• HOMECOMING •

After forty-six years, Lance Corporal Merlin Raye Allen came home. To fanfare and flags, he returned to the little town on the shores of Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin where, as a child, he had spent his summer vacations and later, when his family moved north, he finished out his high school years. He loved the lake and its sandy beaches; he made good friends and felt at home on the water.

But, in 1965, he also felt a duty to serve his country. A few months after his graduation from Bayfield High School, Allen enlisted in the Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam.

For almost half a century, Merlin Allen was one of Bayfield, Wisconsin’s missing in action from the war in Southeast Asia, and on June 28, 2013, the town readied itself for his homecoming.¹ Too small to have its own funeral parlor, Bayfield would wait an extra day to host the memorial service for him in its local high school. In the meantime, Allen’s remains would be shepherded to the Bratley Funeral Home in nearby Washburn, just a few miles south on Route 13, the two-lane highway that traces the lake’s southern shoreline and the promontory leading to the one of region’s prized landscapes, the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

It was a beautiful day, the kind when all of the glory of the Canadian Shield is on display, and the sweet scent of the woods, cut with wild flowers and the cool breeze from the lake, fills the air. A perfect day to greet a fallen hero.

Well before he arrived in Washburn, Allen had already returned to the fold of the military and the care of the nation. He flew from the United States military’s forensic facility in Hawaii, where his remains had been identified, to the Minneapolis / St. Paul airport, where his family and an honor guard waited planeside for the arrival of the urn—a compact wooden chest—nested inside a flag-draped coffin. Soon afterward, members of the Minnesota and Wisconsin Patriot Guard Riders, many of them Vietnam War veterans, with their signature leather vests and rumbling Harleys, joined the official escort. As the column of vehicles moved northward, squad cars from towns and counties along the way led the procession. When they hit the Wisconsin border, state troopers took over.

In Washburn, people of all ages lined the main street in anticipation. Local television crews set up to capture the convoy’s arrival. Flags were given out for children to wave at the cars passing by.

It was a return more symbolic than material. Little of Lance Corporal (LCpl) “Merl” Allen remained—just a single tooth unearthed from a mountainside in the jungles of central Vietnam one year before as part of the US military’s efforts to account for its missing service members from the war in Southeast Asia. If the crowd that had assembled to welcome him home knew what a small fraction of LCpl Allen had returned, they didn’t let on. Or it didn’t matter. What mattered was that after so many years of uncertainty, his family, friends, schoolmates, fellow veterans, and the Bayfield community could finally reclaim him. They could welcome him back and give him the marked resting place that he deserved. And so when the motorcade rolled down Highway 13 and into Washburn, past the local diners, the grocery store, the auto shop, and the memorial park, they stood at attention, many waving flags and wiping away tears. It was, as one vet told me, the only homecoming of its kind that people in northern Wisconsin could remember.

Bayfield is both singular and common in its story of a lost son returned. With a population of 487, it’s a sleepy town despite the influx of tourism and lakeshore development. But on this occasion, as it received that tiny fragment of a once vibrant human life, Bayfield became something larger. The remains of LCpl Allen did more than just put Bayfield on the map for a few days. It created a powerful, if ephemeral, community of mourners—kith and kin and strangers alike.² Around that single tooth, a temporary assembly memorialized a lost life and recalled a war long past. The gathered mourners imagined, if only for an instant, their connection to the young man, a US Marine, and to the nation that sent him off to die and that decades later labored to find his body and to bring him home.

This book is about the Bayfields and LCpl Allens of this country, about the efforts to recover and name the Vietnam War’s missing in action, and about how science is changing the way American war dead are remembered and honored. It’s about what happens when missing service members are identified and what happens when they remain missing. It’s about war, its tolls, and its legacies.