TWENTY

TENDER HANDS

MAY 28-JUNE 1, 2015

Even as Kristen Baker pronounced the word we’d been waiting to hear, we all saw the telltale glint in that burnished jaw beneath her brush.

I should have steadied my hand and kept the video camera rolling. Instead, my body yielded involuntarily to a sudden, powerful yearning to freeze everything around me so I could experience that instant fully, for as long as I desired. I found myself thinking—as I often do—about Tolkien’s great quest story, The Lord of the Rings, thinking that this was how Frodo and Sam must have felt at the end of their own seemingly impossible quest, the world collapsing around them.

But time didn’t stop. Keenly aware of all those eyes upon me, I instinctively donned the inquisitive armor that had served me so well in my long career as a journalist: I turned to Kristen and asked what she was feeling.

“I really don’t know what to say in a situation like this,” she said haltingly.

I knew exactly how she felt.

A couple minutes later John Frye called the two of us out of the hole. He handed cold bottles of New Zealand Tui beer to Kristen and me, as well as Paul and Aman, Titang, Eru, and Katerak, our incredibly hard-working local crew. John toasted Sandy Bonnyman, Mark Noah, Kristen, and everyone else who had made this possible.

And then Kristen got back to work. Per protocol, she turned her attention to the remains in grave #16. The skeleton (eventually identified as Pvt. Emmet L. Kines) lay on its back, shrouded in poncho, face to face with my grandfather, his left arm beneath my grandfather’s shoulders, a bony embrace that had lasted seventy-one years.

Meanwhile, Paul turned the tables—and camera—on me. I rambled for eleven minutes, struggling to keep my emotions in check.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t make more effort twenty-five years ago, when a lot more of the Tarawa veterans were alive,” I said. “But this alone is a five-year odyssey and it’s thanks to Mark Noah.”

Yet the man responsible would miss this astonishing moment by just one hour. In continual contact with him by satellite phone, Kristen had advised him that team was fast approaching grave #17. He arrived at the site shortly before noon, having driven straight from the airport.

“There’s number 21,” John said, pointing to grave #16 (Kristen began numbering individuals with first row, not the main trench), “and right there next to him is Alexander Bonnyman.”

Mark laughed.

“No. I’m not kidding,” John said. “That’s him.”

“Super. Super nice,” Mark said. “Wow.”

Instead of returning to duty at the lab, where I would have been far more productive, I remained at the site for the rest of the day. Having found my grandfather, I was now reluctant to leave his side; I even mused out loud about camping out in the unit that night, but came to my senses when I remembered the shipping company always kept a guard on duty. By late afternoon, the remains of Pvt. Kines had been safely delivered into Hillary’s hands. Tomorrow was going to be quite a day.

Later that night at the Betio Lodge, Paul said he was surprised that I hadn’t shown more emotion.

“I felt it; you saw me choking up on the video. But I had to shut it down,” I said. “I wasn’t about to start blubbering in front of two special-forces guys.”

“Believe me,” Paul said, “when guys lose a friend from their outfit, they show their emotions.”

“Of course,” I said. “But that’s different; I didn’t risk myself like my grandfather did and I just couldn’t . . . I don’t know. I just had to keep a lid on it.”

“Well, just remember,” he said, shaking his head, “that’s on you.”

The next day the crew began removing sand from around my grandfather’s skeleton, meticulously brushing away a few grains of sand at a time, as if his bones were made of delicate crystal. His were just the third set of remains in the main trench not to be wrapped in a poncho, and where other graves had yielded everything from grenades and helmets to watches and a pack of cigarettes, Sandy had been buried with almost nothing by his side. The hard rubber soles of his boots were still pressed to the bones of his big feet and we recovered numerous corroded metal buttons and the shards of his metal belt buckle.

More intriguing, we found a lump of sand-crusted metal in the area that would have been his left front pants pocket, which turned out to be an astonishingly well preserved Zippo lighter on which Sandy had scratched the initial “B,” fused to a heavily corroded medallion I hoped was a dog tag. Mark would go so far as to send it to specialists at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, but it was beyond restoration and we never knew for sure what it was. (My mother said he might have been wearing a St. Christopher medal which, it’s worth noting, did not show up a list of personal property returned to Jo after his death.)

The fact that there was so little material evidence with my grandfather’s remains made sense. Buried less than twenty-four hours after his death, my grandfather’s remains were likely fairly intact, allowing his burial detail to remove anything useful and place him in the trench without a poncho.

Late in the afternoon, as the team began removing rib bones, they found two tiny, unused morphine syrettes (mini-syringes), their small wire caps still in place, in the area of his right breast pocket, and a third, uncapped syrette, adhered to a rib, its tip slightly bent. The syrettes would provide an interesting clue in the mystery of how he died.

Like most of the men in Cemetery 27, Sandy was face down. His left cheek resting on the sand, his arms were crossed beneath his chest, and his right ankle crossed over his left leg just below the knee. His bones were as solid and sturdy as any History Flight had found on the island, except for a small portion of his upper right thoracic area that had been in contact with poncho material in grave #18.

Even without the rock-solid evidence of his gold dental work, my grandfather was pretty easy to identify. His bones were long and strong; his hands and the feet his daughter remembered so well led Kristen to pronounce, “He was a big man.”

As the afternoon wore on and the team placed his remains into evidence bags, Kristen and John saw no immediate sign of skull trauma. There was, however, abundant evidence of apparent shrapnel wounds on the right side of his torso and right hand.

Until that moment, I had never considered that my grandfather’s remains could shed light on the mystery of what really happened atop the bunker. I suddenly realized that here was hard physical evidence to set against all the words ever spoken and ink spilled about his death over the last seven decades. No more hearsay: We had the goods.

Sandy’s remains were in Hillary Parsons’s hands by four o’clock. Mark Noah felt strongly that, as a family member, I shouldn’t take part in the processing of the remains, so I just lurked around the edges of the examination table as Hillary and Kristen went into full forensic-geek mode.

They huddled together over the remarkably well-preserved maxilla and mandible bones, matching all the gleaming gold to dental records. Hillary carefully cleaned the mandible and Kristen gently brushed sand from the cranium as evening fell, and they refused to be distracted even by offers of beer and wine from Paul. I’m sure they would have worked until midnight, or through the night, but once it got dark, John insisted they knock off.

“Don’t worry,” Hillary said, finally accepting a glass of white wine. “I know you’re leaving Monday, but we have this on the fast track.”

Upon careful examination the next day, Sandy Bonnyman’s remains provided indisputable testimony that he had not been shot in the head or spine. It remained conceivable that he died from “gunshot wounds”1 to soft tissues that left no trace on his bones—say, in the neck. But it was clear that Harry Niehoff’s memory of him being shot in the head and dying instantly were not accurate.

What’s more, the trauma to his torso and hand intriguingly pointed to a grenade or mortar shell as the proximate cause of death.

“Perimortem trauma [occurring at the time of death] is present in the form of a series of skeletal lesions consistent with damage from bomb fragments on the anterior and inferior surfaces of right ribs #3-#8, the anterior surface of the right scapula, the anterior surface of the left and right ilia, and the anterior surface of the sacrum,” Hillary wrote in her report, an opinion endorsed by Kristen and by John, who had seen his share of such injuries in the field. The affected areas revealed “thermal alteration”—burning—that surrounded a series of “depressed fractures and nicks. That the trauma occurred perimortem is indicated by the consistency of coloration along fractures with surrounding bones.”²

Hillary had been initially confused about what appeared to be burn marks on many of the osseous materials discovered in Cemetery 27. However, as the data piled up, she and Kristen realized that those dark marks were an anomalous decomposition pattern seen only in remains affected by the rubberized-canvas ponchos. Although Sandy’s remains had incidental contact with poncho material from adjacent graves, the shrapnel-damaged areas of his scapula, ribs, pelvic, and hand bones were not affected.

History Flight essentially was pioneering a new micro-study in the effects of being wrapped in a poncho in tropical sand for seven decades.

“This appears to be due to microclimates inside the ponchos. That’s not something that DPAA has really looked at,” Hillary said, “so it’s new territory.”3

I was caught off guard two months later when DPAA forensic anthropologist Laurel Freas, who conducted the agency’s examination of my grandfather’s remains, concluded that “no perimortem trauma was observed.”⁴

Kristen wasn’t surprised in the least.

“The management is very strict and risk-adverse there. They also are very limited in the types of analysis and judgments they can make. For instance, they are only allowed to use the references listed in their SOP (standard operating procedures), so they don’t have or use the reference we used to help ID that type of trauma,” she told me. “Basically, sometimes they can’t call a spade a spade because someone thinks that might be going out on a limb.”⁵

Where Freas had made her determination in a lab thousands of miles from the recovery site, Kristen and Hillary had made theirs based on a large and growing body of evidence from remains found in the same, distinctive environment. That critical context was completely unavailable to Freas.

Puzzled, I asked Capt. Edward A. Reedy, science director and medical examiner for DPAA, about the discrepancy. For starters, he confirmed Kristen’s assessment of the agency’s caution.

“Our forensic anthropologists are conservative when assigning damage as perimortem trauma,” he said.6

Reedy said the DPAA analyst concluded that the discolored and damaged ribs, pelvic bones, scapula, and hand were probably due to the age and fragility of my grandfather’s remains, despite the fact that the damage occurred in an isolated pattern, not generally. But, he told me, “This is not to say that no perimortem trauma was present.”⁷ In other words, the agency didn’t dispute History Flight’s findings.

Hillary and Kristen found DPAA’s caution absurd. They’d seen plenty of brittle, crumbling bones in poncho-covered remains uncovered at Cemetery 27, and the damage to Sandy’s remains was of an entirely different character. What’s more, the distinctive trauma was restricted to his right ventral torso and hand, which had lain on sand and was otherwise well preserved. Consistent with every other set of remains recovered from the trench so far, the only portions of his skeleton in a notably fragile condition were those on his left ventral side, which had been in contact with the rubberized poncho material from grave #18. DPAA’s remote assessment of the trauma contradicted everything History Flight’s experts had observed regarding the highly anomalous environments created by ponchos at Cemetery 27.

The agency’s timidity opened my eyes to the critical importance of context, and the absolutely irreplaceable value of observation in the field, when it comes to forensic anthropology.

I knew now that there was no evidence that my grandfather had been struck in the head by gunfire, but that there was extremely compelling evidence that he’d suffered perimortem shrapnel wounds to his right side.

The forensic evidence was conclusive: Sandy Bonnyman had not been shot in the head. And evidence that he’d suffered extensive perimortem shrapnel damage extending from his right shoulder to his right hip compellingly suggested that he was not prone, but had been standing or, at the least, kneeling, when he received mortal wounds from grenade or mortar shrapnel that penetrated one or more vital organs, perhaps in combination with gunshot wounds to soft tissues.

And while more speculative, there was also the intriguing evidence of the morphine syrettes. The uncapped, bent syrette found stuck to one of my grandfather’s ribs suggests the possibility that he, or perhaps someone else, had administered morphine to himself as he lay dying atop the bunker.

Physical evidence is the gold standard, and my grandfather’s remains bore mute testimony to vindicate my long suspicion that the account of his death published in Joseph Alexander’s 1995 book Utmost Savagery was not accurate. I didn’t blame Harry Niehoff, on whose memories Alexander had based his version (and something about his highly specific recollection that he had used my grandfather’s lifeless body as a shield has always rung true to me).

But I did fault Alexander, who should have known better, for accepting one man’s fifty-year-old memories as definitive proof that all other previous accounts were incorrect, thereby diminishing my grandfather’s achievement.

I raised the issue with Alexander in 2014. He told me he found “the essence of (Niehoff’s) comments to be plausible and positive.” He noted, however, that he had chosen not to publish Niehoff’s claim that he and John Borich had planned the assault on the bunker, finding it implausible.

I asked the author whether it would have made more sense for Niehoff to receive the Medal of Honor, rather than my grandfather. After all, in his account, he had stood alone—or rather, lain alone—firing on the Japanese counterassault. I reminded the author of the citation for Niehoff’s Silver Star, which made no mention of such a stand, and the fact that he had put my grandfather’s name forward for the Medal of Honor.

“Did he inject a more significant role for himself?” Alexander answered. “Likely so. We all do.”8

Sadly, Alexander died of cancer in September 2014. He never received the good news about finding Sandy Bonnyman and I was never able to present him with the compelling physical evidence of Cemetery 27. I still think highly of Utmost Savagery, but Alexander’s counterfactual rewrite of my grandfather’s history led later historians to repeat his errors; one author even contacted men who had fought beside my grandfather and questioned whether he even deserved the Medal of Honor.

“You go ahead and write whatever you want but all those guys who were there said he deserved it,” Sandy’s former commanding officer Joseph Clerou told the man, according to his son, George. “I’m sure as hell not going to let some author tell me what happened.”⁹

Nor was I.

In the end, the skeptical author’s book did not even mention my grandfather, except to note his Medal of Honor and print the citation.¹⁰

Thanks to History Flight, 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr. has spoken from the grave, and I hope the indisputable evidence of his bones will forever banish Joseph Alexander’s revisionist history of what happened atop that bunker on Betio on November 22, 1943.

The Saturday after Sandy was recovered, the History Flight team met four guys from an Australian road crew who used an excavator to strip away the layer of crushed coral to extend the unit another meter to the west. But everyone had been working nonstop for weeks, and that was it for the day (except for Hillary, who was busily processing and documenting my grandfather’s remains).

That night, Kristen made dinner at her small rented beach house on Betio’s tail. As we ate shrimp, rice, and baked pumpkin (the Kiribati name for squash), she and Hillary engaged in forensic anthropologist banter about the various odors of decomposing bodies (everything from barbecue to kalamata olives), while John put forth the theory that the Tarawa marines had been sacrificed to aid Admiral Chester Nimitz’s aspirations for higher office and Hobbes, Kristen’s sleek, orange adopted tomcat, entertained us with acrobatics. We drained a bottle of Hillary’s Roughstock whiskey and started in on some (much-inferior) Jack Daniel’s.

Sunday morning, John and Paul approached me for a confidential conversation. Like me, they were uneasy about how this might now play out with DPAA. All remains would be surrendered to the agency and flown to Hawaii, where scientists and technicians at the Central Identification Laboratory would simply repeat all the testing and reporting done by History Flight before issuing any legal identification.

I had seen a couple of the agency’s reports and found the level of detail unnecessary for the job at hand, which was identifying remains. For example, the report on Pfc. Manley Forest Winkley (recovered from Cemetery 25 in 2013) expended fifty words to explain why the image of Mercury on the back of a dime is sometimes mistaken for Lady Liberty. (Weirdly, given that taxpayers foot the bill, DPAA reports include a note that, “This document contains information EXEMPT FROM MANDATORY DISCLOSURE under the FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT”; in other words, the agency claims the right keep its reports secret.)

I also knew that one of the most damning findings in the 2013 Government Accountability Office report was that JPAC had let remains languish on its shelves, sometimes for years, before identifying them. That was the case with Pvt. Herman Shermer, the clue that led Mark Noah to Cemetery 27, who was found in 2002 but not identified until 2011.

Under US law, DPAA is the only entity that can officially identify battlefield remains. Now, despite the slam-dunk identification of my grandfather’s bones—soon to be confirmed by a team of top odontologists flown by History Flight to Betio in June—I worried that someone at the agency might delay the process, perhaps even deliberately, as a slap at a pesky “avocational.” I’d seen that kind of behavior before, after all.

John and Paul, former Green Berets, didn’t trust DPAA, either, and had come up with a plan: Hillary and Kristen would finish up their report on my grandfather, then pack up his remains and material evidence in a Pelican case. When I boarded the plane for Fiji the next day, I would simply check the case as baggage.

“You can’t trust these people,” John said, explaining that I would only be doing what any next of kin (I had been designated my mother’s legal power of attorney) had a right to do. Think of it this way, John said: Were I to keel over on Tarawa, my wife would have every right to retrieve my body. “This is the same thing,” he said.

I loved the idea; it was exactly the kind of thing Sandy Bonnyman might do. And there was even a recent precedent for a family claiming remains without DPAA involvement: the case of Army Pfc. Lawrence Gordon, the World War II pilot who had to be identified by German and French labs when JPAC had declined to get involved.11

But I also knew that Mark Noah had signed agreements with both the DPAA and the government of Kiribati regarding repatriation of all remains found. For me to try to force the issue might not just land me in jail, but could theoretically spark a minor international incident. More important, attempting to spirit away my grandfather’s remains might well jeopardize History Flight’s ability to continue working on Tarawa. As much as I distrusted DPAA, based on past experience, I just couldn’t agree to the plan.

Mark Noah had not yet informed DPAA about the discovery of Cemetery 27, fearing interference. But the agency was scheduled to send a team out in July to review History Flight’s work and conduct its own research, so our cat was wriggling in the bag already (I had to hold my tongue when DPAA archaeologist Jay Silverstein sent me a friendly note in May to let me know his team would be looking for Cemetery 27). Mark expected that the agency would take all the remains back to Hawaii in late July.

“So,” I said flatly as we stood in the shade of a coconut palm on Black Beach, “we will hand my grandfather over to them and they will have custody. I will no longer have any say in anything.”

It was true, Mark said. But he promised to do everything in his power to make sure they didn’t unnecessarily delay my mother and aunt from burying their father.

I didn’t like it one bit. But I had a few cards up my sleeve, too.

The day after we removed Sandy Bonnyman’s remains from his grave in Cemetery 27, I ran across the causeway just as the sun was rising. Toad the Wet Sprocket was playing on my iPhone—“Would he fly from Heaven/To this world again?”

Before returning to the hotel, I took a detour on the rutted, dusty road that passed Admiral Shibasaki’s bunker, Bonnyman’s Bunker, and the pier. When I arrived at Kiribati Shipping Services, Ltd., the guard smiled and waved me through the gate.

Peeling back a tattered blue tarp, I climbed down in the hole and sat on the flat sand where my grandfather had rested for so long. One by one, I thought of all those who had been shattered by his death: the little girl left to mourn by herself; Sandy’s “curly blonde,” doomed to a life of addiction and mental illness; Aunty Alix, yearning to know everything she could about her missing father; Granny Great sitting quietly in the sun room at Bonniefield, heart forever broken; Alex Bonnyman, burdened by memories of clashes with his beloved son; my aging Uncle Gordon, painfully stooped with progressive supranuclear palsy, weeping at visions of his beloved older brother; and even myself, missing a man I never knew but needed so much, more like me than I had ever imagined but whose courage I feared I lacked.

I felt a sense of deep gratitude toward much-maligned Betio, whose sepulchral sands had, after all, preserved my grandfather’s bones for all those years. And remembering the day before, I knew I’d missed an opportunity to show real courage.

“When you are afraid of something, you know that you are alive,” Faulkner wrote. “But when you are afraid to do what you are afraid of, you are dead.”

I sat there, silent, for half an hour. And by the time I rose from my grandfather’s empty grave, I understood for the first time that my grandfather had never been fearless. He had just had the courage to choose life.