Where They Lay: A Forensic Expedition in the Jungles of Laos - Brossura

Swift, Earl

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0618562427 ISBN 13: 9780618562428

Casa editrice: Mariner Books, 2005

Riassunto

Where They Lay melds an account of an elite military team's high-tech, high-risk search for a Vietnam War pilot's remains with a remarkably immediate and poignant retelling of his final intense hours.
In far-flung rain forests and its futuristic lab near Pearl Harbor, the Central Identification Laboratory (CILHI) strives to recover and identify the bodies of fighting men who never came home from America’s wars. Its mission combines old-fashioned bushwhacking and detective work with the latest in forensic technology.
Earl Swift accompanies a CILHI team into the Laotian jungle on a search for the remains of Major Jack Barker and his three-man crew, whose chopper went down in a fireball more than thirty years ago. He interweaves the story of the recovery team's work with a tense account of Barker's fatal attempt to rescue trapped soldiers during the largest helicopter assault in history. Swift is the first reporter ever allowed to follow a recovery mission, as these unique archaeological digs are called, in its entirety, and he got his hands dirty, combing the jungle floor for clues amid vipers, monsoons, and unexploded bombs.
Where They Lay resounds with admiration for those who fell and those who seek them. But Swift also raises hard questions about these recovery missions. Is it worth $100 million a year to try to bring home the lost from old wars? Is it worth the lives of today's soldiers? (Seven Americans died in the line of duty just months before Swift went in country.) And is the effort compromised by the corruption among native officials overseeing missions in their countries?
As new conflicts draw our attention, Where They Lay throws brilliant light on war's cost to soldiers and to those they leave at home.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Earl Swift joined his first recovery mission in Southeast Asia, as a staff writer for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, in July 2000. He was taken by chopper to a dig site in Vietnam’s Quang Nam Province, along the border with Laos, to join a team searching for a Green Beret sergeant lost in a freak air accident in 1966. He returned to Southeast Asia twice in 2001, once on assignment for Parade and once to camp in the jungle of southeastern Laos. The only journalist ever to accompany a search expedition from start to finish, Swift has also flown two missions in Papua New Guinea to visit recovery teams in search of missing World War II air crews. He is currently a staff writer for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, and his work has also appeared in Parade and The Best Newspaper Writing 2000. Where They Lay was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.

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Where They Lay

Searching for America's Lost SoldiersBy Earl Swift

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2005 Earl Swift
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618562428

Excerpt

1

Their buddies called it suicide, and maybe it was.
They climbed aboard the Huey knowing the enemy expected
them. They did it knowing their guns were no match for the cannons that
waited. They knew they"d be lucky beyond hope to get past them, and
luckier still to get back. They climbed aboard the Huey just the same.
Time was short. Just over the border, their allies were surrounded
and outnumbered and taking heavy fire. They depended on the four aboard
the helicopter to get them out.
So on a Saturday in March 1971, the Huey skimmed over the
mountains into the wide, wild valley beyond, following a rutted, two-lane
highway into Laos. The country below was a tangle of splintered hardwoods
and sheared bamboo, the jungle"s floor laid bare in wounds that stood fresh
and red against the green. Off to starboard, a chain of low hills marked the
northern edge of the Xepon River"s flood plain. Looming ahead was its
southern boundary, an escarpment a thousand feet high that showed its
bones in cliffs streaked pink and gray. Worn into the rock was a notch a
kilometer wide. In it was the pickup zone.
The flak started miles out. The Huey"s pilots slalomed the bird
among arcing yellow tracers and blooms of brown smoke as it dropped
toward the target. Its gunners opened fire with their M-60s, sweeping the
trees on the helicopter"s final approach.
The reply was overwhelming: Bullets raked the chopper"s thin
metal skin, whistled into the cabin, tore into man and machine. Then came
something worse — a blur, rising from the trees, a telltale plume — and a
flash. Fire swallowed the Huey. It hit the ground in pieces.
Other choppers circled low over the burning wreckage, crews
marking the spot on their charts. None landed. North Vietnamese soldiers
swarmed the bamboo thickets and forest around the smashed chopper, too
many to risk a recovery mission. America was forced to leave the Huey, and
the four, where they lay.
Which is what brings me, on a gray summer morning thirty years
later, to a vibrating seat in the cabin of a Russian-builtMi-17 helicopter. And
why its course takes me from a former American air base beside the Mekong
River into the same valley, toward the same rampart of cliffs, in the battered
highlands along the Vietnam-Laos border.
Somewhere down there is what"s left of Jack Barker, John Dugan,
Billy Dillender, and John Chubb. For two generations their remains have lain
in a remote corner of this remote land, as bamboo and hardwood saplings
erupted into new jungle around them, as monsoon rains scoured the red-clay
earth and swooning heat baked it dry. Their comrades have grown old. Their
children have had children of their own. Today, finally, their countrymen have
arrived to take them home.
Sitting beside me are the soldiers and scientists, most too young
to remember the war, who will search for the Huey"s crew, men and women
who for the next four weeks will live in a camp of canvas and nylon and
lashed bamboo in the Laotian back country, and who will pass their days on
an archaeological dig carved into the wilderness.
They will commute to work in craft all too similar to the ruined
machine they seek, and face a host of dangers once they land — steep
terrain, triple-digit temperatures, withering humidity, and thickets aswarm
with scorpions, foot-long centipedes, and bright green vipers so venomous
their nickname is "Jake Two-Steps," said to be how far their victims get
before dropping.
The mosquitoes carry malaria, and dengue fever, and God knows
what else. Tigers patrol the jungle. And if this weren"t worry enough, the
ground is laced with unexploded ordnance, leftovers of the fighting that
claimed Jack Barker and his crew — half-buried bombs and antitank mines
and rockets and grenades and baseball-sized bomblets that, jostled the
slightest bit, can all these years later turn an arm or leg into a puff of pink
smoke.
The Mi-17 is short on frills. The cabin smells of exhaust. The
sound of the rotor varies from deafening whine to bone-jolting bass chord. Hot
wind buffets in through open portholes. The floor is plywood; the bare-metal
bulkheads are stenciled with instructions in Cyrillic. It has the look and
ambiance of an old and neglected school bus.
Only school buses don"t yaw sickeningly as they travel. They
don"t boast clamshell doors like the big pair forming the cabin"s back end,
doors between which I can see a thin but significant stripe of bright Asian
airspace. I watch the gap for a while, see that its width keeps time with the
Mi-17"s shivers, which course through the frame like a dog shaking dry.
School buses aren"t typically driven by committee either. The
helicopter"s cockpit is crowded with Laotian military men. I can see four of
them from where I sit, all speaking and pointing past a pair of jerky
windshield wipers into the sky ahead. All are in bits and pieces of uniform.
The pilot is a skinny guy in a bright yellow T-shirt. His left hand is pressed
against his headset, as if he can"t hear over the chatter around him.
There are a couple dozen of us aboard, squeezed into troop seats
that line the cabin"s sides. My view of those on the far side is blocked by
luggage stacked four feet high down the length of the wide aisle. None of it is
tied down. The pile — backpacks and suitcases, hard-cased gear and
tools — teeters with each banking turn the big chopper makes. Somewhere
behind us, another Mi-17 carries a similar load of people and equipment, and
sprinkled elsewhere in the sky are four smaller Eurocopter Squirrels, carrying
a handful of people apiece.
In all, fifty Americans are in the air. Most work for the U.S. Army"s
Central Identification Laboratory, where thirty civilian anthropologists and
more than one hundred military specialists perform forensic detective work
under the microscope and in the wildest of wilds, all aimed at bringing home
those lost in America"s wars. Others are with Joint Task Force–Full
Accounting, a puree of the different services that manage the lab"s visits to
Southeast Asia and conduct the research that pinpoints where its teams
should dig.
Beyond the rain-streaked porthole behind me, wispy clouds race
past. I push my forehead against the glass to see the ground below, catch a
glimpse of squares and trapezoids and narrow rectangles of bright green, a
quiltwork of rice paddies stitched together with dikes that follow the land"s
irregular contours. A cloud interrupts the view. Then another. A moment later
we fly through a bigger, thicker mat of vapor, and then there"s nothing but
white out there.
Up in the cockpit, water drips from the ceiling, and the three guys
assisting the pilot are gesticulating more than ever. The pilot is half out of his
seat, squinting. The windshield looks painted over. Some of my fellow
passengers shift nervously in their seats. They know the lay of the land, that
with every minute we"re in the air, the terrain below gets taller and steeper
and rockier, that the bottomland from which we took off gives way to a jumble
of mountains and solitary karsts, pinnacles of limestone that jut skyward like
the teeth of some enormous buried dragon. They know, far better than I, the
Mi-17"s limitations. Among them: This machine lacks ground-reading radar.
We"re flying blind.
A big fellow to my right rests his arm on the luggage in front of us
and lowers his head into the crook of his elbow. He"s been resting that way
for a long minute when we burst into the light. Everyone in the cabin seems
to take a deep breath at once; even the chopper"s crew chief, a sturdy, sullen-
looking Laotian soldier in camouflage fatigues, grins for an instant as we
speed eastward, the clouds now below us. The mood doesn"t last. Eventually
we"ll have to descend back through the clouds.

When Saigon fell in April 1975, ending America"s thirteen years of open war
in Southeast Asia, 2,583 U.S. servicemen were unaccounted for. That might
seem a modest number next to the legions lost in the country"s earlier
conflicts. Tens of thousands of soldiers died nameless in the War Between
the States, after all; national cemeteries are crowded with them, Yankee and
Reb who died in battle and were buried close to where they fell — dozens to
a grave at Richmond, beneath acres at Gettysburg and Petersburg, a
thousand miles from home in the desert of New Mexico. Another 78,000
American bodies were never recovered from World War II, from planes lost in
the mountains of New Guinea and from island beaches seized by landing
marines, from ships sunk a mile deep, from the blood-nourished fields of
Normandy.
Half a century on, there"s been no sign of 8,000 men who fought in
North Korea. Most probably died on the rimy shore of the Chosin Reservoir,
or in smaller firefights that never earned titles. Others simply vanished on
battlefields their country did not win and could not search.
But Vietnam, more than any of those costlier conflicts, proved to
be a slow-healing wound in the American heart, and those who never came
home a source of gnawing unease. Many vets had friends whom they"d
fought beside, whom they"d seen or spoken with moments before they
vanished, and whose fate was uncertain. Thousands of families lacked proof
that a husband, a father, a son was gone. All yearned for answers.
So, since the mid-eighties, the U.S. government has been
embarked on a mission unprecedented in recorded history: To return to the
places where planes went down, ambushed patrols left people behind, men
simply disappeared. To find the remains of the missing. To send home all
they find. To put a name, the right name, on each of their headstones.
It sends an expedition into Southeast Asia ten times each year.
One trip is to Cambodia, where the fates of almost 60 Americans remain
unresolved. Four of the trips, or "joint field activities," are to Vietnam, from
which more than 1,400 men have yet to return; on each, five or six recovery
teams fan out through the countryside, so that over the course of a typical
year, Americans excavate better than twenty sites there. And half of the trips
are made to the Lao People"s Democratic Republic — to this landlocked,
xenophobic throwback of stone-simple villages and roadless jungle, where
nearly 400 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines remain unfound.
Five times a year, American recovery teams fly here on U.S. Air
Force cargo planes. The Laotian government permits only fifty people per
joint field activity and monitors their movements closely. They land at
Vientiane, the capital, where their visas are processed. From there they fly to
Savannakhet, a city on the Mekong, halfway down the Laotian panhandle. At
an airport where the United States once ran supply flights to troops fighting
the Communist Pathet Lao — ancestor of the present government — team
members climb off the planes and onto trucks, which trundle them a quarter
mile to a helipad. Then, loaded onto Laotian Mi-17s, they fly away from the
modern world and into country seen by few Americans in thirty years.
I have flown 12,000 miles and across twelve time zones to join the
mission as its unofficial fifty-first member, to witness its work in the jungle
and immerse myself in the technological leaps of the past fifteen years that
have made it possible. I"ve come, too, with questions about this massive
effort, questions like: Why is the government doing this now? Is it necessary
at all? Is it worth $100 million a year? And: Why are the people of Southeast
Asia, with hundreds of thousands of their own missing, helping us?

It is my third visit to the region. Like those previous, it began with a
seemingly endless flight across the Pacific to the vast weirdness of the
Bangkok airport, a humid stew of peoples and languages, of smells and long
lines and impenetrable crowds where, while waiting for a passport stamp, I
was mesmerized by a gargantuan video screen that loomed over the terminal;
on it, a Thai and his trained parrot whistled the theme from The Andy Griffith
Show. Jetlagged and muddle-headed, I flew on to Laos, a territory slightly
smaller than Oregon and shaped like a long-stalked head of broccoli. China
and Burma lie to the north, Cambodia to the south. To the west, beyond the
muscular Mekong, is Thailand; no bridge linked the two until 1993, and only
one does so today. Vietnam lies to the east, across a border of high
mountains.
It is poor even by Third World standards — too poor, really, for its
socialist government to control any real wealth or production, or to provide
much in the way of services. There"s not a foot of railroad track. Vast portions
of Laos are unelectrified. Most of the country lacks running water, and in the
few cities where it exists it"s unfit to drink. Outside of the same handful of
cities, health care is virtually nonexistent, education is paltry, the economy is
preindustrial, and living conditions border on the medieval. It is a world lit by
fire. Much of the population subsists on family rice plots, crossbow hunting,
and foraging.
In Vientiane I obtained the papers I"d need to travel into the
interior, walked unpaved streets among mildewed concrete buildings,
witnessed the capital"s uneasy courtship with the West after years of self-
imposed exile. My lavish hotel rose from a neighborhood of squalid shacks
and patrolling soldiers. Rats swam past my table at a riverfront bar. At one
Vientiane nightspot, I saw a Laotian rock band cover Pink Floyd"s "The Wall."
At a restaurant in the city"s center I braved Jeo Mengda, which the menu
described as "Chilli sauce with the smell of the water bug served with boiled
vegetables." After six days in town, I caught a ride south, into the panhandle,
to meet the incoming teams. Before long the Mi-17 slows, and its pilot sends
us corkscrewing downward, fuselage shuddering, blades whacking the air.
Some passengers shut their eyes. An army sergeant to my left keeps his
open. He stares out the porthole between us, nodding, then glances over to
me. I evidently look nervous. He taps my shoulder, jabs a thumb toward the
cockpit. "This guy"s good," he yells over the rotor.
"Yeah?" I say.



Continues...

Excerpted from Where They Layby Earl Swift Copyright © 2005 by Earl Swift. Excerpted by permission.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Mariner Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0618562427
• ISBN 13: 9780618562428
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 308
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile