Frozen in Time (5 page)

Harry Spencer thought he saw a horizontal line of blue sky in the distance, and he hoped that they could fly under the overcast to reach it. But the blue line vanished; it was an illusion, a false horizon, created by reflections cast by ice crystals whipped through the sky by an approaching storm.

When the true horizon disappears in the Arctic haze, a pilot might as well be blind. Pilots fortunate enough to survive the phenomenon describe the experience as “flying in milk.” It’s so common in Greenland that the effect even happens on the ground. Once on a hazy day, Monteverde straightened up too fast after bending over at the waist. Surrounded by whiteness, with no way to distinguish between earth and sky, Monteverde felt as though he were floating inside a giant cotton ball. He lost his balance and fell over backward, laughing at the absurdity of it. But it wasn’t funny in the pilot’s seat of a bomber with eight other men aboard.

Adding to their plight, Monteverde and Spencer couldn’t trust their instruments. The B-17’s altimeter measured the plane’s altitude above sea level, not above ground level. If the ground beneath their wings rose sharply, as it often did near the Greenland coast, the altimeter would be no help.

Monteverde and Spencer knew they had to act fast. One option would be to turn the PN9E back toward the water. But they were in the airmen’s equivalent of a polar bear’s den: any movement might wake the beast. With no idea of their altitude, the B-17 might be only a few feet above the ice cap. If Monteverde banked too hard to make the turn, he might dip the wing far enough to make contact with the ground, destroying their plane and putting them in mortal danger. Another option was to pull back hard on the control stick to gain altitude, but that wasn’t much better. The big bomber would need time for that, and there was no telling how much room they had dead ahead—the glacier might rise faster than a B-17 could. A third option, the least attractive, would be to continue ahead and hope for the best, risking a nose-first rendezvous with the ice cap.

Monteverde and Spencer faced the classic definition of a dilemma: a wrenching choice among several lousy options—turn, climb, or do nothing. Monteverde gripped the control wheel and made his choice.

4

THE DUCK HUNTER

OCTOBER 2011

W
ALKING DOUBLE-TIME THROUGH
baggage claim at Reagan National Airport in Washington, Lou Sapienza is frazzled. Normally upbeat, Lou frisks himself like a man who’s misplaced a winning lottery ticket. He can’t find the address of a building in Alexandria, Virginia, where we’re supposed to meet a team of military and government officials who Lou believes hold the key to a glorious quest.

As the president of an exploration company devoted to recovering lost military aircraft and fallen servicemen, Lou is here to propose a navigational feat about a million times more difficult than finding a suburban office building. That is, locating a small airplane and three men entombed in ice for seven decades somewhere in Greenland. His inability to find the meeting address doesn’t inspire confidence.

Lou and I met three months ago, after I learned from an acquaintance that we had a shared interest in three American military planes lost in Greenland during World War II. When we sat down to talk, I told Lou that I was writing about the past, but I couldn’t finish the story without following his planned expedition.

“If I’m gonna work with a writer,” Lou said then, “why shouldn’t I work with the guy who wrote that great book about mountain climbing—what’s his name? Jon Krakauer?”

“You’re right,” I said. “You should work with Krakauer.
Into Thin Air
is a great book. But Krakauer isn’t here. I’m here.”

Lou smiled, and that was that.

Today I’m supposed to be along for the ride, a silent observer recording what happens, good or bad, when Lou requests government funding. And yet I’m determined to go with Lou to Greenland, and I’d hate to see the hopes of three heroes’ families, Lou’s dream, and my book plans collapse because of a missed meeting. I tear a sheet of paper from my notebook and give Lou the address.

We hustle outside the airport to hail a cab. As we approach our destination, I realize that Lou’s waiting for me to pay the fare. I reach into my wallet and wonder if I should have found him Krakauer’s phone number.

W
E’RE USHERED INTO
a nondescript conference room at the U.S. Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, or DPMO. Established in 1993, DPMO’s job is “to limit the loss or capture of Americans who are serving abroad, and to bring home those who are captured or killed while serving our country.”

For someone seeking help, guidance, and financial support to find a missing World War II plane and three lost airmen, a visit to DPMO is mandatory. Lou has yet to bring home anyone killed or missing in action, but he’s been describing his plans to folks at DPMO and similar agencies for years by phone, e-mail, and personal contacts. He’s finally earned a full-blown meeting, to pitch what he has in mind.

Waiting for us is a cast worthy of a television drama series: two army lieutenant colonels, two government historians, a forensic anthropologist, and three Coast Guard officers. One of the Coasties is a commander, one is a lieutenant commander, and the third is a senior chief petty officer. Call the TV show
CSI: MIA
. President Obama’s photo watches over the table from a far wall, and the American flag and a black-and-white POW/MIA banner stand nearby.

The meeting starts immediately. Lou seems nervous, caffeinated, or both. He’s fifty-nine years old and six feet tall, a large man with a big presence. He has no interest in sports yet carries himself with the rolling gait of a former athlete. He has thick features that suit him, lively blue-gray eyes behind metal-rim glasses, and wavy silver hair that’s long enough to curl onto the top of his collar. Lou’s voice is loud, with an adenoidal New Jersey accent. He’s garrulous and affable, his default posture somewhere between undaunted and windmill-tilting.

LOU SAPIENZA IN GREENLAND IN 2010.
(COURTESY OF LOU SAPIENZA.)

Seated at the head of an oblong table, Lou looks ill at ease in a blue blazer and a red tie. Still, surrounded by uniforms and suits, he’s glad that he decided against his first choice of meeting-wear: a khaki explorer’s shirt, complete with epaulets, last in style when Stanley went to Africa. “I thought it might be a bit much,” he whispered to me earlier.

Lou thanks everyone for coming and passes out folders with DVDs, photos, maps, and documents about his New York–based exploration company, North South Polar Inc., and his nonprofit organization, the Fallen American Veterans Foundation. The folders include colorful embroidered patches four inches in diameter that celebrate Lou’s dreamed-of mission. Woven with green, gold, blue, and white thread, the patches feature a sketch of the Grumman Duck in profile, the dates 1942 and 2012, and a red X on a map of Greenland. The military men at the table, their uniforms bristling with ribbons and stripes for battles already fought, missions already accomplished, seem unlikely to affix Lou’s patches onto their sleeves.

Lou explains that he is seeking DPMO’s blessing and financial support to find Grumman Duck serial number V1640, excavate it from thirty to fifty feet of ice, and bring home whatever remains of the plane and its occupants. While he’s at it, Lou says, he’d like support to find a second plane also presumed to be under Greenland’s ice. That plane, a C-53 cargo carrier with five men aboard, went down twenty-four days before the Duck, a crash that indirectly set the Duck on its fateful path. Also, although the chances seem slim, Lou wouldn’t rule out finding a third plane: a B-17 bomber that crashed while searching for the C-53 cargo plane.

Lou doesn’t realize it, but it’s clear to me that his audience needs a scorecard to keep track. The simplest way would be to explain the crashes chronologically and in relation to one another. Something like this: Lou hopes to find a C-53 cargo plane that crashed on November 5, 1942, with five men aboard; a B-17 bomber, which was sent to search for the missing cargo plane, that crashed four days later with nine men aboard; and, most of all, a Grumman Duck that crashed on November 29, 1942, with three men aboard, one of whom was a crewman on the B-17. Lou also might have explained that ten American servicemen remain unaccounted for: five from the C-53; the two-man crew of the Duck; two members of the B-17 crew, one of whom was aboard the Duck when it crashed; and one from a failed rescue mission by motorsled.

Deepening the confusion, Lou wanders to other ideas and dreams, ignoring questions from skeptics around the table. As Lou’s presentation meanders onward, his audience grows distracted. Several exchange furtive glances, while others keep their heads down and shuffle through the information packages. Lou sallies forth.

Leading the meeting for DPMO is Lieutenant Colonel James McDonough of the U.S. Army; he is soft-spoken but all business, his tiny bristles of hair at full attention, his muscular frame snug in a desert camouflage uniform. McDonough repeatedly tries to steer Lou back on track and to lower his expectations.

“I applaud your effort,” McDonough says. But money is limited, the POW/MIA caseload is daunting, and the goal is to clear cases—that is, to find bodies—quickly, efficiently, and economically. It’s evident that McDonough considers Lou’s plan to be the opposite: slow, inefficient, and expensive.

McDonough is being realistic out of necessity. More than eighty-three thousand U.S. military personnel are “unaccounted for,” an overwhelming majority from World War II. Most will never be found—particularly those lost at sea—so the government prefers to shoot fish in barrels rather than chase wild geese, or Ducks, as the case may be.

McDonough tells Lou, “The ones that are easiest to crack usually take priority over the others.” One reason is that time is of the essence. DPMO tries to repatriate the remains of missing soldiers, seamen, and airmen while immediate family members are still alive to see them laid to rest.

As a wall clock loudly ticks, hovering over the discussion is the question of money. With military budgets stretched by wars and slimmed by spending cuts, the phrase du jour in the MIA world is “ratio of cost to recoveries.” Because of complicated logistics and difficult climate and terrain in Greenland, Lou’s unfunded budget exceeds $1 million. McDonough says that might cover thirty searches of European farms and forests, where plenty of World War II–era soldiers and airmen remain unaccounted for. In other words, the price tag alone makes the odds against Lou at least thirty-to-one with this crowd.

Next in line to burst Lou’s bubble is Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Christian, who’s been patient while explaining intricacies of the government and military bureaucracy. He addresses Lou as he might a child: “Finding a little plane in this big, wide world is not an easy thing,” he says. “We want to help. We just don’t want to say anything to make you think we can do more than we can.”

My translation: You haven’t a prayer of getting a dime here. Lou theoretically could mount an expedition on his own, without DPMO’s money or formal approval. But he’d have to raise the funds from private sources and win permits from officials in Greenland. The odds of that are slim to none.

Lou plows ahead as though McDonough and Christian have just offered him an all-expenses-paid, fly-drive trip to the Greenland ice cap. Dejected, I doodle in my notebook, sketching Lou’s Duck mission patch with a slash through it.

McDonough asks Lou point-blank, “Do you have the resources to accomplish what you want in Greenland without the support of the United States government?”

Lou hesitates before answering: “That’s a tricky question.” Translation: No.

McDonough clearly doesn’t think the question was tricky, but he’s game. He asks slower and with more volume, “Can . . . you . . . do . . . this . . . without . . . government . . . support?”

I feel embarrassed for Lou, but he dodges again: “Well, there are all different kinds of support.” For starters, he says, it would be great if the government would supply a military C-130 Hercules transport plane to carry his team and equipment to Greenland. That might be worth several hundred thousand dollars.

I begin to wonder if Lou has a hearing problem. McDonough looks down at the table and says nothing. The room goes silent.

After an awkward minute, seemingly out of nowhere, the Coast Guard flies to Lou’s rescue. A calm, deep voice from the far side of the table chimes in: “I anticipate that if we get a request for a C-130, we will submit the request.” It’s the first upbeat note after a two-hour dirge.

The voice belongs to Commander Jim Blow of the Coast Guard’s Office of Aviation Forces, who’s worked with Lou off and on for several years. Recruiting-poster handsome, trim and fit, with a square chin and short dark hair flecked with gray, Blow is one of many Coast Guard fliers who are the spiritual heirs of two of the service’s greatest heroes: John Pritchard Jr. and Benjamin Bottoms, the Duck’s missing crewmen.

As Blow knows, of the eighty-three thousand American servicemen and -women who remain unaccounted for, only three served in the Coast Guard. One is a lieutenant who died in a Japanese prison camp during World War II and whose remains are considered unrecoverable. The other two are Pritchard and Bottoms. By helping Lou to bring home the Duck’s crew, Blow would be honoring a promise to do everything possible to leave no man behind.

When he agrees to seek government assets on Lou’s behalf, or more accurately on behalf of the lost men and their families, Blow sounds tempted to call out the Coast Guard’s motto: “Semper Paratus,” Latin for “Always Ready.”

“I think we can do it,” Blow says confidently.

Lou relaxes. We shake hands with everyone around the table and leave.

O
VER A STEAK
lunch at the airport Chili’s restaurant, a cheerful Lou says he’s more confident than ever. He’s still woefully short on money, and he’s nowhere near certain where to dig through the ice for the lost plane. Nevertheless, Lou believes that he and his team, which now includes me, will solve an enduring mystery of World War II: What happened to the Duck and the three men it carried?

As we’re leaving, Lou slaps a meaty hand on my shoulder. “That went well, man,” he says. “Didn’t you think?”

I agree, not mentioning the yawning gap in the budget, the logistical and technical challenges ahead, or the doubts that I shared with my notebook before the Coast Guard arrived, cavalry-style.

A serene look crosses Lou’s face. He repeats a comment I’ve heard him make several times before. Previously, he said it with a question mark hanging almost imperceptibly in the air. This time there’s none of that: “We’re gonna bring these men home.”

The Duck Hunt is on.