2

THERE COMES A TIME in every excavation when a recovery team’s motivation shifts from achieving success to simply finishing the job, and the reply to RE-1’s request for information seems to provoke such a shift. At its meeting the following morning, a cheerless resignation grips the team, as if all its members have had the same unhappy epiphany during the night: We haven’t found anything yet, there’s little reason to expect we’ll find anything today, and time is running out.

Little at the site lifts our spirits. The routine on the A-frame is no longer numbing; it now approaches torture. We’re sifting dirt loaded with small pieces of ACS and bomb frag, picking some man-made object off every screen, and still the rhythm of it and the sound of it and the look of it—of seeing little but pebbles and lumpy clay and wire mesh for hours on end—grows maddening. Even our unswervingly tireless Laotian helpers seem sapped of energy: My screen partner, a middle-aged village woman, spends the morning looking around and conversing with her neighbors, rather than pushing dirt. I demote her to the bucket line at lunch and try to draft Sammy to replace her. Even cheerful Sammy is in no mood to work. He insists on remaining in the bucket line.

Haugen closes 500/508 and opens 504/512, a unit southeast of the crater. The squares to its east and west have been fully excavated, and because their southern halves produced few artifacts, she elects to dig only the northern half of the new one. Late in the afternoon, in the unit’s northwest corner, the team unearths a decal that has pulled away from some component of the wrecked helicopter. Printed in block capitals on the strip of clear, skin-thin plastic are the words TAIL BOOM.

“It looks like that area over there is where the tail hit,” Conely tells Haugen, “because we’re pulling all this tail stuff from right there.” The data plate from the tail rotor assembly was found one unit to the west, in 504/508. It does, indeed, appear that a helicopter’s tail once lay there.

“Or that’s where somebody scavenged the tail boom,” Haugen says. “Or that’s where they drug the tail boom.” She sighs. “Things are often not what they appear, unfortunately.”

 

Conely, Dingman, Artillaga, and I share a table at Mama’s. It is one of the few times we’ve dined together; the team has been split by the limited size of the restaurant’s tables into cliques, and we haven’t been in each other’s. RE-1’s three young white women have become a unit. Conely, Dingman, and Posey, of similar age and experience, have often formed another. Posey is also part of a clique of black sergeants, and an occasional member of the knot of bosses—Reynolds, Haugen, Doc Walsh—that convenes most evenings. The team’s two black women are inseparable. Eagmin and Artillaga are free agents, each floating among several circles. Krueger speaks most readily to Reynolds, but has defied membership in any club.

Our meal is a muted affair. “It’s just so frustrating,” Conely says, “to find so much ACS, and nothing else.”

We all murmur our agreement.

“So what do you think?” Dingman asks, leaning back in his chair. “Are we gonna find any remains?”

“I don’t know,” Conely says. “I’m just going to keep hoping for the best. But it’s hard not to be discouraged.”

We again murmur agreement. “If we don’t find any,” I ask her, “will you consider the trip a waste?”

She answers without hesitation. “Oh, no. This has been a great experience.”

“Even if you don’t find anything,” Artillaga says, “it’s a good mission.”

Conely nods. “If I were one of these guys,” she says, “I’d like to think people would come looking for me, and would work as hard as this team has worked.”

Another round of murmurs.

“We gotta stay positive,” Conely says.

Dingman leaves. A few minutes later, Conely announces she is going to turn in early and heads for her tent. Krueger pulls up a chair, Beerlao in hand, just ahead of the similarly equipped Doc Walsh. Right behind comes Mike Crosgrove, an aide at the joint task force’s detachment headquarters in Vientiane.

“Did you hear the news?” he asks. Crosgrove is a wiry, bespectacled air force technical sergeant, smart and gung-ho about the JTF’s work. He’s on a weekend visit to the field.

“What news?” Artillaga asks.

“RE-3 found some bone.”

“They did?”

Crosgrove nods, smiling. “Found a piece of rib.”

Those of us from RE-1 stare stupidly at him. It occurs to me that I should toast the mission’s successful recovery of human remains, that I should feel happy a family may be able to lay a loved one to rest after a three-decade wait. I should feel bittersweet satisfaction at an end finally achieved.

Instead, I feel a twinge of jealousy. Where are our guys? Artillaga looks at me, his expression glum, and shakes his head. “Just gotta get out there again tomorrow,” he says. He, Krueger, and Walsh leave. Crosgrove and I drink our beers.

“Same old shit?” he asks.

“Afraid so.” It seems an act of betrayal, of faithlessness, to voice doubts about RE-1’s prospects to an outsider. “I hate to say it,” I tell him just the same, “but I don’t think we’re going to find anything.”

Crosgrove takes a swig of his Beerlao. He’s the expat who in no time figures out where to eat, find American cigarettes, change currency; how to haggle with the natives; whom to see to get things done. “Listen,” he says, and I do it. He leans forward over the table. “You never know. You can be digging right to the end, and suddenly find the whole thing. You never know.”

 

The rain comes. It starts that night, falling in drops that would each fill a teaspoon, and hard enough that it drowns out the TV in Mama’s. By the following morning, the ground outside my tent is under an inch of water. The deluge does not ease. RE-1 gathers for the morning meeting, Main Street a shallow river outside the barn, the temperature rising, and still, it falls.

The escarpment remains invisible behind a caul of vapor. The helicopters stay on the pads. Shortly before midday, Haugen and Reynolds decide to attempt a trip to the site. They find the grid completely swamped. The anthro calls off digging for the day.

The rain continues throughout the afternoon, stops briefly, then resumes after dark. It’s still drizzling the next morning when we again meet in the barn. “We’re gonna have a swimming pool in that crater,” Haugen says. “We get out there, we’ll be bailing—hell, there might be enough water to use the pump.” She looks around at her team, sapped rather than energized by the wasted day in camp. Eagmin and Conely, both typically talkative and chipper, stare at their feet. The 92-Mikes are bleary-eyed and sucking coffee from Styrofoam cups. A couple look close to tears. My arms ache and my hands are blistered and I feel as if my skin is basted in a sticky paste; it’s just after seven, and despite the rain, the day is already impossibly hot.

“Just go out there and do what you’ve been doing,” the anthro says gently. “We’re very close. We have just a few hours left.”

 

The crater is thigh-deep in water. Rather than drag the pump across the site, Haugen has a half-dozen villagers bail out the hole, passing their filled buckets up two lines. Chubby and another dog, teeth bared but soundless, wrestle among them. The men and women in the line are absorbed in the fight when there’s a shriek at the crater’s bottom: One of the bailing teenagers has been bitten by a slender, foot-long snake in the water. As the Americans in the hole back away, the injured worker traps the creature under his flip-flop, grabs its skull between thumb and forefinger and squeezes. I can hear it crack from thirty feet away.

Fifteen minutes later, another snake pops up in the water. In a blur a villager snatches the animal up by the head, gives its body a twist, pulls it taut, then pinches its head flat. He flings it west across the site. I watch it land on the ravine’s lip and writhe, crazed, down the slope.

Despite the excitement, the crater is drained by midmorning. Its bottom is a fetid brown glue into which Eagmin sinks with his metal detector. He uncovers small knots of aluminum, wire, screws, and a few chunks of bomb frag, while three enlisted women supervise the destruction of a defiant clump of bamboo in 504/500, on the crater’s southwest slope.

Eagmin, moving to 516/504, an unexcavated unit on the crater’s far side, gets a hit, digs with his trowel for a moment, then walks to the break tent for a shovel. “Going to China?” Haugen asks him.

“I’m not sure,” he says. He opens a hole a foot wide and six inches deep, then sweeps his detector’s head over it. “It’s big, whatever it is.” He takes up the shovel again, and as I watch I recall Mike Crosgrove’s words, that we could work right up to the last day without finding much, then hit a trove of remains.

It turns out to be bomb frag. A couple feet away, under a bamboo stump, he pulls up another chunk of heavy metal, orange with rust, and on the unit’s south side, he finds an M-60 tracer round. No trove.

Lunchtime. We gather in the break tent. The conversation centers on what the team plans to do in Savannakhet, where we’ll spend a night on our way to Thailand and a military jet home. Reynolds is eating another can of cold chunky soup. “When we get out of here,” he says, “I’m never eating this shit again. Ever.”

I walk to the cooler to grab a bottle of water. Krueger is standing beside it, humming to himself. “I’m definitely coming back here in a year,” he says, looking around.

I look around, too, to make certain he’s speaking to me. Every conversation we’ve had, I’ve started.

“What, so you can visit Vientiane and stuff?” I ask.

“Fuck Vientiane,” he says. “I’m coming back here.”

“Here? To this village?”

He nods. “Stay with the chief.”

Fair enough: Krueger’s become enamored of village life, of stone-age simplicity. Of hard, honest labor performed in the name of subsistence, rather than the acquisition of status or luxury. Of reliance on a bria and a crossbow for all one’s needs. Of sitting on the ground and cooking over fire. I can appreciate it, myself. To live in Ban Satum is to forego the myriad stresses that grip most Americans, like credit-card debt and promotions at work and whether the kids will get into a top-tier college; to be free of such inconsequentials as the latest fashions, as celebrity gossip, as the goings-on in Washington, in London, in Paris—in any settlement beyond Ban Satum.

It’s not an easy existence, reliant as it is on nature’s kindness. When it rains, you get wet. When a snake bites, you might die. Get sick and you’ll probably have to beat your illness without modern medicines. Break a leg and you’re hobbled for life. Plow or plant in the wrong place and you blow to smithereens.

Ban Satum doesn’t even have a schoolhouse, rough as they are hereabouts. Life doesn’t get much better, or much worse, from generation to generation. In fact, life hasn’t changed much in five hundred years.

“You gonna bring your girlfriend, or something?” I ask Krueger. I figure that he might want to share his next visit with someone close.

He replies, matter-of-factly: “I’m gonna get married here.”

“Oh,” I say. “You gonna bring somebody with you?”

“No,” he replies, “I’ll marry somebody here.”

I haven’t noticed any romance bloom in the grid or on the screens, haven’t seen Krueger conversing with any of the local women. On the few occasions I’ve seen him speaking with anyone, it’s been with the officials, a village chief, or the young guys that work the hole.

I’m digesting his news when a large rhinoceros beetle flies noisily over our heads, legs spread oddly, its hard outer wings swiveled forward, and bounces off the underside of the tarp. “That thing’ll be coming in for a landing soon,” Reynolds observes, as the insect struggles to escape the break tent. A soldier prepares to swat it with a T-shirt but is shouted away by several team members; we watch it carom off the nylon, urging it on, until it seems sure to reach open sky. Just before it does, a Laotian boy darts to the tent’s edge, snatches the beetle from the air, and immediately breaks off its legs with loud snaps. He slips the helpless creature into his shirt pocket.

“That beetle is so bumming,” Haugen groans. “Keep watching. Sometimes they’ll break off the back end and suck the juices out.” We wait expectantly. The kid fails to suck the beetle.

“They’ll eat anything,” Krueger murmurs. There’s admiration in his tone. “Bugs,” he says. “Mud.”

I stare at him, wondering how he’ll cater his wedding.

 

Low, swirling clouds sweep in from the north, the temperature drops into the eighties, and a stiff breeze develops. A twilight falls over the grid. For all this bluster, we get only drizzle. Just the same, the team in 508/504 works quickly, striving to wrap up the unit before the weather’s inevitable turn. The rough circle dug into the crater’s bottom is now sixteen inches deep.

Haugen and Artillaga are working the unit when a third snake materializes in the mud. From the screens I can see the Americans and several Laotian workers retreat while a sole villager lunges for the serpent. He snares it by the ends, twists it, and snaps it taut—and keeps pulling. The snake stretches. “Aw, noooooo!” Haugen cries, and as she does the snake rips in two in a fountain of red, dousing Artillaga in a spray of blood and shredded muscle. A cheer goes up from the bucket line. The local hoists the snake’s dripping halves overhead in triumph.

 

 

Not long after, 508/504 finally closes, having yielded nothing of consequence. Haugen and I watch the last of the locals clamber up the crater’s side. “I hate to see that,” she mutters. “I hoped that even if the wreck wasn’t in the crater, maybe the locals had used the hole for stuff they didn’t want.”

“It’s pretty damn disappointing,” I say. “Especially after that helmet.”

“Yeah,” Haugen sighs. “Assuming Mr. Talin really found it there.”

“You don’t think he did?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I wonder.”

“You think somebody told him to say he found it there?”

“I don’t know.” She kicks at the ground with her boot. “A village makes out pretty well when an excavation happens. They get a lot of money. And it doesn’t really matter whether any remains are recovered—they get paid, no matter what.”

I turn the thought over. There is, indeed, money to be made off the recovery effort, and the longer it takes, the more there will be. “If you were them,” Haugen says, “and you could get a team to come in and pay everybody in a village for a month, wouldn’t you?” We silently regard the site’s seventy workers. The locals have turned out in some memorable T-shirts today. “Three Times Three Are Nine,” one announces. “Mercedes, Symbol of Relatives,” reads a second. And: “Be Like Us!” And: “Baseboll 2000.” Another villager wears a dark blue shirt sprinkled with little American flags, and the words “Land of Liberty” on its placket.

Some are clearly handouts from past teams; some of the rattier shirts might even date to the IE’s 1994 visit here. The others are no doubt knock-offs from the Xepon Market. Western images are immensely popular in Southeast Asia: Last year, at a site in Vietnam, I saw a kid wearing a “Titanic” T-shirt. It was a match for the American movie poster, except that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett had jet-black hair.

As the wordless seconds pass, I mull our expedition’s genesis. A team visits in 1994 and finds so little it recommends against an excavation. Another team visits seven years later with the same result—except that this time, a helmet figures in the story, a helmet that no one thought to mention during the first team’s visit. Without Mr. Talin’s helmet, we wouldn’t be here.

Haugen has been turning this over, too. “If you want to get a team in to excavate,” she says, “you tell the IE that you’ve found a helmet, or flight suit, or zipper. Those three things are almost guaranteed to get a response, because you’re talking life support.” She squints at me. “I think the Lao have figured that out.”

“But if they’ve figured that out, surely they’re smart enough to know that the gravy train’s gonna dry up if they keep having us dig where they know we won’t find anything.”

“Maybe.” She shrugs.

“So what happens to the helmet? Do you think it’ll turn up again, at some other site?”

“Could,” she says. The joint task force has no evidence that the Laotian government has knowingly engaged in evidence planting, though the years have seen many episodes that have injected doubt into the postwar rapprochement—one being that mysterious report of bones at Pete Miller’s 1989 site.

But deception has certainly been part of Vietnam’s style of business on the MIA question, and for years after the war, the Vietnamese mentored the Laotians on all manner of things. The Vietnamese not only have warehoused bones but have further tested American patience by apparently planting evidence on several occasions.

One 1989 example saw Hanoi officials turn over two dozen bone fragments they represented as the remains of a navy A-4 pilot shot down over Haiphong twenty-two years before. The Vietnamese said the remains had been recovered in a unilateral excavation, performed without independent observation, along with a few pieces of material evidence. The artifacts included a five-dollar bill, an immunization card, and a faded military ID card, all “in remarkably clean condition,” and a parachute, “remarkable and clean beyond comprehension for a chute which was said to have been removed from a crater some 12 meters deep more than 20 years after the incident.” U.S. investigators concluded that the pilot had ejected from his plane before it crashed and that his life-support materials and personal effects had been collected shortly after he hit the ground and stored since. A life raft was recovered, too. The experts suspected that the Vietnamese soaked it in jet fuel to bolster their story that it was pulled from a wreck.

The lab was eventually able to identify the pilot from the turned-over bones, but where and when they were recovered remains a question.

Even if the Laotians are squeaky-clean in comparison, their casual handling of the helmet is a worry: A piece of material evidence, linked to one case but bearing no identifiable markings or numbers, remains in private hands in a region busy with unresolved cases. Mr. Talin could trade the helmet away. It could travel several provinces from here. It could reappear in Vietnam.

 

Three feet of water lie in the crater’s bottom when we reach the site. Dingman hauls the pump to the hole’s edge and drains it within a half-hour. Posey leads a team digging the last corner of 504/500. He’s finished by 9 A.M., and RE-1’s focus now shifts to the grid’s eastern edge, where Haugen strings two new units, 508/524 and 512/524, on the ravine’s thirty-five-degree slope. The squares encompass the ground on which she, Reynolds, and I found surface debris at the start of our exploration of the creekbed. They almost immediately yield some promising artifacts: Eagmin pulls a chunk of zipper from his screen, in which he’s pushing dirt from 512/524. “An interesting development,” Haugen calls it. “Unfortunately we’re out of land. Any farther down and we’re in the river.”

Indeed, solid ground ends abruptly at the units’ downhill edge. The final ten feet to the creekbed are vertical, the ravine’s flank having been chewed away; it was here, on this scoured and stratified bluff, that Haugen found evidence of regular and violent flooding when we hiked the creek. Much of the cut bamboo piled beyond the lip is resting on the small hardwoods below. If we were to tread on this dank thatching, we’d fall straight through and into the water. “It’s a bummer,” Haugen says, “because if any wreckage was down any lower, it’s . . .” She sweeps her arm downstream. “It’s gone.”

 

A half-dozen local men work in the hole, one of them in dressy women’s sandals. The site bakes dry. Puddles vanish. The smooth floors of the excavated units parch hard. One of the team’s enlisted women pulls off her soaked T-shirt and works in a tank top. The sight of her muscular shoulders and arms prompts an impressed murmur from the bucket line.

Lunch. We assemble in the break tent. “Not to scare anybody,” Posey says, “but we had three snakes jump out at us yesterday. If anybody goes downhill to help move that bamboo, be aware of what might jump out at you, that you’re disturbing something’s home—and whatever it is, it ain’t gonna be too happy about it.”

Conely dumps artifacts from the morning’s dig into a clean screen. “When we’re done with 512/524,” Reynolds says, “we can have everybody work that last unit, bang that out. Have all twelve screens working the dirt from that one hole.”

Haugen nods. “It won’t be long before we’re ready.”

Conely holds up a swatch of green fabric, the stuff she identified days ago as Nomex. “I don’t think that’s flight suit material,” she says uncertainly. “Now that it’s drying, it looks rougher, more like a cotton—like a kit bag, or something.”

“Have you ever seen flight suit material that’s been in the ground for thirty years?” Reynolds asks her.

“Well, no.”

“Me, neither,” the captain says.

“I just keep going back to the ’94 IE report,” Haugen mumbles, more to herself than to the team. “The villagers told those guys that within two months of the crash they were here, and they found no bodies, they saw no personal effects, no clothes, no boots—and they always came looking for clothes and boots. They really wanted that stuff. They mentioned no blood.”

“It burned, though,” I say. “Maybe there wasn’t any blood.”

“Still, I’m surprised we haven’t found any personal effects,” she says. “No pieces of wristwatch, for instance. Those guys seemed to like those big, chunky, metal Seikos, and they leave lots of pieces. There’s been no dog tag chain—not the dog tags, just the little metal balls.” She shakes her head.

Across the tent, Krueger confides that he’s decided not to marry a villager he’s had his eye on. “She’s already married,” he explains. “I confirmed it.” I follow his gaze to the Laotian break tent, where a beautiful young girl, waist-length hair tied in a purple ribbon, is staring back at him. She drops her eyes when she sees me looking. “How old is she?” I ask him.

“Thirteen,” he murmurs.

“Let’s go, y’all,” Posey says. “Let’s get back out there.”

 

Haugen asks for five volunteers to hack away the bamboo stacked below the open units, and nine villagers scramble bare-footed into the tangle, swinging brias, unfazed by the almost certain presence of snakes in its depths. One of them climbs onto the pile and bounces up and down until it collapses under his feet, and he drops into the creekbed. Unhurt, he tugs at the pile’s underside while his colleagues slip bamboo poles beneath its uphill edge and pry it up and over the ravine’s lip. It ascends in a single mass, matted and wet and heavy. Under it, a cobalt-blue scorpion crouches, every bit of six inches long. A local promptly splits it with his blade.

In 508/524, an old villager wields an axe to chop up a huge bamboo root, which resembles an asterisk of thick, yellow wire more than anything living. His blows glance off the fibrous stalks, and when he scores a solid hit, it only chips their skin. Two younger locals join in with picks, and one finally works the head of his tool under the root’s massive center. It takes all three workers, pushing on the pick’s handle, to rip it loose from the soil. Beneath it are a sliver of glass, a swatch of black fabric, and an inch-square piece of flat rubber. A few feet to the west, another worker uncovers a large rectangle of olive-drab cloth.

Haugen, troweling at the unit’s edge, shows off a strip of metal stamped with numbers, and a thick chunk of painted glass, apparently part of a backlit instrument panel display; its unpainted portions form the word CAUTION. “We found another piece of fabric,” she says, “but it looks like cotton, with an over-and-under weave. Nomex is a polyester, so I don’t think that it’s flight suit. We found a piece of what looks like seat belt, too.”

“Seat belt?” I say, excited. “Doesn’t that count as life support?”

She crinkles her nose. “I wish it were,” she says, “but with helicopters, it’s really discrete, what’s plain wreckage, what’s life support. A helicopter has troop seats.”

“Wouldn’t troop seats have seat belts?”

“Well, yeah, they would. But that’s why it doesn’t really mean anything,” she says. “In a jet, finding a seat belt says the seat was still in the aircraft when it hit. It tells you whether the pilot ejected.

“In a helicopter, with so many seats—and with no ejection seats—it’s just wreckage.”

When the day’s work is done, Conely’s buckets are filled with pieces of seat armor, with red and green and clear glass, with shards of aluminum and torn pieces of fabric. The holes have yielded instrument panel warning lights that read 20 MINUTE FUEL and ENGINE OIL PRESS., and washers and wires and stainless-steel disks, and ragged squares of metal screen. But today, as on every day, no bone. No identifiable personal effects. Nothing that directly connects the site with Barker, Dugan, Dillender, and Chubb.