Where They Lay: Searching for America's Lost Soldiers - Tapa dura

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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. "How can you tell?" I look to the cockpit and decide
not to do it again: One of its occupants is now trying to catch the drips from
the ceiling with a small towel, so that they don't land on the man at the
controls.
"He's found a hole," the sergeant says. "He waited until he found a
hole, and now he's gonna just circle down through the clouds until we're
below them."
Sure enough, our turn tightens until we're heeled over hard, the
spinning ground filling the portholes, and we have to steady the luggage to
keep it from toppling. We drop as if sucked down a drain, the clouds a white
blur as we pass through the overcast. When we level out, we're just below
the ceiling and just five hundred feet off the ground. Treetops seem to reach
for us. We zigzag over the forest, the portholes pelted by rain, until a narrow
strip of asphalt comes into view, its surface pitted with deep holes, shoulders
scalloped and broken. We bank into a wide right turn to follow it.
The chopper fishtails eastward, slicing through the misty tentacles
dangling from the clouds' bellies, the ground rising gradually beneath us, and
so we go for miles, sandwiched in a dwindling wafer of clear air between
jungle and blindness. I stare down at the road, which looms closer with every
minute. It's cracked and gouged, and in places the pavement disappears
completely, is replaced by stretches of cinnamon-colored mud and tiny
ponds that reflect the overcast sky.
"Route 9," the sergeant yells. The chief highway across the
Laotian panhandle. A major link between Vietnam and Thailand. It doesn't
look the part, and I turn a troubling thought: This is a country without money
for basic highway repairs. How much can it possibly invest in pilot training? In
aircraft maintenance?
The rotors throb. Below, rice paddies shimmer. We cross
unbroken miles of forest, then a river stained coffee brown, then a village of
thatch-roofed huts on stilts bunched around a bare-dirt clearing, water buffalo
loose among the buildings. A second village slides by, no more than 150 feet
under the Mi-17's wheels. I can see chickens on the ground and a knot of
children peering up at us.
Just beyond the settlement I notice another feature of the
landscape: a hole, an almost perfect circle, big enough to swallow one of the
village's huts. Another appears. Another. Still another. They're everywhere,
some of them fifty feet or more across, most filled with opaque water. They're
punched into rice paddies, bunched in threes and fours around villages. They
line Route 9. I can see others hidden by the jungle, betrayed by round gaps
in the canopy. In places they're so tightly spaced the ground resembles the
surface of a golf ball. Bomb craters.
The Mi-17's whining turbines deepen in pitch. The big machine
again slows, and ahead, through the veil of a stiffening rain, a patch of bright
blue appears. The chopper flares, nose high, and settles slowly onto a
concrete pad. The helicopter's crew chief throws open the hatch to a shock
of wind and rotor noise; I grab my backpack from the stack in the aisle and
follow the sergeant out. A hard rain is falling, and we jog across spongy
ground past already-parked Squirrels — and past a concrete pedestal that
rises knee-high from the grass, its top adorned with a crumbling Communist
star, a relic from the days when this was a North Vietnamese maintenance
camp.
These days, the star is at odds with the self-contained Little
America that waits beyond. Linking the landing zone with Route 9 is a
straight, narrow dirt road, nicknamed Main Street, and around it rises a small
town of fifty-three canvas wall tents called the Ban Alang Base Camp.
At the landing zone's fringe the joint task force's commander in
Laos, Lt. Col. Kevin Smith, is yelling instructions to scurrying soldiers over
the din of what's now a downpour, apparently unfazed by his drenched T-shirt
and shorts. Smith pauses a second to point me toward my tent. It's prime
Ban Alang real estate, one tent back from Main Street's west side. I duck in
and slip off my pack.
My home for the next month is about twelve feet by eight, with
screened gables and a drooping roof supported by a center pole. A bare-bulb
light fixture is duct-taped to the pole and plugged into a thick extension cord
powered by a generator shack at the camp's western edge. The tent is
otherwise empty. As I'm assessing it, one of Smith's aides sticks his head
in, sees that I don't have a cot, and tells me I'll need to scrounge one up, so
for the next half-hour I roam the camp.
Behind the tents platooned on the street's west side, at the end of
a long concrete sidewalk, stands a low cinderblock building housing the
camp's latrines, which are equipped with otherwise unattainable luxuries in
this part of the world: porcelain sit-down toilets. Just north of the latrines
stand the showers, floored with concrete, framed with bamboo, walled and
roofed with nylon tarp. A bright royal blue, the tarps are ubiquitous at Ban
Alang. They're draped over the roofs of all the tents and overhang the narrow
corridors between. They shroud piles of gear. They've served, over the years,
myriad other functions, so many that they're now considered indispensable;
no other gear used by the U.S. military in Southeast Asia, save for duct tape
and a tough nylon rope called "550 cord," is so highly prized. From the air,
Ban Alang's blue stands out against the jungle's thousand shades of green
as if lit from within.
Just north of the landing zone on Main Street's east side, two tin-
roofed, open-sided barns stand side by side. In one, caged in thick chain-
link, the teams store their shovels, picks, pumps, and surveying equipment.
In the other is one of the camp's social centers: a gym of benches and free
weights, along with two hotel ice machines and a couple of big coolers of
bottled water. Alongside the barns is a metal-framed canvas mess tent. A
chain of portable banquet tables runs down its center, along with a couple
dozen folding chairs; along its north wall is another table, on which sit a
microwave oven and a pair of two-burner propane stoves. A twenty-five-inch
color television and videotape player occupy a corner. The TV is Ban Alang's
readiest connection to the outside world, thanks to a satellite dish outside,
and it runs pretty much around the clock.
A dishwashing station stands out back of the mess tent, and
beside it, a small, open-air shack with a thatched roof, a Ping-Pong table
centered on its concrete floor. A few yards from this modest game room is a
tiny building of screened windows and woven-bamboo walls — the hospital.
And a few yards more to the north is the most remarkable amenity of the
camp's many: Mama's, a dispensary of good, cheap American and Lao
meals, cold indigenous beer, cigarettes (a Thai version of Marlboros), soft
drinks (mostly aggressively sweet Asian brands), and Oreos.
By the end of my search I've amassed one metal-framed cot with
a defective crossbar that causes one end to sag; an army-issue folding field
table, wooden, olive drab in color; one folding metal chair, swiped from the
mess tent; and an electric fan, which I plug into the open socket.
It's dark and raining harder than ever when I sprint across Main
Street to a mandatory camp meeting. The mess tent is already crowded
when I step through the door, shirt soaked, and into its sallow light. Half the
Americans in camp sit at the banquet tables, which have been rearranged
into a long-stemmed T; the rest line the walls. I find a place in a corner as
Kevin Smith, sitting at the T's bottom, stands. The room is instantly silent.
Smith is wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned "Ohio State
Athletics," but even so manages to look like an army officer. His hair, turning
to silver, is thick but cropped a shade too closely to be fashionable, and he
stares a bit too hard, speaks a little too forcefully, rests his hands on his hips
with too much of a "Go ahead, fuck with me" air to be anything but.
"Welcome," he says. "I'm Lieutenant Colonel Smith. I'm the
Detachment Three commander of Joint Task Force–Full Accounting.
Welcome to Laos. Welcome to the Ban Alang Base Camp." As he speaks,
moths flit around the fluorescent strips overhead. The rain's tattoo against the
tent roof strengthens. Smith turns up his volume. "Before we go any further, I
want you to remember this: For as long as you're here, for the entire time
you're in Laos, safety is your number one priority.
"You're in Laos in the rainy season," he says. "In the rainy
season, the ground gets saturated. Critters come out of the ground. And
there are a lot of critters in Laos. Poisonous snakes." He scans the room, as
if to ensure that we're paying attention. "Scorpions." Another
pause. "Centipedes." Pause. "Leeches." Finally: "Insects."
"Be aware of the critters. When you leave your tent at night, take
your flashlight. Take a minute to check the ground outside your tent. Last
mission we had a guy leaving his tent at night. Had to use the latrine. He
didn't usually take a flashlight with him, but for some reason he decided to
this time, and he flicked it on as he was stepping out, and two feet away was
a snake." He squints, searching his memory. "What kind was it? Anybody
remember?"
"A big-eyed viper," somebody says.
"That's it," Smith nods. "A big-eyed viper. You do not want to step
on a big-eyed viper. When you go into the latrine at night, stand there for a
minute at the door. Take a good look around. Make sure Jake No- Shoulders
isn't waiting to say hello to you."
We will have one day off during the four-week joint field activity,
the colonel tells us. Every other day, weekends included, we'll fly to our
excavation sites. We are to keep in mind that doing business in Laos is
expensive and that our carelessness can make it more so: A Squirrel costs
the American taxpayer $11 a minute, every minute, and the Mi-17s, $45. "So
pay attention," he says. "Don't keep that helicopter waiting. We spent $1.1
million on the last JFA on air transportation alone. That's a bunch of change."
Outside, the rain is producing a loud hiss as it strikes gravel
sprinkled atop Main Street. The colonel dispatches someone to fetch our
next speaker; at Ban Alang's north end, separated from the American
compound by orange plastic fencing, fifteen wall tents house a Laotian
military delegation led by a taciturn major. A few minutes later, the officer
strides in with a half-dozen assistants. He faces a linguist from Joint Task
Force-Full Accounting and commences a gruff monologue, punctuating his
speech with little karate chops. "There are many dialects of Lao," the
translator relays. "Without official help, you could be misunderstood. The
locals could be misunderstood." Therefore, we Americans are never to
communicate with the locals without first consulting a Laotian official. One
will never be far away, as we may go nowhere alone: We cannot take off in a
helicopter without a government escort, nor stray far from camp on foot. We
may not stop en route to our excavation sites. We may not take photographs
from the air.
The major wraps up his remarks by echoing Kevin Smith on
safety. To ensure that we're kept from harm, he adds, the People's
Democratic Republic has supplied Ban Alang with eighteen sentries armed
with AK-47 assault rifles. "At night, the guards are on constant patrol," he
says, "so you don't have to worry about things." He smiles. Smith stands,
thanks the major, then holds up a hand. "This is important," he says. "This is
not a sprint, people. This is a marathon. Day three, you're full of vim and
vigor, and you can't wait to get out there because it's something new. By day
twenty-one, it's starting to get pretty old.
"You don't want to be the guy on day twenty-three who for twenty-
two days straight has screened nothing but sterile soil and wishes he were
anybody else, any place else — and who isn't paying attention when that
piece of bone turns up.
"Remember," Smith says, pointing at us, "that you are here to
send home a missing American who fought right where you stand. Whose
family has waited for answers all these years. Remember why you're here."

Copyright © 2003 by Earl Swift. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Company.