THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2001, 7 A.M.: “Isn’t it amazing,” Brian Eagmin says, as RE-1 gathers in the barn beside the mess tent, “to think that today might be our last day pushing dirt?”
As usual, all the team but Haugen is wilting in the early-morning humidity. Reynolds pauses between gulps of bottled water to glare at the EOD. “Thanks, Eagmin,” the captain says. “You just jinxed us.”
“Watch us find bone,” Eagmin says, unfazed.
“God,” a sergeant sighs, “I hope so.” The team responds with a chorus of Amens and No shits.
But the morning passes with few artifacts unearthed; the only item of real interest is a broken black handle, a double for the piece of plastic that Conely identified early in the mission as part of the helicopter’s cyclic. This fragment is larger, and its identity obvious to Eagmin. “That’s no cyclic,” he tells Conely. “That’s a bayonet grip.” American, he judges, of the type that mounted under the muzzle of an M-16, and evidently left here by soldiers on the ground, not by the crew of a crashing helicopter.
At lunch, the team distributes a trash bag full of hand-me-downs to the villagers, clothes that its members carried to Laos from Hawaii. They pass out blouses, shirts, skirts, women’s pants, even a silvery thong from Victoria’s Secret. God knows where the stuff will end up: Perhaps some of it will be traded with peasants from elsewhere in Savannakhet, or travelers on Route 9, and make its way to a village far from here, where months or years from now an American team will land to dig for the dead and encounter this little slip of underwear on a worker—worn who knows how—and wonder: How the hell did that get here?
The team also hands out magazines, which are rarely seen commodities in the borderlands. During a break, a soldier flips through an issue of Cosmopolitan with a gallery of village youngsters, who gasp at the magazine’s ads and fashion spreads. Its cover is splashed with a headline they can’t read: “Sexify your look.”
And there’s another piece of business that Haugen brings up before the break ends. The joint task force in Hawaii has relayed a request to RE-1, via cable to Vientiane and radio to Ban Alang, from John Chubb’s family, which has been apprised that an excavation is under way. The door gunner’s survivors have asked that the team gather some mementos of the site—pebbles, or earth, or bits of the wreckage—and bring them back.
“So what I was thinking,” Haugen says, “is that everybody could collect four rocks, one for the family of each guy on the helicopter, and we’ll send them back to the States. Does that sound like a good idea?”
Several soldiers answer that it does. We fan out across the site in search of rocks.
At 2:15 P.M., Randy Posey finds a small piece of green fabric on his screen. He rinses it under his hose. Two letters, printed in black, appear on its surface. He carries it to Haugen. “Doc,” he tells her, “I found me some name tape.”
Every American soldier in Vietnam wore his surname on the tunic of his fatigues, on a strip of cloth sewn over his right breast pocket. Posey’s find is torn at one end, burned away at the other, but the letters “BE” are clearly visible, along with a portion of a third. Judging from the empty space off to the left of the “B,” it looks to be the leftmost portion of the tape, the beginning of a name.
Conely examines the strip during the team’s final break. “B-E-R?” she murmurs. “B-E-B? B-E-P?”
“Whatever it is,” Haugen sighs, “It doesn’t correlate with our four guys.”
“Maybe it’s not the beginning of a name,” Conely says, hoping. “Could it be from the middle of one of their names?” Several team members silently run through the surnames of the missing crew. It takes just a moment to dismiss the theory.
“Of course, it could be somebody on the ground,” Eagmin suggests. “It may be one of the guys they were going in to pick up.”
“It could be,” Haugen agrees.
“Doesn’t help us much,” Posey says.
“No,” Haugen says. “It doesn’t do anything to correlate this site with 1731.” We stand sweating in the break tent, passing around the nametape, reaching no consensus on the third letter. There is no wailing, no cursing, no display of any emotion beyond fatigue. As disappointing as the discovery might be, we’re all too whipped to hurt much.
As it turns out, the site has waited to within an hour of the excavation’s end to cough up this final relic. Haugen, working in 512/524, sends the last bucket to the screens at about 2:45 P.M.; Dingman turns off the pump twenty-five minutes later. We gather the tools, wash them, carry them to the break tent. We fold the tarps that have shielded the open units. The team says nothing to the Laotians to indicate that the site is closing, and to look at it, there’s work left to be done. Six complete units and half of two others remain unexcavated, Haugen having deemed them outside the debris field’s boundaries. We leave the screening station in place, the shovels and picks, the radio; the team will swoop in tomorrow to pack them up. The locals can sense the end has come, just the same. Sammy, Bing, and a passel of kids hover nearby, watching us closely.
“Well,” Haugen says, when we’re ready to board the Squirrel, “we finished. You guys did a great job.” She smiles sadly. “Of course, the big news of the day was that we found a piece of name tape. That might be the most important thing we found, because it might mean that this isn’t the helicopter we thought it was.
“You shouldn’t feel, though, that this has all been for naught. This team did excellent work. And finding that piece of name tape may allow us to remove this site from the list of possible locations for the helicopter.”
Reynolds thanks the team for its efforts. “I’m sure everybody has learned something on this little expedition of ours,” he says. “We’re coming out of the tunnel now. Let’s get everything done we need to get done. Let’s stay smart, and get home safe.”
We leave for Ban Alang having excavated twenty-two full units and two half units, having carved away some 368 square meters of jungle floor, having shoveled and sifted roughly four thousand cubic feet of dirt.
Something like twelve thousand bucketfuls.
A thousand buckets a screen.
Every one of them empty of what we came for.