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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.

By Wil S. Hylton

Photograph by Christopher Perez/U.S. Navy

May 2008

when tommy doyle’s mom died in 1992, Tommy inherited a big wooden trunk. It was about four feet long and two feet wide, and sitting on the floor of his ranch house in West Texas, it came up to his knee. Tommy could remember seeing that trunk all his life, but he couldn’t remember ever looking inside. There had always been something private in the way his mother regarded the trunk, so for a while, Tommy left it closed.

His wife, Nancy, was more curious, but she didn’t want to seem nosy. "I decided to let him open it in his own time," she said recently. "But it seemed like he never would." Nancy was patient. She waited weeks, then months, then a year. Finally, after about two years, she couldn’t wait any longer. "Is it okay to open your mother’s trunk?" she asked one night. And Tommy said, "Sure," so she did.

At first, when Nancy looked inside, she found mostly old blankets and sweaters, family photos, and a handmade overcoat, but down near the bottom, something else caught her eye. It was a large shoebox, worn at the edges and falling apart. When she lifted the lid, she almost stopped breathing.

Tommy had been just 15 months old when his father shipped off to World War II, and Jimmie Doyle hadn’t ever come back. Or anyway, that’s what Tommy’s mother had told them: His plane went down in the South Pacific, some patch of islands called Palau, and it wasn’t ever found. But Tommy had heard another story growing up, a story he wasn’t supposed to hear. As a child, he heard his uncles whispering: Jimmie was alive, they said. He’d come back a long time ago. He lived in California with a whole new family. He just didn’t care about Tommy anymore.

Tommy never believed that story. Mostly, he didn’t. But he wondered. He’d grown into a powerful man, tall and muscular, played football in college at Texas Tech, still coached the local high school team in Snyder. He was quiet and reticent, not prone to flights of imagination about the things he’d lost, but underneath, the hurt and suspicion coursed through his life. In fifty years, his mother had almost never spoken of his dad. She kept him close, like she couldn’t stand to share what little she had left, not with anyone, not even Tommy.

Now there was this shoebox.

When Nancy showed Tommy what was inside, hundreds of letters he had never seen in his dad’s loose cursive, Tommy walked out of the room. Later, he told Nancy that he couldn’t read them. Just seeing them, his chest got tight. So Nancy read the letters alone, one by one, curled up on the sofa when Tommy wasn’t around.

She was struck by how often Jimmie had written, filling four to eight pages almost every day. "Sure wish you could be with me," he wrote in May of 1944, just months before he disappeared. "If I loved you any more than I do, I would have to get another heart to hold all my love." In June: "I’m dreaming of the time when I can come home to you, and sleep on a really soft bed again, and where it gets a little cold once in awhile. So we can take Tommy to church and carnivals. We are going to get him a dog, just about his size. And I want to build him a swing in the apricot tree." In July: "Just holding your letters makes me feel so very much closer to you, and they are so sweet no one could help loving you even if they tried." In August: "I know this probably seems a little foolish to you, but at the oddest moments I see your quick smile and the way your hair looks when you let it loose, and I hear the tone of your voice. It isn’t the big things that seem so important now, but the thousands of little things you are always doing that have endeared you so terribly much to me. I know this war can’t last forever, and when it’s over and I get back home to you, we’ll make up for all this time we’re losing now."

At the end of August, the letters stopped.

And on September 1, Jimmie Doyle was gone.

Reading those letters got Nancy wondering. They were clearly written by a man who yearned for his family and was desperate to see his son again. So why had Myrle kept them secret from Tommy? And why did Tommy’s uncles say Jimmie had abandoned him? Why did they say they’d visited Jimmie in California? Had they told Tommy’s mom the same stories? Had she believed them? Had she tried to protect Tommy from the truth? To bury Jimmie in that trunk by the bed?

Nancy decided to investigate. Over the next few years, she would contact the Department of Veterans Affairs, the office of Military Personnel Records, even the local Army recruiter, searching for anything related to Jimmie Doyle. But there was almost nothing to find. The Army had no personnel records for Jimmie. No record of his crash. No record of who his crew had been. Not much more than his name in a file. All the rest, they said, had disappeared—probably burned in a fire in St. Louis.

And then one day—it was a Sunday, in fact, Memorial Day weekend 2000—Nancy saw an article in Parade magazine. Some doctor in California named Pat Scannon was searching for World War II planes in Palau. Nancy practically ran to the computer, looked him up, called his home in San Francisco.

"My name is Nancy Doyle," she said, "and my husband’s name is Tommy Doyle, and his father was Jimmie Doyle—"

Pat Scannon interrupted. "And his plane went down on September 1, 1944, and the tail number was 4273453, the pilot was Jack Arnett, the other crew members were Charles Goulding, John Moore, Leland Price…"

Nancy listened for several minutes while Scannon rattled off details she had never heard. When he paused, she whispered, "But how do you know all that?" And Pat Scannon said, "Because I’ve been searching for that plane for six years."

*****

the human instinct to bury the dead is as old as civilization itself, yet one group has traditionally been deprived of the honor: fallen American soldiers. Having made the greatest sacrifice of all, for the first 150 years of American life, many of our troops were denied the most basic thanks: their bodies abandoned on battlefields, stripped of valuables and left to rot, or jumbled into mass graves. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that the military began issuing dog tags, and it was another forty years after that—during World War II—before the government made any formal promise to bring home the men who wore them.

Today, despite a policy to "leave no man behind," the number of Americans still listed as missing in action since World War I stands at 88,000. To find them, the Pentagon has established a unit known as the Joint POW/MIA Account Command, or JPAC, with an annual budget of $52 million. Yet even this amount barely scratches the surface; working at a rate of one hundred recoveries per year, it may take centuries for JPAC to complete its mission—and that’s assuming the funding continues. Over the past decade, the unit’s budget has stagnated, not only because the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the military’s resources thin, but also—and more pointedly—because many Americans don’t believe the mission is worth a penny more. One popular Web site recently blasted the recovery work as "ancient history," suggesting that $52 million was particularly egregious "at a time when the economy sucks and the federal government is sucking the life out of everyone with taxes."

If that assessment seems dead-on to you, chances are you don’t have any missing soldiers in your family. Among survivors of the wartime disappeared, the sense of grief and loss is anything but "ancient"; in many cases, the wounds actually deepen with time, festering a generation later, sometimes two. This can be difficult for people outside the MIA community to grasp, but one way to gauge their collective grief is to consider the frequency with which MIA families construct what might be called "survival narratives"—elaborate conspiracies in which the missing soldier has, for convoluted reasons, remained hidden on purpose. What is striking about these stories, aside from their prevalence, is how unsoothing and discomforting they usually are. In order to create a more plausible scenario, many families are forced to concoct a narrative that stings nearly as much as death itself: the soldier abandoning his family for a pretty new wife, or suffering a horrific psychological meltdown, or being held and tortured in a secret dungeon. It is a testimony to the fierce desperation of the MIA survivor that, given a choice, so many prefer the torment of uncertainty to the fixity of death.

At JPAC, this is a phenomenon that hovers over every aspect of the unit’s work. When I visited their offices in Hawaii this year, I sat down with Johnie Webb, who has supervised parts of the operation since its founding in 1976 and now, in semiretirement, remains the principal liaison for family outreach. A large Vietnam veteran with sad, heavy eyes, Webb had filled his office with mementos of his travels for JPAC—colorful knickknacks from Vietnam, China, Cambodia, and Laos. But what he wanted to show me that day was a small, plain box at the corner of his desk.

"On the tough days, I look at this and remember what it’s all about," he said, removing a silver bracelet. "This was for a young NCO in the Special Forces during Vietnam who was lost in a helicopter crash. Over the years, I got to know his family very well. We became, I would say, friends. A very patriotic family. But I watched over the years as we searched for their son, and they began to lose some of their patriotism. I can remember the father telling me many, many times, ‘Johnie, I don’t want you to send me a bunch of bones. I gave the government my son. I expect you to give my son back to me.’ " Webb stopped and swallowed. He twirled the bracelet between his fingers, studying it as if for the first time, and it seemed clear that however much Johnie Webb believed in his work, he did not, strictly speaking, love it. "Shortly after we excavated the site for his son, I met the dad at a National League of Families meeting. I told him, ‘You know, you need to prepare yourself. We’re going to have some information for you in a short period of time.’ And again, he reminded me that he didn’t want any bones. He wanted his son back." Webb stopped again and cleared his throat. "Well, eventually we made the identification. There was a huge military funeral. A lot of politicians turned out. And after maybe three weeks, I received a packet in the mail. It had a very simple card with the POW/MIA logo on it and a note that said he wanted to thank me for all that we had done. He wrote, ‘To show my appreciation, I am sending the POW/MIA bracelet of my son that I have worn for the last 20 years.’ " Webb’s voice cracked, and he ended the story.

With six decades of distance, it can be tempting to imagine that the anguish of families was somehow less crippling during the Second World War, that the men and women of the "greatest generation" were imbued with a special storehouse of stoicism, and that the survival narratives we associate with Southeast Asia were as much a product of the Vietnam era as the Vietnam war—a time when trust in the government had reached a nadir and many families were disinclined to believe anything the military told them. In fact, this is mostly a modern fantasy. At the JPAC offices, I was reminded of this when I stopped to chat with one of the unit’s historians and noticed the screen saver on his computer—a series of white words floating across a red background. The message, taken from a letter to the unit, said, "If those bodies or bones aren’t recovered and returned home I hope all 19 boys haunt you nite and day—until you die." It was written in 1947.

For the 400 men and women who work at JPAC, this grief and frustration have created a special set of challenges, unique within the military. Each investigation requires a fragile balance, between the science of recovery and the faith of the bereaved. On the one hand, JPAC must excel at military logistics, preparing for long deployments to remote locations, sorting and transporting millions of pounds of equipment, and coordinating tens of thousands of man-hours of labor. Yet at the same time, there is a uniquely human challenge to the work: the fear of disturbing a grave site unnecessarily, the risk of damaging human remains, the challenge of knowing when to give up, and the prospect of raising a family’s hopes prematurely. If the nature of JPAC’s work is military, its purpose is humanitarian: not only to locate the casualties of war but to salve the psychic wounds of war. On the most fundamental level, its mission is to write a new narrative for each family, in the hope that truth allows life, finally, to go on.

It is with this goal in mind that JPAC teams can be found on almost any day of any month in some of the most remote locations on earth. No other unit in the American military deploys as often: Whether in peacetime or war, employees spend a quarter, or a half, or even three-quarters of every year on missions. They go deep into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, building cities of bamboo, camping in the rain forest, bathing in the rivers, fishing for food, and chewing on the nuts of palm trees for energy. They trek high into the Himalayas, setting camp above 16,000 feet, an altitude where oxygen runs thin and men have trouble sleeping, eating, even breathing. They ascend glaciers in Greenland, visit enemy nations like Burma and North Korea…and sometimes even descend into the ocean to search for long-lost airplanes in the deep.

Which is how I found myself, in January of this year, strapped to the wall of a cavernous KC-135 transport jet, rocketing over the Pacific Ocean on a seat made of red mesh, surrounded by a thirty-six-man crew of airmen and Navy Divers, shouting and cursing and barreling toward the distant islands of Palau in search of Tommy Doyle’s dad.

"Listen up!" the steward of the plane shouted as we sped through the black tropical night. "I’m not going to bore you with safety bullshit. If this plane goes down in the middle of the ocean, it’s going to break up into a million fucking pieces. So just hold on for the ride."

*****

in the days before Jimmie Doyle’s plane went down, he was stationed just north of New Guinea, on a satellite island called Wakde. Although the jungles of the South Pacific are notoriously remote, at the height of World War II, Wakde had been transformed into something resembling a small American town, with a single paved airstrip for Main Street and electrified neighborhoods of tents on both sides. In Jimmie’s letters home, he described swimming in the ocean, climbing trees for coconuts and bananas, and chasing lizards with his friend John Moore. But if life on the base was like a cheap imitation of home, the illusion did not extend to the unit’s missions.

Seven hundred miles to the north, the islands of Palau lay deep within enemy territory, defended by more than 35,000 troops as the regional headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Navy. But as the American military marched across the Pacific toward Japan, Palau would be in the crosshairs: With General Douglas MacArthur advancing from the southeast and Admiral Chester Nimitz approaching from the northeast, the islands were trapped between two columns of American attack. It fell to Jimmie Doyle’s bomber group—the 307th—to help soften the target for a Marine invasion.

By the end of August 1944, the 307th was firmly in place, making air raids daily. To do so, they had to cross an invisible line into one of the deadliest sites in the Pacific war.

The flight alone was grueling, a four-hour endeavor that pushed the outer limit of what a B-24 could travel. To make the distance, the planes had to be retrofitted with additional fuel tanks—but since the only place to store those tanks was in the bomb bay, that meant the planes arriving in Palau were not only manned by exhausted crews at the end of an arduous flight; they were also spectacularly underarmed, with half the normal -munitions. If the flight was punishing, the mental trip was even worse: The men of Jimmie Doyle’s bomber group were flying directly into the heart of a Japanese garrison fiercely armed with antiaircraft artillery—a garrison that would eventually take 1,500 American lives and wound several thousand more. Today the battle for Palau is largely forgotten, eclipsed by the horrific fighting at Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and Guadalcanal. Yet Palau is by many accounts home of the third-bloodiest battle in the Pacific war, dubbed "the forgotten corner of hell."

Each day, airmen like Jimmie Doyle flew directly into that hell, reporting to the airstrip at the crack of dawn, boarding more than a dozen bombers, and heading out to the open ocean. As they neared their target, there was no mistaking it: Antiaircraft artillery lit up the skies, and shells whizzed past at 1,800 miles per hour while the plane’s gunners, like Doyle, rattled off .50-caliber rounds in response and the pilots struggled to navigate a path through the haze of incoming fire. When at last they arrived at their target, they would unleash their payload—the enemy soldiers scattering and shouting and erupting in flames as the bombs landed in their bunkers and offices—and then the men of the 307th would turn toward home, fighting back to the open water and to Wakde Island for a night of sleep before starting the journey again the next day.

Day after day, into the horror of battle they brought touches of home, painting a nude woman on the side of their plane, along with the words Babes in Arms. But on that final mission, the men of Babes in Arms would not be on their own plane. For reasons that are lost to history, they were transferred to another B-24, tail number ’453, and early on the morning of September 1, 1944, Jimmie Doyle and his crewmates joined a fifteen-plane formation heading for the northern island of Koror. The night before, Jimmie went to the camp’s makeshift theater and distracted himself with a movie; then back in his tent—probably kneeling on the floor like he often did, using a toolbox for a table, with a candle at the end of his bunk—he wrote a final letter home to Myrle.

"Sweet, my mind is nearly a blank tonight, for I am all took up with thoughts of you and home. Maybe it won’t be too long until the day when I will be home, and we will be together again. With your arms around me, I can forget all this and settle down to spending years with you. Gee, what a glimpse of you would be worth! I’ll have lots of time for just feasting my eyes on you. How I miss you! Sweet Darling, tomorrow is a busy day, and I have to get up early. So I’ll stop for tonight, and tomorrow I’ll do better. But you know I love you with all my heart and will for always. Tell the folks hello, and write as often as you can. Good night, Sweetheart. With all my love, Jimmie."

The next morning, he manned a .50-cal as the ’453 sped toward Koror, reaching its target and dropping its payload, when a shrieking blast of antiaircraft fire tore into it, ripping off the left wing and sending a cloud of shrapnel in all directions. Arching to the side, corkscrewing down in a black streak of fire and smoke, the ’453 hurtled toward the water while the men on the other American planes could only watch, helpless. The last thing any of them would remember was the sight of three parachutes popping off into the sky, and a Japanese boat heading out to the crash, looking for survivors.

*****

sixty-four years later, landing in Palau still has the feel of crashing into the ocean: As you approach, you see nothing but water for thousands of miles, then a speck of land, then two, then three, until suddenly the plane banks and descends, certain to overshoot such a small airstrip; stepping onto the tarmac, you are instantly drenched in sweat.

"Get used to it, guys," the senior team leader, Captain George Mitroka, called out as we piled off the KC-135. "You won’t be dry till you get home."

Mitroka was a huge man stacked with muscles that seemed just slightly softened at the edges; he looked like someone who might have won a bodybuilding competition a few months prior and then taken time off to relax. But on the plane he hadn’t been relaxed at all: While the rest of the team struggled to fall asleep, shifting in awkward and contorted positions, Mitroka crouched forward in his chair, clutching a Sony PlayStation with both hands and pounding the keys for hours on end with a determination that seemed to border on madness. We had left Hawaii at 3 a.m. and arrived in Palau half a day later, and we had crossed the international date line plus five time zones; and just stepping from the plane into the equatorial sun, my body sank into the hot pavement, aching for a bed or a soft patch of grass, but Mitroka was having none of that. From the moment we landed, he was a flurry of motion, sprinting across the airfield, unloading cargo, orchestrating the activities of a handful of JPAC staff, and coordinating the rest of the day’s logistics. Within ten minutes, he had emptied the plane of its luggage, corralled a small motorcade of minivans, loaded the team inside, and commenced speeding through the overgrown jungle toward our hotel, where we dumped our bags and assembled in the lobby to begin the day’s work: visiting the local hospital and docks, devising a medical-evacuation strategy, inspecting the island’s hyperbaric recompression chamber, and running a test of the smaller chamber that JPAC had brought. For the next six hours, Mitroka never let up, holding meetings in the hotel restaurant, barking orders to mysterious people on the other end of a cell phone that he had already switched to a Palauan carrier, and negotiating the details of the week’s agenda with a local crew.

The unrelenting pace would continue for the duration of the mission: eleven hours a day, six days a week. Each morning the team would wake at 5:30, convene for breakfast no later than 6:30, and be out the door of the hotel by 7:00. By 7:15, we were aboard a pair of speedboats racing into the open ocean, and by 7:30 we stood on the deck of a 40-by-120-foot metal barge, our staging base for the operation, where we would remain until the onset of dusk. Throughout the day, there would be no food provided, no water, and no lunch break—nor, for that matter, any other kind of break. It was each man’s private task to scavenge food and water on his own time, either in the Palauan markets after dark or early the next morning before we left.

As we loaded equipment onto the barge the first morning—massive container-shipping boxes filled with thousands of pounds of diving, camera, and archaeology gear—I joined a few of the Navy Divers on a speedboat to pinpoint the location of the wreck, for which we had been given a set of coordinates.

To lead that trip, and to oversee all the mission’s underwater operations, the Navy had assigned a man named Rod Atherton, whose roguish exuberance stood in marked contrast to the military precision of Captain Mitroka. If Mitroka was a man streaking forward in his career, Atherton had already peaked. At 37, with two decades in the Navy diving program, he had reached the rating of Master Diver, the highest distinction any diver can receive. To reach the rating, a man not only has to excel from his first day in the program; he also must possess a variety of intangibles, like the ability to discern by instinct the native talents of the men around him, to command their loyalty through the innate gift of leadership, and to absorb, process, and recall huge volumes of data in a relatively short time. At any moment, Atherton was able to recite, verbatim, endless swaths of diving literature, history, and statistics, including complex multiple-dive decompression tables; then, just as rapidly, he could switch to an assessment of which parts were essential, which were marginal, and which needed to be reconsidered by the Navy—all the while laughing and joking and munching a hot slice of pepperoni pizza he had mysteriously procured on a barge in the middle of the ocean. Among all the men on the mission to Palau, including two Ph.D. anthropologists, a physician, and several officers, each with a mastery of innumerable skills, it was entirely possible that Atherton—a farm boy from Pennsylvania with little formal schooling—possessed the sharpest mind of all.

As we approached an indistinct patch of ocean where the GPS indicated the wreck’s coordinates, a few divers jumped into the water and swam around, shouting and pointing when they saw the shadowy mass of the ’453 below them. We positioned the boat nearby, and Atherton stood to test his men.

"Here’s what I want to do," he snapped. "I’m gonna stand back and let you dive. I want the chief to supervise, and I’m gonna see how you do. So go ahead like I’m not even here." Atherton sat down as Chief Paul Wotus, a fourteen-year veteran with the ripped and tattooed physique to prove it, stood up, pulling out a pair of stopwatches and looking somewhat pleased.

"Chief Wotus has the side!" Atherton shouted.

"Chief Wotus has the side!" the rest of the boat shouted back.

"Okay," Wotus said, removing a spiral-bound handbook from his pocket and starting into a pre-dive checklist: Had anybody dived that day? Did everyone feel okay? Was everyone wearing all the right equipment? Were the regulators attached to the tanks properly? Eventually, Wotus completed the checklist, and two divers splashed into the water.

"Now, how long did that take you?" Atherton asked, sounding irritated.

Wotus looked surprised.

"A long fucking time," Atherton answered. "It took you twenty-two minutes to get divers in the water. Twenty-two minutes! It should take you seven." He grabbed the spiral notebook. "This is you," he said, burying his nose in the book. "Mah mah mah wah wah. Reading into the book! Next time, I’m going to take the book."

"Okay," Wotus said, staring at the deck.

"It doesn’t matter what the book says," Atherton continued, shaking his head. "You have to know which part is important. That’s what this is all about. Anybody can read the book and run through the rules one by one. A Navy Diver doesn’t have to."

Wotus continued looking down.

"What was the weather forecast this afternoon?" Atherton asked.

Wotus shook his head.

"It’s supposed to rain," Atherton said. "When is high tide?"

Silence.

"Is it coming in or out?"

Nothing.

"I’m not trying to bust your balls. It’s the first dive and all that. But I’m gonna get you sharp on this trip. We’re gonna work it out."

Atherton turned away, and the boat was quiet for several minutes, until one of the divers emerged from the wreck and climbed in. As Wotus debriefed the diver, Atherton checked the volume of air left on his tank and splashed into the water to see the wreck for himself. He was gone less than fifteen minutes, but by the time he returned, all the divers on the boat had agreed: Being supervised by such a hard-ass for the mission, having every move second-guessed, and being untaught the rules of the Navy dive manual, which had always been regarded as a holy book, was purely a stroke of good luck. In diving, there is no other safety net besides ability, and a man like Atherton could eliminate the illusion that there was. On any given year, a Navy Diver could spend between 500 and 1,000 hours underwater, his life dependent for every second on his capacity to read the environment around him. For every thirty-three feet that he descends, his body is subjected to as much weight as the entire atmosphere of the earth. At sixty-six feet, he is at three atmospheres of pressure; at 165 feet, six atmospheres; at 231, eight. But in the Navy’s diving program, 231 feet is just the beginning. In the course of his career, Rod Atherton had dived well below 300 feet; in compression chambers, he had surpassed 850 feet of pressure; and at the Navy Experimental Dive Unit in Panama City, Florida, a few men had actually breached 2,000. To go so far beneath the ocean, men spent days, even weeks, in a compression chamber, the weight on their bodies rising higher and higher. Finally, at the target pressure, a chamber could be lowered into the water and cracked open at depth, where the divers would begin their mission—maybe repairing a substation on the ocean floor or installing a beacon. It might take hours or days or weeks to perform the task—sleeping and eating inside the chamber—then weeks more to return to the surface. At any time, a mechanical failure or a biological quirk—an air bubble lodging in a diver’s brain or saturated nitrogen gas boiling out of his blood—might throw the operation into chaos. When that happened, the divers found themselves alone. A doctor could not be pressurized in time to save them. Because of this, a Navy Diver faced an irreducible risk every time his fins hit the water. Even in training, it was common to make mistakes and black out in the pool, being resuscitated on the deck by a medic. During missions, this job fell to a man’s partner: sharing oxygen, stemming blood loss, and maintaining the proper depth and decompression regimen for the eternity that it took to return to the surface. Among divers on any mission, a certain camaraderie was born, a closeness of necessity and mutual advantage that resembled the brotherhood of men at war.

Brotherhood like the men of Babes in Arms.

*****

the coordinates of the ’453 had come from Pat Scannon, whose search for the plane evolved over ten years into an odyssey that nearly consumed his life.

Scannon, who is 60, with a neat gray beard and wire-rimmed glasses that belie a lifelong addiction to adrenaline, had discovered Palau in the early 1990s, when a friend invited him to help solve a mystery. During the 1992 presidential campaign, rumors had circulated that President George H. W. Bush, a former Navy pilot, attacked and sank an unarmed fishing trawler in Palau during World War II. Bush claimed that the boat was armed, but as the fiftieth anniversary approached, the Palauan government wanted to find out. They sponsored a search for the trawler, and Scannon’s friend invited him along. With his Berkeley biotech company, Xoma, running smoothly after a decade in operation, vacation time was not hard to come by; he invited his wife along, and when the expedition was complete—finding the trawler heavily armed in a channel just off the coast—the Scannons stuck around, hiring a tour guide and asking to see "other wrecks," never imagining that their lives were about to change forever.

In Palau, the number of World War II wrecks is surpassed only by their pristine condition. After more than sixty years, it is still common for boaters gliding across the turquoise water to glance over the deck and spot a warplane resting on the ocean floor, untouched since the day of its crash, or to gaze back toward the shore and discover, on the bare limestone and volcanic bluffs, the gaping mouths of caves once manned by Japanese gunners, with twenty-five-foot cannons still protruding and the bones of soldiers half buried inside. Even deep in the jungle, hikers frequently stumble upon massive artifacts—tanks lying sideways with a hole through the middle, or upright and intact, as if parked for a few hours.

From his first dive at one of these wrecks, Scannon was transfixed by the time-capsule quality of the islands. He remembers standing frozen in the water, gaping at a sixty-five-foot airplane wing, which he recognized as part of an American bomber. "I literally saw the wing and I was a different person," he says. "The only thing I could think was, Where’s the rest of it? I was absolutely convinced that people had died on that site, and I had to know what happened to them."

Back home Scannon flew to the Air Force archival center in Alabama to research planes that had disappeared in Palau. He developed a theory about the wing, matching it with a plane that had gone missing during the war; then he began assembling records of other missing aircraft. He read books on the Pacific theater of World War II, studied maps and journals and military records, and committed to memory the various tactical events that marked the Palau campaign. "I was possessed," he says. "I had no idea where it was going, but I promised myself that I would let it take me."

He returned to the islands, and in a mangrove swamp, he discovered the wreckage of a Marine Corsair; his determination intensified. The following year, he returned again, and the year after that, 1996, he recruited a team of history buffs and diving pros to join him, spending weeks on the hunt, asking locals for tips, scouring each wreck they found for details, and matching them with the list of lost planes.

As the years passed, Scannon’s group evolved into a core of about twelve members. He named the team The BentProp Project, developed a volunteer relationship with JPAC, and submitted a thick written brief before and after each trip. With each plane he found, his commitment became more personal, even intimate: When he identified a fighter plane whose pilot had survived the crash, he found the man still alive in the States and called him, saying, "My name is Pat. I found your plane." When he discovered a TBM Avenger in shallow water, the pilot killed on impact, Scannon folded two American flags over the wreckage, then flew to St. Louis to deliver them to the pilot’s sisters.

But as time went by, it was the ’453 that began to haunt him.

He had been searching for the plane since his first mission in 1994, and everything he had read suggested that it would be easy to find. For one thing, other airmen in the skies that day had submitted detailed reports of the crash, even providing approximate coordinates in files that Scannon’s researchers dug up. Then, too, as Scannon’s team consulted with Palauan locals, they learned that tribal elders in the area remembered the crash. Standing on the shore, these elders pointed to a muddy channel known as Toachel Mid, recalling how a plane made impact there; it was the same location described in American records. But as Scannon scoured the channel each year, he came up empty-handed every time.

He visited the National Archives in Maryland, hunting for clues and information. He flew to Japan and studied records there. He interviewed former Japanese soldiers, probing for anything that might lead to the plane. Where had the ’453 crashed? How many parachutists had escaped? Had any of them survived? He listened to stories that turned his stomach and broke his heart—tales of American prisoners being starved and de- capitated—but nothing led to the ’453.

When Parade magazine ran an article about his work, he was contacted by Tommy and Nancy Doyle; hearing their story inspired him to search harder, but the Doyles had little information to add. He shared what he knew and continued looking.

In 2003, the first lead surfaced: One of the BentProp volunteers, Flip Colmer, had discovered an obscure warehouse in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, owned by the National Archives and full of photographic records. There was film inside from the Pacific war. Some of it was taken by airmen over Palau. Some of it dated from the fall of 1944. And some of it was shot on September 1—the day the ’453 went down.

Scannon flew out that night. The next morning, he and Colmer waited anxiously while an archivist wheeled a white cart into the viewing room with a dozen black canisters on top; as they cracked the lid of the first canister, the stench of acetic acid wafted into the room—it had not been opened in sixty years. Wearing protective cotton gloves, they gingerly removed the film and began to study each image, frame by frame.

"We found it on the last two frames," Scannon told me recently with a smile that still hinted of disbelief. "The last frame said ‘End.’ And on that frame and the frame before it, there were splashes in the water where we had never been."

As we spoke, Scannon had been sitting at a small table in his Berkeley office, but when he recalled the film, he jumped to his feet and rushed to his computer. "I can show you," he said, hammering at the keys until a digital image appeared. "There!" he pointed. Looking at the screen, I became aware of how absurd Scannon’s task had been. Even with the photograph in front of me, with Scannon pointing at the critical spot, explaining precisely what it was, I could barely make out the "splashes" against the grainy, faded black and gray background. They were minuscule specks that might easily have been a photographic error, or a breaking whitecap, or a trick of the eye. It was almost inconceivable to think that Scannon and Colmer, looking at the same images in a series of hundreds, had spotted those specks and known what they were.

With the photos in hand, Scannon returned to the island that spring and asked one of his Palauan friends, Joe Maldangesang, to interview locals about the site. Joe reported that a fisherman remembered seeing something in the area. A few days later, he brought Scannon and two other BentProp divers to the spot, including Jennifer Powers, who was filming a documentary on the team. They geared up, dropped in…and Powers landed directly on top of the ’453. "I grabbed the propeller and held on," she says, laughing. "I wasn’t about to let go until the other divers came around and saw it!"

In time, Tommy Doyle would join them, earning a scuba certificate near his home in West Texas, then flying halfway around the world for his first open-water dive at the scene of his father’s crash. Sixty feet below the surface, holding on to the fuselage with one hand, he felt a sensation he hadn’t known since he was 15 months old: the presence of his father. He saw a handful of .50-cal bullets lying in the sand and scooped up a spent casing, wondering if his father had been the last man to touch it. He imagined Jimmie there with him, and he spoke to his father, private words. But he couldn’t be sure that anyone was listening. Pat Scannon had found the ’453. Tommy Doyle had come to see it. But there was no way of knowing whether Jimmie was inside.

*****

that would be up to jpac.

As we boarded the barge early each morning, a marked shift in power took place between Captain Mitroka and a man named Eric Emery. On land, Mitroka had filled the role of "senior team leader" with the driving force of a locomotive, but on the barge, he almost disappeared, ceding total authority to Emery, a civilian archaeologist working for JPAC. If the challenge of JPAC is to blend military zeal with scientific care, this was where the two met: On land, it was George Mitroka’s mission; on the barge, it was Eric Emery’s laboratory.

Emery had no military background, but he carried himself with a distinctly martial bearing. Where Pat Scannon seemed the very picture of an academic explorer, excited by the adventure and eager to share it, Emery was terse and tense and spoke in jargon laced with military acronyms, using terms like "osseous material" and "high-impact deceleration" instead of "bones" and "crash." If Scannon, in skintight wicking fabrics and a custom BentProp hat, seemed like he could hardly wait to return to the jungle each year, Emery—in the same faded khaki T-shirt for days on end—looked like he was rarely anywhere else.

Emery’s focus was absolute; it came from a deep and personal place. When he was a graduate student in the late 1990s, his life was torn from him and irreparably changed. He was working a site in the Andes with his friend Jon Faucher, searching for signs of a pre-Incan civilization at the bottom of a mountain lake. But from the moment their team set camp, everything began to go wrong. First, the seasonal rains picked up. Then, the helicopters that were supposed to bring their food stopped coming. Then, a group of local miners began acting suspicious, then hostile. After a little over a week, huddling together through cold, wet, hungry nights, Emery’s team decided to get the hell out. But as they packed their gear and boarded a helicopter, rising slowly from the edge of the water, then circling back over the tarps and bamboo huts, a grinding noise pierced the air, and the chopper lurched to the right, spiraling and plummeting toward the lake, crashing into the ice-cold water. As the chopper rolled onto its side, Emery could see Faucher sinking into the water, tearing off his seat belt and kicking a door open, then swimming free. Emery struggled to remove his own seat belt but realized it was jammed. He was pinned inside the sinking bird.

At the surface, Faucher took a gasp of air and felt a shooting pain in his back, but he turned back toward Emery, then scrambled over to help him break free, when the chopper shifted and rolled again, swishing Emery below the surface. Ignoring the pain, Faucher—who would later discover that one of his vertebrae had been crushed—shouted for another passenger to give him a knife, then dove underwater to Emery’s unconscious body, sawing through the straps of his seat belt. When he ran out of air, Faucher raced back to the surface, took another gulp, and swam back down to Emery again, finally slicing him free and hauling him to the surface.

"He was gray," Faucher told me. "And his eyes were open and fixed. That was the worst part."

Treading water, Faucher began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until Emery sputtered back to life, his eyes blinking frantically. He hadn’t breathed in four minutes. If not for the cold water, which slows the absorption of oxygen, he probably would have died. If not for Faucher, he definitely would have.

That’s when Eric Emery decided to give up. Or anyway, to give up underwater archaeology—to give up the thing he had spent his adult life working for, which now seemed almost entirely meaningless. He had always believed that life was a journey of calculated risks, but to risk his life for a bunch of relics? "You know how they say your whole life flashes before you?" he says. "Well, the thing that flashed in front of me was ‘What the hell am I doing here? I can’t believe I’m risking my life for this.’ " Back home, Emery confessed to another student that he was planning to drop out of school, but when that student began telling him about a part-time job he had taken with the military’s recovery unit, Emery felt like a light came on. He would join that unit. He would search for those men. He would go underwater and retrieve their bodies.

He understood the meaning of that.

In 2001, Emery was hired as an underwater specialist, but for the first three years his specialty proved mostly nominal. In practice, there weren’t many underwater operations, and he spent almost all his time on land recoveries, bringing remains home from places like Cambodia and Laos. It was work with a purpose, and Emery was more fulfilled than he had ever been. But when Scannon announced the discovery of the ’453, Emery would have a chance to get back in the water.

In 2005, he led the first recovery team to the site, diving nearly every day and trying to piece together, from the position of the wreckage, what had happened as the plane struck water. The debris was clustered at two main spots on opposite sides of a mound of coral. Emery designated them location A and location B. At location B, he found the nose of the plane, smashed into dozens of pieces; on the other side of the coral, at location A, he found the plane’s tail in a single massive piece. Most likely, he theorized, the plane had struck the water nose-down, the impact demolishing the front half, while the back simply snapped off, gliding to rest on the ocean floor.

Emery prepared to begin digging. He designed a screening station on the deck of the barge and showed the divers how to bring sediment up from the wreck, then sift through the pebbles in search of human remains. When the team was ready, Emery splashed two divers and parked a chair by a video monitor, watching through cameras strapped to the divers’ helmets. But as the operation picked up speed in the weeks to come, Emery hit a devastating snag. He was approached one day by the Master Diver. The plane was becoming unstable, he said. It wasn’t safe to keep divers near it. Emery called off the operation immediately and gave the divers a new task: Send down the men with experience in metal fabrication. Have them study the site and draft a blueprint. If the plane wouldn’t hold itself up, they would build a cradle to hold it up.

Back in Hawaii, he submitted the blueprint to the naval shipyard at Pearl Harbor, then deployed to other recovery sites, staying in constant contact as the cradle was built.

He also made contact with the Doyles.

At JPAC, this was a major taboo. Because the unit’s work is so sensitive, the stakes high and the emotions raw, most employees are forbidden from speaking with families. Even now, after seven years, Emery can count on one hand the number of families he has ever contacted—in fact, he can count them on one finger. But when he received an e-mail from a JPAC officer in 2006, telling him that the Doyles were eager to speak with him, Emery leapt at the opportunity. The more he learned from the Doyles, the more mysterious the ’453 became.

In all the records of Jimmie Doyle’s career, Jimmie had been listed as a tail gunner. That meant he sat in the rear of the plane, firing a .50-cal out the back. But as Emery excavated the tail in 2005, he’d never seen a turret there. And as the 2007 mission got under way, loading the massive four-piece cradle onto a cargo jet, then lowering the pieces underwater in Palau, Emery kept his eyes peeled—but the tail turret simply wasn’t there.

Moving on to the nose at location B, Emery tried to imagine what might have happened. It was possible that the turret had simply broken off during the crash, landing with the front of the plane. He waited eagerly when the divers opened the plane’s cockpit, collecting debris and sediment, and when the material came aboard the barge, it was an archaeological gold mine: bones and dog tags from half a dozen men. They were beautifully preserved in the salt water, and the cockpit had protected them from the tides. But as each dog tag was rinsed off, each name matched to the flight manifest, none of them said "Doyle." Emery filed for an extension and kept looking, but when his time ran out, he had no turret. No Jimmie Doyle.

"I don’t want to give the wrong impression," he says now. "I wanted to find every single one of the guys on the ’453. But I had become curious about Doyle. I knew the family history, and there was a lot riding on this. By the time I left in 2007, I was placing personal pressure on myself to produce results for the Doyles."

As Emery flew back to Hawaii at the end of the mission, he tried to remind himself that in every other respect the trip had been an overwhelming success, finding perhaps six of the men—men with wives and children and grandchildren; men missing for six decades; men finally coming home to rest. But he couldn’t shake the sensation that he’d failed. He had once asked Jon Faucher to explain why he dove into the icy water that day, with his back broken, to retrieve his lifeless body, and Faucher told him, "I didn’t want to face your parents and tell them I did nothing."

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.

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.

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.

"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?"