Bones of My Grandfather Read online

  But my grandfather had been my hero since I was a small boy gazing at that medal, hanging from its fading, pale-blue ribbon against midnight velvet in a gold-painted frame on the wall in all my childhood homes. As I grew older, my hero grandfather became a perfect exemplar against whom I couldn’t help measuring myself and, failing to measure up, I turned away. It wasn’t until much later in life that I turned toward him again, inspired by a man who wanted to bring my grandfather home, a man who had no reason to care, other than admiration for what he and his fellow marines accomplished at Tarawa.

  This book is the story of the quest to find Sandy Bonnyman, in both body and spirit, and bring him home.

  ONE

  UNKNOWN HERO

  2009

  In August 1973, my mother, Fran Bonnyman Evans, moved with my father, Dr. Clayton “Gus” Evans, my sister, brother, and me to a spacious new home on the northern rim of the Boulder Valley, northwest of Denver, Colorado.

  With its high ceilings, tall south-facing windows, and flourishes of Santa Fe style, the new house was a big a step up from our first home in Boulder, a boxy, low-ceilinged colonial knockoff that was prone to flooding and lay directly in the path of occasional—and literal—hurricane-force winter winds.

  Now we could stretch out. My mother bought a long, dark, polished oak table that dimly recalled the one at my Granny Great’s house in Knoxville, Tennessee. And now she had a perfect place to hang the portrait of her father, my grandfather, 1st Lt. Alexander “Sandy” Bonnyman, Jr., recipient of the Medal of Honor in World War II: above the fireplace in our sun-splashed living room.

  Eugenia Berry Ruspoli, my grandfather’s eldest aunt on his mother’s side, had commissioned the painting in 1944. Born to a former slave-holding family in Rome, Georgia, “Aunt Jennie” had married an Italian prince, Enrico Ruspoli, in 1901, and inherited his estate, Castle Nemi, when he died just eight years later. Working her Italian connections, she commissioned celebrated Italian portrait and landscape artist Arturo Noci to create a posthumous image of her heroic nephew Sandy.

  Noci succeeded beyond even the high expectations of Princess Ruspoli. The portrait is both beautiful and haunting, portraying handsome, blond, blue-eyed Sandy in marine dress blues against a sky roiling with flame-gilded smoke and a distant, impressionistic island studded with battle-blasted trees. A brilliant rainbow of award ribbons, brassy buttons and buckles, and the white disc of his cap stand out from Noci’s somber palette of war. My grandfather, too, is somber, his eyes gazing at a distant horizon, as if faintly troubled by some new realization. Subtle and haunting, the painting is far superior to the knockoff portrait by Russian-born American artist Nicholas Basil Haritonoff, which now hangs at Oak Hill Museum at Berry College in Rome, Georgia.

  At age eleven, I was mesmerized by the image of the hero, whose legend had hung like a morning mist in the deep hollows of family lore ever since I could remember, and whose medal my mother always proudly displayed. Until I had outgrown such things, I would at times stand beneath the portrait, venerating my icon, sometimes even seeking his guidance at moments when I felt misunderstood or misused by the living.

  Fascinated, like my father, with World War II, I’d spent countless hours slowly flipping through thousands of pages of photos in the immense Time-Life coffee table books and multi-volume subscription series about the war. I didn’t just love heroes—Batman, the Green Hornet, Tolkien’s brave hobbits—I needed them. Dissatisfied when I learned of Hitler’s desultory suicide, I regaled friends with the “true” story of the Canadian ace pilot who parachuted behind enemy lines to put the bullet in the Nazi madman’s forehead . . . then claimed the avenging airman as a relative.

  Yet I was strangely incurious about my grandfather, the real-life hero in my bloodline. I did not pause particularly over images from Tarawa in all those books or ask questions of my mother or aunts. At some point, I did read the citation displayed in a golden frame next to the medal:

  The President of the United States takes pride in presenting the MEDAL of HONOR posthumously to FIRST LIEUTENANT ALEXANDER BONNYMAN, JR., UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS RESERVE, for service as set forth in the following CITATION:

  ‘For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as Executive Officer of the 2d Battalion Shore Party, 8th Marines, 2d Marine Division, during the assault against enemy Japanese-held Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands, 20–22 November 1943. Acting on his own initiative when assault troops were pinned down at the far end of Betio Pier by the overwhelming fire of Japanese shore batteries, 1st Lt. Bonnyman repeatedly defied the blasting fury of the enemy bombardment to organize and lead the besieged men over the long, open pier to the beach and then, voluntarily obtaining flame throwers and demolitions, organized his pioneer shore party into assault demolitionists and directed the blowing of several hostile installations before the close of D-day. Determined to effect an opening in the enemy’s strongly organized defense line the following day, he voluntarily crawled approximately 40 yards forward of our lines and placed demolitions in the entrance of a large Japanese emplacement as the initial move in his planned attack against the heavily garrisoned, bombproof installation which was stubbornly resisting despite the destruction early in the action of a large number of Japanese who had been inflicting heavy casualties on our forces and holding up our advance. Withdrawing only to replenish his ammunition, he led his men in a renewed assault, fearlessly exposing himself to the merciless slash of hostile fire as he stormed the formidable bastion, directed the placement of demolition charges in both entrances and seized the top of the bombproof position, flushing more than 100 of the enemy who were instantly cut down, and effecting the annihilation of approximately 150 troops inside the emplacement. Assailed by additional Japanese after he had gained his objective, he made a heroic stand on the edge of the structure, defending his strategic position with indomitable determination in the face of the desperate charge and killing 3 of the enemy before he fell, mortally wounded. By his dauntless fighting spirit, unrelenting aggressiveness and forceful leadership throughout 3 days of unremitting, violent battle, 1st Lt. Bonnyman had inspired his men to heroic effort, enabling them to beat off the counterattack and break the back of hostile resistance in that sector for an immediate gain of 400 yards with no further casualties to our forces in this zone. He gallantly gave his life for his country.’

  (signed) Harry S. Truman.

  But what I absorbed and remembered from those 395 words barely qualified as a Cliff’s Notes version: Killed fighting the Japanese on a faraway island called Tarawa. Won the Medal of Honor. My mother received the medal when she was twelve years old. Just knowing my grandfather was a hero, it seemed, was enough.

  Perhaps that was no surprise. His heroism was a background to our lives, something to be proud of, but my mother didn’t speak of him often. I was too childishly self-absorbed to consider her deeper feelings when the subject of war arose, as when I announced that the Civil War was my “favorite” war. “The Civil War was terribly sad, brother killing brother, father killing son,” she said without judgment. “War is sometimes necessary, but it is always a tragedy.”

  Visiting my Granny Great in Knoxville was an annual summer ritual, but if the adults there ever talked about my grandfather, I don’t recall (I was not yet six years old when she died in September 1968). We had occasional visits from my two fun-loving aunts, Alix and Tina, and the odd drop-in by my mother’s cousins over the years, but there was never any Sandy talk, and my siblings and I had no other encounters with the Bonnyman clan for most of my childhood.

  Then in 1980, my Uncle Gordon—in fact, great-uncle; he was Sandy’s younger brother by nine years and patriarch of the clan since the death of my great-grandfather in 1953—orchestrated a reunion at the High Hampton Inn, his family’s annual summer hideaway in the remote Appalachian mountains on the border of Georgia and North Carolina. By then I was a brash eighteen-year-old headed off to college, more interested in
drinking with like-minded family members than learning our shared history.

  Having come of age in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam, I shared the view of my peers and saw military service as a lowly calling, an option only for kids not smart enough to go to college. I wrote furious anti-war poems, plays, and an incensed column in the school newspaper when President Jimmy Carter re-established Selective Service registration for all eighteen- to twenty-six-year-old males in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. My father, who had served two years as a Russian-language translator for the Air Force in 1950s Turkey, found me arrogant, selfish, and entitled, too loud, too opinionated, too cocksure, too much. He warned that I would soon have no friends, no girlfriend, maybe even no family; but, he advised, joining the military might teach me enough discipline and humility to avoid such a fate.

  “But I don’t want to kill anyone,” I said.

  “Oh, bullshit,” he said. “You’re just afraid to die.”

  We were both right, though at that stage we had no way to talk about it.

  My father never openly compared me to Sandy Bonnyman, but he didn’t have to. I knew I didn’t measure up. My grandfather had been a football star; I’d quit the team in junior high school so I could spend fall afternoons reading read science fiction novels that sent me on flights of thrilling imagination. Sandy was, I was certain, a good son; I was rebellious and independent and felt constrained by my family. My grandfather was a gallant Southern gentleman; I was an entitled, party-hearty, spoiled kid who had little use for authority. My grandfather was that greatest of American icons, a successful businessman; I wanted to be, of all things, a writer. Most important, Sandy Bonnyman had sacrificed his life for his country; I wouldn’t even consider joining the military.

  I knew I was no Sandy Bonnyman; I would win no medals, and no princess would ever commission a famous artist to paint a heroic portrait of me. I was a rebel, a punk who walked into the world fists balled, chin outthrust, tuned to see insults wherever I turned my gaze. Though I would never be tested in battle, I would spend a lifetime seeking out adventure, risk, and challenge in a never-ending campaign to prove to the world—to myself—that I was no coward.

  For most of her life, Alix Prejean had no clear idea of how her father had been killed. Just one and a half years old when Sandy Bonnyman left for Marine Corps service, his youngest daughter had a trunkful of letters, photos, and memorabilia, but no memories. She had read the Medal of Honor citation, but like me, hadn’t absorbed it.

  “All those years I grew up thinking he’d been blown up by a grenade or something,” she said.1

  As the eldest child, my mother, Fran Bonnyman Evans, had long been the designated family spokesperson about her father. Media sought her out whenever a Tarawa anniversary rolled around, and she dutifully answered inquiries from authors, history buffs, even Tarawa veterans. But she never liked talking about her father, and in the 1980s she surrendered her role to Alix, who embraced it with gusto. She joined the American World War II War Orphans Network, visited Camp Tarawa on the big island of Hawaii, where the Second Marine Division had been garrisoned following the battle in December 1943, and began participating in Memorial Day wreath-laying ceremonies at the National Cemetery of the Pacific on Oahu every year.

  In 1994 Joseph Alexander, a retired Marine Corps colonel and military historian, wrote to my mother seeking details about her father’s pre-war life for Utmost Savagery: The Three Days of Tarawa, a comprehensive history of the battle published in 1995.

  “It occurs to me that I don’t know much about Alexander Bonnyman other than: played football at Princeton, owned and operated a (several?) copper mines, obviously had kids, probably didn’t have to enlist, did so anyway, and was meritoriously commissioned a lieutenant after valorous combat service in Guadalcanal,” Alexander wrote, noting that he had gathered a wealth of biographical material on Tarawa’s three other Medal of Honor recipients. “Would you care to fill in some of the gaps as to what he was like, both as a man, and a Marine? . . . I’d love to know more.”2

  My mother forwarded his request to Alix, who struck up a correspondence with the author. Alexander had published a well-received monograph on Tarawa, which recounted the canonical narrative of my grandfather’s actions. But now, based on a single fifty-year-old eyewitness account, he informed my aunt that, “events atop the bunker were not quite as melodramatic” as he’d previously written. “Your Dad’s conspicuous contributions were more in the realm of organizing and leading a demoralized group of men.”3

  According to Harry Niehoff, then seventy-five, a marine corporal when he had fought beside my grandfather on his final day, Sandy had not single-handedly stood against a counterattack of desperate Japanese. Rather, the two men had lain side-by-side on the leading edge of the bunker and fended off the assault together until Sandy was killed instantly by a shot to the head, according to Niehoff. My grandfather, he told Alexander, had directed the assault with cool efficiency but no great ardor. What’s more, Niehoff, one of several marines to recommend Sandy for the Medal of Honor, now claimed to have drawn up assault plans long attributed to my grandfather.

  Alix took immediate umbrage at the author’s apparent diminution of her father’s heroism. But in truth, she knew little more than Alexander about Sandy’s life, and was able to provide him with just a few sparse details and tales passed down by family members, some likely apocryphal. But she very much wanted to talk to Niehoff, who may have been the last person to see her father alive.

  As it turned out, Sandy Bonnyman had been on Harry Niehoff’s mind for decades. He had even sought out my mother after someone sent him a clipping from the Denver Post about the 1985 christening of the marine prepositioning ship 1st Lt. Alex Bonnyman (so named even though my grandfather was always known as Sandy, and his marine buddies called him Bonny) in Beaumont, Texas. Niehoff wrote the paper seeking information about Fran Evans and the Post proudly reported that it had “arranged contact.”4 My mother does recall receiving a letter from Niehoff, but in keeping with her long reluctance to dredge up the painful past, she never responded. Ten years later Alix, in keeping with her long campaign to make friends with everyone—she calls herself Aunty Octopus and hugs everyone she meets, no matter what—struck up a friendship with Niehoff that lasted until his death in 2008.

  Alix also asked Alexander if he had happened to come across any clues in his research regarding the final disposition of my grandfather’s remains. She had seen the ten-foot-long Italian marble headstone on the Bonnyman family plot in Knoxville, with its chiseled insistence that Sandy had been “Buried at Sea.” But she’d heard lots of other things, too, including that his bones had been buried as an unknown in the National Cemetery of the Pacific, aka The Punchbowl, just outside Honolulu. Alexander replied that Sandy was buried on Betio, “sure enough, but no one can say precisely which spot.”5

  Yet when Utmost Savagery was published in 1995, Alexander wrote that Sandy’s remains, along with those of fellow Tarawa Medal of Honor recipients William Deane Hawkins and William Bordelon, “now lie in Oahu’s Punchbowl,” citing the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Tarawa: The Story of a Battle by Robert Sherrod.6

  That seemed to square with my mother’s beliefs. During a 1976 Christmas trip to Hawaii, she took my sister, brother, and me to see our grandfather’s name carved into the marble walls of the Courts of the Missing at the Punchbowl, gold-painted and sporting a star, in recognition of his Medal of Honor. She told us he was buried there.

  Yet she knew, or should have known, that he wasn’t. She’d written a letter just a few months earlier to request that a memorial headstone be placed in the Santa Fe National Cemetery, noting that he was still “buried at Tarawa where he was killed.”7

  She also had a 1990 letter from the US Navy that confirmed her father’s remains were still somewhere on Betio.

  “Regrettably, we cannot provide information on the whereabouts of your father’s remains because they were never recovered from Tarawa.
That’s why his name appears on the Tablets of the Missing,” wrote Maj. A.E. Edinger. “The ravages of time, battle damage, and the circumstances of burial made locating and identifying the Tarawa dead a formidable task.”8

  For whatever reason, two decades later nobody in the family seemed aware of that fact. “After all these years, I just thought, he’s dead and buried and we’ll never know,” said my aunt, Alix Prejean.9 But she remained curious, and once she got connected to the Internet at her remote home on the island of Maui, she discovered Tarawa on the Web. Jonathan Stevens, whose father Gordon had fought in the battle, created the site in 1998 as “a tribute to the 2nd Marine Division of WWII and a historical resource to further the knowledge of an epic struggle that was an integral part of the march of the United States towards defeat of Imperial Japan.”10

  My aunt began routinely monitoring the site’s lively forum, Tarawa Talk, frequented by history buffs, descendants of those killed in the battle, and a slowly dwindling number of Tarawa veterans.

  I had never heard of the site when my aunt sent me a brief email in late 2009—“Do you know about this?” I clicked the link and what I saw made my jaw drop. It seemed that Joseph Alexander had been right before he’d been wrong: Not only were Sandy Bonnyman’s remains not entombed in the Punchbowl, but two separate, independent civilian researchers were now claiming he was still buried on faraway Betio Island along with hundreds of other missing marines. And pressure was building for the US Department of Defense to find them and bring them home.