Vanished (10 page)

Scannon felt the chill of death wash through him again, the same sensation he had first experienced at the Dixon wing. He and Lambert whispered quickly in the darkness, deciding not to touch another thing. They hurried outside and back to the boat, speeding off toward Koror, where they passed along the coordinates of the quarry to local preservationists.

As Scannon returned to California, he was filled again with a feeling of defeat. However intriguing the Yapese money had been, however beautiful the islands, he had gone for the Arnett plane and he now felt farther away than ever. In his first solo trip, he had found two B-24s; now, he’d made two more trips and found none. Now, he knew how impossible the task would be: it was impossible to search the channel alone, and just as impossible with the wrong team. Of the six team members he’d brought along, only the Lamberts had the right skills for the task, and even they found the channel dreary and dull. Of course they did. The channel was dull, but to Scannon it was all that mattered. How could he ever hope to find a team who felt the same way, who were willing to fly halfway around the world to one of the most beautiful underwater meccas on the planet, and then spend the whole time mucking around in the murky waters of a shipping channel?

All he knew for sure was that he hadn’t found that team yet. “We clearly weren’t productive in ninety-six,” he said. “It was a feeble attempt to put together a team.
I learned from ninety-six
what not to do.”

—

S
CANNON TOOK A YEAR OFF.
Then he took another. Without a team, he had no plan, and without a plan, no reason to go back. Yet the rest of his life seemed to be drained of purpose without the islands. He felt restless, adrift; he tried to re-immerse himself at work, but work was no longer enough. The intricate puzzles of biotechnology still captivated part of his
imagination, but now there was another part, one that longed for the physical mystery of the islands and the plunge into the unknown.

One day, without telling Susan or anyone, he drove up to the Yolo County Airport in Davis, California, and signed up for a tandem skydive at a company called SkyDance. As the plane climbed to ten thousand feet and the door cracked open, Scannon flashed back to his flight with Spike Nasmyth over Toachel Mid, and he took a deep breath and dove into the battering void, the instructor at his back as he streaked down, his mind as clear as the cloudless sky. A few days later, he jumped again. Then he was jumping all the time. In the space of only a few months, he racked up more than one hundred skydives, and began training for a high-altitude jump from thirty thousand feet: he spent three days in a hypobaric system at Beale Air Force Base until his blood was accustomed to the same hypoxic levels as a climber halfway up Mount Everest; then he climbed aboard the tiny plane, rising through the jet stream and leaping into air so thin that it didn’t even ripple his clothing. But with each jump, Scannon felt his interest waning. It wasn’t that skydiving was no longer fun—every time he stepped through the door of a plane, he felt the same terrifying rush of adrenaline—but he no longer doubted that he could do it, and without the doubt, it was no longer an interior journey. “Then it just wasn’t satisfying,” he said. “
It was skydiving for the sake of skydiving
.”

Finally, in the summer of 1998, after two years off the islands, Scannon pulled his old sketchbook down from the shelf. He flipped through the pages, remembering all the hopes and discoveries and the days of thwarted plans, the business cards taped into the margins, the ideas jotted on yellow stickies. It had been five years since his first trip, and the book was nearly full. He could close it, and leave the last five pages blank, or he could return to the islands and fill some unknown number of books in an endless search of the Arnett channel.

Scannon bought another book. It was identical to the first.
He cracked open the front
and wrote “Vol. 2” on the inside cover. Then he called the Lamberts and Dan Bailey, and they agreed to go back with him.

For six days in 1999, they trolled Toachel Mid, dragging a side-scan sonar device and staring blankly at the monitor. Each time they got a ping, they splashed in for a closer look, but as the week groaned by in driving wind and rain, they came up empty. In their downtime, at restaurants and bars, they chatted with other divers. Nearly everyone who dove the islands knew of some unidentified wreck, and they began to jot down directions and coordinates. After a few hours on the channel each morning, they would follow those directions, wading through mangroves or drifting through shallow water until they came upon fragments of metal. On the western edge of the barrier reef, they found pieces of a small airplane that looked like it could be a Marine Corsair; in a bay on the western coast of Babeldaob, they came across the remnants of another; and on the southern tip of the islands, they found a Navy Avenger. By the time they went home, they were no closer to Arnett, but they faced a world of new possibility: there were dozens of small American planes yet to discover. Scannon knew less about them, but he resolved to learn everything he could. He had started with a search for three airplanes; now he would search for hundreds.

By the time he got the call from
Parade
magazine in the spring of 2000, he was planning his sixth trip to the islands, and he’d put together a long list of Avengers and Corsairs he hoped to find. He regaled the
Parade
reporter with the story of his first mission with Lambert and Bailey, described their discovery of the Bush trawler, and explained how he’d gone to find Dixon and Custer. He told her about his return with Lambert and Bailey a few months earlier, finding Avengers and Corsairs, and his plan to find more on the expedition to come.

He left out the Arnett plane. It was his great white whale.

When the article appeared on Memorial Day weekend, Scannon bought a copy of the magazine and studied the opening photo. The man in the picture beside the vintage bomber with the rope spooled over his shoulder was almost unrecognizable as the same man pictured on his ID tag from Maxwell Air Force Base just a few years earlier. His hair and
beard were graying, but something else had changed as well. His eyes were more alive and focused, his posture more assured. He looked as different as he felt. It was as if he had found another body on the islands.

In the days to come, as calls began flooding the Xoma switchboard, Scannon sorted through a stack of blue “Phone Memo” messages. He saw the names of veterans, families, and historians, all calling with questions and clues. One of the memos said, “Corsair is his baby.” Another said, “Bloody Nose Ridge.” A third said, “Survivor of Bataan.”

And one said simply, “Doyle.”

—

F
OR
S
CANNON, THE
P
ARADE
ARTICLE
marked a turning point in several ways. It was a reminder, first, that his fascination with the air campaign was not a lone obsession. After years of scouring histories for any glancing reference to the Long Rangers, he was suddenly inundated with calls from other history buffs who shared his frustration with the comparatively thin record.

But he also discovered that for families of the missing the oversight was far more personal. To the sons and daughters of the disappeared, the wounds of loss remained fresh, and the lack of answers about what happened to a father, brother, or son was only deepened by a dearth of information about the war he fought. “That was the biggest surprise,” Scannon said. “I wasn’t sure how many families even
cared
anymore, but when you talk with them, the first thing you find out is that the later generations care even more—it’s like
there’s an empty chair at the dinner table
all their lives.”

To someone outside the MIA community, this can be difficult to grasp. The special grief of the MIA family is little understood, and only a handful of researchers have ever focused on the issue. One of the first to do so, in the early 1970s, was a student at the University of Wisconsin named Pauline Boss. A doctoral candidate in family studies, Boss was interested in the way that grief can be heightened by uncertainty, and she
was beginning to develop a concept that she would eventually label “ambiguous loss.” Whether it’s the sudden disappearance of a child or the slow erasure of a parent by dementia, the grief process is disrupted because so much of grieving depends on the knowledge and acceptance of what has happened.

When Boss presented her early ideas on ambiguous loss to a conference on family relations in 1973, she was approached by two social scientists who worked with military families. Edna Hunter-King and Ham McCubbin had been counseling the families of missing men and prisoners from the Vietnam War, and they recognized the signs of ambiguous loss in the MIA community. If Boss wanted to focus her dissertation on the military experience, they told her, they could put her in touch with MIA families. “They said, ‘
We have data on this, but no theory
,’” Boss recalled, “‘and you have a theory with no data.’”

In the decades to follow, Boss, Hunter-King, and McCubbin would develop a small literature on MIA grief. What distinguished the missing soldier from other combat losses, they found, was that the family was deprived not only of a son, but of a clear explanation for his loss. Without knowing where the man died, or how, they faced a story with no ending, and their inconsolable grief had as much to do with narrative as with death. “When you have someone missing, it does something to the human psyche,” Boss said. “It’s not logical. It’s not natural. There are no rituals for it. The rest of the community doesn’t know what to do. And grief therapy doesn’t work. They don’t have closure, and they never will.”

Boss was also intrigued by the way MIA grief passed through families. Like Scannon, she noticed that in many cases, a daughter, son, or grandchild would become fixated on the loss of a man they had never known. By 1998, Boss and Hunter-King had documented so many MIA families in which the grief carried into a second or third generation, that they were invited to draft a new chapter for the clinical handbook of multigenerational trauma, alongside entries on the effects of slavery, nuclear annihilation, and the Holocaust.

“
Unlike the Holocaust
,” Hunter-King wrote in the manual, “mothers of MIA children were not suddenly uprooted from their homes and deprived of their possessions, countries, and cultures. They did not lose parents, siblings, and husbands to programmed incineration. They were not subjected to incarceration, underfed, and abused, as were Holocaust victims. . . . On the other hand, most children of Holocaust survivors have not waited for over a quarter of a century in a state of ambiguous grieving, wondering whether their parent is dead or alive, as children of MIAs have done. Both groups, however, have perceived the conspiracy of silence between survivors and society, and between survivors and their children. . . . For most of these MIA adult children, unless they are convinced that the fullest possible accounting has been made, and/or unless the father’s remains are located, adequately identified, and returned to the family, their prolonged, ambiguous grieving will continue indefinitely.”

Even as Boss, Hunter-King, and McCubbin began to document MIA grief, their emphasis on Vietnam left out the majority of MIA families. Over the past century, some eighty-three thousand service members have been listed as missing, of whom seventy-three thousand disappeared in World War II, and forty-seven thousand in the Pacific theater alone. To put it another way, the number of men who disappeared in the war against Japan makes up more than half of all missing service members, and is nearly the same as the total number of combat deaths in Vietnam. Of course, this is partly a reflection of the difference in scale between those wars, but it also calls forward the special challenge of the Pacific theater. The same watery expanses that made the B-24 essential would later make the task of finding a lost crew nearly impossible.

It may be tempting to imagine that for the MIA families of World War II, the grief and confusion were somehow less acute than for Vietnam families, and that the men and women of the “greatest generation” were imbued with a special storehouse of stoicism that softened the agony of loss. But this is a modern myth. At the military’s MIA recovery office in Hawaii, specialists who work with families of the missing say that the
lingering pain from World War II is as potent as any other war. This is a point made clear in the unit’s main research room, where the words of a letter sent to the Army flash against a blood-red screen: “If those bodies or bones aren’t recovered or returned home, I hope all 19 boys haunt you nite and day—until you die.” The letter was written in 1947.

By the time the article on Pat Scannon appeared in
Parade
magazine, the Pacific war was half a century past, yet Scannon continued to receive a deluge of calls through summer and into the fall—nieces, grandsons, great-nephews, cousins, and daughters all searching for the final chapter of a family story.

When Scannon spoke with Nancy and Tommy Doyle, he could hear the same longing in their voices. Though the Doyles did not mention the rumors in Tommy’s family, they offered to meet with Scannon for a longer conversation at the next reunion of the Long Rangers, which was scheduled for San Antonio that fall. It would be Scannon’s last stop in the United States before leaving on yet another journey to Palau.

At the reunion, Scannon and the Doyles found each other and slipped into a side room. They sat down at a small table beside a model of a B-24. On the wall, a reunion organizer had propped up a poster-sized map of the South Pacific, marked with long red lines to show the movement of the Long Rangers. Scannon opened his briefcase and laid a stack of folders on the table.

“This is everything I have on your father’s plane,” he said, passing the folder to Tommy. For the next two hours, they pored over mission reports and photos. Scannon walked over to the model plane and explained the crew positions; he stood before the map and described the two-column strategy of the war, and the distinctive position of the Long Rangers, flying in support of both MacArthur and Nimitz. Periodically, Tommy or Nancy would interject with questions, but mostly they listened in wonder.