Bringing the Troops Home
Bryan Bender and Kevin Baron of the Boston Globe have done some outstanding reporting on military affairs. In December we highlighted "Army Knew of Cheating on Tests for Eight Years." Now they have produced an excellent Memorial Weekend series, "Finding the Fallen."
Most of the series is set in Papua New Guinea, where more than 2,000 American pilots and crew members disappeared in World War II. In April, Bender, Baron and photographer Yoon S. Byun accompanied a Pentagon team as it searched for soldiers' remains. They stood at the site where Lieutenant Allan Harrison crashed:
Army Major George Eyster, head of a US recovery team made up largely of combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, examines the site and makes a mental assessment of what might have happened: The scattered bits of debris indicate that the plane broke up - and possibly exploded - before it struck the palm trees and hit the ground.
That much Eyster can tell. But as a combat veteran himself - one who had two pilots under his own command perish in Iraq - there is another scenario that's vivid in Eyster's imagination: What those last minutes must have been like for the 19-year-old Harrison.
Before his own combat experiences, Eyster didn't quite understand what it was like to completely risk one's life, even though he came from a family of soldiers, and even though his own grandfather had made the ultimate sacrifice.
Now he knows, and that knowledge is part of what bonds him to the memory of the young fighter pilot who disappeared on February 11, 1944.
"You go into harm's way, but it doesn't really connect in your brain that you are absolutely a very vulnerable human who can die at a moment's notice," Eyster says. "It is at those moments when you have seen someone else killed or maimed that you know that you're really vulnerable. You kind of go, 'I can't run through a hail of bullets and come out the other side.' "
http://www.boston.com/news/specials/mia/