Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (31 page)

Now comes the moment when the family is finally notified. The branch of service in which the man served sends its mortuary affairs officer, who is a funeral director, to visit the family and explain the findings and the reviews. At that time the family has the option of accepting the findings, or, if they so choose, having their own expert examine the remains and review the file. This almost never happens and, on those rare occasions when it has, the outside expert has never succeeded in finding evidence that would overthrow the recommended identification.

But even now the process isn’t quite finished. With the family’s concurrence, the files, with all of the reviews, including that of the family’s consultant (if they decided to hire one), goes to the Armed Forces Identification Review Board (AFIRB). AFIRB consists of officers in the various branches of service who hold the rank of 0–6 (that is, a colonel in the Army or Air Force, a captain in the Navy). Most of these officers have served in Southeast Asia under the same conditions as the men who were lost. They understand from their own experience what conditions were then, and are now, in that theater of war. If they agree with the recommendation, it then goes to the Graves Registration Office, for final approval.

The remains, which have stayed in the Hawaii laboratory all this time, are taken in flag-covered transfer cases from CILHI to the adjacent Hickam Field, where they are loaded onto military aircraft by an honor guard of the branch in which they served. They are then flown to a mortuary in the continental United States where they are placed in a casket with full uniform and appropriate decorations and insignia. The remains then go to the national cemetery or to a hometown cemetery, just as the next of kin wish.

We cannot work miracles, however. It is a fact that some remains stay in the L-shaped room adjacent to the laboratory for years, and a handful may never be identified. Every year additional records are sifted for comparison. There is always the hope that additional portions of remains will come in, or that some clue will jog an investigator’s memory, leading to a file on an unaccounted-for serviceman that turns out to be the correct one. But in these stubborn, residual cases, where the dental and skeletal evidence is sparse, the investigators face a formidable task. Some of these bones literally come from nowhere; we do not even have the name of the spot within Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia where they were unearthed. That information has been lost. Yet the bones are retained, year after year, and are often taken down and studied afresh, over and over again.

The task of identifying unaccounted-for remains at CILHI is immense and never ending. Alas, honesty compels me to admit that the laboratory did not always function as smoothly and professionally as it does today. As a congressional inquiry later revealed, some identifications made at CILHI were based on conclusions that were only inadequately backed up by evidence. I discovered this for myself when I visited CILHI as an outside expert in 1985. My involvement with the laboratory stemmed from a plane crash over Laos many years earlier, and from the persistence of one devoted widow who could not forget the loss of her husband.

Four days before Christmas, on December 21, 1972, an AC-130A gunship was shot down over Laos near a place called Pakse. The AC-130A was on a mission to attack North Vietnamese vehicles moving south along the Ho Chi Minh trail, which at that point wandered through supposedly neutral Laotian territory. The AC-130A is a formidable gunship, a modified Lockheed Hercules C-130 transport plane, which is still very much a part of America’s aerial armory. It has seen service in Somalia recently. Stuffed with computers and radar, carrying a crew normally numbering fifteen, bristling with cannons and machine guns with electronic firing pins, which blast bullets downward in a well-nigh solid stream of murderous metal, the craft is a slow-flying dreadnaught capable of immense, accurate destruction.

But on this day the plane was hit by antiaircraft fire from below and fuel began to flow into the fuselage, soaking the crew and the huge stores of ammunition aboard. A survivor later spoke of wading through this highly flammable fuel as it sloshed about inside the doomed aircraft. The pilot desperately steered his stricken plane toward Thailand and safety, but soon realized the situation was hopeless. Remaining at the controls, he gallantly ordered the other crew members to head for the rear, open ramp of the Hercules. That day there were sixteen men aboard the aircraft; the plane was carrying one extra crewman.

The other crew members were on their way aft, ready to parachute to safety, when the plane gave a jolt and spun out of control. In one cataclysmic second the fuel ignited and exploded. Two men were blown out of the rear of the craft and parachuted safely to the jungle below. There they were picked up and rescued by search and rescue aircraft and taken to safety in neighboring Thailand. They were the only survivors. It is believed that the other fourteen men, including the navigator, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Trammell Hart III, perished when the AC-130A plunged into the jungle at a high angle of impact and burned, its cargo of thousands of rounds of ammunition exploding in the fire.

A day or so later a human arm was found in the jungle by some local friendly forces and was returned to U.S. military personnel, where it was identified by fingerprints as one of the members of the crew. His body was thus accounted for at that time. The rest of the crew members were officially listed as “missing in action.”

In 1985, I received a telephone call from Lieutenant Colonel Hart’s widow. She told me that she was active in the League of Families, a support organization trying to resolve cases of relatives missing in action. Not content with the official account of the crash, this resolute, plucky woman had visited the crash site in Laos and gone over the ground herself. Not only that: she had actually picked up bone fragments from the surface and turned them over to American authorities. She told me that later a CILHI group had worked jointly with a team from Laos to excavate the crash site and recover the remains of the dead personnel, but she confided that she had no faith whatever in the CILHI laboratory or its personnel. At this point CILHI had not yet made any identifications of the Pakse remains, but even so Mrs. Hart was skeptical. She was not prepared to accept CILHI’s word when it came to her husband’s remains. She wanted independent confirmation. My name had been mentioned to her by a colleague in Colorado, Dr. Michael Charney, and she asked me for a second opinion. She wanted me to examine personally the remains said to be those of her husband.

I said I would. She asked how much I would charge. I said I would not charge anything to assist the family of a lost serviceman. Unfortunately, I had to go to China that summer to give a series of lectures on the identification of air crash victims. When I returned, I found out that CILHI had indeed identified one set of remains as Lieutenant Colonel Hart’s. Since I was unavailable, Mrs. Hart had gone to Dr. Charney, who performed the second examination.

Charney made no secret of his disagreement with the official army identification of Lieutenant Colonel Hart’s remains. In interviews given to the news media he accused CILHI of practicing “voodoo science” to identify these remains. The Pakse case received such wide attention that in December 1985 I received another telephone call, this time from one of the most distinguished figures in forensic anthropology, Dr. Ellis Kerley, a professor at the University of Maryland, whose reputation was legendary.

Kerley asked me if I would be interested in joining a three-man commission of anthropologists, which the United States Army had asked him to form, to visit and evaluate CILHI. I agreed but advised Kerley that, instead of having a third anthropologist, what we really needed was a forensic dentist. Teeth can be crucial in identifying human remains. Kerley then invited Dr. Lowell Levine, an internationally known forensic dentist from New York, and we all received invitational travel orders from the Army to visit the laboratory. Ellis was to write an unclassified written summary of our findings. And so we flew to Hawaii.

Science can be a cruel discipline sometimes, and the truth can cut deeply. Ellis Kerley found himself in a terrible position soon after arriving in Hawaii and entering the CILHI laboratory. He was being called upon to evaluate the work of one of his oldest friends, Tadao Furue, an honest and upright Japanese scientist with a remarkable history. Furue had been chosen as a kamikaze pilot in the closing days of World War II and only the quick end of the war after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had prevented him from climbing into his plane and immolating himself as a human bomb for his Emperor.

After the war Furue went to college in Tokyo and, while yet a student, was hired by a U.S. military laboratory in Japan to assist in the identification of American soldiers killed in combat. Some of the greatest names in forensic anthropology were active in this work, including my teacher, Tom McKern, as well as Mildred Trotter, the famous anatomist and human osteologist, and T. Dale Stewart, the curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, who had for years performed the analyses of human remains for the FBI and other governmental agencies. Kerley, too, had worked at the Tokyo laboratory during the Korean War. En route to Japan, aboard ship, Kerley met his future wife, Mary, who was traveling with the USO. When they were married in Japan, Tadao Furue had been Ellis’s best man.

Furue remained in Japan after the U. S. Army lab closed. From time to time his services were used by other mortuaries, whenever he was needed. In those days there was no central identification laboratory. In the early years of the Vietnam War all the identifications of dead U.S. soldiers were carried out in individual military mortuaries. It was only as the war wound down that a central identification laboratory was opened in Thailand. When that laboratory relocated in the 1970s to Honolulu, Furue was employed for the first time away from Japan as the anthropologist.

Now Ellis Kerley found himself in the delicate position of passing judgment on the work of the man who had stood up for him at his wedding. Ellis found the situation excruciating. He is one of the most gentle men you could ever hope to meet. I can picture him saying to a student who flubbed an examination: “Well, Mr. Smith, you
really
didn’t do as well as you
might
have on this examination and we are going to have to
ask
you to take the course over again.” He would never be so brutal as to say: “You flunked.” Ellis is the soul of discretion, a man who would bend over backward to spare people’s feelings.

The laboratory, when we visited it in 1985, was made up of two buildings. There was the administration building, a two-story cinder-block affair; and a one-story warehouse-like building next door, made of a corrugated material, probably asbestos, with a nicely finished interior. Furue had a large office in one corner that was separated from the laboratory floor by the x-ray room, whose unshielded walls housed the dental x-ray machine. This machine was the only radiographic facility in the laboratory.

All of the anthropological instruments in the laboratory were Fume’s. The entire reference library—mostly books in Japanese—belonged to him. The laboratory’s array of photographic equipment was so limited that, when Furue wanted to document specimens, he used his own camera, bought his own film and often had the film processed at his own expense. The pictures in the laboratory files therefore didn’t even legally belong to the government. They were Fume’s own personal property. There wasn’t even a hot-water heater in the building.

One end of the laboratory was divided off into a records room where all the medical records on the unaccounted for were housed. Also available there were condensed mortuary records on every serviceman and woman who had been killed in Southeast Asia and identified at the mortuaries that preceded CILHI.

We had only two and a half days in the laboratory so we had to work quickly. We naturally focused on the Pakse case as a kind of convenient benchmark, a recent example of the laboratory’s methods. This was, after all, the case that had aroused official concern because of the inquiries by Lieutenant Colonel Hart’s widow. As the hours passed and the three of us sat around the table looking at files and notebooks, a feeling of dread gradually took hold and spread among us. We were being pushed inexorably toward a painful conclusion: some of Fume’s identifications of the Pakse remains simply would not hold water.

At the beginning of the summer of 1985, CILHI had announced that every single one of the thirteen lost men had been identified from the bone and dental fragments gathered on site in Laos. All these remains would be returned to their families. The whole crew had been accounted for. Fume told us with pride that approximately 50,000 bone and tooth fragments had been recovered from the crash site. Those, along with the fragments Mrs. Hart had collected, had been analyzed by him with the help of his assistants. They had separated out all the fragments that might be used for identification. As we looked at his photographs, we began to see that many of the identifications were made on distressingly little evidence indeed, based on an examination of the scantiest of remains. Even when more complete skeletal remains were available, there were still some grave difficulties.