Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (55 page)

“We don’t have to go so fast,” I call up.

“Getting tired?” Ed goads me.

“No.” (Actually, I am winded.) “I just don’t want you to push yourself too hard.”

“Don’t worry about me,” he says.

Mike, a few paces back, is holding up the rear to make sure I don’t lag behind.

We hike on, and at the top of another trail I peer down to marvel at the fir trees clinging defiantly to the mountain wall. Several appear as if they’re growing sideways. I snap some pictures.

“You couldn’t ask for better conditions,” Ed says over his shoulder. “You’re really lucky.”

It’s true. I’ve been fortunate throughout my entire journey, and never more so than with this trip. I knew early on I wanted to conclude my travels by focusing on “found” history, and this story jumped out because it represented such a rare and serendipitous discovery. There was one glitch: Nobody could tell me where exactly the PV-1 had gone down. I sought out Chuck Eaton, but he wasn’t listed in the phone book. I called the regional forest service office, but they didn’t want to disclose the spot because there could still be unexploded rounds in the immediate vicinity. I contacted outdoor-adventure stores in the area, the local historical society, and anyone else I thought could be helpful. All dead ends.

I had already started my travels when Ed, who knew I was bouncing around the country, asked me when I planned to visit Washington.

“Not sure,” I said, “and I’m getting anxious about it. My original story was about this plane that vanished during World War II and then was randomly found fifty years later on a mountain outside of Bellingham.”

“You’re talking about Mount Baker?”

“Yeah,” I said, surprised he’d heard of it. “But I can’t track down anyone who knows where it crashed.”

“I know where,” Ed said.

“Like, generally speaking or specifically?”

“I worked on the recovery.”

Ed was clearly putting me on, and I wasn’t falling for it.

“You’re joking,” I said.

“I’m not.”

“Ed, this is a serious story.”

“I’m being serious.”

“You
personally
were part of the team that went to Mount Baker and helped identify the PV-1 lost in 1943?”

“I was actually one of the first people on the scene after it was called in.”

Floored, I could barely respond. “Ed, I’m … I mean the odds of this, that you were there is, it’s a million to one.”

I felt especially guilty for doubting him in light of what I had to say next. “So, I know you’re
really
busy, and Bellingham is pretty far north of you, but I kind of have a huge favor to ask you—”

“Let me look at my calendar, and we’ll lock in a date.”

We both arranged our schedules to meet this weekend, and when Ed got injured, he called Mike Vrosh to come along for good measure. Ed couldn’t have enlisted a more ideal wingman; aside from being an expert mountain climber, Mike had served as the team leader on the PV-1 salvage mission.

We hike for another hour, and Mike’s coughing has gotten worse. He’s now ahead of me, next to Ed, and I see them stop, exchange a few words, and wait for me to catch up.

“See that slope over there?” Ed says, and I follow his finger to where it’s pointing.

“I got it.”

“That’s the site. It’s snowed over again, but it’s underneath there.”

Ed tells me we can get closer, and we continue walking.

“You guys came in by helicopter, right?” I ask.

They nod. “We landed below the glacier, where the ground levels off,” Ed says, and goes on to recall how quiet everything was. No wind. No birds. And very little talking among the team. Just the crunching of their feet on the ground as they surveyed the site.

From the wreckage, Ed could make educated guesses about the plane’s final instant before it slammed into the wall of ice.

“One propeller wasn’t bent,” Ed says, “which means the blade wasn’t spinning at the moment of impact.” This corroborates with Radioman LaValle’s report that an engine had conked out. “I also remember coming across an altimeter and holding it in my hands, and I knew the copilot must have had his own fingers on it while he was adjusting the barometric pressure before they crashed. That little detail has always stayed with me.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the crew when we first got there, to be honest,” Mike says. “We had a thousand logistics to deal with. But I uncovered a dog tag, and that’s when it all started becoming real for me.”

Other personal items they collected included LaValle’s sailor’s cap and quarters that had fallen out of the airmen’s pockets.

Mike made the day’s most horrifying find. “I picked up what I thought was a long, thin strip of foam padding from one of the seat cushions,” he says, “and I realized it was a spine.”

Ultimately they gathered together more than 350 bone fragments. Blood-testing kits were later sent to relatives of the six crewmen, and at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Maryland, experts positively identified the remains.

Unlike Pete Ray’s disappearance in Cuba, there was no conspiracy by higher-ups to keep the PV-1’s fate cloaked in secrecy. Government officials truly didn’t know what had happened. Nor was there anything particularly unusual about the mission or its crew. They were six ordinary young men, five of them practically kids, on a routine exercise that went awry.

And it’s the very “ordinariness” of this story that makes it so remarkable to me. More than twenty-five thousand Navy and Army Air Corps troops were killed
within
the United States during World War II, mostly while testing new aircraft, training other airmen, or flying coastal patrols. These stateside losses represent one out of every sixteen U.S. fatalities in the war, and yet they’re hardly ever acknowledged. One story is cited with some frequency, but only because it involved
the world’s tallest building (at the time) and fourteen deaths, the majority of them civilians. On July 28, 1945, a B-25 bomber lost in low-hanging clouds over New York City collided with the Empire State Building, killing the three-person crew on impact. Eleven office workers on the seventy-ninth floor died instantly or in the ensuing fireball, and one of the bomber’s engines crashed into the elevator shaft and onto an elevator roof, causing the car to plunge almost eighty stories. Emergency brakes installed by the Otis Elevator Company prevented it from slamming into the basement at full speed, and the two passengers inside survived, albeit banged up and badly shaken. The Empire State Building crash made headlines, but for the most part these home-front accidents were quickly forgotten.

“Would you guys mind if we rested for a bit and ate something?” I ask. “I’m starving.”

“Sure,” Ed says.

“I’m ready for that,” Mike agrees.

We park ourselves on three small boulders conveniently clustered together and drop our gear. From his backpack, Ed pulls out several plastic containers and starts handing them to me. I peel off the lid to the first one and find freshly sliced tomatoes and cucumbers inside. The aroma alone makes my mouth water. In the next little bin are feta-stuffed olives drizzled with oil. Ed unwraps a block of sharp cheddar and hard, herb-crusted salami, cuts off several chunks with his pocketknife, and passes them around.

“That’s
really
good,” I say to Ed, savoring the tangy cheese and spicy meat pressed together.

Hunger makes the best sauce, the saying goes, but even if I weren’t famished, the small feast Ed has prepared is the best meal I’ve had in months. He’s thought of everything.

“Chocolate-covered almonds?” he asks.

“If you insist.” I grab a handful.

We all sit there contentedly, eating and soaking up the sunshine.

“I can’t thank you all enough for doing this.”

“We’ve been wanting to come back for years,” Ed says.

“How old were you again when you were first here?”

Ed does the math in his head. “Twenty-four.”

“Looking back on it, how do you think it affected you?”

“You know, when we first arrived,” Ed says, “we had a job to do, inspecting the site and setting up ropes for the ordnance and mortuary teams behind us. As Mike said, once we started finding personal items, that’s when it got real. I became much more aware of what these guys had lost, and I think the whole experience made me more grateful, as a person.”

Mike agrees. “When you realize what other people have gone through or, like these guys, sacrificed, it gives you a different perspective on life,” he says, “and you become more appreciative of things in general.” To the best of my recollection, no one else on the trip has explicitly made this connection, but it does seem that all of the people who’ve guided me around various sites and shared their love for history have exuded a similar sense of passion and gratitude.

Within a year of the 1994 recovery mission, details about the airmen and their loved ones began to emerge. Upon first receiving the news that her husband’s plane had gone missing, Charles Nestor’s wife got into a car with her parents and circled the twisting roads around the flight path in hopes of finding something the Navy search planes had overlooked.

Carl Brown’s mother and stepfather didn’t own a telephone and drove up from their ranch in Northern California to Whidbey Island. They stayed near the base for a week, waiting for news.

Ralph Beacham, the oldest member of the crew, left behind a child, and his wife gave birth to their second son two months after he died. For more than fifty years Mrs. Beacham clung to the belief that somehow, somewhere, her husband was still alive, and she never remarried.

Pete LaValle’s brother Angelo was shot down over Papua New Guinea in a B-24 bomber six weeks after the Mount Baker crash. The Western Union man wouldn’t show Mrs. LaValle the telegram from
the War Department until her husband came home from work. He didn’t want her to be alone when she learned that another one of her boys had been killed.

Once the men were positively identified in 1996, relatives were finally able to arrange proper funerals. Ralph Beacham and Carl Brown were laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, and the others were returned home. For many of their loved ones, the recovery mission brought a measure of comfort. “It’s put closure on this,” Helen Gray McConnell said after burying her brother Robert in a cemetery close to the South Dakota farm where they were raised. “We knew he was gone, but it’s a relief to know what happened.”

Ed, Mike, and I finish resting, pack up our gear, and check to make sure no food or trash has been left behind. Ed winces as he stands, and Mike begins coughing again after taking a slug of water.

“We really need to do this more often,” Ed says to Mike.

At first I assume he’s being sarcastic, considering their condition.

“I was just thinking that,” Mike says. “It’s been too long.” His tone is serious.

We all stand there for a minute, admiring the glorious scene around us, before venturing on.

“God, it’s good to be alive,” Mike says.

Ed shifts his weight to his right leg and smiles.

“Amen, brother,” he says. “Life is good.”

And they mean it.

RETURNING TO WASHINGTON, D.C.
, feels more like a layover than a homecoming. Wonderful as it is to be sleeping in a familiar bed, I soon find myself thumbing through my tattered road atlas, plotting the next getaway. The stories keep accumulating. The manila files keep getting fatter.

“Out of all the places you went, what was your favorite?” a dear friend and professional genealogist named Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak (that’s really her name) asks me days after I get back.

“I’m going to have to think about that,” I say.

Megan and I have known each other for so long I don’t remember how we met, but we bonded over a shared interest in military history. A self-described “Army brat,” Megan has spent the last ten years helping the U.S. government locate family members of American troops killed overseas whose remains, some dating back to World War I, are
still missing. She’s also become a rock star in the genealogy community for several high-profile finds. On September 14, 2006, the
New York Times
ran a front-page feature about Megan’s efforts to identify the first immigrant through Ellis Island, an Irish teenager named Annie Moore. Megan was responsible for linking President Barack Obama’s maternal family to Moneygall, Ireland, and she scored another front-page
New York Times
article for tracing Michelle Obama’s roots to a young slave girl from South Carolina. Megan tracked down an 1850 will that mentioned the First Lady’s great-great-great grandmother Melvinia Shields, among other “property.” Six years old, little Melvinia was valued at $475.

During our phone conversation, Megan tells me that when she comes to Washington she wants to show me a little-known site relating to the man responsible for creating the Statue of Freedom atop the U.S. Capitol Building.

“It’s not a huge story,” she says, “but I thought it was interesting.”

“I like the smaller stories,” I say. “I just need some time to unpack and get settled.”

Travel is a glorious form of procrastination, allowing us to put off the daily deluge of e-mails, phone messages, and countless burdens with a simple, socially acceptable excuse: “Sorry, I’m on the road …” Now that I’m back, those obligations beckon, along with some new and unexpected demands. The most unusual involves an appointment with the FBI; a close buddy of mine named Jay Michael is applying to the agency and has listed me as a reference.

Within forty-eight hours of coming home I find a business card stuck in my apartment door from an FBI special agent who stopped by while I was out running errands.

I phone him that afternoon and say, “I can come down to your office or talk here, whatever’s easiest for you.”

“Let’s meet at your place if that’s okay, and does now work?”

“Now is fine, I guess.”

“Be there in half an hour.”

Twenty-nine minutes later, he buzzes on the intercom. I go to the
lobby and encounter not one but two men, both in their early thirties and dressed in khaki slacks and white button-down shirts, no tie or jacket. (I was sort of hoping for the whole sunglasses/black-suit G-man getup.) The lead agent, my initial contact, is leaner and shorter than his partner, who’s built like a rugby player.