Bones of My Grandfather Read online

  In 1943 Maj. Gen. Julian Smith, commander of the Second Marine Division, believed he had all that, and more.

  “For its part, the U.S. Marine Corps was itching to test itself against a defended beach, a task for which it had been preparing since 1775, the year the Marine Corps was founded,” write Tarawa historians Eric Hammel and John E. Lee. “The solution was simple: Betio would be assaulted.”16

  THREE

  PARADISE LOST

  1943–2010

  As I was pondering my first trip to Tarawa in 2010, I read The Sex Lives of Cannibals, J. Maarten Troost’s wry 2004 memoir about the two years he and his girlfriend spent living in a tropical paradise, sight unseen.

  The couple had figuratively closed their eyes and stabbed a finger into a map of the Pacific Ocean, landing on a remote atoll they’d never heard of: Tarawa. But Betio was hardly Gilligan’s Island. Its once gorgeous reef was dead and stinking, the water table teemed with bacteria that caused periodic outbreaks of cholera and typhus, mosquitoes carried dengue (aka “break bone”) fever, and the beaches were not only mounded with twelve-foot high heaps of garbage but also mined with human feces. With more than twenty thousand of the poorest residents in the world crammed onto less than a square mile of flat coral sand, Betio was a depressing, hot, uncomfortable tropical slum.

  As Troost wrote, “it was a filthy, noxious hellhole. But it was our filthy, noxious hellhole.”1 And, in the spirit of my adventurous grandfather, there was no place on earth I’d rather go.

  In June 2010 I wrote to Johnie Webb, an Army veteran who had been with the US Department of Defense Joint POW/MIA Accounting Agency since 1975 and now served as its top civilian administrator. Imagining Webb to be some sort of bureaucrat, I wouldn’t learn until later that he was one of the founding fathers of America’s modern efforts to recover the remains of tens of thousands of missing military personnel. He was friendly, helpful, and enthusiastic about having a member of the Bonnyman family observe the JPAC team’s work on Betio in August and September.

  I was soon speaking to the agency’s director of public affairs, Lt. Col. Wayne Perry, and Maj. Ramon “Ray” Osorio, press liaison for the eleven-man team headed to Betio. They, too, welcomed my visit and promised that I would be given the courtesy of full access to dig sites. Perry suggested I plan to arrive the second week of August, when the work would have begun in earnest. He also suggested I contact Steven C. Barber, a Los Angeles-based videographer hired by JPAC to document the mission.

  Barber had teamed up with US Navy veteran Leon Cooper to make a 2009 documentary, Return to Tarawa: The Leon Cooper Story. An energetic filmmaker with a knack for sniffing out a good story, he was constantly chasing down celebrities in hopes of breaking into the Hollywood big leagues. Barber had never heard of Tarawa until 1997, when he scored a brief interview with actor Eddie Albert, then ninety-five. Albert was a stage name, and as Navy Lt. Edward A. Heimberger, the actor had earned a Bronze Star for rescuing injured marines at Tarawa, and performed the grim duty of pulling the dead from the lagoon.

  The salty, irreverent Cooper, a Navy coxswain, recalled ferrying marines across the reef and “closing the eyes of the dead” on the beaches. (Military records show that while Cooper did serve as a coxswain, he did not spend time ashore.2) Cooper’s disgust and sadness over the deplorable conditions he found on Betio when he visited in 2008, and his outrage at learning that there were still marines buried on the island, formed the emotional core of the film, which he produced. Now, JPAC had hired Barber to create a film based on its Tarawa recovery efforts.

  “The boss [Perry] and I spoke with Clay Bonnyman [sic] the other day,” Osorio wrote to Barber after my first phone meeting with the JPAC officials. “We gave him the green light to come out and play, I figured this would work out nicely for your piece.”3

  Heeding Perry’s advice, I called Barber to ask advice on what to bring, where to stay, and the easiest way to fly to Tarawa. He immediately warned me to prepare for the worst, because I was going to a “third-world hellhole,” but unlike Troost, he didn’t seem to see much upside to the place. He sent me his itinerary and offered to put in a good word so that I could stay at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart convent, still going strong on neighboring Bairiki, a far less degraded island than Betio.

  Speaking in a non-stop rush, the filmmaker also laid out his vision for a film in which I would be the “star.” He would shoot me gazing out the window as the Air Pacific 737 approached Tarawa, exploring the island, and if we got lucky, the expression on my face when JPAC located my grandfather.

  A couple of days later, Barber sent a boisterous email with a link to a YouTube video, a fundraising pitch that announced, “Medal of Honor winner Alexander Bonnyman . . . will have his grandson Clay embedded with our production crew as the search [for remains] begins in August.”

  I immediately called him and asked him to remove my name from the video, explaining that I wasn’t going to be “embedded” with anyone. He didn’t call back, instead sending a curt email: “You’re on your own. . . . I had a house lined up for you but when you bailed on me I gave away your spot.”4

  On the suggestion of Kurt Hiete, whose American Legion post had made a donation to cover my travel costs, I also contacted Mark Noah, founder of History Flight. The non-governmental organization had, to date, conducted thousands of hours of archival research and spent more than four months on Betio using every conceivable technology, from ground-penetrating radar to a cadaver-detection dog, in a single-minded mission to locate “the lost graves of Tarawa.” JPAC planned to excavate up to six sites identified by Noah’s crews during the mission.

  “Feel free to drop me a line any time,” Mark responded when I emailed. “I’d be happy to show you any and all of our Tarawa info.”5 He also offered to connect me with his local “fixer” on Betio, Kautebiri Kobuti, who could help me find accommodations, and suggested I rent my own car, with the mysterious aside, “so you are independent of all the PT Barnum grandstanding that is going to be happening there at the time.”6

  It would be a long time before I met Mark in person, and even longer before I talked him into explaining why a civilian with no connection to the Marine Corps or Tarawa would so relentlessly seek the graves of men long dead, lost and mostly forgotten by ever-more distant relatives who never met them. But that first conversation a month before leaving for Tarawa in 2010 would be only the first of many.

  Mark, a bull-stout guy with a fine brush of reddish-brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a round, ruddy face, had racked up thousands of hours of flying time for government and commercial delivery services by the time he founded History Flight in 2003. Dedicated “to preserving and honoring American WWII, Vietnam, and Gulf-War aviation history and aircrew combat veterans,” the nonprofit offered flights to the public on its fleet of World War II-era aircraft: the North American B-25H Mitchell bomber, Barbie III; a North American AT-6 Texan, used to train P-51 Mustang pilots during World War II; and a Boeing N2S Stearman biplane.

  Mark had no formal connection to the military. Born in 1965, he had spent most of his childhood overseas, living in countries where his father had been posted with the US State Department—China, Finland, the Philippines, Russia, South Korea, Thailand. He returned to the United States to attend the prestigious Westminster School in Simsbury, Connecticut with the likes of H. John Heinz IV, son of the late US Senator from Pennsylvania and stepson of former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. It was, Mark recalled, “an upper-crust education that resembled the Dead Poets Society.”

  He took a year off before attending college so he could save money and achieve his dream of becoming a pilot, which eventually helped pay for his undergraduate degree at Atlanta’s Emory University. After graduating, he spent several years in the music business—mostly punk—in Atlanta and Los Angeles before deciding to become a professional pilot. When I met him, he was making his living flying cargo runs to South America and Central America for United
Parcel Service.

  Mark found his way into the MIA recovery community via The Bent Prop Project. Founded by physician, scuba diver, and World War II aviation enthusiast Pat Scannon of California, the non-profit organization is dedicated to locating and recovering American MIAs, with a special emphasis on downed aircraft in the tiny western Pacific nation of Palau. Described as “the Indiana Jones of military archaeology,”7 Scannon worked closely with JPAC and had been conducting annual missions to Palau since 1999.

  Mark joined Bent Prop as a volunteer reconnaissance pilot and first learned of the lost graves of Tarawa during a 2007 Bent Prop mission to locate a missing aircrew believed to have gone down in Tarawa’s vast, jewel-hued lagoon. It was a story that had not been merely forgotten, but virtually erased from history. In the years after the battle, the US government fed a litany of false explanations to families of the fallen—their loved ones rested in neat rows beneath white crosses on Betio, or they’d been buried at sea, or anonymously interred in Hawaii. In truth, as many as half of the 1,049 marines and navy personnel killed in the battle remained unaccounted for.8

  So how could more than five hundred gravesites have gone missing on the flat, featureless, 1.2-square-kilometer sandy spit that is Betio? Multiple factors played a role.

  As soon as the fighting ended on Betio on November 23, 1943, chaplains from the Second Marine Division oversaw the burial of hundreds of Americans killed in the battle. The burials were hasty—most of the bodies had been rapidly decomposing for two or three days in the blazing equatorial heat—but the marines did their best to keep things orderly. Whether they had been buried in scattered individual graves or trenches dug by Navy Construction Battalion (Seabee) bulldozers, identities of the dead were recorded where possible (though hundreds had to be buried as “unknown”), and the location of graves was marked on a map. Marines erected rough markers cobbled together from the shattered remnants of Japanese structures over each individual grave and buried the dead with one set of dog tags—if available—and hung the other from the markers.

  But with the planned assault on the Marshall Islands just over two months away, rebuilding the airstrip on Betio was an urgent priority. Jeeps and bulldozers that began rumbling off the pier as soon as the coast was clear destroyed many grave markers, while others were removed to make way for construction. Noah had interviewed a former Navy bomber crewman, Ralls Clotfelter, who recalled seeing his commanding officer punch a Seabee officer for removing crosses to make way for an aircraft parking area.9

  Seabees were laying down “twelve to eighteen inches of crushed coral rock on top of burial sites,” Mark told me. “That’s one reason they never found them after the war—nobody thought to look under a parking lot.”10

  To further complicate matters, virtually all the Second Marine Division had packed up and sailed for Hawaii before the end of November, leaving no witnesses. In early 1944, the US Navy began what it called “beautification and reconstruction,” taking down almost all of the original crude grave markers and building a series of orderly “cemeteries” complete with gleaming white crosses, crushed coral ground cover, and borders made from coconut logs or anchor chains. There was just one problem: Most of the “graves” contained no remains.11

  By the time US Army Graves Registration returned in 1946 with a Catholic chaplain who supervised the burials to reclaim the dead, the island was a very different place. Armed only with shovels, and with little to guide them but the priest’s memory, hand-marked maps, and a few aerial photos, the team can be forgiven for failing to locate hundreds of graves. Less forgivable were the subsequent decades of efforts to hide the truth from families of the missing.

  “Tarawa,” Mark Noah said, “is a double tragedy where 1,113 young Americans lost their lives and the parents, children, and siblings of 495 of them that became ‘missing’ after the battle never received the truth about the disposition of their family members because the records pertaining to their disappearance were classified until a generation after the parents of the missing themselves deceased.”12

  When Mark returned from Tarawa in 2007, he was determined to do whatever he could to help the families of the missing. He and a paid researcher spent thirty-five days delving deep into the National Archives, Marine Corps Historical Division, and other dusty archives for clues that might allow a modern team to locate the lost graves. Eventually—and not until they’d done battle with several bureaucracies—History Flight obtained copies of Individual Deceased Personnel Files, casualty cards—index cards with typewritten information about death and disposition of remains—and other documents indicating that a minimum of 216 American dead were still buried somewhere on the island.13 But nobody knew where.

  “The missing graves on Tarawa were like a Rubik’s Cube,” Mark said, “only ten thousand times more difficult to solve.”14

  But Mark had no intention of restricting his search to the dusty stacks of Washington’s public archives. He began raising money from friends and private donors. He and his researchers hunted down and interviewed some hundred Tarawa veterans. And in 2008, Mark sent a team of surveyors, historians, and archaeologists armed with magnetometers, GPS locators, a GSSI 3000 Ground Penetrating Radar unit, and even a good, old-fashioned survey wheel, to Betio for a total of eight weeks in the first intensive effort to locate the lost graves since 1946. In May 2009, he self-published a lengthy report, The Lost Graves of Tarawa, which retraced the history of the problem and laid out a case—including copies of hundreds of casualty cards—he hoped would spur the Department of Defense into mounting its own mission to Tarawa. History Flight’s 2009 report highlighted the case of Alexander Bonnyman, Jr., the only missing Medal of Honor recipient, whose “casualty card showed him buried in #17, 8th Marines Cemetery #2, where he still lies today.”15

  But JPAC was not exactly impressed, arguing that soil disturbances identified by History Flight as possible grave sites “may be the result of Japanese defensive positions, U.S. construction efforts, burial of war dead, prior searches of U.S. burials, or more recent construction activities.”16

  In one of those inexplicable synchronicities of history, Capt. William L. Niven, USMC (retired), had also stumbled across the mystery of Tarawa’s MIAs, and in 2007 he spent some $50,000 of his own money to self-publish the first book on the subject, Tarawa’s Gravediggers. Alternately described by the author as a “non-fiction novel”17 and a “comprehensive research study (that) accurately identifies and locates the undiscovered graves of many Marines and Sailors killed in action during the battle for the island of Betio,”18 the spiral-bound, professionally printed volume covered some of the same ground as History Flight’s later report.

  With help from historians at JPAC and its sister agency, the Pentagon’s Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO), Bill had painstakingly developed what he believed to be the first accurate roster of 1,104 US service personnel killed in the battle using official reports, chaplain diaries, journalist accounts, and other documents. He hired a Virginia-based cartographic company to help him overlay battle-era maps and photos of Betio with Google Earth images and eventually arrived at a set of precise geographical coordinates where he believed the lost marines would be found.19

  Bill had been a marine pilot, and in another incidental parallel to Mark Noah, flew cargo jets for Federal Express and Flying Tigers. He had always been interested in Marine Corps history, and among all the campaigns of World War II, Tarawa was the one that most captured his imagination—especially the story of Sandy Bonnyman. Bill visited Tarawa in 1989 in part to “retrace his footsteps to the place where he was killed.”20

  Bill’s book deserves to be known as the pebble that started the avalanche of government and public interest in the Tarawa fallen who had never come home from the battle. After seeing him on MSNBC on Memorial Day 2008, James Balcer, Democratic alderman of the 11th Ward of Chicago and a marine veteran who fought in Vietnam, tracked Bill down and invited him speak to the city council. Bill decli
ned, but sent a copy of his book to Balcer, who persuaded the council to send a resolution to JPAC and President George W. Bush, to request that a recovery mission be dispatched to Tarawa posthaste.

  US Rep. Dan Lipinski, Democrat of Illinois, then picked up the ball and introduced House Resolution 2647, which directed JPAC to review research conducted by civilians and “do everything feasible” to recover Tarawa’s lost marines.21 That suggestion became an order with the passage of the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act—thanks to a big push from US Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee—which not only directed JPAC to conduct a mission to Tarawa, but also mandated that the agency increase the number of remains identified to 200 per year by 2015. It was an enormous boost in expectations: In 2009, the agency identified eighty MIAs, and in 2012, sixty.22

  JPAC had by then begun to meet with both Bill Niven and Mark Noah. The two men knew of each other’s work and had spoken. The relationship was cordial, but competitive.

  “Mark Noah is a patriot,” Bill said. “But I think he’s wrong.”23

  “Bill’s a nice guy,” Mark said. “But he hasn’t been to Tarawa since 1989 and he hasn’t done the fieldwork we have.”24

  When the time came for the DPMO—the Washington-based agency tasked with oversight of recovery efforts—to put together a plan for the 2010 mission on Betio, it put its chips on Noah’s History Flight.

  “In 2009, JPAC and DPMO researchers conducted a review of the History Flight report and in September 2009 a small investigation and coordination team mapped and developed a recovery plan for the possible mass grave locations determined by History Flight. JPAC and DPMO researchers also held meetings with [name redacted, but almost certainly Bill Niven] and Mr. Mark Noah, of History Flight in April 2010 to evaluate the available historical evidence concerning these possible mass grave locations,” according to a 2010 JPAC email.25