EIGHTEEN

STRIKING GOLD

2014–2015

For seven years, Mark Noah had endured sabotage, slander, shunning, and scheming by everyone from a US military agency to the Kiribati government. But with every slight, he only grew more determined to bring Tarawa’s MIAs home.

By 2014 History Flight had recovered more than thirteen thousand American bones and countless artifacts. But Mark’s ardor puzzled even the New York Times, which reported that he “couldn’t fully explain” why a private citizen with no connection to the military would be willing to endure so much frustration and financial drain to pursue long-forgotten bones.1 I, too wondered, but Mark had always waved off the question when I asked about his motivations. So I was equally surprised and intrigued when he contacted me in February 2015 to say he was ready to talk.

He told me his earliest interest in World War II was spurred by an uncle who served in the First Marine Division and showed him artifacts brought back from Peleliu and Okinawa, sites of two of the most gut-churning Pacific battles to follow Tarawa.

Though he never served in the military himself, he’d been deeply affected by violence. While living in the People’s Republic of China during the 1980s (his father worked for the US Department of State), some of his young friends in the pro-democracy movement disappeared during the government’s brutal 1989 crackdown. Some later turned up dead, but Mark was even more haunted by those who had simply vanished, their fates unknown.

His own initiation into violence came during his years of running with a “punk-rock” street gang, when he learned to be a street fighter and enforcer of a violent code of ethics.

“I saw a tremendous amount of street violence and bloodshed in Atlanta and LA,” he told me. “I saw friends screaming out to God to save them when they knew they were going to die, and they knew there was no salvation.”2

Memories of those dead and disappeared friends, which he told me he’d never even shared with his wife, would later inform a kind of spiritual motivation for finding Tarawa’s MIAs.

“A lot of these beard-stroking academics and PhD anthropologists approach this work as if they are more interested in themselves than helping other people. They act very nonchalant and cavalier around deceased people, with not even a semblance of dignity,” he said. “But I have something they don’t have: They’ve never been there when a ‘forensic event’ happened, they’ve never been violently injured themselves.”³

Mark outgrew his violent youthful diversions to become a responsible husband and father of two, and that punkish pugnacity evolved into a marine-like tenacity in the face of adversity.

“One of my strongest points is that I’m hard as nails, and I’ve never taken shit from them [JPAC]. They tried to undermine me every way they could. They started their big slander campaign, and it blew up in their faces,” he said. “But they didn’t know me very well, and every time they pulled anything, we doubled down and made our efforts even more successful.”⁴

So here’s Mark Noah: an adventurous, driven, stubborn, sometimes impetuous son of privilege, ever ready—even eager—for a fight.

Now who did that remind me of?

In 2014 Mark Noah added a new member to the History Flight team, former Army Special Forces medic John Frye, whom Kristen had met while both were working on JPAC missions in Korea and Vietnam. John’s expertise in field medicine would prove a valuable asset to History Flight’s work on Betio.

“At JPAC they couldn’t care less about my experience. They wouldn’t listen to me if I’d tried to stand on somebody’s desk and shout, because I wasn’t a forensic anthropologist,” he said. “But I’ve seen a few people blown up and shot, so I know a little about what those injuries do to the body.”5

On Memorial Day that year, History Flight announced the repatriation of partial remains of “at least forty individuals” recovered between January and May, mostly from the Cemetery 26 and 33 areas, and invited six Tarawa veterans—Wendell Perkins, C.J. Daigle, A.J. Bowden, Jim Morrows, Dean Woodward, and Dean Ladd—on a tour of Betio and Wellington, New Zealand, where they had been stationed before and after the Second Marine Division’s time on Guadalcanal.

Finally, after four years of sporadic effort, JPAC recovered its first set of Tarawa remains without any input from History Flight in October 2014. Following up on a tip from a Betio resident, a team led by anthropologist Jay Silverstein zeroed in on the grave by overlaying a historic photo on a modern aerial image of the island. A dog tag bearing the letters “RED” was the first clue in the eventual identification of Pvt. Jack Redman, who was killed on the last day of the battle.⁶

JPAC also had officially identified the American remains unearthed at the Taiwanese housing development by Kristen Baker her first weeks on the job. Pfc. Randolph Allen of Watseka, Illinois, was one of just nine marines killed on the final day of fighting on Betio. (The other remains recovered at the site were Japanese.)

Both discoveries, along with their subsequent funerals, drew attention from the media, and casual observers might well have concluded that the score was JPAC 1, History Flight 1. But things were about to change in a big way for the agency and the nonprofit alike.

On March 31, 2015, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced a major reorganization of the nation’s efforts to identify and recover the estimated 83,000 missing American war dead around the world. Three agencies tasked with those duties, JPAC, DPMO, and the Central Identification Laboratory, would be merged into the new Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA, “a single accountable organization that has complete oversight of personnel accounting resources, research and operations” under the oversight of a director in the Pentagon.7

Meanwhile on Betio, Kristen Baker was poised to make the discovery of a lifetime. Kristen, like Mark, had never lost her interest in thoroughly exploring the crushed-coral yard at Kiribati Shipping Services Ltd., believing that CIL deputy director Bill Belcher had ignored JPAC’s own protocols by failing to further excavate the site after finding small bones and American artifacts in 2012.

But numerous hurdles, both logistical and political, had prevented History Flight from conducting a more systematic search of the area. The cramped yard was hemmed in by two hulking post-World War II Quonset huts, a dilapidated two-story office building, a twenty-foot high tin-sided warehouse, and the boat basin, rendering it all but impossible for the company to conduct regular business around a large hole in the ground.

But in late November 2014, Kristen noticed that the company had begun tearing down the Quonset huts. If they weren’t replaced, there might enough room for both commerce and archaeology. But when History Flight fixer Kautebiri Kobuti made inquiries, the manager declined to grant permission to dig in the yard.

After spending the holidays in Hawaii, Kristen and John Frye returned to Tarawa in January. But a destructive “king tide”—a perigean spring tide, the precise opposite of the weak high tide that doomed so many marines during the battle—battered the island, smashing one of Betio’s myriad hulking reef wrecks through the seawall on Red Beach 2 and waterlogging the island, making it impossible to work at their current site, Cemetery 26.

Kristen used the delay to press for access to the shipping yard. By then, the shipping company had a new general manager, Tamana Natanaera, who green-lighted the project, provided the team stopped working when the company’s fifty-six-foot inter-island transport Butimari was in port.

“I’m amazed to this day at the way everything suddenly came together so perfectly,” Kristen said.8

On March 15 Kristen, John, and volunteer Rick Snow, founder of Knoxville-based Forensic Anthropology Consulting Services, Inc., opened up an exploratory trench east of the lamp pole where Herman Sturmer had been found in 2002. Within hours, the team encountered American remains some three to four feet beneath the surface (later identified as belonging to Cpl. Roger K. Nielsen of Denver, killed on D-day).

“That was all the confirmation we needed,” Kristen said.

The excavation process was slow and painstaking. Once the local laborers—Aman, Titang, Eru, and Katerak—had broken through the layer of crushed coral, the team gently “shovel shaved” a half inch of soil at a time and dumped it into five-gallon plastic buckets for sifting. As soon as a shovel struck anything solid, Kristen called a halt to the digging to examine the find. Once they hit human remains or artifacts, she, John, and experienced volunteers would use spades, brushes, and small wooden tools to fully expose the remains. Each individual would take up three days to expose, document, and remove.

Though painstaking, this kind of archaeology absolutely was a spectator sport, as the team discovered four more complete sets of American remains as well as a torso on a stretcher. Through dental comparisons and artifacts, Kristen was able to provisionally identify three of the six marines as Nielsen, Sgt. James J. Hubert, and Pvt. Robert Carter Jr., all of whose casualty cards listed only memorial graves at Cemetery 33.

Carter’s hand was literally a couple of inches from the telltale remains of JPAC’s exploratory trench—“almost like he was reaching out to Bill Belcher,” Kristen said.9 But none of three identified marines seemed to be associated with Cemetery 27. Had the team stumbled onto a completely different site? Kristen numbered the remains as “individuals” 1–6 (including one found to the west of the pole), tentatively labeled the trench “Row B” of Cemetery 27, and began digging exploratory trenches in search of the mother lode.

“If you are looking for something that is running east-west, you dig north-south,” she said. “Otherwise you can dig all day long and miss what you are looking for.”¹⁰

When they found only “sterile soil” to the south, they began digging to the north, toward an anomaly identified through ground-penetrating radar in 2012. Once beneath the hard upper layer, the first shovel cuts revealed the distinctive soil profile Kristen now recognized as a bulldozer trench. She laid out a grid for a large unit and in short order the team had unearthed an intact set of remains.

Back at the lab—a tile-floored, three-room suite at the Betio Lodge II—a dog tag and dental comparisons led Kristen to make a strong provisional identification of Pfc. Charles E. Oetjen. Killed on D-day, Oetjen was recorded as having been buried in “Grave #6, 8th Marines #2, Central Division Cemetery”—Cemetery 27. It was a tantalizing clue, but Kristen wanted more data before making any sweeping conclusions.

Digging west, the team recovered five more sets of remains over the next couple of weeks: Pvt. Frank Penna, an unknown later identified as Cpl. Walter Critchley, Pvt. Palmer Sherman Haraldson, and Pvt. Fred Evert Freet, whose casualty cards indicated that they were buried in grave numbers 6 to 2, respectively, and an unknown later identified as Cpl. James D. Otto, whose arm was partially exposed in the western wall of the unit and recorded as occupying grave #1.

Now there could be no doubt.

“We knew we’d found Cemetery 27,” Kristen said.

(It’s worth noting that the location was about fifty yards southeast of the coordinates “at or very close” to where Bill Niven originally predicted the trench containing my grandfather’s remains would be found.11 Close, but definitely no cigar; I had learned that in archaeology, missing by an inch is as bad as missing by a mile.)

After carefully exhuming twelve sets of remains in under six weeks, Kristen flew back to Hawaii on May 1 for a scheduled ten-day break. But she couldn’t wait to get back to Betio to solve the puzzle of Cemetery 27.

“When we came back,” Mark Noah said, “we began to dig east and the burial feature began to yield an eerie similarity to the historical record that we had recreated.”¹²

And according to that record, my grandfather would be found in “grave” #17, less than six meters to the east.

Mark first called me in mid-March to say that his team may have finally located Cemetery 27. I forced myself to tamp down expectations. How many times, after all, had we agreed that finding Sandy Bonnyman was comparable to searching for the proverbial the needle in a haystack? And by now I knew the vagaries of Betio all too well. Who knew if locals had backhoed through the part of the trench where my grandfather should have been, or dug up his remains while digging a trash pit, or if his grave was otherwise disturbed, even removed? Still, knowing that Kristen had identified marines whose names appeared on that monument next to my grandfather’s went far beyond any previous tantalizing hints.

Over the next few weeks, Mark continually updated me on the good news. Finally, in May, I got the call I’d been waiting for: “You need to get down there. And bring a video camera.”

To my surprise, conditions on Betio and South Tarawa in general had not fully relapsed into pre-seventieth-anniversary squalor. Whether due to seasonal conditions or some human effort, the air seemed less infused with the corpse-like odor of the reef and residents were now making use of green plastic garbage bags emblazoned with Kiribati te Boboto or “Keep Kiribati Clean.” For the first time ever I saw dogs wearing collars and sporting shiny coats, even one running happily alongside a boy on a bicycle.

Or maybe I was just seeing the place through Sandy-tinted glasses.

Responding in part to a cultural-resources management proposal drawn up by History Flight, the Kiribati Board of Tourism had scraped away the junk and overgrowth around Admiral Shibasaki’s bunker and strategically placed wrecked cars and rusty sheet metal around Bonnyman’s Bunker in an effort to discourage residents from using the top as a latrine. There also was profusion of new “restraunts” and curious offerings of consumer goods for sale, from blow-up Santas to Mylar balloons and shiny new bicycles.

All those changes were due, in part, to a bevy of internationally funded projects that had brought an influx of Australian and Kiwi workers. These included various initiatives funded by the European Union, the United Nations, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, including a major road-improvement project funded by the World Bank and managed by New Zealand’s McDowell Construction, which also had put up razor-wire fencing around the airport for the first time.

By the time I walked over to the dig site that first day, the sun was high and hot. Kristen and John had fully exposed the remains in grave #8, carefully removing and wrapping every bone, fragment, and piece of material evidence—the rubber soles of boondockers, the standard-issue marine combat boots; shreds of sock; ammunition clips; and more—in aluminum foil before placing it into large plastic evidence bags.

Like three-quarters of the remains that eventually would be recovered from “Row A”—which was, in fact, Cemetery 27—those in #8 were wrapped in a green, rubberized canvas poncho. Like all but three of the marines buried in Cemetery 27, Pfc. James Mansfield was killed on the first day of fighting but wasn’t buried until several days later. Given the advanced state of decomposition, burial details simply wrapped remains in ponchos, apparently making little or no effort to remove gear or personal items.

Exhuming poncho-covered remains day after day, Kristen Baker was seeing the fascinating effects of the moisture-retaining microenvironment, which had preserved a host of typically biodegradable materials, including leather, hair, even a pack of Camel cigarettes. But the moisture inside the ponchos also made many bones porous and fragile.

“Things fall apart,” Kristen murmured down in the hole, quoting Yeats.

I had seen bits and pieces of human remains in my previous work with History Flight, as well as the skeletons of Randolph Allen and four Japanese at Cemetery 26, but that was the first time I was able to get in for a closer look. The soles of Mansfield’s boots seemed so human and awoke me to the reality of what lay before me.

“Jesus, I don’t want to die alone,” Johnny Cash sang mournfully from Kristen’s boom box on the edge of the hole.

Kristen worked assiduously to follow and even surpass the standard operating procedures she learned at JPAC. When a JPAC team recovered three sets of remains from Cemetery 25 in 2012, they didn’t bother collecting every tiny toe or finger bone or fragment of rib, but Kristen was intent on preserving even the smallest grain of evidence, right down to sock threads that fit on the tip of her little finger.

“They have good standards, but I tend to go above and beyond,” she said. “It’s a matter of respect, too. These guys deserve the best treatment we can give them.”13

Based on solid provisional identifications of remains whose grave locations neatly corresponded with casualty cards, Kristen was confident that we were on track to find Sandy Bonnyman in grave #17. When we did—if we did—his teeth would provide virtually instant confirmation of his identity: Kristen had practically memorized my grandfather’s dental chart, which revealed extensive work and multiple gold restorations. Upon examining each successive set of remains, Kristen took to pronouncing, “No gold.”

“Gold was very expensive and unusual at the time, and there weren’t very many people, particularly in the marines, who had gold bridges and fillings,” Kristen said. “In the forty people buried here, only maybe three or four had any gold fillings at all.”¹⁴

After all these years of anticipation, my mind refused to share her confidence, and in my jittery state, I constantly imagined nightmare scenarios: “Unfortunately, it looks like there’s been extensive disturbance after #15 . . .” or “There’s a trash pit where your grandfather should be . . .” To combat the constant fluttering of butterfly wings in my gut, I kept myself busy shooting video and photos, chipping in with screening or digging, walking to the store to buy cans of Pringles for the crew. I was unspeakably grateful that I happened to share most of Kristen’s musical tastes—Creedence Clearwater Revival, Johnny Cash, Metallica, Rise Against, the Black Keys, Lynyrd Skynrd. It would have driven me around the bend to have my butterflies flapping to bad country or disco.

When I first arrived, each set of remains was taking two to three days to expose, document, and remove, including time for Kristen to make highly detailed in situ sketches of all remains. My wife Jody and I had agreed that I would stay on Betio as long as needed to either find Sandy, or confirm that he was not buried here, but I was feeling antsy. After a couple of days, I got up the nerve to ask Kristen if it would save time to make the drawings later, based on photographs. Had she told me that would violate best practices, I would have understood; after all, where I was focused on one particular grave, it was her job to give her utmost professional attention to every set of remains. But after giving it some thought, Kristen thanked me for suggesting the idea. After she made the change, it generally took between one and two days to fully process each set of remains.

Mindful that the shipping company’s inter-island cargo ship Butimari was due to dock within a couple of weeks, the crew also stepped up their already grueling work schedule, working straight through rain squalls and staying “in the hole” from seven or eight o’clock in the morning until six in the evening. Kristen drove herself so hard that she suffered a relapse of chikungunya, a debilitating, mosquito-borne viral disease recently arrived from Africa. Though sore and exhausted, she refused to take a day off, even when John suggested it.

With the team now processing a new set of remains nearly every day, a huge backlog of lab work began to mount. Once removed from the ground, all remains had to be carefully cleaned, dried, cataloged, and photographed, and a full report (typically ten or more pages) had to be written for each individual set. All that work had literally ground to a halt upon the departure of forensic anthropologist Rick Snow (one of Kristen Baker’s early mentors) before I arrived. On Snow’s recommendation, Mark hired a PhD candidate from the University of Tennessee—home to one of the country’s top forensic anthropology programs—to pick up the slack.

Hillary Parsons had completed her coursework and was now living in her hometown, Bozeman, Montana, working at a whiskey distillery and completing her dissertation. To speed things up in the lab, I began assisting Hillary in the lab after visiting the dig site and capturing video and photos each morning. I had ulterior motives for helping out: The lab was air conditioned and scrubbing bones—not to mention lots of banter—kept me blessedly distracted and my mind (mostly) free from its usual doom-and-gloom chatter.

Little did I know that working in the lab would come to resemble a mini-seminar in forensics—call it bones for boneheads—courtesy of Professor Parsons. As I carefully brushed and washed away grains of sand, she answered all my questions, gave me the name of even the tiniest bones, pointed out clues to determine age, sex, ancestry, and cause of death.

Hillary also let me play Watson to her Sherlock Holmes. After cleaning up a brass watch found with the remains in grave #3, I noticed that “PSH” and “C-1-6” had been scratched into the cover. Guessing that these were the marine’s initials and unit number, I flipped through History Flight’s research on the missing and discovered that a Pvt. Palmer Sherman Haraldson, with C Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, had been killed on D+3. After a dental comparison, Hillary was able to confirm that provisional identification with a high degree of confidence.

“You need to be there now. All the time,” Paul Schwimmer advised me one night after dinner at the Betio Lodge II. Paul, a US Army Special Forces veteran, had been doing pro bono survey work for History Flight for years. “This is Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I’m telling you, we are coming closer and closer to the ark.”

The next morning I woke at five o’clock and ran to Bairiki. As the sun rose I found myself staring up at the clouds, remembering my first trip to Tarawa, and CNN reporter Ted Rowland’s fruitless attempts to wring some tears from me.

Back then, the idea that we would actually find my grandfather had seemed little more than a fantasy. Now, the team had exposed grave #15, less than a meter from where my grandfather lay. There had been no glitches so far, just one set of intact remains after another, day after day, and no reason to think that would change.

Jogging along the causeway, I felt myself . . . untethered. I no longer feared that we wouldn’t find my grandfather, but that we would—or rather, what I would feel in that moment. I once told CNN cameraman John Torigoe that going to Tarawa had divided my life into before and after. But the after had really been a kind of limbo, a liminal state that I never really expected to end. Now, as I tried to imagine the once unimaginable, I saw myself collapsing, going mad, drifting away.

Suddenly I was overcome with sadness—for my grandfather, my mother and aunt, my great-grandparents, for all Tarawa’s dead and all their families, too. I stopped atop a culvert on the causeway; stripped off my shirt, socks, and shoes. Plunging into the blue current rushing below, I rode it seaward, my tears swallowed up by the mighty Pacific.

When I got to the dig site at eight o’clock, the team had shovel-shaved down to a bench about two feet deep, exposing the butt of a green, World War II-era Japanese beer bottle in the south facing wall. At mid-morning, sand began to trickle into a small, oval void below the beer bottle. Kristen, sporting one of her trademark skull bandanas, pulled on blue latex surgical gloves and gently palpated the hole.

“It’s the edge of a helmet,” she said. “There is a cranium inside.”

Over the next few minutes, she carefully brushed away sand, keeping it level and smooth. As I looked over her shoulder, something else came into view: a small, smooth patch of brown just a few inches from the helmet. My heart began to thud faster.

“Another cranium,” Kristen said evenly.

She continued to expose the area, singing along with Shinedown’s rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man”: “Boy, don’t you worry, you’ll find yourself/Follow your heart and nothing else . . . And be a simple kind of man/Oh, be something you love and understand . . .”

I’d always seen a little of myself in the song, but now I thought of my grandfather: “Take your time, don’t live too fast/Troubles will come and they will pass.”

Goosebumps prickled my skin in the tropical heat and I raised the camera to my eye, focusing on Kristen’s hands. I held my breath, trying to hold steady. From behind me, I heard John say, “Yup.”

“Gold,” Kristen said a split second later.

Then I dropped the camera.

It was 10:49 in the morning, May 28, 2015—seventy-one years, six months, five days and perhaps twenty hours since 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr., Sandy, Bonny, my grandfather, had taken his last breath.