Vanished (25 page)

Tommy kicked his fins to get closer and Maldangesang gave him room. There was a rectangular opening on the top and Tommy recognized it as the waist gunner’s door. Johnny’s door. His dad’s best friend. The husband of the woman, Katherine, who’d come to live with Tommy and his mom after the crash. Johnny had always been a ghost to Tommy, like his father. Now, staring at the window and the machine-gun shells spilling onto the seafloor, he wondered if Johnny was near.

Emotions crashed through Tommy like cymbals. He reached out and touched the plane, then pushed his head through the opening. He peered down the long, shadowy interior to where the end of the fuselage plunged into the sand. The tail turret would be down there, just a few feet away. A strange sensation washed over him, and he realized that for the first time in sixty years, he might be close to his father. Sixty years of waiting, wondering, doubting, and in moments he dared not acknowledge, seething at the injustice of his father’s disappearance, and now he felt a wave of release. There was still no way to know if his daddy’s bones were there. They might be in a cave nearby, or the jungle, or a cemetery in California. But for the first time Tommy could remember, there was a chance that Jimmie was with him. He closed his eyes and held on to the plane and let the feeling overtake him.

—

A
S
T
OMMY AND
N
ANCY RETURNED
to Texas, Eric Emery was on his way to Palau. Four years of building the underwater program and it all came down to one plane. For Emery, it wasn’t that the plane itself had special meaning. In most respects, it was no different from any other wreck, and part of his job was to maintain critical distance. He hadn’t learned much about Arnett or his crew, their mission, or even the islands, and he’d never met Pat Scannon or the Doyles, and he didn’t expect to.

But the wreckage was underwater, and that made all the difference. It would finally allow him to test the underwater program, and in doing so, it marked a crossroads in his life, bringing together the disparate threads of a twenty-year journey: the early infatuation with scuba, the academic studies in history, the unexpected fusion of those interests in underwater archaeology, and the sense of purpose he felt on his first expedition to the Mount Independence bridge; then the loss of that feeling as he sank into the Andean lake, and the temptation to abandon his work; and finally, the renewed sense of purpose he felt at the lab, developing an underwater program to bring home men who had gone through a similar fate.

As Emery sped toward the islands on a C-17 transport filled with forensic specialists, ordnance disposal experts, and Navy divers, he felt the weight of the mission bearing down. All of the lab’s usual methods had to be adapted for water, but nothing required more adaptation than the team itself. A Navy deep-sea diver hit the water with a skill set that was unmatched in the world. Most of the divers around him were so physically fit that they looked like action figures, but that was only the surface. A Navy diver spent more time underwater than almost anyone alive. Day in and out, he lived there—fixing ships’ hulls and clearing channels and setting underwater communication lines. Some of them deployed with SEAL teams to augment combat missions; others helped ordnance units dismantle bombs in the Persian Gulf. Wherever he worked, a Navy diver could expect to spend hundreds of hours underwater, often at depths so
extreme that his body took weeks to recover. In the water, every 33 vertical feet added as much pressure as the atmosphere of the earth. At 66 feet, a man’s body was under three atmospheres of pressure. At 165 feet, he was under six. At 231 feet, eight. Yet in the Navy dive program, eight atmospheres was just a start. Some of the divers traveling with Emery had been to 800 feet of pressure, and at the Navy’s Experimental Diving Unit in Florida, a few had breached 2,000 feet—sixty atmospheres of pressure closing in.

To do his job on the bottom of the ocean, a diver sometimes had to spend days in a compression chamber. When the pressure was high enough, the chamber could be lowered from the deck of a ship and cracked open at the proper depth. The diver might spend hours there, working to repair a beacon or splice a communication line. Then it might be weeks more in the chamber to depressurize. Along the way, any problem he encountered—an air bubble lodging in his brain, gas boiling from his blood, or the dizzying effects of nitrogen narcosis—would throw his life in jeopardy. He couldn’t be sprung to the surface for treatment, and a doctor couldn’t be pressurized in time to save him. He was stuck in the darkness with only the other divers to help. Each time a diver’s fins hit the water, he faced an irreducible risk. Even in training, it was common for a man to succumb to a biological glitch and black out, only to be resuscitated on the deck of the pool by his friends. Over time, the divers developed an insular camaraderie, a closeness of necessity and mutual advantage that resembled the brotherhood of men at war.

Emery knew the divers on his team were stronger, faster, and more accustomed to the depths than he would ever be, but he also knew that they had been conditioned in one problematic way. They were trained to emphasize speed and power, to accomplish as much as possible on every dive. The more quickly a diver could wrench off a bolt, snap an old propeller, or move a rusty flange, the more valuable he was to the Navy. Speed and power were not just habits, they were essential to the job.

Archaeology was the opposite. It was tentative and cautious and by its very nature embraced the arc of time. A Neolithic vase embedded in the bottom of a Chinese lake could wait another century to be recovered—but it only took one careless instant to destroy the piece forever. To prepare a Navy diver for archaeological work involved more than a new set of tools; it meant trying to impart, in a few days of training, a new conceptual framework. “We’re trying to take these guys who are rewarded for speed, and put all these restrictions on them,” Emery said. “When you get down there and you’ve never done it before, you want to just go crazy. You want to dig everything up. And that’s like doing
brain surgery with a chain saw
.”

Luckily, the lead diver on the mission was among the most decorated in the Navy. Dave Gove was only thirty-three years old, but he was rated as a master diver, the highest distinction a diver could attain. To reach the rating, a man not only had to excel in the water. He also had to possess a variety of intangibles, like the ability to discern the strengths and abilities of the men around him, and to command their respect, loyalty, and subordination through the innate gift of leadership. In his fifteen-year Navy career, Gove had been honored with a litany of awards for exactly those talents, including the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal, three Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals, and seven Letters of Commendation for “excellence under pressure.” Four years earlier, he’d been named “
Sailor of the Year
” by the chief of naval operations in Washington, DC. He was the first Navy diver ever to receive the honor.

As Gove and the divers hauled their equipment to a large metal barge on Koror, then towed it to the crash site, Emery used a scuba tank to explore the wreckage. First he swam around the coral, trying to orient himself. Then he studied the positions of key pieces in the nose and cockpit along the western slope, before moving to the long tail slumped down the other side. It made sense to begin with the tail, he thought. It was a large, clearly defined space, and there might be skeletons inside.

The procedure Emery had developed for the operation was deliberately plodding. There would be no flash of insight, no moments of inspiration. The divers would simply divide the landscape into one-meter squares and excavate one square at a time. Working in pairs, they would descend to the site in hard-hat diving suits, with each diver carrying a large vacuum hose known as a Venturi dredge. The dredge would pump all the sand and debris into a large steel basket on the seafloor. When a basket was full, it could be lifted by a crane to the deck of the barge, where all the other divers would fill buckets of sediment and carry them to a screening station nearby. As they sifted through every grain in search of metal or bone, divers below would fill another basket.

As the first divers headed down, Emery took a seat behind a small desk inside a shipping container. There was a monitor on the desk, streaming a live feed from cameras mounted on the divers’ helmets, but the images were fuzzy and Emery strained his eyes to make out the details. It was frustrating to feel so removed from the site, but he wasn’t qualified to use hard-hat gear. The Navy certification process was so extreme that many recruits, fresh from competitive high school swimming programs, failed to get through. Emery was two decades older and hadn’t even tried. So he was stuck at the monitor, watching and waiting while other men worked his site.

When the first basket was full, the divers hooked metal cables to the corners and a crane operator raised it gently until, with a loud swish, it burst into the air, draining a brownish gray slurry of sediment and debris back into the water. Once the basket was safely resting on the deck, Emery signaled for the rest of the team to approach, all filling buckets of sand and mud to haul toward the screening station. Soon there was a shout. They’d found a boot. Then they found another. Then a zipper with fragments of cloth. Then a button. Then a quarter. Then a couple of pennies. Then another basket was rising to the surface with a .50 caliber machine gun inside. Emery studied the weapon and found pieces of coral growing near the trigger, and mixed in with the coral, human bone, as
though a man’s hand were still holding on. He placed each item in a bucket of clean salt water to protect it from the air, pacing between the monitor and the screening station as the divers worked their way down the tail. But when they reached the part buried in sand, Emery saw a change come over Dave Gove.

“We were having a great year,” Emery said later. “I knew we had remains. But when we got about three-quarters of the way through, the master diver came up to me and he said, ‘You know what? With all the sediment we’re taking from under this plane, I’m afraid she’s going to slip and pin somebody.’”

Emery winced and nodded. There was only one thing he could do. His own protocol forbade him to excavate a new square until this one was complete. But if the dig was destabilizing the plane, there was no way to move forward. He told Gove to bring up the dredges and prepare for the journey home. “It was frustrating,” Emery said, “but it was a question of safety. We couldn’t take any more sediment from the aft fuselage because that was actually holding the aircraft in place. So we had to stop the mission. I said, ‘Look, I need you to shift gears. We’ll finish processing all the artifacts and getting the archaeology side of the house closed down. What I need you to do is gather up all your guys and dive them one after another to take notes on this wreck—its position, what it’s in contact with, and what it would take to get it up and support it, so we can come in here at a later date and dig it out.”

Then Emery packed his belongings for the long flight to Hawaii, never imagining that it would be two years before he returned.

—

E
VERY DAY THE WORLD
seemed bigger to the Doyles. After a lifetime in Texas, they had been to the far side of the world, and now that they had, they began to travel more often. There was a network of MIA families that reached into every corner of the country, and they met periodically to share their stories and search for answers. For Tommy, the
discovery of other sons and daughters with a history like his own was an unexpected source of comfort. The more MIA families he met, the more clear it became that the strange story that haunted his family also haunted theirs. “
You go to these meetings
,” he said, “and everybody has a story like mine. You know, somehow the guy survived. He’s still going to come home. You hear that from people who lost somebody in the Pacific, in Europe, in Africa, all parts of the world. As soon as they start talking, there’s something along that line. It’s a mistake. It’s not right. There’s something funny about it. Every time.”

Even among the Big Stoop families, those stories crept in. There was Diane Goulding in New York, struggling with a lifelong suspicion that Ted was still alive. There was her younger brother, Paul, gripped by the same faith, but so embarrassed by it that he’d never told Diane. “You feel like it’s a juvenile thing to be fifty years old and still think your brother-in-law is stranded on some island,” he said. “You’re expecting somebody to say, ‘Are you stupid? He’s gone, and he’s never coming back.’ But I was well past my fiftieth birthday and I was still having recurring dreams. I would say
I probably had hundreds of dreams
over a fifty-year period.” The dreams were always the same. As a child, he had been the first to see Ted coming up the long driveway on his final visit home, and in the dream, he saw Ted there again, older now but still carrying the duffel bag on his shoulder. In an unpublished memoir, he recalled the trauma of the recurring dream. “
It would play over and over
,” he wrote, “and ause me to imagine that my brother-in-law was marooned on a deserted island in the South Pacific. As I grew, my theory remained steadfast. I hid my secret well, but in times of deep thought, I, approaching fifty years old, would see a smiling Ted walking up the road with his baggage. I never shared with anyone the unending recycling of a dream that had overtaken me decades before.”

In Charleston, West Virginia, Jack Arnett’s mother struggled with her own suspicions. Though she didn’t know that during the war Jack’s brother Marvin had flown over Palau to look for him, she, too, had
always believed that he was still alive. After the war, she and her husband, B.B., would relocate to Florida, where they kept a painting of Jack above the fireplace for the rest of their lives, and in the strangest moments, Dessie would look up at the painting and wonder what Jack looked like now. When she received a telegram from the War Department that still listed him as “Missing in Action,” she took the words as a hopeful sign, writing to Myrle Doyle, “I am thankful for that thread of hope. Do you still hope our boys are alive? I am sitting here by my window, looking through the darkness of the night to the stars overhead.
The darker the night, the brighter they shine
.” When Dessie saw a newsreel at the local movie theater, showing footage from a Japanese prison camp, she jumped from her seat and raced into the projection booth to demand that the operator rewind the film. One of the men in the footage, she was certain, was Jack. “
She believed he was alive
for the rest of her life,” a niece, Carolyn Arnett Rocchio, said. “She never really believed he was gone.”