’s not a piece of airplane. That’s a piece of my roof.’”
The Squirrel returns with the two witnesses. They’ve probably never been higher than the branches of the village’s trees, and look eager to get out of the machine. As Collins follows them out he looks to Combs and shakes his head. The captain sighs and has him ask the pair whether they’ll hike to the site to mark the LZ. The younger man tells Collins that if he leaves early in the morning, the soonest he can expect to be there is twelve o’clock. “Fine,” Combs says. “Do that and the IE will rendezvous with you at about 3 P.M.” The captain’s plan calls for the men to light a fire in the LZ shortly before the appointed time; the IE will look for its smoke. If it’s too wet to light a fire, they’re to use a VS-17 panel, a vinyl signal blanket of fluorescent orange and pink, to mark the spot.
Raul Alvarez, a twenty-five-year-old marine from Brooklyn, has doubts about the plan. “You know what’s gonna happen,” he murmurs. “Watch ’em light that VS-17 panel on fire.”
Pierce laughs. “No kidding.”
“Doesn’t matter,” says another analyst, Greg Parmele. “It’ll smoke up real nicely.”
I wander off to examine the schoolhouse, which is the only structure in Ban La-o Khao that isn’t on stilts. Even by the standards of the eighteenth-century American frontier, it’s rough: no blackboard, no hanging maps, no books. Dirt floor. Narrow benches of hewn timber for the kids, more hitching posts than seats. For light, two squares are cut in the woven-bamboo walls. I stand at the doorway, transfixed. More than anything else I’ve seen in Laos, this sad little classroom fills me with a sense of how lucky I am and how mean life in Southeast Asia remains at the dawn of this new millennium. The room embodies the help a Laotian youngster will get in preparing for life. This is the ruling generation’s leg-up to its progeny. This is the country’s hope for the future. This is it.
How much of the millions of dollars the United States pumps into the Laotian economy each year filters its way down to villages such as Ban La-o Khao, I wonder, and to schools such as this? When our helicopters lift off later today, what will we leave behind, other than stories handed down, generation to generation, about the day the outsiders came in their flying machines?
While I’m chewing on this, word comes that a witness to the second airplane crash site has just returned from hunting and is willing to lead us there. He and Combs, Collins, a provincial official, and I climb into one of the Squirrels and take off to the south.
We climb a steep-sided ridge, just clear the top branches of its jungle cladding, and circle the peak of 2,130-foot Phou Kadoy, about ten miles southwest of the base camp. The witness points to its shoulder, to a gap in the trees exposing a puddled oval of dark rock, but before we can drop into the hole the man tells Collins he’s all turned around and isn’t sure precisely where the wreck is or where we are, and that he wishes he had a friend along who knows the place better.
“Let’s let him get his bearings,” our Kiwi pilot says over the intercom. “He’s all fucked-up right now.” We wander westward, circle for a minute, then slowly make our way back to the mountain. As we near the clearing Collins says the guy’s figured things out. The pilot starts us down.
The hole is so tight that our blades touch branches to our right and left, chopping leaves to a green mist, splintering wood with loud cracks. Combs, sitting in the front seat, opens his door and hangs out of the chopper, looking aft to the tail rotor. “OK . . . OK . . .” Rotor-wash thumps his headset’s microphone, nearly drowning him out. “OK, you’re touching this side but you’re OK,” he says. “Tail is clear.”
Our touchdown comes on rock tilted ten degrees to the left and so wet and slick-looking that the pilot has Combs climb out to test the footing before he powers down the Squirrel, lest the chopper slide sideways into the woods. The captain gives a thumbs-up, and we all scramble out. It is a weird place, the rock pocked with round, foot-deep holes filled with crystalline water, carpeted elsewhere with patches of dense moss that squish underfoot. Sprigs of tall grass erupt from cracks in the stone, along with yellow flowers that resemble miniature orchids. Collins fires up a chainsaw, Combs swings a machete, and by the time a second bird arrives with the rest of the team and officials, it has enough room to settle nose-to-nose with ours.
With that, we set off into the bush. Hiking single-file, we weave among the trees down a steep hillside, the forest growing dark, the air filled with the metallic thrum of cicadas. We reach a rocky precipice, butt-slide our way down a notch in its face, and whack our way through thickening jungle below, stumbling over hidden roots, shaking loose of vines, pushing through waist-high bushes. We chop through stands of saplings and bamboo. We move so quickly that I don’t have time to fret about snakes.
Thirty minutes in, we slide down a ravine to a stream studded with flat boulders. The witness gazes at waterfalls upstream and down, then tells Collins that he thought we’d find the wreck right here. “Aw, I don’t like the sound of this,” Combs mutters. “What’s he want to do?”
“He says he’ll go that way a little.” Collins points downstream. “He thinks he’ll find it. Then he’ll come back.” The villager splashes off. We squat on the rocks, slap at mosquitoes, slather on bug juice, wait. Twenty minutes later he’s back, and waves us on.
Before I see any sign of a wreck, Parmele has jumped into thigh-deep water in the stream’s middle and hoisted a heavy cylinder of steel from the drink. A landing gear strut. “Sweet-ass sweet!” he hollers. “Fuckin’ beautiful, huh?”
Now, all along the banks, I see the shredded remains of a jet lying among stands of bamboo and the trunks of giant rosewoods and mahoganies—another section of landing gear, thick and sprouting bolts and pistons, white paint still fresh. A rusted turbine blade fused into the knotty bark of a tree. The circular guts of an engine, three feet across, combustion cans still bolted around its perimeter.
Parmele leads a group downstream while Combs and Alvarez, examining the engine, find a series of numbers in its combustion cans, hand-etched by some General Electric engineer long since retired. They record the numbers, though they’re likely of limited use; they’re the numbers of the cans, not the engine, and it’s the serial number of the whole assembly that would be recorded in the military archives. We hear Parmele hollering, singsong, down the river: “We found the grail! We’ve found the gray-yell!”
“You get the engine serial number?” Combs yells.
A shout back: “Lots of part numbers.”
“Shit,” Combs mutters. “They didn’t find shit.”
“There might be a number under this thing,” Alvarez suggests, kicking the combustion chamber.
“Wanna wash it off?”
“Move out of the way.” Alvarez heaves the combustion chamber onto its edge, exposing a circle of dark, wet soil in the sloping bank. A whip scorpion, a black arachnid four inches long with a stiff, antenna-like tail in place of a stinger, scuttles for cover. Alvarez doesn’t even flinch. He gives the machinery a push, and the big disk thumps end over end into the creek, where it makes a tremendous splash and immediately muddies the water. He and the captain step in to their knees, fish around beneath the murky surface, find the metal. They lift it, let it flop back, lift it, let it fall, flushing red mud from its tangle of pipes and crushed skin. The effort gains them nothing: When they peer into its dripping folds, they find no number.
The team stalks through the woods lining the creek, searching for more wreckage. A few pieces lie wedged in the soil here and there, but little of the Phantom’s fuselage. Combs points out the reason: The forest floor is dimpled with shallow depressions, the remains of test holes dug by scavengers. The nearest road is miles away, beyond a chain of steep and rocky ridges, but that hasn’t stopped some enterprising salvager from toting big pieces of this airplane to market.
We leave after an hour, the wreck’s part numbers scribbled in our notebooks, and start the long climb back to the LZ. It is far nastier than our trip down the mountain. We climb hand-over-hand up palisades of rock, grunt and sweat through broadleaf forest rising from slopes of forty-five degrees or better, cuss our way through vines bristling with inch-long spikes. I’m at the rear of the file, Alvarez behind me, and we slip, flailing and lurching, on the slick trail left by those in front. Before long the others are far ahead, invisible in the jungle.
A half-dozen times the trees thin, the slope seem to ease, and each time we urge each other on with shouts that we’re about to bust out of the woods and onto the LZ at Phou Kadoy’s summit. A couple times I even imagine a flash of red paint—the Squirrels! But each time, we top just a bump in the mountainside and find another slope ahead, even bigger and steeper and more snarled with brush than the last. An hour into the ascent I’m dizzy and sick to my stomach and breathing with such noisy rasps that the cicadas fall silent around us. I stop for a long drink of water, Alvarez waiting patiently as I catch my breath. It doesn’t help: On my very next step, I lose my balance and topple to my left, over the lip of a small promontory, too whipped to so much as grab for a branch to save myself. A web of thick vines catches me, and holds me fast until Alvarez pulls me back to the trail.
A minute later, we do spot red paint, and stagger onto the black rock where the rest of the team is sprawled, sucking down water. A Squirrel powers up for the first lift back to camp. I’m too weak, too comfortable lying flat on my back, to get aboard.
As it takes off, its rotorwash blows my soaked T-shirt up, baring my stomach. It’s covered with blood. I find a neat round wound in my bellybutton, but the leech is already gone.