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ACROSS THE RIVER STYX; LETTER FROM VIETNAM |
Padded ear protectors had transformed the thunking of the helicopter's
blades to a bland white noise, enhancing the sense of dreamlike remoteness with
which we drifted over fields of shining paddy. Standing starkly in one green
field, a woman wearing a pale, conical hat shaded her eyes to watch us. Hills
appeared and the ground became less lush, patched with raw brown and covered
with the green scrub of secondary growth. Shortly afterward, we landed on the
southern slope of the Dong Ma Mountain, in Quang Tri Province in central
Vietnam. Thirty-six years ago, in April of 1968, a patrol of ten American
soldiers was ambushed from this hill, and a young G.I. lost his life. The men
and women I had come to meet were here to retrieve what they could find of his
body.
A short trail led through scrub vibrating with cicadas to a rough shelter
made of bamboo and blue plastic awning. It was a hundred and three degrees, and
the humidity registered at sixty-three per cent. Beyond the shelter's blue
shade, on a precarious slant, a small band of diggers subjected the hillside to
a tidy but determined excavation.
The eleven members of Recovery Team 4 at work on Hill 328, as Dong Ma
Mountain was prosaically called during what was known here as the American War,
had been deployed in Vietnam by the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command
(jpac). Operating under the Department of Defense, jpac is the largest of five
units--with a collective annual budget of a hundred and four million
dollars--that are dedicated to retrieving and identifying the remains of
American military personnel across the globe.
Work on Hill 328 was monitored by Captain Charles Gatling. Tall, dark, and
energetic, the thirty-three-year-old team leader could often be found in the
pit, churning out shovelfuls of dirt with large, capable hands. He espoused a
theory of leadership based on communication and "caring about your
people." The latter point, he said, "is just part of your
upbringing."
Every member of Team 4 was a veteran of previous recovery missions.
"Most here have been in the military for seven or so years--they stay
because they like it," Captain Gatling told me. "They are the kind of
people who like getting on with people." Civilians, he allowed, could be
more problematic, although the "doctors are very focussed"; the
"doctors" were the civilian anthropologists, assigned to each
recovery team, who direct the actual excavations. The "anthro" of
Team 4 was Dr. Elizabeth Martinson Goodman, or Zib, an athletic, golden-haired
woman in her early thirties. Zib grew up on an apple orchard in Washington
State. She characterized the recovery excavations as "honest, healthy
work."
"Archeologists usually excavate habitation sites, or burial
grounds," she said, gesturing toward the pit. "There is a moral
clarity to this kind of work--you are not plundering graves."
Mapped out into a grid of three-by-three-metre squares, the pit was cleared
by a bucket line that extended up the hill to a screening station. The soil was
dumped into one of twelve hanging screens, then passed through quarter-inch
mesh and examined for artifacts and biological matter; most excavations turn up
only fragmentary remains. Each hour on site was broken into forty minutes of
hard work, followed by twenty minutes of rest, during which both American and
Vietnamese workers retreated to the shade of their respective shelters. Under a
kind of leafy bower on a ridge of the hill, Vietnamese government officials,
who accompany every mission, had their own small camp, from which smoke or the
steam of a pot on the boil occasionally escaped.
Along with the medic, the linguists, the forensic photographer, the Life
Support Technician, and the Mortuary Affairs Specialist, an essential component
of every recovery team is the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician, whose job
is to handle those tricky situations which arise when a shovel hits suspect
metal or, as happened on my first day, someone finds that the stubborn lump of
clay dumped into his screen contains an unexploded grenade. Team 4's ordnance
expert was Staff Sergeant Carl Traub, whose placid, unlined face belied his
chosen trade. Traub described his decision to handle live explosives as a
"career move."
"You want a critical job," he drawled in a Tennessee accent,
through chewing tobacco. "It was this or counter-intel, but I didn't speak
any language other than redneck." Sergeant Traub's principal
preoccupation, much discussed during the breaks, was his desire to return home
in time for his tenth wedding anniversary. Yet when a yelp of alarm was raised,
Traub moved swiftly toward the object from which everyone else was fleeing, and
grasped it with a practiced hand. The first grenade, an M-79 40-millimetre
fragmentation, he declared to be inert; the second, a Vietnamese fragmentation
hand grenade with a pin so rusty it might easily slip from its spoon, was
another matter. "Has anyone got a penny?" he asked, and afterward
pronounced the grenade "good to go." In all, fifty explosive devices
were neutralized on the site. "They sometimes know only one thing,"
Gatling later said of the ordnance technicians. "But they are seriously
good. Personal safety is not an issue for him," he said of Traub,
matter-of-factly, offering a glimpse of the unnatural code required in war.
jpac is authorized to deploy up to four hundred and twenty-five civilian and
military personnel, drawn from all branches of the services. The unit is
headquartered at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, where jpac maintains the
largest and most sophisticated forensic-anthropology laboratory in the world.
There are also jpac detachments in Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. The four other
units handle everything from policy issues to highly specialized forensic
analysis, but it is jpac that is responsible for the actual field work of
identifying sites and excavating remains, at an annual cost of more than fifty
million dollars. jpac maintains eighteen professional recovery teams, of ten to
fourteen members each, which are typically assisted by anywhere from ten to a
hundred local laborers. The teams' areas of deployment span the earth: the
forests of Panama, remote Pacific islands, Okinawa, Indonesia, China, and the
jungles of Papua New Guinea; a sixteen-thousand-foot-high ice face in Nepal, a
mountain ledge in Laos, Russia, the fields and forests of Europe, underwater in
the Pacific, the deserts of North Africa and North Korea. With the exception of
a lone M.I.A. from the Gulf War, the losses in Southeast Asia are not only the
most recent but also the most politically charged.
"Vietnam was significant because it saw the beginning of grassroots and
particularly family pressure on our government," Larry Greer, an official
at the Defense P.O.W./Missing Personnel Office, one of jpac's four associated
units, told me. Faced with anger over the mounting deaths--the final reckoning
would reach more than fifty-eight thousand--the government dramatically
expanded its commitment to retrieval. "This was a lobby group of
wives," said Greer. "Frankly, what you're seeing today is a result of
this; this was a generation that had come of age in the sixties, very vocal and
effective."
The lobbying led to the establishment, in 1973, of the U.S. Army Central
Identification Laboratory, headquartered initially in Thailand and then in
Hawaii, where it was known as cilhi. In 2003, jpac was formed when cilhi merged
with Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, which had been established more than a
decade earlier to address the issue of P.O.W.s and M.I.A.s in Southeast Asia.
"The United States is the only country that does what we do in the way
we do it," Greer said. jpac's stated mission is to achieve "the
fullest possible accounting of all Americans missing as a result of our
nation's previous conflicts." The epic scale of this undertaking is revealed
in blunt statistics. There are an estimated eighty-eight thousand unrecovered
remains from the Gulf War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Korean War, and
the Second World War--the conflicts named in jpac's mission statement. More
than half of these are acknowledged as being currently unrecoverable: an
estimated forty-three thousand Second World War fatalities, for example, are,
as jpac's language puts it, "entombed" deep in the Pacific. More than
forty-five thousand are in theory obtainable. jpac identifies approximately a
hundred and ten remains each year. At this rate, barring fresh losses in new
arenas of conflict, it will take the United States government four hundred and
nine years to make good its pledge.
In early April, 1968, during the rainy season, a ten-man patrol set out on
foot from artillery firebase Camp Carrol for Hill 328, just north of Highway 9,
where a North Vietnamese position was suspected under cover of an outcrop of
rock. The patrol spent the night on the mountainside, and continued its way up
at dawn; just after noon it was ambushed and the leader of the patrol was
killed under heavy fire. Other members, badly wounded, had been unable to
retrieve his body.
"He fell with a thud, and his armor clattered upon him"; "the
spirit left him, and a dark mist seeped over his eyes." So the deaths of
even minor players are commemorated in the Iliad, the definitive chronicle of
war, and the reader is kept mindful that every casualty has a name, parents who
will mourn, perhaps a wife, some small, frugal history. It is to the specifics
of such often lonesome deaths within the grand campaigns that the jpac
researchers first turn when commencing their investigations. Each Loss
Incidence File contains everything known about the events that led to
death--official reports, maps, anecdotes told by companions of the patrol, by
enemy combatants, oral histories by local witnesses. In 1968, the members of
the ambushed patrol had returned twice to recover their leader's body. In the
second attempt, five weeks after the ambush, another marine lost his life. Of
special significance are those jpac cases that can begin at a place where
reliable witnesses locate the deceased as L.K.A.--Last Known Alive.
Reminiscences that, decades later, are perhaps fuzzier, perhaps more burnished,
are given full and serious attention: We scattered, we came together, we ran to
the west, we crawled down. . . . I saw him lying ahead of me, he was running to
my right under the ridge, he was moving toward the trail.
All the Southeast Asian cases have been physically investigated at least
once, and many repeatedly (the identities and full details of each case are
withheld, pending notification of the family). The general area relating to the
case under Recovery Team 4's excavation had been investigated in 1993, and was
revisited for investigation in 1996, when a villager came forward who claimed
to have buried the remains all those years ago in a bomb crater near where the
body had fallen. In 1997, with only days left to a mission, an item imprinted with
the letters "-ta" was found, and identified by the team's Life
Support Technician, an expert in military equipment of the time, as part of a
military-issue jungle boot, whose brand name, Bata, was stamped on the sole. In
1999, jpac excavators returned to dig the depression but were unsuccessful. The
site was again investigated in 2003, and a second crater was recommended for
excavation, but when work resumed in March, 2004, this was soon identified, by
its neatly finished sides and a cache of unspent 7.62-millimetre round
cartridges, as an N.V.A. observation post. However, some distance north of the
first crater, in a pit used by local scavengers, the team unearthed C-ration
wrappers, the remains of a poncho, water bottles, insect repellent, a field protection
mask, and the upper portion of the Bata boot discovered in 1997. On the second
day of digging, excavators found a tooth.
With the threat of an approaching storm, Captain Gatling told the Vietnamese
workers to leave early. From the hill's height of four thousand feet, we had a
commanding view over the foothills immediately below, out to the expansive
plain that bounds the Cam Lo River--the kind of broad, flat terrain on which,
when conventional battles had been the rule, armies would have clashed. Behind
us, on the other side of Hill 328, to the north, lay the D.M.Z. The
topographical map of the region also listed defunct towns and hamlets: Dinh
Dien Hoan Cat, Cam Chinh, Thon Minh Huong--all noted as "Destroyed."
Below the hill, the departing workers could be seen descending in single file
toward the plain. An aerial photograph of this terrain, taken in 1968,
resembles a rare color image from the First World War--a blur of raw earth, the
jagged stumps of blasted trees, everything washed with the sepia tone of mud.
From the vantage of the hill, the patrol that had made its way toward the
outcrop must have been visible long before the soldiers strayed into enemy
range. Some of the workers now returning may have heard the story of the dead
American before the arrival of Recovery Team 4. I had received only one
directive from Mr. Sun, the Vietnamese official accompanying the team:
"Please don't speak with the workers." This request could have been
prompted by any number of reasons, but one, undoubtedly, was to forestall the
predictable line of inquiry--"Did anyone in your village know about this
dead man? What did your father do in the war . . . ?"
Recovery Team 4 was billeted in the town of Dong Ha, some twenty-two
kilometres from the site, and the principal town of Quang Tri Province. An
important combat base was formerly on its outskirts, where, during April and
May of 1968--the time of the fatal patrol--the Battle of Dong Ha took place,
ending with the loss of some twenty-six hundred lives, more than two thousand
of them North Vietnamese. To a casual visitor, Dong Ha showed few scars of its
recent war. It was now a bustling town, its dusty thoroughfare lined with
handsome two-story houses built in French-colonial fashion, with ornate
balconies on the upper floors. Open-fronted shops were packed with goods, and
fresh fruit of the season--jackfruit, bananas, star fruit--could be bought in
the market. The team stayed in two basic but pleasant hotels, where
slow-turning ceiling fans gently batted mosquitoes away; guests wishing not to
be disturbed could hang on their doors a sign bearing the all-purpose phrase
"Please Don't Bother."
After the second day at the dig, I drove with Mr. Sun and other government
officials thirty minutes north to the Truong Son Cemetery. Set on a hill amid
landscaped parkland, the cemetery covered almost a hundred and fourteen acres
and was, according to Mr. Sun, who knows Washington, D.C., the equivalent of
Arlington National Cemetery. Short, youthful-looking, and shy, Mr. Sun became eloquent,
and, waving toward the rows of neat markers presided over by a shrine to Ho Chi
Minh, told me that "the people wish to honor the heroes." Each
headstone bore two dates, those on the top line most commonly 1950, 1951, 1952,
and, less frequently, 1945, 1946; those on the bottom, 1965, 1966,
1970-something. Sticks of incense filled the small containers placed on each
slab. The cemetery, in a landscaped complex fashioned in the shape of a flower,
contains the graves of 10,327 Vietnamese soldiers.
The exact number of Vietnamese killed in the war is unknown, but it
approaches, conservatively, two million. The unrecovered military dead--the
Vietnamese M.I.A.s--number approximately three hundred thousand. In traditional
Vietnamese culture, the site of death is held to be of great importance, and so
the missing dead are a matter of enormous religious as well as emotional
concern for surviving families. If death occurs in an unfamiliar place, the
soul of the deceased may take fright and wander, perhaps causing much mischief
before it can be coaxed, by incense and prayer, to the family's ancestral
altar.
"It is hard," one Vietnamese official later told me in Hanoi.
"We go into villages and women appear saying, 'My sons are missing and you
are looking for the American dead.' "
The ritual of retrieval of fallen warriors from enemy hands represents one
of the few time-honored civilities of war, dating at least as far back as 750
B.C., the approximate date of the Iliad, ever the first and enduring authority
on war. "Revere the gods, Achilles," Homer's King Priam says,
imploring pity, as he begs the victorious Achilles for the body of his son,
Hektor. "I have endured such as no other mortal man upon earth; I have
taken to my lips the hands of the man who killed my child." It is not the
hero's death but the petition for his body that is the epic's emotional climax.
The Americans' retrieval of their dead from Vietnam is accepted by both
sides as a necessary condition for the normalization of relations between the
two countries. Ironically, the previous lobbying for accountability of the
missing had helped delay the rapprochement that would make this possible.
Rumors of American P.O.W.s languishing in remote camps in the jungles of Laos
continued to stoke anguish and distrust long after the war had ended. In 1991,
the United States Senate, led by Senators John McCain and John Kerry, both
veterans and McCain himself a former P.O.W., authorized an investigation of the
P.O.W./M.I.A. issue. The conclusion--after eighteen months of intense, on-site
investigation--was that there were no remaining P.O.W.s in Southeast Asia. In
1994, twenty-one years after the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement, and
nineteen years after the fall of Saigon, normalization was begun with the
lifting of the trade embargo. Nonetheless, even as relations progress between
the two nations, any new P.O.W. "sighting" continues to be
scrupulously examined.
"We have had two hundred or so live sightings investigated,"
Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Smith, the commander of jpac's Vietnamese Detachment,
told me at a pre-mission briefing in Hue. "Not a single one was
credible." One investigation of a group of Americans spotted wandering
through the jungle found only another investigative team. The electrifying
report of an African-American sergeant held under guard in chains in the forest
turned out to be the son of a Senegalese Foreign Legionnaire, who used chains
for a logging operation and armed guards to protect his hardwood.
The Vietnamese treat the American recovery teams not as mere visitors but,
as Lieutenant Colonel Smith said, with the kind of deference that one would
accord "a strange monk from a far distant land." He said, "They
know we have something to do with bringing back the dead."
As we returned on foot from the excavation site at Dong Ma on the second
afternoon, Zib Martinson Goodman described a discovery of what were believed to
be American remains that had been found covered in parachute fabric before
burial. "The parachute had been beautifully wrapped," she said, and
stopped on the trail, by way of emphasis. "The body had been reverently
wrapped."
jpac's work in any host nation is conducted under precisely determined
conditions, but those imposed by the Vietnamese government are especially
exacting. Not only must Vietnamese officials accompany all investigation and
recovery missions but jpac personnel must wear civilian clothes at all times;
Vietnamese pilots fly the Russian MI-17 helicopters into and out of the usually
difficult-to-reach sites. ("I look at it this way," a senior jpac
official told me. "I could fly with a twenty-five-year-old American hot
shot or with a seasoned Vietnamese pilot who's survived twenty-five years of
flying.") Each mission and site must be negotiated, and a cost for an agreed-upon
field session, generally lasting thirty-five to forty days, is paid to the
Vietnamese government, which pays the local workers.
When human remains are found, they are analyzed by both Vietnamese and
American specialists. If both parties agree that the remains are
"Western," they are sent to the Central Identification Laboratory at
Hickam. There, the remains are examined again and, if possible, identified.
Once identification has been made, family members are notified. The remains are
then returned to them to receive a military funeral.
"My government will do whatever it takes to find out what happened to
every fallen soldier and bring him home," Smith told me. But, he added,
"The sites are getting harder and harder and harder. All the low-hanging fruit
have gone." As a result, the measures taken for retrieval have become more
extreme. An excavation of a pond in Vinh had required the building of a steel
cofferdam to keep the foundations of an adjacent apartment block from
collapsing. Jungle rivers had been diverted, and the entire fluvial contents
run through a sieve. Perhaps the most elaborate mission had been the exhumation
of an airplane from a swamp in the Mekong Delta, a site first identified by a
local shrimp farmer who had reported "a place where nothing grows,"
and where traces of oil bubbled up from the silt. Retrieval of the plane had
taken three weeks of preparation, followed by seventy-one days of hard labor to
pump the contents of the swamp from one specially dug twelve-metre-deep catchment
to another and then back again, aided by a bucket line of two hundred and
thirty local workers; the pilot's class ring was the only relic discovered. In
general, owing to the high acidity of the soil in Southeast Asia, the survival
of substantial remains is rare.
By the end of Recovery Team 4's work on Dong Ma Mountain, no further remains
had been found. A conclusive identification of the tooth recovered two months
earlier would be made at the Central Identification Laboratory. The case was
now closed. After approximately forty-five hundred hours of excavation, at an
incalculable cost, the sole human remains recovered from the ambush of 1968 was
a single tooth.
"Maybe it's not so noble," one jpac member suggested
mischievously. "Maybe it's like the guy who drives his fat S.U.V., or the
Texan who owns his big Magnum--it's because we can."
White clouds were closing in as we approached a remote site three miles from
the Laos border, on the western slopes of the A Shau Valley. Flying just below
the cloud ceiling, we passed over forested waves of highlands before landing in
a rough clearing, where whole trees lay toppled as if they had been impatiently
pushed aside. Stepping out of the helicopter, I was greeted by Captain Grover
Harms, Jr., the senior officer of Recovery Team 5, and a graduate of West
Point. A slim man of middle height in his early thirties, Harms had a quick
smile and the bright, dark eyes of a small and friendly animal.
Up a forest trail, Team 5's base camp was a sprawling complex of bamboo structures
and awnings. The scope and sophistication of the facilities reflected the fact
that this circumscribed arena would be home to twelve hardworking people for
twenty-three days. All food, fuel, water, bedding, clothing, personal effects,
and excavation equipment had been flown in; camp amenities included a
generator, a DVD player, and, most impressively, an inflatable shower, with
water pumped out of a nearby stream and heated. There had been heavy rains in
the early days of the mission, flooding possessions and miring the camp in mud.
The damp, insinuating cloud that pressed around the mountains often lingered
here; dry, clean clothes, I was later told, were a luxury.
A U-shaped catwalk, constructed well above the muddy ground and sheltered by
bamboo-and-plastic roofing, formed the team's living and eating quarters,
somewhat resembling a traditional longhouse. Set along its plywood-and-bamboo
floor were a series of pup tents, which afforded each team member minimal
privacy. A sign had been carefully printed and hung on a bamboo rafter:
Why suffer'st thou thy sons, unburied yet,To hover on the dreadful shore of
Styx?Make way to lay them by their brethren.There greet in silence, as the dead
are wont,And sleep in peace, slain in your country's wars!--"Titus
Andronicus," Act I, Scene 1.
An undulating slope of slick mud, made tractable by bamboo steps and a
railing, wound from the camp through a tunnel of greenery and bamboo, and ended
on a muddy hill. A knot of Americans were digging near the base, the claggy
earth carried up the hill by a bucket line of Vietnamese men and women, some
seventy workers in all. On the summit, workers sifted the dirt through screens,
and, as at the first site, an American inspected each pannier for remains. A
significant portion of the hill had been scraped bare during a previous
excavation and was, in the parlance of the profession, "sterile."
From out of the disturbed earth and roots and hacked vegetation, three
poisonous snakes had been found on this one day.
Working some distance from the screen line, approaching the hill's
downslope, was the anthropologist August Goodman, a tall man of thirty with
pale skin and a black beard and features one might see on marble busts of Roman
emperors: his actual name, it turned out, was Augustus. Goodman, who is married
to Zib Martinson Goodman, was responsible for the sign back at the camp.
He was from Mississippi, and before joining jpac he had worked for a
cultural-resource-management firm, doing field work, above the Brooks Range, in
Alaska, where he had dealt with old Bering Sea culture, dating back some two
thousand years, and where he had been living, as he put it, "in a little
bitty hut" in temperatures as low as minus forty degrees. Trained as a
forensic anthropologist, he had written his thesis on using bone histology to
differentiate between Asians and Caucasians. Practical application, as opposed
to teaching, had appealed to him from the beginning.
The object of the search on this nameless hill was the pilot of a UH-IC, or
Huey, gunship that had been shot down by heavy-calibre machine-gun fire while
engaged in an extraction mission in May, 1967. In the words of jpac's report of
"Circumstances of Loss," on being hit "the engine quit, then the
helo received another burst of fire; the crew lost control, the helo crashed
and rolled into a small ravine. Later the downed helicopter exploded."
Reports from other helicopters on the mission indicated that all four crew members
had escaped and scattered into the forest. Over the next few days, searches
were conducted by air and on land, and eventually three of the men were
rescued. On two occasions, within twenty-four hours of the crash, rescue
aircraft had spotted flashlight signals. The pilot, however, was never found.
The case had been the object of five jpac investigations, and one previous
recovery effort, dating back to 1991.
Local witnesses reported having seen the body lying on this hill. According
to one witness, the body had been face down; according to another, it had been
face up.
"The challenge is to funnel the witnesses' reports, the material
evidence, and the geotopography," Goodman said. It was a difficult site.
The hill's precipitous slopes, which ranged from thirty-five degrees to as much
as sixty degrees, and the heavy rains of the region had undoubtedly insured
that, after so many years, any remains had been carried down and away to one
side of the hill or the other; and although the body had been seen on the
ground, there was no report that it had ever been buried. Team 5, and the
earlier recovery effort, had found fragments of equipment, such as a spring
from a radio and an airplane's data plate. Just this day, a bayonet was
unearthed in the farthest grid, and an unspent .45-calibre bullet was found in
a second pit, at the foot of the slope.
The clouds had been edging lower and lower, and were now a white fog
drifting over the tops of the towering trees that ringed our small hill,
swallowing the forest, as the forest had apparently swallowed the downed man.
At that moment, the task at hand seemed preposterous and futile, belonging more
to the realm of myth than to reality. A man had been leached into the earth,
and the earth was now being turned inside out to find him.
By dusk, rain had begun to fall. Back toward our camp, I was taken by
Captain Grover Harms, the team's senior officer, to meet Colonel Khoi, the
Vietnamese government official accompanying Team 5. Harms and Khoi had known
each other since 1998, when Harms had first come to Vietnam. Khoi had his own
substantial base camp, with family and colleagues often in attendance. Dressed
in a singlet and shorts, he sat on a bamboo structure that formed a kind of
bench, with the nonchalant authority of a genial James Bond villain. Harms
enjoyed hanging out here, and, as he said, took advantage of the offer of many
good meals. While Team 5 had airlifted in crates of tinned supplies, the
Colonel had a small flock of live fowl sharing his quarters.
"If I could do this for the rest of my career, I would be happy,"
Harms said. This was the third mission he had led as a captain; on his first
mission, in Laos, the remains of Governor Howard Dean's brother, Charles, had
been found. For Harms, that had been a memorable experience.
"Even without their speaking, you can feel the appreciation," he
said of the Dean family. "It removed any shadow of a doubt I might have
had about whether the families find this meaningful."
Later, over dinner at the base camp, by the murky light powered by the
generator, members of the team spoke of other missions. Staff Sergeant Tami
Reeder had been on several in Papua New Guinea, for cases relating to the
Second World War. Bodies from Second World War crash sites tend to be more intact
than those of later conflicts, because the speed of aircraft was so much
slower, and less destructive. In one case, according to Reeder, a body was
found with eyeballs, flesh, and kidneys intact; "it was maybe embalmed
with the fuel," he said. In Papua New Guinea, skeletal remains are found
that have been left undisturbed throughout the decades; "nothing touched
or looted," Reeder said. Taboos against touching the dead had kept the
local populations at an awed distance. When jpac investigators requested assistance,
the local people performed ceremonies of propitiation and absolution before
they approached.
Before turning in to my tent, I stood briefly outside in the night. Darkness
and mist had reduced the forest to the black silhouettes of the foremost trees,
standing in sentrylike silence over the camp. Many reports by men who had
served in the A Shau Valley during the war recall its "spookiness."
Strategically, this cleft in the otherwise impenetrable terrain was of great
importance, serving as an N.V.A. supply route and, at the northern extremity,
as a staging area. From time to time, between the monsoons, American forces
attempted to make inroads, but without lasting success, and at the time of the
ill-fated extraction mission the valley was entirely in North Vietnamese hands.
According to conventional military wisdom, control of the heights commands
control of a valley; but in A Shau the heights were cloaked in a camouflage of
triple-canopy forest and, more often than not, shrouded with clouds so steeply
banked that helicopters had to push up as high as ten thousand feet in search
of holes in the coverage.
"An eerie, dark world," as Lieutenant Colonel Smith described it.
"You can see the little scratched-out bare spots of old firebases on the
hilltops, like pitiful little life rafts swallowed whole by a vast green
sea."
The rain became heavy during the night, and a damp, foggy dawn broke with
the crow of the Colonel's doomed rooster. It was soon apparent that there would
be no flying today. Local workers arrived and left on foot every day from their
homes in the valley, and our small group took the route they used to get out.
With a guide leading, and having been warned never to grab hold of anything
without looking at it first, we set forth. Steep and slippery at the outset,
the path levelled off after forty-five minutes, and then merged into a small
stream, which we followed, ankle deep, all the while under cover of leaves and
vines: no one looking down from above could have seen us; nor, because we walked
in the water, did we leave any mark of our passing.
When the forest trailed off, we arrived at the valley floor, vivid and green
and watered by the A Sap River. Across the river, I wrung out my clothes and
checked for leeches, then turned to look back the way we had come. A line of
scrub trees was visible, and behind it only white fog: the mountains and forest
had disappeared.
Both August Goodman and Zib Martinson Goodman had spoken of the same
incident: one of the excavations had yielded a single fragment of bone, the
head of a humerus, which was duly turned over to the dead man's family. His
grown daughter, Zib said, "had gripped the bone as if electrified."
Her father had been killed before she was born, and this was her first and only
contact with him.
"That's what it's all about--bringing answers to the families,"
Lieutenant Colonel Smith said. "When I salute, I hold that salute just a
little longer--for the families." The occasions he referred to were the
repatriation ceremonies for recovered remains, the joint-services honor and
color guards and salutes over the flag-draped transfer caskets, upon their
arrival on American soil, in Hawaii.
On my return to Hanoi, I made a tour of the jpac detachment quarters, where
photographs of such ceremonies were displayed. The substantial aluminum
caskets, designed to accommodate the body of the average American male, and
borne by traditional pallbearers, belied their usually meagre contents--a
single tooth, a fingernail-size fragment of bone.
"There's no problem with showing those, then?" asked a former
British Army commando, who was also visiting. "What about the ban on
photos of coffins coming from Iraq?"
The Lieutenant Colonel explained: "In the case of Iraq, it's intruding
on the family's grief. In this case--" he gestured toward the photos on
the wall--"we're giving something back."
"The life of a man cannot come back," says Achilles.
Of possessionscattle and fat sheep can be taken by force,and tripods can be
acquired and tawny-headed horses;but the life of a man cannot come back, it
cannot be taken by force, nor won back, once it gets past the teeth's barrier.
If repatriation is the compensation claimed by families, what is due the
dead? The issue of "compensation" is one in which the Iliad has keen
interest. How much bloodshed constitutes vengeance? How much for the ransom of
a body? What is the value of a life?
For the Homeric hero, there was nothing to look forward to in the land of
the dead, beyond the Styx; the only approximate compensation for death was
kleos, a word usually translated as "glory," but the primary meaning
of which is "rumor" or "report." "Glory," as
such, is what is said about you after you have died. The kleos of Achilles is,
of course, the Iliad; lesser heroes must be content with the little
bullet-point histories that accompany their deaths. This, not the extravagant
act of excavation, may be jpac's most enduring offering to the dead: the
resurrection of a soldier's kleos, his Loss Incidence File, his L.K.A.--Last
Known Alive.