Vanished (15 page)

Something about the skydivers resonated with Scannon in a familiar way. Like the veterans of the Long Rangers, they were disciplined in the sky, with a clear chain of command, while on the ground they eased into an egalitarian ethos born of shared experience. “I don’t care
if you skydive a thousand jumps
or twenty,” Scannon said. “Everybody that I ever saw go into the plane had an abiding respect for everybody else. There are rich people who do it, there are people who save every penny they can get to do it, young people, old people, professionals, military, and yet you carry this respect for every other person that puts a chute on their back.”

As Scannon returned from his meeting with Belcher on Police Hill, he was beginning to realize two things. The first was that skydivers like Powers, O’Brien, and Major were uniquely qualified to help with his search. Like the Lamberts, they had traveled the world and were accustomed to rugged conditions. They were comfortable with a high level of risk, and used to working together under pressure. Their experience in aerial formations was also surprisingly adaptable to the water—the best way to
conduct a grid search in the channel was to canvass the seafloor in a linked formation. Finally, many of the skydivers had learned to jump while serving in the military. They had a bone-deep respect for the missing men.

The other thing Scannon was beginning to realize was that he needed a better organization. If he wanted the recovery lab to see him as a partner, he would need to make his work more palatable to the military command. That meant giving it a name and a stated mission, something that could be written down to show that it wasn’t just one man’s quixotic obsession. Over the next several months, Scannon began to craft a formal identity for the search. He came up with a name: the BentProp Project. He designed a logo of a battered propeller superimposed above blue and red stripes. He found out where military units printed their challenge coins, and produced one with the BentProp logo on the front. On the back, he printed a line from the Laurence Binyon poem “For the Fallen”: “At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them.”

Next, Scannon decided to name his expeditions. A journey to the islands would no longer be “a journey.” It was a “PMAN,” short for Palau-Marines-Army-Navy, and he gave each PMAN a Roman numeral. He backdated the first to 1999, so it was PMAN-I. That made the trip to Police Hill with Belcher PMAN-III. Then Scannon began to change the way he kept records. When he reached the last page of his fourth artist’s notebook in 2002, he didn’t buy another. Instead, he bought a small yellow notepad with waterproof pages, which he could stuff in his pocket and bring into the field to fill with diagrams and coordinates. The lyrical reflections that wafted through the huge white pages of his journal disappeared. There would be no more long descriptions of the rain on Iberor, no thoughtful contemplations of the sunset on the golf course overlooking the southern bay. On the small, lined pages of the yellow pads, he assigned formal positions to the friends who joined him. As more skydivers came along in 2002 and 2003, he gave them titles like “Dive Safety Officer” and “Team Navigator” and “Military Liaison.”

Watching the BentProp Project emerge, the Lamberts rolled their eyes. They found the stiff formality amusing at best. In less charitable moments, they would say that it was pretentious and unnecessary. The shift from an ad hoc labor of love to a routinized organization felt awkward and stiff, and they were deeply skeptical of all the skydivers showing up. On their own recent missions with Scannon, they had been forced to insist that he take days off, and relax a little, and enjoy the islands. But the skydivers were willing to drill down with Scannon day after day, and it seemed to the Lamberts as if the whole endeavor was becoming uncomfortably militarized. It was as if, in his quest to find the missing men, Scannon had discovered a new side of himself.

In fact, it was just the opposite.

—

S
CANNON’S NEW CONNECTION
with the military emerged from a long and conflicted past. He had spent most of his life trying to get away from the US Army, and it was only with reluctance that he now turned back. Born in 1947, he was a product of the war himself. His father, Tony Scannon, had been a captain in Europe, who fought a line through France and then worked for General George Patton in postwar Germany. His mother, Nora Esterházy, came from the other side: born in Romania and raised in Czechoslovakia, she worked for the Nazis during the war.

For Nora, the job was not a choice. As a teenager in eastern Europe, she watched the Nazi ascent with natural suspicion: her family lived in Bratislava, just a short train ride from Vienna, where Hitler’s arrival in 1938 brought cheering crowds to the Heldenplatz—but
Nora’s family had sufficient money
and social standing to be wary of any change. She was a well-educated young woman, fluent in German, Hungarian, English, Czech, and Slovak, and she was even proficient in Latin. When the German consulate instructed her to help their embassy with translation, Nora made the journey each morning past barbed wire to transcribe documents in a windowless room. At night, she listened to her parents rail
against the Nazis she was helping—and on the streets of the neighborhood, she found a small community of teens who groused about the Germans. When some of those friends drifted into the Czech resistance, forming a link to the underground network that stretched across Europe, Nora began to feed them information from the consulate. Anytime she translated a document that seemed important, she would carbon an extra copy and slip it into her purse. Then, to avoid being frisked on the way out, she would flirt with an embassy officer until he offered her a ride home. “I don’t know exactly how that relationship worked,” Scannon said with a bemused smile. “She never went into detail, and I sure didn’t ask.”

For Nora, the small subterfuge was an act of faith as much as daring. Though she would eventually pass along more than a dozen documents, she never knew how far they made it, or if they went anywhere at all. She would later confess to her daughter, Harriet, that the only file she could remember described her homeland, Romania, and its vast oil refineries at Ploesti.

In 1943, Nora convinced the German government to let her move to Leipzig and enroll in medical school. But just as classes began, so did the American bombardment. She spent as many days hiding in a bunker as she did in class, listening as American bombers turned the city into one of the most devastated in Europe. Years later, at her condominium in Florida, she would surprise her children by jumping from a chair and cowering on the floor as a vintage B-24 bomber passed overhead.

By the time Nora met Tony Scannon, they were both living in postwar Germany. Nora had brought her parents in a harrowing journey by train, and Tony had a job organizing performances by visiting stars like Roy Rogers. It was a world apart from where each had been a year before—Nora ducking bombs in Leipzig, while Tony fought through the Ardennes—but they found themselves dancing together at the parties Tony arranged.

It was
still illegal for a US soldier
to marry a European bride; the abundance of American men in the ruined cities of Europe was a social
tinderbox that the Army was not eager to ignite. Brothels abounded on the streets and dalliances were commonplace, but it would be another year before marriage was formally allowed.

Somehow, Tony and Nora escaped those rules. The story they passed down to their children was that Tony’s boss, General Patton, approved the union shortly before his death in December 1945, and lent the couple a Mercedes that had once belonged to Hermann Göring for the reception.
Whether or not that story
was exactly right, the Scannons did marry in Germany before Patton’s death, and afterward they left Europe to live near Tony’s birthplace in Georgia.

The move was hard on Nora. Hostility toward European refugees was fierce in the rural South, and as she gave birth to three children in four years—Pat in 1947, Harriet in 1948, and Mike in 1950—the pressure of living in a hostile, alien environment proved too much. When Tony deployed to Korea in 1951, Nora filed for divorce. Two years later, she met another Army officer and tried again.

For the Scannon kids, Harry Walterhouse would prove a different kind of paternal figure. Like Tony Scannon, he was a lieutenant colonel, but where Tony was strict and distant with the children, Walterhouse was warm and attentive; even as a soldier, he was less a warrior than an intellectual, interested in the role that military force could play in postwar development. By the time the Scannon children entered adolescence, his theories on what is now called nation-building had become early benchmarks of the field. In particular, a small, dense book entitled
A Time to Build
, which described the history of “military civic action” from ancient Rome to modern Africa, would be
a staple of scholarly studies
for decades to come. When the opportunity arose for Walterhouse to spend four years in postwar Germany, he and Nora settled into a large house near Nuremberg.

Like rural Georgia, small-town Germany was still laced with postwar hostilities, and Nora encouraged the kids to stay close to home. They spent most days playing in the forest adjacent to the house, and to keep
them occupied, Nora embraced their curiosity. When Mike, at age six, showed an interest in biology, she brought home dead frogs and birds to dissect, using her medical school background to tease apart the musculature in an impromptu biology lesson. “They were always cutting something up,” Scannon said. “It was gross.”

Pat’s interest was chemistry, and Nora brought home liquids, powders, and booklets of experiments. When he finished the written recipes, he would mix concoctions of his own. “Mostly I just burned a lot of things,” he said. “I always wanted to make a big explosion.”

There was no television in the house, so in the evenings they listened to military broadcasts on the radio or made up stories of their own. Years later, the Scannon kids would look back on their years in Germany as some of the best in their lives, which made the return to the United States all the more difficult. In 1962, Nora and Harry Walterhouse split, and Nora sank into a depression. She sent the children to live with their father, who was back from Korea and living in Georgia with a wife and two daughters.

Tony Scannon was forty-nine years old with a lifetime commanding men, but he had little idea what to do with young kids. He turned to the tools he knew. There were inspections on Saturday morning, harsh penalties for mistakes, and consequences for any hint of insubordination. Even today, the Scannon kids wince at the memory. “
There wasn’t a lot of joy
in the house,” Harriet Scannon said.

For Pat, school became an escape. He threw himself into his studies, finding in academic success a solace from the vagaries of life. At sixteen, he graduated from high school and took a year of classes at Augusta College to burnish his résumé before applying to universities. His first choice was Georgia Tech, which had a stellar chemistry program, but at Tony Scannon’s insistence, he also sent an application to West Point. Then Tony pulled strings at the military academy, and intercepted the letter of acceptance from Georgia. In the fall of 1967, Scannon drove to New York to attend the only option he believed he had.

Today, West Point is widely celebrated as an academic force, but during the turmoil of the Vietnam years it was somewhat less renowned. Scannon felt listless. His mind disengaged. By the end of his first semester, he was ready to transfer out, but he was terrified that his father would think he’d given up. He decided to finish his freshman year and attend yearling summer camp, including the notorious Recondo week, before announcing plans to drop out.

He finished his undergraduate degree at the University of Georgia, and drove his Mercury Cougar west to begin a doctoral program in chemistry at UC Berkeley. It was 1971. The Bay Area was a notorious cacophony of drugs and protest, but Scannon passed through oblivious. At a party one night, he was surprised to find that a brownie was spiked with marijuana; it would be the only drug experience of his life. Instead, he chased the doctorate at breakneck speed, finishing his coursework in three years and writing his dissertation in two months. Years later, when he gave the commencement speech at Berkeley, he would be introduced as the only person ever to receive a chemistry doctorate in three years. But as he was walking across campus a few months before graduation, he experienced a sensation that he would later describe as an epiphany. “I was literally halfway through a step,” he said, “when I realized that I didn’t want to become a chemist. I wanted to become a doctor.”

Scannon collected his PhD and enrolled in medical school. By the time he graduated in 1976, he was twenty-nine years old, with an MD, a PhD, and a debt to the military still hanging over his head from West Point. He decided to complete his military service with a residency at the Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco, where he met a radiologist named Hugh Cregg, whose son was emerging as a popular singer with the stage name Huey Lewis. Cregg was looking for a young partner to join his practice, and he offered to bring Scannon in. Scannon by then was married to his girlfriend from Berkeley, and their daughter, Nell, was three years old, but he declined the offer, telling Cregg that he wanted to start a company of his own. He found financial backers, including
technology magnate David Packard, and set out to build a company that would combine his interests in chemistry and medicine. It would be a few years before someone told him that what he was doing was called “biotech.”

By the time Scannon connected with Chip Lambert and made his first trip to Palau, he’d spent more than a decade of his life at Xoma. His colleagues had no inkling of his military background, his studies at West Point, or the deep influence those experiences would have on his life. But as Scannon began making journeys to Palau, he realized that his interest in the missing men was linked to his past. It was driven by a sense of duty and the need to sacrifice as his parents had, by a feeling of awe at his father’s drive through the Ardennes, and his mother’s courage in a Nazi consulate, and his stepfather’s unwavering faith in the benevolent potential of military might.