Leave No Man Behind

LEAVE NO MAN BEHIND
Since World War I, 88,000 Americans have disappeared at war, never to be seen again. But our government has never stopped trying to find them. This is the story of one search—for a B-24 bomber shot down over the tiny island nation of Palau in September 1944—and the extraordinary effort to bring those bodies home.
For Emery, the fear had become his own. He didn’t want to tell the Doyles he had found nothing. He would return to Palau in 2008.
*****
sitting at the edge of the barge this January, Emery looked tense, his face drawn and tight. It had been four days since the team’s arrival, and the barge was finally ready. Each of the container-shipping boxes was positioned in a discrete spot, dividing the deck into a series of interconnected rooms: one for medical equipment, one for fins and masks, one for tanks of air, one for communications equipment, and the room where Eric Emery sat now, surrounded by diving helmets and massive air hoses, staring into the water.
“Bring it in,” Mitroka shouted, and Emery stood to address the men.
“Before I left, I got an e-mail,” he said, careful not to mention the Doyles by name. “I’m going to read part of it to you, so you understand what you’re doing here. This is from a football coach whose father was on this plane.” He unfolded a sheet of paper and began reading. “Eric, looks like this is going to be the year that you will finish the excavation. Whatever we find out, we will always be grateful to you. Of course, our first concern is for your safety and for that of your team of divers. You are, and will continue to be, in our thoughts and prayers. Please give our best to your team. Tell your parents that we are thankful to them for raising such fine men.”
As Emery refolded the paper, the deck was hushed.
“Okay,” Atherton shouted, breaking the spell. “Let’s bring these boys home.”
“HOO YAH!”
Within minutes, the barge was a hive of motion. Divers splashed into the water, -descending to the wreck and using six-inch-diameter vacuum hoses to fill giant baskets with sediment from the wreck. As each basket filled, it was hoisted onto the deck by a foot-foot crane parked in the middle, and then the lid was lifted and a dozen divers gathered, loading two-gallon buckets with the silt and sand, then hauling them over to the screening station where they could be analyzed. With the system humming—baskets rising, emptying, and descending again—I found myself standing on the edge of the barge, staring into the turquoise water and struggling to make out the activity below. But the tide was moving, churning up clouds of debris, and I could see only a few feet.
After a while, I was joined by the team’s physician, Andy Baldwin. I had spent the first days of the trip slightly wary of Baldwin, for no other reason than that he had just wrapped a season as The Bachelor on ABC, which seemed a dubious distinction. But I had come to admire him in spite of it. He was the most senior officer on the boat (ahead of Mitroka by a hair) but also possibly the hardest working—constantly volunteering to push a broom or lift something heavy. Over the next few weeks, despite being the mission’s doctor, he would log more hours underwater than any other man, and in his free time, he visited local villages, providing free medical care. He was also a competitive athlete, who followed eleven-hour workdays with long runs through the islands and had completed eight Ironman triathlons. Now, as we stared into the water, I complained to Baldwin that it was frustrating not to be able to see the wreck, since JPAC rules forbid civilian diving. Baldwin shot me a mischievous look. “I can get you down there,” he said.

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As we fitted ourselves into masks and fins, he explained the basics of free diving: We would swim over to the wreck, fill our lungs, and plunge down, kicking as far and as fast as we could. The only risk, he explained—aside from inhaling water—was something called “shallow-water blackout,” a phenomenon he made every effort to explain but which I was too jittery to comprehend. I nodded and dove into the water, struggling to remind myself that Baldwin was an actual doctor, and didn’t merely play one on TV.
We swam out from the barge, and the difference between our abilities was obvious. The second we arrived in the correct spot, Baldwin grabbed a breath and shot down while I gasped on the surface, winded from the swim. When my breath returned, I began making stabs into the water. Each time, I felt confident at first, plunging down into the chalky blue, then less confident as the pressure increased, then not very confident at all as I panicked and raced back to the surface. Finally, resigning myself to the possibility of shallow-water whateveritwas, I took one last breath and forced myself down, surging deeper and deeper into the void until finally, like a shade lifting from a window, the water opened before me and the divers appeared. I looked around and saw Baldwin nearby, floating calmly upside down.
As I gazed over the site, the wreck was unmistakable—massive mangled chunks of metal overgrown with coral and dancing with fish The coral was like an underwater -mountain, with a huge propeller at the base and the divers maybe a third of the way up, hunched over their vacuum hoses, using one hand to brace the tube, the other to sweep debris inside. It was like seeing astronauts on the moon, taking soil samples. Behind them, the tentacles of their hoses disappeared into the distance, filling baskets that would be lifted by the massive crane to the top of the barge, but here, in the fluttering streams of sunlight and the gnarled wreckage of the ’453, those baskets and the crane were a world away. Here, we were trapped in a place without time, under the shadow of the hulking warplane. Here were the men of Babes in Arms, falling from the sky and through the ocean, to rest in this spot; here were their lives, their dreams—not ended, but paused.
When I couldn’t stay under any longer, my lungs surging involuntarily, I shot to the surface and looked for Baldwin. A minute later, he surfaced, grinning. “I found the tail,” he said. “It’s a lot deeper, but you can try if you want.” I didn’t, but I nodded anyway, and we paddled a few yards, then dove again, to forty feet, then fifty, then sixty, with rays of sun slicing through the darkening waters until the veil lifted once again and the enormous tube of fuselage appeared, shimmering on the sand below, with a rectangular opening on its side: the waist gunner’s door. In a flash, I pictured Jimmie there, leaning into a .50-cal and spitting rounds at the man who’d shot him, but this wasn’t Jimmie’s gun position. He was in the tail turret.

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Or was he?
Back on the barge less than twenty minutes later, I was just drying off and trying to process the sight when a shout rose from the screening station. I hurried over and saw a diver standing by one of the baskets with a bone. It was ten inches long and fat at both ends. When Baldwin arrived, he took it with both hands and turned it over gently; then he pressed it against his own forearm. “It’s a right radius,” he said quietly. “You can recognize the triangular shape at the tuberosity—that’s the radial head. It’s what allows you to supinate and pronate your arm.” He turned the bone over again, and no one spoke, the initial excitement morphing into something different; each man, in his own mind, was drifting back to Emery’s letter, to the reality of what had happened in this place, in that awful moment, and for the first time, I imagined what it must have looked like: the sky above us lit up with artillery and the red fury of a burning plane screaming toward this spot from land, spiraling down as it fell, its left wing shorn off, a black streak streaming behind as it pounded into the water.
“This was somebody’s dad,” Baldwin said, still gazing at the bone. “I wonder if his ghost was waiting for us to find him.”
Over the next five weeks, the pile of bones would grow—pieces of rib, arm, leg, hip—each carefully removed by the divers, noted by the anthropologists, and returned to the lab in Hawaii for DNA analysis. Each sample would be matched with a surviving relative, and by summer or fall—with a little luck—the men of the ’453 would be identified.
But there was one discovery that wouldn’t take so long—something unearthed near the end of the mission, near the front of the plane, where nobody ever expected to find it. It was a single skeleton, almost whole, with a gold wedding ring…and Jimmie Doyle’s tags.
*****
the doyle house in West Texas is modest but cozy, with wall-to-wall beige carpeting and a large stone fireplace; around the main living room are paintings and photographs of their two children, Brandi and Casey, who served with the Marines in Iraq and is the spitting image of his grandfather Jimmie. When I visited a few weeks ago, Nancy, who is compact and pretty, brought out several plates of cookies, then invited me to a long coffee table where she had laid out a small collection of memorabilia. Tommy, who is tall, with a long face and a white crewcut, sat nearby in his easy chair, watching.

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“This was given to Tommy’s mother,” Nancy said, pointing to a folded American flag. “I don’t know when she got it or what for. She didn’t talk about it much.” Nancy turned to a small array of medals. “And that’s his Purple Heart, and these other medals Tommy’s mother had never gotten. After she passed away, we found letters from the government that said what medals he had earned, and there was a self-addressed envelope, but she’d never sent it back. It took us two years, but we got them.”
“Why do you think Tommy’s mother never got them?” I asked.
Tommy shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve discussed it a lot and never come to any conclusions.”
Nancy said quietly, “She never really believed he was gone.”
As we began to discuss the rumors that Jimmie Doyle had survived, I realized that something was off: We were speaking in different tenses. When I asked whether they had believed the stories, they responded in ways that suggested they still did—or anyway, might. It took several minutes to figure out what was happening, but finally I asked, “Have you talked to JPAC about what they found on this trip?” and Nancy said, “Johnie told us they expected to have news very soon.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I said. Then I blurted out, “They found Jimmie’s tags.”
Nancy gasped. Her face turned white, and she grabbed her cheeks, rocking forward on the sofa. “You’re the first one who’s told us,” she whispered.
Tommy sat rigid in his seat, then his face crumpled, and the tears began to fall. “If they hadn’t found him,” he said after a while, “after they found everybody else, I would have spent the rest of my life thinking he’d left us.” He wiped an eye with his big hand and said, “What I want to know is: What did I do to deserve all this? There’s no way to express our thanks to all these people, like Pat Scannon and Eric Emery and Johnie Webb, all the divers and everybody else. Why do I get to have all these people working so hard, making sacrifices just so that I have an answer?”
“You made a pretty big sacrifice, too,” I offered.
Tommy Doyle shook his head. “No,” he said. “There are lots of people just like me. So many.” He looked me in the eye. “Why am I the lucky one?”To learn more about The BentProp Project, click here.