Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (32 page)

Tadao and his assistant had tried to separate out the Pakse remains into neat piles, by age and size. Unfortunately in this case all of the crew members were white, all of them were male, and most of them were young. They ranged in age from nineteen to forty-one. In some cases, teeth were missing from the sets of remains altogether. The sum total of one set of remains was a single fragment of the shoulder area. Any identification based on such meager remains, with no additional evidence such as DNA test results, is bound to be mere wishful thinking.

We said in our report that in only five of the Pakse cases could identifications be substantiated from dental evidence. This was a far cry from the thirteen positive identifications Furue and his assistants had announced.

Tadao is dead now, so I can speak of him without wounding his pride; for he was a man of intense pride, who set himself the impossible goal of accounting for every single one of the lost servicemen in Vietnam if at all possible. The phrase, “fullest possible accounting,” which is so often heard from opponents of normalizing relations with Vietnam, and which is an utter impossibility, became for Tadao Furue a real goal to be aimed at. Ultimately this unreachable standard of perfection led to his downfall. He became so obsessed with the identification process that he would reach conclusions in cases where no answer was possible. He was a perfect gentleman, rigorously moral in his personal life, one of the courtliest men I’ve ever met, but I think he suffered from the intellectual isolation of being alone in the laboratory. The very confidential nature of the military identification process itself inhibits free discussion. Unable to confer with students and colleagues in the field, working practically alone in a laboratory thousands of miles from the U.S. mainland, Tadao was literally and intellectually cut off.

It became our painful duty to inform the Defense Department that the CILHI laboratory needed a serious overhaul. The three of us returned home and drew up our reports. Ellis, instead of preparing the final report himself, submitted our three reports separately and independently. My report was probably the most critical of the three and, since these documents were not classified, they created quite a stir when they were released to the media in January 1986. ABC’s “20–20” news journal put together a segment on the CILHI laboratory and this created an unpleasant ruckus in the Defense Department. Blaming the bearer of bad tidings is only human nature. Everyone who has been in uniform knows how unpleasantness tends to roll downhill in the armed forces.

Our immediate reward for being so frank about CILHI was to be subjected to a loud, private harangue by a member of the White House’s national security advisers—an officer who was one of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s associates, and whose name I have no wish to recall. This unforgettable, high-decibel tirade occurred well after I thought the whole CILHI affair had been laid to rest. It lasted four weary hours one evening and took place in the Executive Office Building next door to the White House, in a room adjacent to that in which the Iran Contra papers were so assiduously shredded to long confetti. The officer loudly protested our findings. We had opened a Pandora’s box of endless mischief! I was accused of ruining Tadao’s life, of having robbed him of the will to live, even of causing the liver cancer from which he now suffered! I have seen many disturbing sights in the autopsy room, but the spectacle of this enraged colonel, sitting a few hundred yards from the very pinnacle of power, disturbed me more deeply than many a ghastly corpse. Were such illogical men really in charge of our national security? I emerged shaken and angry from this ordeal.

Happily the angry colonel’s views were not shared by others in the military. In early 1986, I was invited to testify at a hearing of the Veterans Affairs Committee at the U. S. Senate. After my testimony I was invited by Major General John Crosby, who had also testified on behalf of the Army, to join him for lunch at the Pentagon. Crosby was an extraordinary officer, a man who radiated an air of command and brisk efficiency. I told him frankly that I believed any problems within CILHI could be corrected if we all worked together, instead of at cross-purposes. General Crosby agreed with me and over the months that followed we were gratified to see nearly all the reforms we had proposed carried out at CILHI.

Toward the end of 1986, General Crosby invited us back to the laboratory for a follow-up visit. Soon the three of us found ourselves under contract to review all identifications recommended by the laboratory involving Southeast Asian casualties. This review process continues to this day. Ellis Kerley became chief of the laboratory for several years but is now retired and living in Hawaii. Today CILHI has several civilian consultants. Lowell and I are the most active, but there are others who watch over the laboratory on a less frequent basis. Tadao Furue was handled gently. He was kept on as senior anthropologist at the facility, but his role became more and more an advisory one. He died a few years later.

Now I visit CILHI twice a year. Besides reviewing every single case recommended for identification, my colleagues and I discuss CILHI’s personnel needs, its staff, improvements in equipment and such stuff. Often we huddle over a set of remains and make suggestions as to what more might be done to identify them. At other times we play devil’s advocates, challenging age estimates and other conclusions. Fresh air and free debate make every identification more reliable and trustworthy.

The search for unaccounted-for servicemen does not stop at CILHI’s laboratory doors. Year in and year out, you will find teams from CILHI in the field, actively searching for and recovering the remains of our lost soldiers. In the rain forests of New Guinea they can be found investigating the hundreds of plane crashes left over from World War II. In the mountains and gorges of South Korea they are busy seeking out the dead from some long-forgotten battle, reclaiming them from the shallow graves where they were buried by returning villagers. There is a full-time American-run search office near Hanoi. Expeditions still comb Vietnam, north and south, as well as Laos and Cambodia. Here the anthropologists and the army investigators alike wear civilian clothes, as the Vietnamese do not permit American uniforms to be worn in the countryside. Their work can be dangerous. Some of the personnel in the laboratory wear Purple Hearts for wounds received many years ago in such search-and-recover missions. Recently one CILHI team in Cambodia came under fire from Khmer Rouge guerrillas. Lately the North Koreans have been turning over sets of U.S. servicemen’s remains from that more than forty-year-old conflict, and these too, must be identified.

Unfortunately, the Pakse case ended messily. Doubts over the unidentified remains persisted and in 1986, after I had done my report on CILHI but before I signed a contract with the Army to conduct an ongoing review of the lab, I was asked by Mrs. Hart to look again at the remains of her husband. I agreed.

The remains were brought to my laboratory in Gainesville in a full-sized casket with a military escort. The lid of the great polished casket was opened—to disclose seven tiny bits of bone. I thoroughly described each fragment and what conclusions could be drawn in terms of age, weight, height and so on. The Army then asked Ellis Kerley to review the Hart case, as well as the independent reports made by Dr. Charney in Colorado and myself in Florida. Based on this evidence, Ellis recommended that the identification of Lieutenant Colonel Hart be rescinded. Later another identification from Pakse was rescinded as well.

Concerning this pair of rescinded identifications, an important point must be made: the fact that the identifications were rescinded means that the available evidence, on which the identifications had been made, was later found to be inadequately proven in the collective opinion of the reviewing scientists. In other words, the evidence in these two cases did not meet reasonable levels of scientific certainty. But I want it understood clearly that there were no findings of
misidentifications
in these disputed cases, and there is absolutely no evidence to support any such charge.

Mrs. Hart sued the government and won approximately $500,000; but the government appealed and ultimately won its case. The persistent widow, whose honest doubts had led to a thorough reform of CILHI, was not able to prove in court that CILHFs overconfident identification of her husband, even though it was based on such limited evidence, was “intentional and malicious,” as she had claimed in her lawsuit. Another family, whose son was also identified after Pakse, was so incensed that they scorned to accept his alleged remains, giving them instead to Dr. Charney, who uses them as a lecture exhibit to demonstrate evidence used to make some military identifications.

This bitter aftermath vividly shows how painful and vexatious the whole question is, how different is the emotional response of each family it touches. Some want to get the whole thing behind them, and some will never sleep until they have vengeance. I make it a point to avoid contact with the families. Their emotions would cloud my objectivity; and frankly, I do not want to tell them the terrible tales of violence and suffering told me by those bones. I will say no more here, beyond what most people already know: that death in combat is not always quick, clean or painless, and the remains of our soldiers are sometimes maltreated after death, as we have all seen on television as recently as October 1993, in the streets of Mogadishu, in Somalia.

During my first visit to CILHI—which, for all I knew then, would be my last—I took a few minutes out to attend to some personal business. My wife had a roommate in college whose brother had been a pilot in Vietnam. His jet had crashed, and he had been killed; but his body had been recovered. Taking advantage of my unique access to the laboratory, I asked to see the young man’s mortuary records just before I left. To my relief, I found that the young pilot had been identified by dental records as well as by fingerprints. As I closed the records I knew that, if my wife’s college roommate ever asked me this awful question, I could reassure her that there was absolutely no mistake about her brother’s identification.

What does the future hold for CILHI and the whole process of identifying our unaccounted-for war dead? As time goes on, the recovered bone fragments are growing smaller and smaller, the teeth scarcer and scarcer. As a result, identifications are obviously getting harder and harder to make. It is not hard to foresee a day, not very long distant, when CILHI will have to rely on DNA analysis to identify these remains, rather than go through the grindingly slow process of physically examining minuscule bits of skeletal material. By comparing DNA samples recovered from the remains with that of living relatives, identities could be established beyond all reasonable doubt, in weeks rather than years.

I must hasten to add that CILHI doesn’t have the capability to do such DNA matching right now, at least not on the grand scale needed to close out the Vietnam files, let alone the even older and more fragmentary remains that are coming in from South and North Korea. Such a task lies beyond the combined capacity of all the DNA laboratories in the United States, at present. I should therefore like to see CILHI establish its own DNA lab, devoted exclusively to its own casework on our unaccounted-for servicemen. It would not be cheap. But the sum would be small indeed, compared to the mountains of money spent waging the Vietnam War.

I have seen the names of the Pakse crew on the famous Vietnam memorial wall in Washington. For me, as for most visitors, the wall is a deeply moving experience. But I am touched almost as deeply when I visit Arlington National Cemetery and see the grave of the Unknown Soldier from Vietnam. To the end of his life, my friend Tadao Furue lamented that these remains had been wrested prematurely from his care, taken from CILHI and buried in Washington.

I remember Tadao shaking his head in frustration and telling me: “If they had only given me more time! I could have identified him!” Tadao’s spirit was unconquerable. Could he have made this Unknown Soldier known? One can only wonder. Heavy slabs of marble now guard the nameless warrior forever.

13
The Misplaced Conquistador

At lengthy Pizarro, unable, in the hurry of the moment, to adjust the fastenings of his cuirass, threw it away, and, enveloping one arm in his cloak, with the other seized his sword, and sprang to his brother’s assistance. It was too late; for Alcantara was already staggering under the loss of blood and soon fell to the ground. Pizarro threw himself on his invaders, like a lion roused in his lair, and dealt his blows with as much rapidity and force, as if age had no power to stiffen his limbs. “What hoi” he cried, “Traitors! have you come to kill me in my own house?”

—William H. Prescott,
History of the Conquest of Peru
,
Book 4, Chap. 5

Francisco Pizarro died as he lived, by the sword. When the rapiers of his assassins pricked his gullet, they extinguished a life that was all strife and struggle. Illegitimate and illiterate, a foundling in infancy and a swineherd in youth, he made his way to South America and, by pure force of will, toppled one of the greatest empires the world has seen. He enriched himself, his family and the King of Spain beyond the dreams of avarice. Indomitable in adversity, ruthless in victory, Pizarro and his followers laid waste utterly to the Inca civilization whose ruined monuments dazzle us still; whose Cyclopean walls, golden masks and inscrutable pictographs are so extraordinary they almost seem not of this earth. But when it came to sharing out this almost immeasurable loot, Pizarro and his associates became embroiled in blood feuds that proved fatal. At the very height of his powers, the warlord of conquered Peru was assassinated.

Thanks to the faithful chroniclers of New Spain, we know nearly as much about Pizarro’s assassination in 1541 as we do about many political murders in our own century. Because of the extraordinary continuity of Spanish civilization in the conquered continent, we can follow the story of his bones almost year by year.