I met Merl Allen on the airstrip at Khe Sanh.1 I was gathering up my gear when this tall skinny kid with a big grin says “You here for recon? Name’s Allen, from Bayfield, WI. How long you been in country? Oh … FNG [fucking new guy] huh? Recon’s this way.” That was the start of a short but everlasting friendship.
FNGs were the new guys. They were frowned upon because they usually screwed something up right away. Also, you just never made friends quickly because it was too hard seeing them hauled off in body bags right away. Hard to explain, but that’s the way it was. A friendship was earned and just sort of established itself over time.
Merl was my mentor, he took me under his wing and he taught me about Recon, and he taught me about Vietnam. He was my friend when I needed one. That’s how Merl was.
We had a lot in common—both from the Midwest, both took ships to Vietnam, both radio operators, both big dreamers. We were both extremely proud to be in Recon. We talked, constantly, about “the world”—home, girls, cars, hunting, fishing, Bayfield, what we’d do later, after Nam. We laughed, and talked, and dreamed. Just like the two teenage kids that we really were. The war hadn’t hardened us yet.2
ON JUNE 30, 1967, Jeff Savelkoul survived the enemy fire and helicopter crash in Thừa Thiên–Huế Province in central Vietnam. On its final approach to insert a reconnaissance team, the helicopter came under attack, and despite the pilot’s efforts to maneuver the aircraft, it crash landed into the tree line.3 The attack and ensuing explosions killed his best friend, Merl Allen, and four others: the pilot, Captain John House II, and three members of Team Striker from the US Marine Corps’ Third Reconnaissance Battalion, Alpha Company—Michael Judd, John Killen III, and Glyn Runnels Jr. A sixth man from Third Recon, Dennis Perry, died two days later from the wounds he sustained in the fiery crash, and a seventh, Eugene Castaneda, would return to battle and be killed on another patrol mission two months later.
Savelkoul himself was severely wounded that day, with broken bones and over 65 percent of his skin burned. He and Perry were evacuated to a military hospital in Japan for treatment. He woke up on a gurney, a few feet away from Perry. “He looked me straight in the eye, and just died.”4
For years, Savelkoul thought he had been the sole survivor—as did Mariano “Junior” Guy. In the aftermath of their chaotic extraction, each knew nothing of the other’s fate. It wasn’t until twenty-three years later that they reconnected and pieced together the story of that day. Savelkoul wrote out a detailed description, which he uses when speaking to various audiences about his wartime and postwar experiences. He shared it with me after we met, after he learned that I had taken part in the excavation of the crash site that recovered the remains of his best friend Merl. In it, time slows down as he recounts the chaotic scenes of the downed helicopter, loaded with men and explosives. His are visceral recollections of death and survival:
As we descended into the LZ [landing zone], the tailgate was down and we were all in our positions for departure. Just above the ground we started to take SA [surface-to-air] & AA [anti-aircraft] fire. The pilot pulled up and we were hit with a rocket. It blew a huge hole in the side of the chopper, severed the fuel line, sprayed jet fuel all over the chopper, and us—and ignited. This inferno, the rocket blast, and all the rounds we were taking killed most of the team at that time.
The inside of the chopper was like an 8-foot culvert with a pile of burning tires in it—that thick, black, orange, oily, smoke-like acetylene without oxygen. You couldn’t see and you couldn’t breathe. Everything was on fire! I needed air. I stuck my head out a broken window and came back in with burning plexiglass stuck to my face—but I got some air!
I could see streaks of light coming in where bullets were coming through, but I couldn’t see anyone else. How I didn’t get hit was a miracle! My clothes were burned off and my pack was on fire. I remember thinking of the ammo and 12 frag grenades I had in my pack. And that Merl would have his radio. So I threw off my pack. Our M-16’s were already melted at that point.…
Capt. House, our pilot, tried to fly us over a ridge to safety, despite being already shot through [the] arm. (This was the same pilot that hovered with one wheel on a stump, taking heavy fire while his crewman ran out and rescued all of Team Hawk in April ’67.) We were losing altitude fast and he couldn’t make the ridge. About three-quarters of the way up the steep hill we hit the trees, sheared off the rotors, and free-fell 90 feet to the jungle floor. When we hit the ground, the chopper split open, the air rushed in, and it exploded.
Those of us who were alive had worked our way up to the gunners’ opening on the right side of the chopper. Somewhere between the treetops and the ground, we were blown out that small window. I remember flopping back down through the branches of a big tree … and landing in the dirt below. Junior was stumbling around holding his head. Perry was laying in a heap. There was a leg laying outside the chopper. Cass [Eugene Castaneda] was pounding on the windshield in frustration trying to get the pilot out, who was trapped and burning to death. All the other Reconners were dead.
At this point in the narrative, Jeff turns to the panicked moments that ensued as he and the survivors fled to the mountain ridge, a site I had come to know well by the time I read his account. It was there, four decades later, that we—the US military recovery mission—would labor for days, sifting through dirt and debris to locate remnants of the helicopter and remains of the pilot and the fallen members of Team Striker:
We had no radio. We had no weapons. We had one hand grenade, six pencil flares, a half a canteen of water, the co-pilot’s .38 cal revolver, and Junior’s machete. The NVA were everywhere, you couldn’t see them, but you could hear them coming!
Cass and Junior gathered up Perry and me and started us up the hill. We stumbled, fell, clawed our way to the top of the hill. I had to grab onto branches to keep us going, there was no skin left on my hands. We got up the hill and I collapsed leaning against a tree with Perry in my lap. Junior came up to me and put our one grenade in my raw hand, wrapped my fingers around it, and pulled the pin.
Map of Vietnam.
He stuffed my hand between me and Perry and told me not to let go unless the NVA got to me. We wouldn’t be POW’s!!!
I kept passing out from the pain. I would lurch awake and tell myself, “Don’t close your eyes. You’ll never wake up.” I’ll bet I said that a thousand times. My hand hurt so damn bad, but I held on to that grenade.
We were all gathered up on top of the hill, under the trees when a chopper came in and hovered over the wreck below us. We had no comm [communications], so Cass fired four of the six flares. They didn’t see the flares and went back and reported “no survivors.” About two and a half hours later we heard choppers again. One flew right over us and Cass fired the 5th flare. It was a dud! My heart sank, I was going to die here.
Another chopper was getting closer so Cass fired the last flare. All we knew was that it went up through the leaves. Years later I finally found the pilot who rescued us. He said he dropped a reactionary force in the valley behind us and was hover-taxiing up the ridge to look at the wreck and go back, [when] he glanced out his side window to check his rotor clearance and saw a flare. I told him it was our last flare. There was a long pause, he said, “Honest, it was just a glance.”
He came over to where it came from and his crew chief yelled “There’s guys on the ground, and I think they’re Americans.”
They couldn’t get a sling down to us through the jungle, so Junior climbed up a tree—under fire—and chopped off the branches to clear the way. The chopper hovered there, under fire, as they winched each of us up the 100 feet. Cass and Junior stayed to be the last two. Each put a foot in the sling and came up together, neither wanting to leave the other. They selflessly risked their own lives, putting the rest of their team first.5
In his account, Jeff Savelkoul is quick to highlight the selfless acts of the pilot, Capt. House, of Junior Guy and Eugene Castaneda, even Merl Allen, whom he credits with shielding him from the explosion that tore apart the back end of the helicopter and thus saving his life. He is not a person who covets the spotlight; rather, over the past four decades, he has sought to hold the men from Team Striker who died on June 30, 1967—and the two who died a few short days and weeks later—in the bright light of memory. He explains in his public talks, “I don’t expect that you’ll remember their names, but I hope you will remember their story, and pass it on to others, so that they are never forgotten.”6
This notion of a memory shared, a story that in its circulation animates and thus prolongs the essence of lives lived and lost, fits within a larger history of caring for war dead, what historian Jay Winter has called the “work of remembrance.”7 In the wake of the Great War, he argues, individuals and groups came together to create a space in which “the story of their war, in its local, particular, parochial, familial forms, [could] be told and retold”; this memory work was neither wholly individual nor exclusively national (i.e., part of the “national theater of collective memory choreographed by social and political leaders”).8 Rather, Winter saw it as a generative force that operated in the in-between spaces of grief, “at a point between the isolated individual and the anonymous state.”9 It forged bonds of “fictive kinship,” extending the work of remembrance beyond the strict parameters of family to other members of a community. Though emerging from a very different war and in a very different era, Jeff Savelkoul’s attempts to share the details of June 30, 1967, as we will see, have brought about their own forms of fictive kinship.
I met Jeff in Superior, Wisconsin, in September 2016, already three years after I had started researching the story of Lance Corporal Merlin Allen and had traveled on a few occasions to the Bayfield Peninsula. Like many conversations that have informed this book, our first real talk took place at a diner, over coffee and between slices of French toast and bacon. For all the files I reviewed at the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii in preparation for the 2012 recovery mission, I still knew little about the reconnaissance patrol, or even the events that led to the crash itself; I had no idea of what happened to the men who survived the incident. Speaking with Jeff was a chance not only to fill in the gaps, but also to think about MIA accounting from an entirely different perspective and within a larger chronology.
It helped that he brought photos.
We spoke for about three hours that day. Over the course of our meal and the meandering discussion, the restaurant gradually emptied out and filled up again with a second wave of customers; we sat absorbed in the past, pushing along topics of the war, the helicopter crash, and his recovery. As conversationalists go, Jeff is subdued—not standoffish or reserved, but not someone who runs at the mouth—and so it was I who asked the questions, gauging as best I could what might be wading too far into troubled pools of recollection.
The photographs, stored in an old checkbook box, came out after we had set aside our plates of diner fare and the coffee had grown cold. Internally, I fussed at the thought of sticky smudges of syrup marring their surface, and I wiped my hands again on the now crumpled napkin at the edge of the table.
“Here’s Merl and me.”
“That’s Khe Sanh.”
“We’re on patrol there.”
Scenes of bare-chested young men smiling into the camera, cocky, goofy, relaxed. I searched for war’s sharper edge, but it wasn’t there among the faces, or at least not yet. Later, Jeff’s words would return: “We laughed, and talked, and dreamed. Just like the two teenage kids that we really were. The war hadn’t hardened us yet.”
He left the photos for me to look through while he went to the restroom. I gingerly pulled them out, one by one, and scanned their faded scenes. In his absence, they felt different in my hands. There were so many of them, and yet they each deserved time. I began to move more quickly as the scenes sorted themselves into categories. They conjured up landscapes, bonds of camaraderie, and the labor of war on someone else’s soil.
One image stuck out for its inescapable suggestion of violence. With tattered white rags as blindfolds, two Vietnamese men crouched on their heels, hands bound behind their backs. I think I remember there being other figures, legs that hinted at a circle of onlookers, but I can’t be sure.
As the ice melted and a water ring spread beneath my plastic cup, I wondered how to ask Jeff what happened to those men.
Often in studying war, scholars adopt a narrow scope, privileging one experience over another, drawn to one side or the other. Here was an abrupt reminder of my own tunnel vision, what Viet Thanh Nguyen might call the blinders of “remembering one’s own.” In his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, he writes about the connection between remembering and forgetting, explaining that it is a relationship “more fundamentally about remembering our humanity and forgetting our inhumanity, while conversely remembering the inhumanity of others and forgetting their humanity.”10 While Nguyen admits that “total memory is neither possible nor practical,” he resists easy lines cordoning off war’s events and actors, because doing so fails to capture its enduring effects.11 “Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.”12
When Jeff returned to the table, I asked him about the picture of the Vietnamese prisoners. He didn’t know what had happened to the men. Weighed down by the guilt of his own survival, he was doing his best to remember those who hadn’t gotten off the mountain slope alive. The prisoners’ memory was not his to safeguard. In a similar vein, just as Jeff cannot tell the story of the North Vietnamese troops who shot down his helicopter and killed his best friend, so too the account that follows cannot capture Vietnamese experiences—neither of the war itself, nor what it meant to the Vietnamese who witnessed and, in some cases, labored alongside the US military recovery team. Such are the limits of lived experience, of fragmented and unstable memory, and of our endeavor to make sense of both in the present. Perhaps it is best then to acknowledge that the attempt to locate and repatriate the remains of US service members is, like an archaeological dig, an act of partial reckoning. It seeks to account for lives lost on one side of a war that lingers, haunts, and defies easy recollection. That is to say, MIA accounting for the missing is a singularly American enterprise, an extension of an American tradition, undertaken for American surviving kin, veterans, current military, and public. And yet it’s carried out on Vietnamese soil, by permission of the Vietnamese state and with the indispensable aid of Vietnamese laborers.
That acknowledgment should give pause. It should invite us to imagine, alongside the events described below, what exceptional acts of care might be required to recover and sustain the memory of Vietnam’s missing—the three hundred thousand lives lost on the other side of what the Vietnamese call the “American War.”
THE EXCAVATION “UNIT,” the four-by-four-meter patch of rust-colored earth, had taken all day to hollow out and in the process had left each dig team—the pair of Americans who rotated in and out of the shallow trench for an hour apiece—drenched in sweat and physically spent. We only had to cut into the jungle floor about fifteen centimeters to reach the bottom—where signs of helicopter wreckage disappeared—but the unit’s loamy earth and maddening network of roots and rocks required extra strength behind each swing of the pickax or shovel. With the temperature well over ninety-five degrees and humidity well above 90 percent, the jungle seemed to be steaming. Even the young Vietnamese men who manned the bucket line, the human chain that ferried soil and debris up the mountainside, tried to press themselves into the shade, with the unluckiest among them suffering under the blazing sun.
Bác Thuận, one of the Vietnamese laborers, whom members of the American team had nicknamed “Old Man Shovel” for his finesse with the tool, was also bathed in sweat. From the beginning of the dig, he had strategically positioned himself at the bottom of the bucket line. As US military protocol allowed only American personnel to dig within the unit itself, he took up one of the most arduous tasks at its edge—filling the buckets with what had just been unearthed. He worked there each day, nonstop for hours on end. Though he rarely spoke and, in the early days of the dig, rarely smiled, he quickly won the American team’s respect as his labors set a pace of steady but intense exertion that everyone working beside him followed, American and Vietnamese alike. That he too felt—and showed—the strain of the dig that particular day signaled just how challenging the unit had been. After the last rotation, looking down over its hard-won, though still partial, “floor” and neatly trimmed “walls” (terms of archaeological excavation whereby destruction gives way to superimposed order), I took stock of the sight, this section of land in the middle of the jungle in central Vietnam, and the day’s accomplishment. Those few hours, perhaps more than any other during the month-long mission, impressed upon me the extraordinary physical effort of MIA recovery: tearing into and scouring the land—the soil of a foreign land—to find whatever bits and scraps of human remains and material evidence that had endured from the CH-46 helicopter crash some forty-five years before.
The clearing sat on a draw at the intersection of two steep slopes, with inclines ranging from thirty-five to seventy degrees. Heavy rains and the natural force of erosion of the past four decades had pushed the wreckage downward, along a central and two smaller washes that empty into a creek below. While gravity had played a hand over time in dispersing the wreckage farther and farther away from the initial site, not all the disturbance stemmed from the laws of motion. Much more had occurred at the hands of people—local villagers and itinerant scavengers—who cut up and carted off the metal of the downed chopper.13 They themselves relied on gravity for help, using the slippery incline of the draw to haul vast sections down off the mountain. Following the logic of war and its deprivations, they took what they could and put it to use in their houses and gardens, fields and farms.14 More valuable scrap metal could be sold on local and international markets.
Helicopter wreckage was not the only object of interest on the slope. Reports containing the names of the five missing in action eventually surfaced from nearby Huế and Hồ Chí Minh City, as well as from farther-flung refugee camps in Thailand where thousands of South Vietnamese had fled after the war ended in 1975.15 As Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense James W. Wold explained in a letter updating Mrs. Amy House, wife of the pilot Captain John House II, of their ongoing efforts to investigate her husband’s case, “Over the years, we have received refugee reports with identification media information on each of the five servicemen.”16 These dog-tag rubbings, identification media, and secondhand stories of remains recovered in the jungle inland of Huế pointed toward a different kind of scavenging: in the limited but active field of “remains trading,” bones associated with American MIAs became articles of exchange in the region’s wartime and postwar market.17
Between 1993 and 2011, Reference Number (REFNO) 0746 (the case number assigned to the June 30, 1967, CH-46 helicopter crash) was investigated eleven times, including as part of several joint field activity (JFA) missions conducted with the host state—that is, alongside Vietnamese officials from the central government (e.g., its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of National Defense, Ministry of Interior) and at the provincial level. During this period, investigative and recovery efforts centered on two sites in Thừa Thiên–Huế Province: first, the record loss location near Hương Phú commune, Nam Đông District, with site surveys conducted on the 23rd JFA in May 1993, the 27th JFA in January 1994, and the 55th JFA in May 1999; and second, at another helicopter crash site where personal artifacts—a wristwatch, a card from a deck of playing cards (“2” black ace), a rosary necklace, and a piece of an ink pen—and “several pieces of aircrew / troop related items” were purportedly recovered, in Phú Lộc District.18 Survivors of the crash had recognized some of the articles said to have been found at the second site—Jeff Savelkoul, in particular, his own rosary. But preliminary investigations during the 60th JFA in May 2000 and excavations carried out at the site during the 68th JFA in January 2002 and again on the 70th JFA in June 2002 proved futile. No remains were recovered and the location could not be definitively correlated with REFNO 0746. Finally, as part of the 83rd JFA, in November 2005, the Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command returned to the site near the original record loss location in the mountains near Hương Phú commune, Nam Đông District; they resurveyed the site and documented “numerous fragments of metal, composites, and fiberglass consistent with possible aircraft wreckage.” Before departing the site, the recovery leader (a position filled by either an anthropologist or an archaeologist) set a “datum”—a “poured concrete slab on the ground with a bundle of nails immersed at its center”—at specific grid coordinates determined by a GPS receiver.19 Found, then sidelined, then found again, the original loss site was now pinpointed geographically. Seven years later, the United States military returned once more to search for the five service members missing in action from REFNO 0746.
OUR THIRTEEN-PERSON RECOVERY TEAM from the Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) arrived in May 2012 and set to work on the mountain, with its dense canopy and unforgiving underbrush. My fieldnotes detail my initial discomposure:
May 22, 2012: Ospina leads a small group of us up into the draw, into the chaotic mess of vines and branches, slippery rocks and wet leaves. Gone is my fear of leeches, thrust to the back of my mind out of sheer necessity—I’m grabbing on to whatever tree trunk or root gives me leverage to ascend yet another few feet on this treacherous, dense slope. Where on earth have I come to and how, how, are we going to find human remains in the middle of this damn jungle?
The first days were disorienting: the jungle vegetation was thick, and initial surveys proved futile in locating the datum, the key marker left in November 2005. Laurel, the civilian forensic anthropologist leading the excavation, worked with the EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) technician, Jimmy, a twenty-three-year-old who had already cut his teeth locating and disarming UXO (unexploded ordnance) in Afghanistan. Canvassing the swaths of land that local workers cleared with deft strokes of their machetes, he swept his Excalibur II metal detector across the jungle floor. When its hum intensified, he pulled out the more exacting tool, a hand-held detector that beeped and whined with its own insistent pitch at the presence of larger pieces of metal, most of which turned out to be “bomb frag,” portions of exploded bomb casings unrelated to the helicopter crash. Central Vietnam remains the country’s most affected region of UXO contamination, a punishing legacy of US bombing campaigns.20 By the Vietnamese government’s tally, there are still some eight hundred thousand tons of ordnance present, including bombs, mines, missiles, artillery shells, mortar shells, and other UXO.21
On the second day of the recovery mission, before the US team moved into the base camp, we got a taste of that legacy. Not two minutes into the walk on the logging road that led to the dig site, one of the team members signaled for everyone to head back to the main road. Jimmy had spotted a munition. There, in the middle of the dirt track, lay a 100 mm artillery round. Someone had carried it in and purposefully placed it along the route. As we filed back toward the main road to await the bomb disposal, nearby construction workers chuckled knowingly, perhaps having seen who left the round earlier that morning. The munition hinted at a subtext left mostly unexamined by the American team: the resentment felt by some Vietnamese about recovery efforts for US missing (with little regard for Vietnamese missing), and the destruction wrought by US bombing.22 If the source was unclear, the action demanded was obvious. The dangerous vestige of war required care too, as much as, if not more than, the remains of American war dead.
Jimmy would earn his keep that mission, disposing of three other munitions back on the slope, including three M381s—40 mm high-explosive fragmentation grenades, one fired and two unfired. It was his first assignment as a JPAC “augmentee,” sent by the US Army’s Sixty-Fifth Ordnance Company to support the mission, and so he had done his research in the run up—consulted manuals, read up on Vietnam-era munitions, punched data into a blast frag calculator to anticipate how far he’d need to push people back from one round or another. Protocol on the dig was different from what he was used to, and he would have to adapt. Rather than detonate a munition in place, as he would have with an IED (improvised explosive device) in Afghanistan, in these circumstances he needed to protect both personnel and the dig site itself by moving the round to the UXO pit he had built on the ridge above the base camp.
On the mountainside, Jimmy’s task was not only about identifying and mitigating munition risks. He was there to help Laurel, the anthropologist, map the crash site. Working in tandem, they stuck brightly colored pin flags in the soil for each of the “big hits” from the metal detector, and gradually a pattern of debris began to emerge. It was an intimidatingly large field of subterranean traces; the wreckage was so dispersed, there was no clear sign of where to begin digging.
A breakthrough eventually came when a local man, a bee gatherer from a nearby town, encountered one of the laborers and in passing mentioned that he knew something of the original crash site. Shortly thereafter he made his way up the mountain slope to speak with the Vietnamese officials, personnel from the Vietnamese Office for Seeking Missing Persons (VNOSMP or VNO for short), tasked with providing logistical support for the recovery mission and day-to-day management of the Vietnamese laborers at the site. While there were local and provincial representatives assigned to the VNO team, the majority of them were from Hanoi and thus had limited connection to the district and limited knowledge of the crash site itself. The local “witness,” however, was confident that he knew the spot.
The man dropped to his heels, squatting on the slope as he surveyed the thick vegetation to his right and left. There, he indicated, was where he had seen the helicopter wreckage back in 1995, what remained of it at least—a charred section with two seats, possibly from the rear of the chopper. Other segments had been hauled off the mountain slope, with a crane and big trucks brought in for the task, and he himself had scavenged what he could from the remnants.23
The conversation between the Americans and Vietnamese proceeded haltingly. The anthropologist posed questions to gauge the witness’s intentions as much as the accuracy of his recollections. The man nodded his head nonchalantly as the interpreter relayed the wary, compact questions.
“What did he see? Ask him to describe exactly what he saw painted on the tree trunk.”
“A skull and crossbones, spray-painted in pink, with an English word. It started with P and ended with E.”
Laurel shook her head. “We wouldn’t have left that kind of mark.” JPAC field investigation protocol precluded the possibility of such signage, and thus the proof offered raised more questions than it answered. Not long afterward, the man, nonplussed, rose to his feet and collected his machete. Nodding at the Vietnamese officials standing nearby but brushing past the US personnel, he took his leave, heading down the rocky wash that led back to the base camp and, beyond that, the main road. While the man lent support to the general location of the crash site, he also openly acknowledged the ongoing practice of scavenging that stripped the area of evidence definitively correlating the loss incident with the site.
IN A MATTER OF DAYS, the excavation site was transformed, with brush cleared and units plotted. Given the complex terrain, with the central draw and the rocky, steep, and uneven topography, the key, Laurel explained, was to set the grid in a manner that conformed to, or at least worked with, the natural features of the landscape. Moving outward from her transit lines centered at N500 / E500, she plotted several units with string and wooden stakes; first, four meters north, then another four meters east. In the course of an afternoon, we established the parameters for eight units, four on each side of the wash. An exercise of laying down order onto a landscape of natural chaos, old and new technologies, complementary tools of measuring, reading, and taming—the transit and its precise electronics, the hand-held GPS instrument, the Excalibur II wand, alongside machetes, stakes, pin flags, and string—soon rendered the site legible to the eyes of the anthropologist who would in turn determine the course of the excavation.
By the time the main body of the recovery team arrived on site, the land that served as the base camp had also been cleared by the villagers and thus, apart from large trees, was emptied of the same thick vegetation that covered the crash site. The villagers had been hard at work, clearing and building not only the base camp structures, but also seventy-five yards worth of steps up to the landing zone, itself utterly denuded of trees and ground cover. Much of the equipment and supplies were flown in by helicopter and carried down the hill to the camp, about a fifteen-minute hike from the excavation site. We set up our individual tents, the three women on our own separate platform, the ten men on theirs, and a kitchen “hootch” where at the beginning and end of the day, we ate rudimentary meals of oatmeal, tuna, and dehydrated noodles.
For my own part, as the social anthropologist—not the forensic anthropologist directing the dig—I ordered my space on the women’s platform with an eye toward how best to write up fieldnotes. Behind my tent I created a makeshift desk with my footlocker, which stored thirty-five days of non-perishable food, and a lawn chair. For the next twenty-some days, after dinner ended and the kitchen hootch emptied out, I would retire to that space. To the hum of the generator and the unfamiliar sounds of the jungle at night, I would type up the day’s observations and reflections.
Before that, however, I had to figure out how to open up an army-issue cot. Mark, the team’s medic (whom everyone on the team would call “Doc”), knew ineptitude when he saw it, and came over to assist.
All of this building and ordering had its literal price. Generally speaking, the process of clearing the land is especially big business when it comes to US-Vietnamese negotiations around MIA accounting, and it takes shape in two forms of monetary compensation that the US teams provide Vietnamese officials, either directly or negotiated on behalf of local landowners: “land comp” (compensation for land clearing and use) and restoration (money provided to restore the land to its pre-excavation conditions). In addition to land compensation, recovery missions involve the intricate task of planning for and utilizing local labor. Ours was a typical mission in terms of such labor, starting with a core group of about thirty Vietnamese workers and expanding to upwards of sixty when the excavation began in full force and villagers manned bucket lines and helped screen the dirt removed from the crash site. Hired directly through the VNO, the Vietnamese local workers are supposed to receive approximately thirty dollars per day (in a region where the per capita GDP at that time was $1,003), but in actuality pocket far less after the government takes its cut.24 Indirect channels of redistribution exist but are opaque—at least to the US teams—following complex networks that exist at local, regional, and federal levels. Thus, although the explicit policy is that the US government does not pay for remains, it pays steeply to access those remains.25 With an operation and maintenance budget for the Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) of approximately $130 million per year, nearly 70 percent is allocated to the agency’s operations in Southeast Asia.26
The postwar politics of the arrangement are unmistakable: the victors let the vanquished back in to collect their losses, but they control each move, set the tone, and dictate the terms, monetary terms included—the land comp prices, the workers’ wages, the helicopter flight (“blade”) hours, and so on. In carrying out its investigative and recovery missions, the US government seeks to drive its own hard bargains in purchasing local goods and services. For the recovery missions during May–June 2012, when first entering and later exiting the country, US personnel stayed at a newly built resort hotel in Đà Nẵng, down the road from the wartime air base with its concrete B-57 hangars tucked just beyond view from the posh grounds of the beachside resorts. With the promise of at least four missions annually of sixty to seventy members apiece, the US government receives a steep discount for the deluxe accommodations, one-third the regular charge for a night’s stay.
If the interactions among the official parties hewed closely to prescribed roles during negotiations about the excavation’s logistics and operations, more spontaneous, personal exchanges took place between members of the US recovery team and the local workers at the excavation itself, often out of sight of the VNO officials. After the first week of the dig, lunch break became an icebreaker.
June 12: One of the nice developments has been lunch with the workers. It began with Le relaying their invitation to eat with them, and slowly a small contingent of us have taken to bringing food for the group—like a potluck—in addition to their myriad dishes of rice, bamboo shoots, curried fish, pork, soup, pumpkin stalks, and morning glory. It’s a veritable feast that we embellish with our tins of soup and Chef Boyardee and packets of tuna and snack-packs of peaches and cookies. Originally, we joined the group over on their side, where it’s cooler and shadier, but today they placed two screens (upside-down) in the shade between our two “areas” and we all gathered around. They had brought roasted duck among other dishes, and we ate until we were all full. We rely on Le and Baker to translate, but we also do pretty well in understanding one another in the basic enjoyment of company and generosity of spirit.
The meals encouraged conversation, and the US interpreters helped navigate the early tentative exchanges. Is she married? Does he have children? How old are they? A few of the older workers spoke of the past and of the war, and Bác Hùng (“Uncle” Hùng), a former Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) medic, sought out Doc, our recovery team’s medic, to talk about their common work. The wiry old man, always first to the site in the morning and first to shoulder the heaviest loads up the mountainside, still remembered a few of the English phrases he learned during the war and would try them out each day with Doc. He too enjoyed the collective meals, telling the Vietnamese American linguist, “It could be the same food but the people I sit with make the difference of how much I can eat.”
For Doc, the highest-ranking member of the team as a senior chief petty officer in the navy, the lunches offered an important opportunity for cultural exchange. “I’ve been around the world. I can name a list of all the places that I’ve been, more than I’ve been in the States. That’s one of the things I’ve learned is I’d rather get away from the mainstream and hang out with the people and learn the culture and learn the people, because it gives me a better respect for them and them a better respect for me.”27 He took note of how each day, the workers asked us to eat with them, and how, after each lunch, one of the men would invite him to go have a smoke. It bothered him that some among the American team rejected the workers’ hospitality by rejecting their food. Their refusal missed the point. “We didn’t come all this way to eat pizza.”
THE EXCAVATION SOON GAINED its own rhythms and routines—the sound of shovels biting into the earth, buckets being filled and rocks against mesh screen. Like clockwork, by late afternoon, the skies would open and it would rain hard, if only for a few minutes. The workers anticipated this each time and left the site before they got caught in the downpour.
Most days, after the last bucket had been screened, a few of us remained to watch Laurel and the life support equipment expert examine the day’s finds at a smaller screening station to the side. The two of them picked through the articles slowly, sorting out wreckage to be disposed of at the end of the dig and the more important material evidence, including fragments of life support equipment, that would eventually return with us to the laboratory in Hawaii. The consequential recoveries they sealed in evidence bags, recording the contents of each. The act hinted at the chain of evidence gradually emerging from this harsh landscape to establish definitively the area we were digging as the location of the crash site and to document the precise provenience of any human remains that might turn up in our screens. The sifting and sorting also gave Laurel a chance to see what the day’s unit had yielded. The amount and kind of material recovered helped guide her choice about which four-by-four-meter patch of jungle to dig next. Scooping up handfuls of assorted debris—stone, burned plastic, wood, any object that to our untrained eyes resembled bone—she quickly filtered the significant from the “noise.”
On the surface, much of dig’s day-to-day labor and archaeological practice seemed counterintuitive to members of the military team on their first excavation, as it did to the Vietnamese farmers who worked land of their own. When instructed to push cleared brush up the steep incline rather than down, many of the local workers shook their heads in disbelief and frustration. It made no sense, and the Vietnamese American linguist Le, an augmentee also from the navy, had to battle their skepticism. He tried to lead by example, to model the work required. Straddling the language divide between the Vietnamese and Americans, Le had a knack for reading people and smoothing out cultural frictions that served officials on both sides well. But the dig logistics were often challenging to explain, especially when they didn’t yield ready results. Sifting seven tons of soil and debris daily through quarter-inch mesh screens in search of wreckage and remains surely appeared excessive, if not futile, as days passed without any remains recovered.
After the first week of excavating, tensions began to build and divisions emerged among the Vietnamese workers. Apart from Bác Thuận (“Old Man Shovel”)—who in reality looked to be in his mid- to late 40s—the older members of the group had staked claim to the positions closest to and up at the screening station on the mountain ridge, leaving the younger men to work the lower sections of the bucket line. The difference was significant: those toward the bottom of the line stood in the direct sun for hours, stuck with the most tedious work of the dig. The sole US team member who understood both the language and the cultural dynamics, Le ended up running interference between the two camps, on the one hand asking the elders to compromise or, in turn, exert their own authority, and on the other hand pushing the younger men to work harder. For him, the difference in work ethic had to do with the war itself. He rationalized that the older workers felt a kind of sympathy for the Americans. “Knowing, you know, that Americans died there, helping them. ‘Cause they fought in the war also, you know? … And we have to travel so far and work so hard to recover our fallen soldiers. So they sympathize a lot.… The older people actually have to think about it more, but the younger worker, maybe is just there … It’s good money.”28 Eventually, the Vietnamese officials stepped in and fired some of the younger men. Many were replaced the next day with the older workers’ relatives, immediate and extended. Bác Hùng soon had six members of his family working at the site, Bác Thuận brought his wife and daughters. Kin ties proved a stronger labor incentive and the mood gradually lightened along the bucket line, despite the disappointing lack of results.
Finally, on day nine, a single tooth and then another appeared in the screens, to the surprise of the entire group. One was a pre-molar and the other a molar with restorations, an important feature to compare later against dental records on file. The day had started slowly, with the digging especially hard because of the unit’s tough terrain. And so just after the lunch break, when one of the US team members called out from his screen that he had found a tooth, those of us on the ridge erupted in cheers. The Vietnamese at the screening station beamed; they too seemed to take joy in the discovery. “It was like finding gold,” explained Le. The news traveled quickly down the bucket line to the excavation site itself. The effort and strange methods of the past several days finally had brought results and a boost to morale.
Objects of curiosity for the team, the teeth drew close inspection. I hadn’t expected their color: a bluish-green tint that made them look almost fake. But to hold them in your hand, you sensed their worth, their particular power—the potential to recognize individual identity of one or more of the missing service members whose remains had lain undetected on the mountain slope for four decades despite Vietnamese and American efforts otherwise. As one of the team members reflected, “At the least, somebody’s loved one would eventually get part of them back.” Later that day, back at the base camp, some of the US team studied the photographs of the five missing men, searching for clues as to which of them might have just been recovered. Doc hoped aloud that the teeth might belong to one in particular, a missing navy medical corpsman whose photograph coincidentally he had seen over and over during the course of his career with the navy, displayed on POW / MIA remembrance walls in naval hospitals and medical training facilities. For him, the prior encounters had infused the recovery mission with special meaning.
As I had already learned at the laboratory back in Hawaii, finding teeth and not bone is hardly unusual. The acidic soil of Southeast Asia tends to erode bones more quickly than teeth. The discoloration too has its logic—the blue-green tint was likely due to the oxidation of materials in the metallic dental restorations as the teeth decomposed in the soil for over four decades. I was struck by the way teeth could become a signpost for a person’s identity. On the surface, teeth are not something we typically associate with someone’s individual identity, at least not in an era in which DNA, our genetic “fingerprint,” dominates understandings of unique biological markers. We tend to think of teeth instead as commonplace, expendable, even replaceable. But in this particular context, the teeth offered a chance to resolve absence, to know definitively who died where and to return some portion of a missing person to surviving kin. Elusive relics of the war, they mattered as proof of identity after death in ways they never did in life.
Invigorated by the initial discovery, the excavation efforts went on to yield an additional five teeth and three minuscule potential bone fragments. In the days that followed, my eye became increasingly sharpened to the shape of rocks and my fingers to their feel, surface, and weight. At the beginning of the mission, Laurel had spoken about the rocks’ “warmth,” the sensation of their relative temperature as they lay in her hand. For her, bone generally feels warmer than rocks, which have a cooler and damper feel. I struggled to understand what she meant at the time, but after holding the teeth in my own hand, her explanation made more sense. There was something different, or at least I felt myself to be more attuned to their singular texture and weight. Nevertheless, like Doc, I continued to fret about the responsibility of screening the dirt and debris. In fact, finding teeth and then bone, actual human remains, had added a new dimension to the day’s work. It made searching alternately burdensome and thrilling—burdensome in the worry that I would flip the screen and empty its contents without being absolutely certain that I hadn’t overlooked some fragment of bone, tooth, or wreckage; thrilling in anticipating that I too might happen upon remains, that we might find another fragment of one of the missing men.
Gradually, however, finds became less frequent. Our efforts unearthed fewer pieces of wreckage, as the excavation followed the principle of digging units until a buffer zone, an outer, so-called sterile edge, was created through an absence of recovered objects. The occasional attention-grabbing piece of material evidence still popped up, including a Zippo lighter that the team leader spent over an hour pursuing, bucket after bucket of soil removed, until half of his torso stretched into the hole he’d dug following the lead of telltale discolored earth. Even still, momentum tapered off as we neared the end of the month, and team members began talking about home, about meals they craved and family they missed. Signs of fatigue and impatience surfaced.
For two of the US team members, however, the ethos of exceptional care ran especially deep, connecting this excavation to their experiences in Iraq and at Dover Air Force Base as mortuary affairs specialists, or 92Ms. Each had served at the different ends of the contemporary conflict’s care for its war dead—from receiving bodies fresh from the conflict to assisting with their embalming process back at Dover. Both states are disturbing, for different reasons, as one of them, the team sergeant, explained:
For me, the remains that you first get when you’re in Iraq are so—either they’re still smoking because they’re burnt to a crisp and they have that smell to it, or just the disgusting, been-in-the-heat-forever, the metallic blood smell. But then in Dover, you know, where they see the remains when they first come in … [and during] the embalming process where the remains are cleaned up. You still see how disfigured they are, but then at the end you see how perfect they are. It’s so crazy.29
For these two members of the team, recovery missions with JPAC fell under this same ethic of care—caring for the missing in action from past conflicts followed the same creed as caring for the bodies of fellow service members killed in action. Indeed, in their view, faith in the mission itself was paramount; it kept people centered when the conditions became more challenging, when base camp got old and the physical labor too much. The other 92M added, “You’ve got to have work ethic. That’s something you can’t learn out here.… When times get tough, it’s important to have some kind of belief in the mission.” For him, the assignment with JPAC was “one of the more gratifying things I think I could do with myself.”30 Through it, he also honored his grandfather, who served in the US Navy for over thirty years, including as a corpsman in World War II. This particular mission was his last before leaving the military, and he was determined to appreciate it, whatever the conditions.
THE FINAL TWO DAYS OF THE MISSION broke with the routines we had developed over the month, and in their own ways offered lessons in the practice and politics of MIA accounting. The second to last day was dedicated to documenting the mission’s archaeological results. Just as the start of the dig unfolded deliberately, from locating and clearing UXO to staking the units, it closed with a methodical, if odd, task: to prepare the site for final photographs, we needed to “sweep” it clean, removing any debris or soil that had since fallen into the excavated units. Awake at daybreak, the US team split into two groups—a smaller team remained at the base camp to dismantle structures, haul equipment up the slope to the landing zone, and coordinate the airlift test run, while the rest of us hiked to the dig site for the final clean-up session. Among our tools, we carried five brooms.
Once there, we quickly cleared the site of debris and set up a rudimentary screening station at the base of the grid in the draw. The anthropologist remeasured her units, replacing stakes where they had come loose, and then directed us in sweeping the entire site, its so-called floors. It seemed a silly exercise: whisking away loose dirt and small rocks on the side of a mountain that we had so unceremoniously (if systematically) ripped apart in search of remains and wreckage. While some of us swept, others gathered the scree into buckets to send down to the screening station to make sure no bit of remains or wreckage had escaped notice. Within three hours we finished, and the anthropologist and the photographer began recording the site in its final, preternaturally pristine state. The photographs, like the sealed and marked evidence bags, were part of the scientific record being assembled through the recovery efforts; they documented the terrain as an archaeological space from which we had extracted teeth, bone, munitions, fragments of life support, and other material evidence.
The exercise of final photographs also illustrated just how much the dig had changed the landscape and how much physical exertion was required to recover the few, minute pieces of human remains we did locate. From the base of the site, in the corner unit where the scavenger witness once crouched to give us directions, a massive area of denuded jungle extended upward, a stretch of rust-orange earth interrupted only by a few solitary trees, too big to be removed. The view from across the draw was even more striking; there you could take in the angle of the slope, its dips, the change in soil, the niches that the workers on the bucket line carved into the mountainside to have solid ground beneath their feet. Though the landscape had altered and grown familiar through the excavation’s routinized labor, it was a transitory change. The jungle would soon reclaim the site. In this regard, the photos served as an important resource for future digs. The site would not yet be officially closed as additional units needed to be dug. In fact, two more recovery mission teams would return over the following two years as the search for remains continued, and the photographs would help guide their efforts.31
This final sweep took place just before another major event of the mission. We had known for several days already that a member of Congress would be coming to the site at some point toward the end of the dig. To our frustration, the delegation didn’t appear until the very last day, keeping us at the base camp for another twenty-four hours, though the excavation had ended and, for all intents and purposes, the mission was over. The politics were not lost on the US team members, especially those who had served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan: the congressman wanted to visit a site, regardless of whether that entailed visiting work in progress.
With final photos complete and the base camp organized for our departure, we had little to do but wait for the delegation’s arrival by helicopter. The local workers were scheduled to come after lunch to assist with the final stage of breaking down the site, but by mid-morning, a small group, many of those who were part of the lunchtime exchanges, assembled by the creek just beyond the base camp. They began preparing an elaborate meal: a vat of bún bò (a beef broth with vegetables, meat, and congealed blood dumplings) and piles of rice noodles. Along with the large pots and the food itself, they had carried in special porcelain dishes for the occasion, as well as more decorative chopsticks, not the simple wooden ones they lent us up at the screening station.
Eventually, the helicopter arrived, and the congressman and two others, a staff member who had served in the Vietnam War and another female congressional staffer, picked their way down the steep incline from the landing zone, the woman holding tight to the arm of one of the military personnel accompanying the group. Immediately it was clear—she wouldn’t be visiting the excavation site. There was simply no way she could make the trek up the slope. The congressman and his aide, however, were determined to tackle the mountainside and view the excavation, or what remained of it. The aide was former special forces, with almost two hundred “jumps” during his service in Vietnam, leaving him with 50 percent disability in both of his knees. But he didn’t complain; he would make the hike up without a word about the steep grade.
During the brief tour of the base camp, the recovery team leader steered the delegation toward a large wooden board where the photographs of the five missing men were displayed. In truth, the board had been set up in anticipation of the congressional visit, a fact that irritated Doc. In his mind, it should have gone up earlier, at the beginning of the mission. Standing before the photos, the congressman, a member of the House Committee for Veterans’ Affairs, seized the opportunity to press the team, in particular the anthropologist, about when the military members of the mission would be informed if their efforts eventually led to an identification. Though seemingly out of place, the question hinted at tensions within the Command, about which the congressman had obviously been briefed. It spoke to concerns about the flow of information and charges of territorialism or obstinacy, alternately levied by the MIA accounting community’s military and civilian leadership against one another. His line of inquiry was a harbinger for things to come: one year later, the various agencies within the Department of Defense working on MIA recovery and identification would undergo intense scrutiny regarding the efficiency and transparency of their collective efforts (recall Senator McCaskill’s hearing testimony), with the scientific and military components often pitted against one another.
With the tour of the base camp over, the delegation and members of the US team headed up the slope to the excavation site, where the anthropologist assumed the task of explaining the archaeological protocols—the processes of digging, screening, and recognizing remains. There, the congressman’s attention turned to scavenging and concerns as to whether local Vietnamese would try to dig up remains after the US team had departed. He voiced his skepticism of the local workers, without whose labor remains could not have been recovered in the first place, as well as of the VNO—the Vietnamese officials—particularly in their capacity to secure the site. A few minutes later, seemingly oblivious to the irony of his request, he asked in a roundabout way about wreckage and whether there might be something for him to take home. An article from the excavation “sitting on your desk sure is a conversation starter,” he explained to the anthropologist. Laurel politely but firmly declined his request. JPAC’s (now DPAA’s) position was clear on this point: recovery leaders do not allow souvenir collecting on sites such as these, where US service members have died.
After we returned to the base camp, a contingent of the US team offered to take the congressman and his staffer to the swimming hole where we cleaned up at the end of each day—what we called the “pool”—and to a waterfall farther up. It was a pleasant hike and would be a good end to the tour. The route would take us past the workers, who were eagerly awaiting us to join them for the lunch they had prepared. A few members of the US team dashed ahead while the delegation lingered at the base camp, and we sat down on the rocks to enjoy the steaming bowls of bún bò. They measured out heaping portions with meat and blood dumplings for us and then for the congressman, when he and the others arrived. Urged by his staffer to try the food being offered, he turned to ask, “Do these people know who I am?”
The meal was rushed to fit his pace. Leaving behind half-finished bowls, we guided the delegation along the creek toward the pool; a smaller group then continued with him up to the waterfall, where he and one of the US team members lost their footing, coming close to slipping off the precipice in an attempt to get a good photograph of the congressman on his site visit. On the way back, he again passed by the workers at the creek. They offered him slices of pungent jackfruit, but he joked to his staffer that they should push on before he was forced to eat “more crap.” Those of us within earshot cringed, grateful that the Vietnamese hadn’t understood his words—or so we hoped.
Once the delegation finally departed, other scenes of gift giving and leave taking unfolded. Part of a larger system of exchange at work, they were tied to the site’s history and MIA accounting writ large. For example, when the US team left at the end of the recovery mission, the base camp’s tarps and plywood would go to homes and businesses, a bit like the downed helicopter salvaged for parts and scrap so many years ago. But there were also more purposeful items bequeathed. Surreptitiously, beyond the view of the Vietnamese officials, on these last two days of the mission, US team members had assembled special packages, rice bags stuffed with goods, to give to the villagers with whom they had labored most closely over the past month. To the most respected of the workers, Bác Thuận, the man whose tireless exertion outstripped everyone on the site, team members gave their own prized possessions—assorted equipment, trowels, a utility knife, the base camp’s microwave in need of repair. He would return later that day to present the team with a handwritten letter expressing his own gratitude. In it, he addressed the two linguists: “I know we spent a lot of time together sharing stories and feelings.… We are sharing a little of our belongings and a lot of our heart as gifts. It’s almost one o’clock now and I cannot sleep because I am still thinking. Because I cannot control my greed and accept your gifts for memories. That’s why I write this letter to give to you tomorrow.” To the rest of the American team (“Please forgive me for not knowing everyone’s name”) he ended with “a few words to say goodbye. I would like to represent the workers to wish you all to be happy to return to your country with your families.… We can shake hands and wait for the day we meet again.”
Bác Thuận also brought a live chicken that he offered for our final dinner at the base camp. Flabbergasted at the notion, the team leader hesitated: “What the fuck will we do with a chicken?” But others, in urgent, hushed tones, pushed him to receive the gift with the proper decorum. They understood that to refuse to accept it was to reject the bonds that the past month’s hours of intense, communal labor had forged—in Bác Thuận’s words, “so much love and emotion” felt at the mission’s end. The chicken spent the rest of the afternoon tied up in a bag under the kitchen hooch, until one of the team members, who beneath his veneer of grit and bravado honed in the forward operating bases of Iraq, took pity on the bird and, simultaneously cursing it for its incessant squawking and gently pulling at the knots that bound its leg, untied it. Already dusk, he carried the chicken up to the landing zone and walked it into the jungle, leaving it to its own fate. Like the others, he couldn’t bring himself to kill the bird, but didn’t want Old Man Shovel to return the next day to see what could only be perceived as the team’s ingratitude for his gift. A willful beast, the chicken followed him back out of the jungle and under the bright stars wandered about the barren landing zone.
As the gifts given and received made clear, the bonds of reciprocity that arose among members of the two groups were temporary and asymmetrical. The asymmetry stemmed from the war itself, part of the imbalance of the US-led enterprise—a recovery mission for American remains in a land scarred by US bombs and whose own numbers of missing dwarf the US MIA toll by hundreds of thousands. And yet these exchanges, especially the gifts between the American team members and Vietnamese workers, offered a means for expressing gratitude and for saying goodbye in the absence of a common language.
The next morning, we woke up early, broke down our tents, and packed our footlockers. Within hours the site was dismantled and the equipment flown out by helicopter. Then we hiked out, just as we had hiked in. With one exception.
June 17, 2012: Laurel and I are walking up the last incline of the dirt logging road, and she’s handed me the black pelican case that contains the seven precious teeth, the three bits of bone, and the scraps of the wreckage that constitute material evidence. I take it in my hand and feel its weight as it swings by my side—the metaphysical weight of at least one of our five missing men now recovered. It’s the lightest and heaviest thing I’ve carried in or out of the site; it’s our collective achievement, resting in the grip of my hand. The main road nears, and I pass the case back to Laurel, the proper custodian. It’s hers to walk out, her charge—and honor—to fulfill.
From start to finish, symbols and rituals marked the mission and the various transformations that it spurred, with the most important among them centering on the remains themselves. Once back in Đà Nẵng, where all the teams (six recovery teams and one investigation team) had reassembled, these teeth and fragments of bone became the objects of a final display of expertise and authority: the joint Vietnamese and US scientific examination at the conclusion of the mission, known as the Joint Forensic Review. Laurel had handed over the recovered “possible human remains” to the VNO once we left the site, and they remained in the Vietnamese officials’ custody until this formal joint review. The event took place at the resort hotel where we stayed on our arrival to the country. In one of its conference rooms, American and Vietnamese forensic anthropologists and odontologists convened to examine and debate the status of the remains—whether they were human (and not animal); whether they were American remains (and not Vietnamese). If the experts agreed with one another that the osseous material might indeed be human, and likely American, the Vietnamese would grant the permission necessary for repatriation—that is, to be transported back to the United States.
On this occasion, the teeth recovered from our site offered the Vietnamese and American odontologists an opportunity to compare methods; subtle corrections to mistakes in identifying the precise kind of tooth were followed with equally courteous words of gratitude and praise. Extracted from sealed plastic evidence bags, examined and photographed, and again stored according to the chain-of-custody protocol, the remains entered the realm of scientific analysis, where they would reside until they yielded enough data to restore individual identity and allow for individualized commemoration. In short, before they could belong again to a human being, one or more of the MIAs from the crash site, they belonged to the nation and, specifically, to its military forensic guardians. The following day, the Vietnamese authorities formally handed over the black evidence cases filled with the possible remains before the repatriation ceremony on the tarmac of the Đà Nẵng airport.
The occasion illustrated how scientific practice and military ritual worked in tandem to redefine the recovered remains as sacred objects, ushering them from one state of existence (unrecovered remnants of a helicopter crash) and one sphere of meaning (biological material) to another (a revered, symbolic object of the nation). This is one of the most important aspects of rituals—they allow social groups to signify and set apart the sacred from the everyday and the mundane. Rituals also help usher objects and people through liminal space, that ambiguous position “betwixt and between.”32 More often than not, we tend to think of rituals as religious acts—prayers, hymns, rites, and so on—but rituals arise in the most secular of contexts as well, where they assign and protect meaning. The screening station at the top of the mountain slope, for example, was a space governed by ritual; there was something deeply transformative in the act of picking out bits of metal, cloth, glass, tooth, and bone from countless screens of nothing other than rocks, sticks, and leaves. We changed the most ordinary artifacts into the sacred, turning them over in our hands and then dropping them into the bucket designated for recovered wreckage, for vestiges of the air crash and its human losses. We had recognized something special and set it apart. For “sacredness as an attribute is not an absolute; it is brought into play by the nature of particular situations.”33 Indeed, it was the ritual act of screening that prompted one of the most powerful moments of the mission: when the first tooth was recovered and its consequence rippled through us, the assembly of American team members and Vietnamese workers on the ridgetop. We had found someone, one of them, in a tiny fragment of a human being. In that instant, the entire mission changed.
So too the repatriation ceremony that marked the first leg in the long journey home toward identification and commemoration turned on ritual. Its symbols and scripted motion transformed the remains into something more than simply bits of bone found on a mountainside or objects of scientific examination. It was there, in this public celebration of recovery, that they first became sanctioned emblems of national sacrifice.
Military ceremony enabled this “rite of passage,” this transformation in the meaning ascribed to the remains.34 Here we see how rituals also entail performance and require audiences, whether present or imagined, to achieve that transformation. Just as the month-long recovery efforts, the daily rites of digging and screening, performed American care for its dead to both current service members and the Vietnamese laborers and officials, the ceremony on the tarmac that day performed the ritual of repatriation to American and Vietnamese audiences alike. The team members stood at attention in their Class B uniforms, sharp and polished. Some served as guards. Others were assigned to carry the remains and place them gingerly within the silver transfer cases—the same kind used to transport US bodies back from Afghanistan and Iraq to Dover Air Force Base and into the care of mortuary affairs specialists, like the two on our mission. Once secure inside those cases, the remains were covered in the American flag—brought under the aegis of US control. Those tasked with the flag draping had practiced over and over the snap that unfurls the cloth; their motion perfectly synchronized, the flag hung taut above the case. In that single instant of suspense before the nation’s literal and figurative reclamation took place, everyone’s attention was riveted. Then, finally, with the flag tucked securely around it, the coffin was lifted and carried into the gaping belly of the awaiting aircraft and the next destination, the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii.
