TO HOME SOIL WAITING
JUNE-SEPTEMBER 2015
When I returned from Tarawa in early June 2015, I was steeled for battle. I had reluctantly left my grandfather behind, and now it was my job to make sure his daughters would see him buried with honor—and soon.
I also dived into my next assignment for History Flight: contacting family members of marines whose remains we had recovered from Cemetery 27 to request DNA samples. Although I wasn’t in a position to confirm we’d found their relative (information that by law must come from DPAA), most enthusiastically agreed to help.
“I, along with my family, hope that we can have my uncle, John Frederick Prince, identified and brought home to the US for burial,” responded Patricia Donigian of New York state. (The remains in grave #20 were later confirmed as Prince’s.)
There were a few, however, who said they’d already been asked to send samples and didn’t understand why they should do it again. Over time, DPAA had contacted many families, as had a former Dallas police detective and one-time JPAC staff member Rick Stone, who had taken it upon himself to issue official-looking reports that included confident assertions of the whereabouts of each of Tarawa’s missing. (According to Stone, Sandy Bonnyman’s remains were “most likely” those interred at the Schofield Barracks Mausoleum as unknown number X-198.1) I did my best to persuade doubters by noting that of the three organizations, only History Flight had actually recovered remains from Cemetery 27.
There also were a couple of older family members who were not interested. One cousin said, “Leave the guy alone, let him rest! There’s nobody left but me. I’m ninety-three years old and I’ll be going soon.” Another said her parents had been very clear that they did not want their son’s remains disturbed.
“I just think it would be disrespectful to their memory,” she told me.
On June 17, 2015, I received a copy of History Flight’s odontology report for my grandfather, written by Dr. David R. Senn, director of the Center for Education and Research in Forensics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Senn had arrived just as I left and began working with forensic dentists Corinne D’Anjou of Montreal and James Goodrich of New Zealand to identify Cemetery 27 remains.
It may come as a surprise to a CSI-loving public, but the science of odontology—dental matching—remains the primary method of identifying military remains, presuming teeth are present; DNA is just a cherry on top. After x-raying the teeth found in grave #17 and making a visual comparison with my grandfather’s 1942 dental records, the team ran its data through OdontoSearch, a vast online database containing tens of thousands of dental x-rays, to assess “the frequency of occurrence of specific dental patterns and (provide) objective means to quantify the relative frequency . . . in the general population.”2
Calling the evidence “exceptional and extraordinary . . . striking,” Senn concluded that the teeth recovered from grave #17 were “distinctive and concordant and not found in the Odonto Search combined civilian and military databases . . . indicating a very distinctive dental pattern.”3
For all practical purposes, those gold fillings could belong to no one else but Alexander Bonnyman, Jr.
Armed with new confidence, I wrote a long letter to retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael S. Linnington, whom US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter had named DPAA’s first permanent director on June 19, to formally request that the agency accept History Flight’s findings and not unnecessarily delay the return of my grandfather’s remains, explaining that we planned hold a funeral in September. I cc’d the commandant of the Marine Corps and Carter’s office, as well as US senators from Colorado, Hawaii, and Tennessee, and the head of the armed services committees in the US House and Senate. I included a detailed description of my concerns and history with the agency and offered an honest assessment of the public relations choice facing the agency.
“What a shame it would be if the DPAA chooses to delay two aging women from seeing their World War II hero father properly buried after more than seventy years, for no more reason than to duplicate the excellent work of History Flight professionals at taxpayer expense,” I wrote. “Surely that’s not the kind of story the agency wants the public to hear as it emerges from a tumultuous period under new leadership and oversight.”
Mark Noah asked me to hold off on sending the letter until he notified DPAA about the discovery of Cemetery 27, which he had kept under wraps for fear that the agency would try to swoop in and usurp the excavation. Finally, on June 24, he gave me the go-ahead, and I sent the letter via certified mail.
Two days later, I was on a conference call with Linnington, a deputy commandant for the Marine Corps, and Hattie Y. Johnson, head of repatriation for the Marine Corps Casualty Section.
“I’ve gotten a look at the odontology on your grandfather’s remains, and I’m very impressed with the quality of the work as well as the very uniqueness of your grandfather’s dental work,” Linnington said. “That makes it easy to make the identification by dental alone. Just to be completely open and transparent, we are not going to do our own DNA testing in this case. Dental will be sufficient.”
He requested time for DPAA to conduct “the necessary and important step” of a peer review of History Flight’s work, but promised that “we will be able to meet your September time frame, based on the dental.”4
Halfway around the world, Kristen, Hillary, John, and Paul remained skeptical, but it was clear from our conversation that Linnington had been hired to take DPAA in a new direction, and he had no interest in starting his tenure with another public relations snafu. He was already negotiating with History Flight and other nongovernmental organizations to create public-private partnerships, which he described as “the exact future of this agency.” That new spirit of cooperation would soon translate into History Flight’s first contracts with DPAA, to recover remains from cemeteries 27 and 33.
“The fact the we found and identified Alexander Bonnyman is going to open up the possibility of finding many more—not hundreds, but thousands—of MIAs simply because his history is so spectacular,” History Flight archaeologist Chet Walker said at the 2016 meeting of the American Society of Forensic Odontology. “He shows that this is possible—and that it is deeply personal.”5
After more than seventy years, the marines of Tarawa had won a battle of a different kind, and once again, my grandfather had played a crucial role.
I told Mark I’d handle media about the Cemetery 27 recovery, which would without question attract attention from around the globe. But as the end of June approached, we’d still made no public announcement and I was starting to feel impatient.
Long before going to Tarawa in May, I had decided to “thru-hike” the 486-mile-long Colorado Trail from Denver to Durango. I had initially planned to depart in mid- to late June, but thanks to weeks of heavy late-spring precipitation, the higher sections of the trail—which averages more than ten thousand feet in elevation—remained impassable. Now the snow was melting and I was eager to head down the trail.
Mark had granted me permission to put the word out on the Bonnyman telegraph in advance of an annual family get-together at a mountain lodge in North Carolina. Inevitably, word was beginning to get out beyond the family, and one cousin in the military reported that he’d heard about the find from friends in the Marine Corps. I urged Mark to pull the trigger, and I finally sent our press release on June 29, a month after my grandfather’s exhumation.
For the next seventy-two hours, Mark and I juggled interviews, sat in front of cameras, and Skyped with journalists around the world, talking about the remarkable discovery of Cemetery 27. Stories aired on ABC, CBS, NBC, and local affiliates in Tennessee, Hawaii, Colorado, New Mexico, California, and beyond. News organizations from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser to the Washington Post, Santa Fe New Mexican, and Agence France Presse ran stories. The story was broadcast on National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as well as radio stations in New Zealand, Australia, and Japan.
Soon, I began receiving congratulations from around the world. Some people expressed disappointment that Sandy would not be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, but there had never been any doubt that he should come back to Knoxville.
“God knows after all these years he may never be found. But if he is, I would love nothing better than anything in the world than to have his remains back in Knoxville; he is the only one (of his family) not there,” my aunt Alix had said in 2010. “If he’s buried on Tarawa forever, that’s okay. But if he’s found, he belongs in Knoxville.”6
We decided as a family that he would be laid to rest, at long last, on September 27, next to his parents, sisters, and brother.
“They all died without knowing the truth,” I told the Washington Post. “I’m not a woo person. I don’t believe in ghosts or whatever. But I still feel like I’ve been able to play a little part in closing the circle for the family. And I feel great about that.”7
More than one reporter asked if we planned to have the words “BURIED AT SEA” removed from beneath my grandfather’s name on the back of the Bonnyman monument.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “It’s a beautiful irony. It’s part of the story.”
On July 2, head swirling with everything that had happened in the last three months, I abandoned the world for the trail. For the next three and a half weeks my life was reduced to its most basic elements—walking, finding water, making sure I had enough to eat, making and breaking camp, and walking again, interrupted only by brief trips into town for resupply (and the occasional media interview).
Like many other first-time thru-hikers—the name for people who hike the world’s long trails from end to end—I wondered how I would fare in body, mind, and spirit while walking mostly alone through the wilderness. Every day on the trail brings some kind of physical discomfort, a new blister or swelling, painful chafe, stiff muscles. Successful hikers just keep walking.
Though I often walked for eight or ten hours without seeing anyone, I was never alone. Watching the last few sparks of a dying campfire rise into a perfectly still, moonless night, or gazing in awe over some vast mountain valley, I recalled my grandfather’s passion for the outdoors and tried to imagine the trials he’d experienced on Guadalcanal and Tarawa, so far removed from anything I might face in the wilderness. At times, thinking about him woke me from mindless rage at rain, stinging chafe, a swollen ankle—If you’re never uncomfortable, I imagined him saying with a grin, how much of an adventure can it really be?
Walking the trail step by step with my grandfather’s memory, I considered the life I’d led. Like him, I’d always sought adventure, loved the outdoors. Like him, I’d been impetuous, thoughtless, and reckless. I’d even abandoned my own Ivy League education and run off to work as a cowboy, just as Sandy had gone to the mountains of Virginia to, well, learn to blow stuff up.
Like Sandy, I’d always had a hard time sitting still. I was ever on the hunt for that next great adrenaline rush or endorphin high—riding bucking horses, skydiving, running ultramarathons, mountain climbing, surfing, night diving with sharks, hiking five hundred miles, dangling from the roof of a twenty-two-story dormitory just to prove to myself I wasn’t afraid. Indignant at the thought that there were any limits on how I chose to live my life, I made scandalous choices that shivered the branches of the Bonnyman family tree. Yet I can honestly say that I did it not to rebel, but out of an almost irresistible compulsion to seize every thrilling moment of life, which, I knew, could be taken in an instant.
Of my grandfather at twenty-two, I remembered, a family friend had written, “There will always be much of the boy and a sheer joy of living in him.”8
Walking for hundreds of miles through bristlecone pines and flickering aspen groves, along windblown rocky ridges, shielding my face from torrents and tempests, or blissfully ambling across high mesas through bright asylums of mountain flowers, I reveled in every part of myself. I was strong, resourceful, determined, stoic, flexible, friendly, compassionate, generous, and creative—but also petty, angry, judgmental, self-centered, and prideful.
When my grandfather died, a friend wrote, “I don’t mean that he wasn’t intensely human, but I’ve always thought of him as ‘good’—in the best sense of the word.”9
Having spent all those years searching for my grandfather, I came to the conclusion at last that while I was no hero, maybe we weren’t so different after all.
Lost in the wilderness, I missed Mark Noah’s ultimate vindication: On July 26, he received the title of Honorary Marine from the US Marine Corps, joining fewer than 100 figures—including such notables as Gary Sinise, Chuck Norris, and former US senators Max Cleland and Daniel Inouye, not to mention Bugs Bunny and Jim Nabors—for his contributions to the corps. I sent a letter in support of his nomination a year before, describing a man who, though he had not served, perfectly represented the determination and grit that has for so long characterized the US Marine Corps.
“He is so damn smart and determined,” said retired Marine Col. Michael Brown at the ceremony. “He doesn’t want accolades. He just looks at it as mission accomplishment, and there is nothing more marine than that.”10
Five years had shown me that anything could happen in the recovery business, and it wasn’t until my grandfather’s flag-draped casket rolled off Delta Airline Flight 1292 into the waiting arms of six marines on the rain-soaked tarmac at Knoxville’s McGhee-Tyson Airport that I could finally exhale: Home at last. It was four months since we’d seen that first glint of gold.
More than a hundred members of the Patriot Guard Riders led the way and countless well-wishers braved a three-hour delay along rain-washed Alcoa Highway and Kingston Pike as the procession wound from the airport to Berry Highland Memorial funeral home, less than three miles from where Sandy had grown up. There was not a dry eye among the usually stoic Bonnymans in that limousine as we watched children waving flags and veterans saluting our passing cortege. At the funeral home, the fire department had hoisted a twenty-foot-high American flag from the end of a hook and ladder.
By the time bagpiper Kay Irwin began to play “The Marine Corps Hymn” the following afternoon, the rain had passed. Smoky autumn sunlight infused the East Tennessee Veteran’s Memorial plaza in downtown Knoxville, where my grandfather’s casket had been brought to lie in honor. Hundreds of people turned out for the ceremony, including Lt. Col. James Michael “Mike” Sprayberry, a Vietnam-era Medal of Honor recipient who had driven 200 miles from Alabama.
“If a guy can wait seventy years to be back on native soil,” he declared, “it’s the least I can do.”
I spoke briefly, reading from my great-grandparents’ letters.
“This is where he belongs,” I said. “I’m glad he’s home, and I’m glad Tennessee’s glad he’s home.”
I reserved the pub-like top floor at Armada Craft Cocktails in downtown Knoxville for that night, inviting anyone and everyone to come and toast Sandy Bonnyman and History Flight. It was exactly what I’d hoped for: a free-wheeling, boisterous celebration of a hundred or more, including two Tarawa veterans, C.J. Daigle and Elwin Hart, DPAA chief Mike Linnington, Mark Noah, Kristen Baker, Hillary Parsons, John Frye, and a dozen other people from History Flight who had worked on Cemetery 27, along with assorted Bonnymans, friends, members of the Alexander Bonnyman Detachment of the Marine Corps League, active-duty marines, and even a framed photo of Buster the cadaver-detecting canine, who, though invited, wasn’t able to attend.
It was a hell of a party. Sandy would have loved it.
Marine Barracks Washington, better known as 8th & I, is the oldest Marine Corps unit in the nation. Founded in 1801 by President Thomas Jefferson and Lt. Col. William Ward Burrows, third commandant of the corps, it is home to the famous Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon, Marine Corps Drum and Bugle Corps, Marine Band, the official Marine Corps Color Guard, and the Marine Corps Body Bearers. The unit’s official duties are to support “ceremonial and security missions in the Capital.”
But early in the morning of September 27, 2015, for the first time in recent memory, members of 8th & I left Washington to honor the burial of a marine five hundred miles away in Knoxville, Tennessee. At noon, led by Maj. Gen. Burke W. Whitman and Col. Robert A. Couser, who had escorted Sandy Bonnyman’s remains from Hawaii, some eighty-five marines in full ceremonial dress—red for members of the band and drum and bugle corps, blue for the drill team, bearers, and color guard—followed the casket on a custom-made, horse-drawn caisson (built by a local nonprofit reenactors’ group, Burroughs Battery) for a solemn, half-mile journey to the highest point at Berry Highland Memorial Cemetery, where the ten-foot-long marble Bonnyman monument has stood since 1949. A remarkable end to a very long journey.
Hundreds of citizens, including retired Army Col. Walter Joseph Marm, Jr., awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in Vietnam, gathered atop the hill as four Marine Corps Cobra helicopters thudded overhead, one peeling off in the famous, heart-rending “missing man” formation. Rev. Dr. Robert McKeon and Rev. Anne Bonnyman, nephew and niece of the deceased, led a brief service, followed by a twenty-one-gun salute and “Taps.”
Just as three pairs of white-gloved hands removed the flag from the casket and began to fold it, a cool breeze rolled across the hilltop, breaking the heat of that perfectly clear, blue, autumn afternoon. A few golden leaves twirled down from high branches, one settling into the folds of the flag. Gen. Whitman—tall, blond, and blue-eyed, he bore a resemblance to my grandfather—solemnly received the flag from the bearers, walked over and knelt before Fran Bonnyman Evans, now eighty-one.
“On behalf of the president of the United States, the United States Marine Corps, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your father’s honorable and faithful service,” he said quietly, eyes glistening.
He laid the flag on my mother’s lap, clasped her spotted hands in his, and leaned in to whisper words I could not hear.
At long last, someone had come to console the little girl with a broken heart.