Bones of My Grandfather Read online

  Despite Bill Niven’s efforts, outsiders gave credit to History Flight for rolling up its sleeves and getting its hands dirty.

  “JPAC’s MIA recovery mission is based entirely on the excellent work done by Mark Noah and History Flight,” Jim Hildebrand posted on Tarawa on the Web. “First they did all their homework on the MIA problem. Then they took a team to Betio, equipped with ground-penetrating radar, to look for unexhumed graves/bodies. . . . They also provided GPS locations to JPAC. My impression is that the information was so good, it could not be ignored by JPAC.”26

  All this was good news to those who wanted to see the Tarawa marines recovered and brought home to their families. But behind the scenes, JPAC was riven with factionalism, and some scientists at its Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu were lobbying against the little NGO that could and against History Flight and its methods.

  As I prepared for my trip, I discovered that nobody had ever heard of Tarawa. The staff at Boulder’s venerable Changes in Latitude travel store, whose map of the world was stuck with hundreds of brightly colored pins designating far corners of the world visited by well-heeled locals, had to consult a guidebook to look up Kiribati (the modern name for the independent nation that includes the Gilbert Islands, it’s pronounced KIHD-uh-boss) when I walked in. Even the nurses at the local clinic that did nothing else but provide shots and advice to people traveling to weird places overseas hadn’t heard of it.

  I began to receive advice from Tarawa Talk members who had traveled to Betio, and it didn’t sound good. Dennis Covert, a US Navy veteran who visited Tarawa in 2008, warned, “Sanitation is poor or lacking. Betio is overpopulated . . . people, pigs, dogs, kids, trash litter, excrement, etc., all mixed in crowded conditions. The Betio lagoon is regarded as a cauldron of infectious diseases, which are continuously re-cycled back to the people through their consumption of contaminated fish.” Seven people on South Tarawa had died from dengue fever just prior to his trip, and “hepatitis is widespread and the majority of the population has intestinal parasites and worms.”27 Never mind that the atoll’s contaminated water table leaves residents vulnerable to giardiasis, cryptosporidiosis, hepatitis, dysentery, typhoid, salmonellosis, internal parasites, and cholera, all contributors to the highest infant-mortality rate in the Pacific region.28

  Dennis sent me a detailed list of essentials to bring, everything from a mosquito head-net to a prescription antibiotic and Lifesaver candy to hand out to the children who would happily swarm any i-Matang—foreigner—they saw.

  “Oh my God, it’s not that bad,” Kelle Rivers said with a laugh when we met at Dot’s Diner in Boulder. “You make it sound like you’re going into a war zone.”

  I had reason to trust Kelle, a longtime friend and, briefly, girlfriend who had been living in Thailand for years and just happened to be visiting her family in Colorado. In 1994, I had hugged her one last time and watched her disappear down the jetway at Denver’s Stapleton International Airport, on her way to a Peace Corps assignment in Kiribati. She had been posted to Abemama, seventy-six miles (and twenty-four hours by boat, as she would learn to her dismay) south of Tarawa, teaching at Tetongo Primary School and swimming daily in warm, crystalline waters. It wasn’t all paradise—she battled ants, loneliness, and little for a vegetarian to eat—but it was close.

  “I’m writing by the light of a little oil lamp—actually it’s an old jar with a wick and oil. I have it hanging inside my little thatched-roof sleeping house. It’s spreading a faint pinkish light through my mosquito net, enough to read this letter. All I can hear right now is a cricket, the ocean, the wind, and an occasional bird in a nearby tree,” she had written in her first letter to me.29

  But she acknowledged that Kiribati’s capital, Tarawa, where she had to attend meetings and conferences at the Peace Corps office, made for quite a different experience. Teeming with more than half of Kiribati’s one hundred thousand residents, South Tarawa was constantly abuzz with noise from passing minibuses blaring tinny Christian music and streams of barefoot girls and boys in colorful school uniforms walking along the narrow shoulder of the atoll’s lone paved road at all times of day or night, as well as countless pigs and scabby, feral dogs and cats. But Kelle adored the people. There was little crime to speak of, and she encouraged me to swim in the lagoon, that aforementioned “cauldron of infectious diseases.” After all, she had, and lived to tell the tale.

  I told Kelle my goal was to trace my grandfather’s footsteps.

  “Well, that should take you about five minutes,” she said, understanding the scale of Betio in a way I could not. “And seriously, it’s not that bad. You’re not going there for a beach vacation, anyway.”

  She was right. My grandfather had come to Tarawa literally in the dark, uneasy, but eager to defeat the enemy, and hoping his war might end soon so he could go home to his family. My arrival would be very different, but I was on a mission, too: to exhume a tragic episode from my family’s past that had been buried for far too long.

  FOUR

  RESTLESS SPIRIT

  1868–1928

  This is everything I knew—or thought I knew—about my grandfather a month before my departure to Betio: Grew up in Knoxville; went to Princeton, where he played football; married my grandmother, Josephine Bell; moved to New Mexico and became a successful mine owner; joined the marines in a patriotic fervor after Pearl Harbor, though he didn’t have to go; killed at Tarawa; received the Medal of Honor.

  There’s also this anecdote, recounted to me by nearly every Bonnyman family member who had known him, however briefly, and repeated by relatives born decades after his death: Even as an adult, Sandy delighted in alarming observers with daredevil antics at the swimming pool at his childhood home, Bonniefield. He would scramble up the backside of a small bathhouse at the eastern end of the pool, take a few loping strides up the slanted tile roof, then launch his long, muscled body over twelve feet of concrete into the water.

  “It was quite a dive,” said Robert McKeon, a nephew who witnessed the feat. “I don’t know how he didn’t kill himself.”1

  And there was this: During the 1980s, I worked for another of my grandfather’s nephews, Alexander “Sandy” McKeon (my father used to joke that the Bonnymans lost the baby-name book, as there seem to be only about five names to go around) who owned several ranches in California’s central valley. Sandy McKeon remembered his uncle from boyhood, and knew how much I idolized him.

  “He wasn’t perfect, you know,” he casually mentioned one blazing afternoon as we trailed cattle across sun-crisped, rolling hills. “I’ll bet you didn’t know he was once shot in a bar fight in Santa Fe.”

  My hackles rose immediately. Angry responses galloped through my head: Why haven’t I heard this before? You’re just jealous; you may have done your little hitch in the Army, but you hardly served with the same distinction as your uncle. And if there really was a “bar fight,” who’s to say he started it?

  But when I pressed him for details, he had none. Fuming, I spurred my horse and headed toward the front of the herd. Only years later would I come to understand that my deeply Catholic cousin wasn’t trying to insult my grandfather so much as remind me that all fall short of perfection.

  The next time I called home, my mother confirmed that Sandy had been shot. But she was just six years old at the time and the only thing she remembered was how big her father’s feet were as he lay on the couch recuperating.

  The first known reference to Scottish surname Bonnyman in North America was published June 9, 1682, in a history of the Bruton Church in Williamsburg, Virginia. My great-grandfather, Alexander Bonnyman Sr., was two when he arrived with his family from Scotland in 1870. George and Ann Toner Bonnyman and their five children settled in Lexington, Kentucky. It’s not clear how (or if) George Bonnyman made a living, but he often “would go on [drinking] sprees.”2 Young Alex was often sent by his mother to retrieve his father from local taverns, an experience that would lead to lifelong abstemi
ousness.

  Just five feet, six inches tall, Alex had short, powerful legs and a long torso that made him appear as tall as many a six-footer when seated. His thick, wavy brown hair, round cheeks, and bright blue eyes gave him a cheery avuncular appearance that belied his formal and sometimes demanding personality.

  Accepted at age sixteen to study engineering at the University of Kentucky, Alex Bonnyman was already teaching math to undergraduates at the age of nineteen.3 He had finished all his mathematical and engineering work but still had a few electives to take when his father, who never fully approved of his son’s “cow college,” abruptly informed him that he would be shipped off to study at the Edinburgh School of Medicine. In an early demonstration of will and determination—some would say stubbornness—Alex refused. His father immediately withdrew financial support, forcing Alex to drop out of school (the university awarded him an honorary doctorate of law in 1950).

  But Alex had learned enough of engineering to find work with several Southern railroad companies. He became chief engineer for the Atlantic, Birmingham, and Atlanta Railroad in 1899, where he supervised construction of more than 600 miles of rail.

  While in Georgia, he met Frances Rhea Berry, youngest daughter of Capt. Thomas Berry, a Confederate veteran turned wealthy cotton merchant and plantation owner, and Frances Rhea, daughter of a former slave-holding family with a plantation near Gadsden, Alabama. Born in 1878, my great-grandmother lived a genteel life, cared for by servants and schooled by a governess on an idyllic plantation outside the town of Rome. Like her future son, she grew up loving animals and exploring the outdoors.

  Alexander Bonnyman was thirty-eight when he proposed to Frances, ten years his junior. Her Episcopalian family did not approve of her marriage to an immigrant and, worse, a Catholic. But in an early demonstration of the independent streak she would share with her oldest son, Frances not only married Alex in 1906, but also converted to Catholicism. The couple’s first three children were born in Atlanta, including Alexander Jr. on May 2, 1910.

  Having learned a great deal about mining while working the railroads, Alex moved his family to Knoxville in 1912 to take a job with the Campbell Coal Mining Company, owned by the wealthy husband of his wife’s sister Laura. Four years later, with help from my great-grandmother’s inherited fortune, he bought a coal mine near Hazard, Kentucky and started Blue Diamond Coal Company. The company’s mines in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia made a “major contribution” to the American campaign in World War I and would ship more than a million tons of coal a year during World War II.4

  Alex built Bonniefield on twenty-six acres west of Knoxville in 1916.5 Designed by Charles Barber, the South’s most famous Beaux-Arts architect, the mansion was lavishly appointed with sculpted tile floors, shiny hardwood stairs, a generously lit sunroom, and a swimming pool. Ivy-twined and surrounded by wide swaths of well-tended lawn, ornate gardens, and carefully sculpted shrubbery, the estate’s north side dropped off into a steep ravine, where a railroad track split the tangled Tennessee wilderness. Here the Bonnymans’ many servants, cooks, nannies, drivers, and groundskeepers, both black and white, helped raise four children.

  As the firstborn son of a cultured conservative Scotsman and a daughter of the plantation South, my grandfather was both privileged and doted upon. Cared for as an infant by an African American nurse named Minerva, by the time he was walking and talking he was his father’s greatest pride. Wearing long, curly, blond locks and dressed in white gowns, knee socks, and buckle shoes as a toddler, he was barely distinguishable from a little girl. But he was, from the beginning, all boy, and as soon as he could he was off exploring the woods at the back of Bonniefield, dropping a fishing line into the Tennessee River just down the hill, or riding his little black pony, Tap, at Galbraith Springs, a summer resort seventy miles northeast of Knoxville.

  My great-grandmother insisted that the children be well educated, and they were among the first students to attend Mrs. J.A. Thackston’s School when it opened in Knoxville in 1920. She read to them often from The Harvard Classics and the red-leather-bound series, The Children’s Hour, which contained young Sandy’s favorite poem, Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”

  The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;

  From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;

  Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!

  But I, with mournful tread,

  Walk the deck my Captain lies,

  Fallen cold and dead.6

  The Bonnymans brought the children up to be devout Catholics. Frances read them the Bible, and they attended Mass weekly at Knoxville’s Church of the Immaculate Conception and regularly made confession.

  Sandy always loved animals. Bonniefield was home to a long line of dogs—Mack, his favorite, Duff the sheepdog, Jo Dick, and later a slew of hounds whose puppies he trained for bird hunting—cats, and homing pigeons, not to mention the snakes, toads, and lightning bugs he captured in the nearby woods.

  When he was ten, Sandy became passionate about photography. He constantly pointed his No. 2 Kodak Automatic Brownie at his sisters and baby brother Gordon, his pets, the house and surrounding lands, and friends, especially his favorite boyhood companion Shirley Spence (a boy). His photo albums reveal an early charisma, theatricality, and sense of humor: carefully posed shots of him preparing to dump a bucket of water from a hayloft onto his “unsuspecting” sister, or “stuck” in a coal chute while Margot prepares to paddle his rump, mincing with a parasol. His sisters and mother laughed at his performances, and even stodgy, serious Alex Bonnyman couldn’t help breaking a smile at his antics.

  “He has always been such a lovable boy and there will always be much of the boy and a sheer joy of living in him,” a family friend observed.7

  Sandy traveled to Europe twice by the time he was twelve, and the wounds of The Great War were still fresh when the family sailed aboard the New Amsterdam and Iles de France in 1920 and aboard White Star line’s RMS Adriatic, sister to the doomed Titanic, two years later. Visiting recent battlefields in France, Italy, and Belgium, Sandy photographed landscapes still scarred by battle.

  “On this hill more than 2000 French and American soldiers were killed in less than 2 min.,” he scribbled beneath a photo of a barren, blasted hillside that had been covered in blood in the Battle of Marnes. “It was taken by the Germans and when the Allies made an attack they blew it up.”

  Sandy matured into a strikingly handsome young man with golden hair, penetrating blue eyes, and his father’s dignified, straight nose. By age twelve he had already surpassed Alex in height, on his way to becoming the only six-footer in a family of men for whom five-foot-eight was an achievement.

  As a teenager Sandy learned his lifelong love for fishing and bird hunting while traveling with Shirley Spence’s family to the hills of Tennessee and the great lakes of Michigan and Minnesota. He always returned with photos of himself with his quarry—duck, pheasant, a toothy pike—in one hand and a shotgun or rod in the other. Having long outgrown his pony, he loved to ride sleek Thoroughbred horses in jodhpurs and tall black boots. He took up tennis and soon was competing with some of Knoxville’s top junior players, including city youth champion Kyle Moore.

  He also began to reveal a wild side that troubled his abstemious father. As soon as he was able to drive, he began to stay out late. Alex tried to ground him, going so far as to drain his Ford Model T’s gas tank, but Sandy just slipped out through a window, siphoned gas from other vehicles at Bonniefield, and drove off into the night, drawn into a wider, wilder world he could never resist.8

  As he matured, Sandy began to develop a reputation around town as something of a lothario. His sister-in-law, Isabel Ashe Bonnyman, described him as “the most devastatingly handsome man” she’d ever seen, and her prominent Knoxville family was at first reluctant to allow her to date Gordon, fearing he shared his brother’s wild ways.9 Mary Tate, who spent years working as a housekeeper for the Gordon
Bonnyman family, heard many stories about my grandfather, who was “flamboyant . . . a lover, a playboy” and perhaps a little spoiled.

  “Granny (Bonnyman) couldn’t do a thing with him,” Tate said. “She always knew he would have his way.”10

  Sandy’s Berry blood seemed to overpower his father’s cultured European ways, and he fit the archetype of Southern masculinity, displaying honor, self-reliance, faith, virility, and martial prowess. But like so many of Faulkner’s tragic white men—like Faulkner himself—he also shared another, less honored, aspect of traditional Southern manhood: hard drinking.11

  So it was no surprise, perhaps, when Alex sent his strong-willed son away to attend the Preparatory School, a Catholic boarding institution in Lakewood, New Jersey, at age sixteen. There, well north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Sandy fell in love with one more staple of modern Southern manhood: football. Starting at left offensive guard in 1926, he got to shake President Calvin Coolidge’s hand as a member of the 1927 squad.12 Long before it became a multi-billion dollar spectator extravaganza, football engaged what William Phillips called “the most primitive feelings about violence, patriotism, manhood,” for fans and players alike.13 The game thrummed with martial metaphor and Sandy possessed the size, fearlessness, and drive to make him a captain worth following.

  Upon graduation, Sandy became the first in a long line of Bonnyman sons to attend Princeton University, where he studied engineering. He had earned enough college credit in prep school to enter as a sophomore in 1928, and he made the first string of the Tigers football team at guard that fall. He proved indomitable on the field, refusing to leave a 1929 game with Yale even after a 200-pound opponent had cleated his hand and he could no longer see out of one bloodied eye.14

  Football brought out more than just his iron will and physical courage. My grandfather’s charisma and ability to rally the troops inspired fierce loyalty from his teammates, who made him their captain. “I thought the sun rose and set on Sandy as did, I believe, everyone who knew him,” wrote one.15