You Are Not Forgotten Read online

  THE STORY OF A LOST WWII PILOT

  AND A TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SOLDIER’S MISSION

  TO BRING HIM HOME

  Bryan Bender

  Copyright © 2013 by Bryan Bender

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company for permission to reprint “The Man in the Dead Machine” from White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946–2006 by Donald Hall. Copyright © 1990 by Donald Hall. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor

  Jacket photogrraph © Travel Image UIG/Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bender, Bryan.

  You are not forgotten : the story of a lost WWII pilot and a twenty-first-century soldier’s mission to bring him home / Bryan Bender. — First edition.

  pages cm

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Repatriation of war dead—United States. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Missing in action—Papua New Guinea. 3. Iraq War, 2003–2011—Aerial operations, American. 4. Eyster, George Senseny, V, 1973– 5. McCown, Marion Ryan, Jr., 1917–1944. 6. Air pilots, Military—United States—Biography. 7. United States. Army—Officers—Biography. 8. United States. Marine Corps—Officers—Biography. 9. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (U.S.) I. Title.

  D810.D4B46 2013

  940.54’26585092—dc23 2012036354

  ISBN 978-0-385-53517-5

  eBook ISBN 978-0-385-53518-2

  v3.1

  To Maria Cristina, whose love and support has no ending

  And to the “one percent,” and their families,

  who volunteer to serve on our behalf

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART ONE CHAPTER ONE: The Legacy

  CHAPTER TWO: A True Charlestonian

  PART TWO CHAPTER THREE: Heeding the Call

  CHAPTER FOUR: Preparing for War

  CHAPTER FIVE: A Loss of Faith

  PART THREE CHAPTER SIX: Moving Up the Line

  CHAPTER SEVEN: A New Path

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Missing

  PART FOUR CHAPTER NINE: Rediscovery

  CHAPTER TEN: Coming Home

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes and Sources

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  It is not the oath that makes us believe the man,

  but the man the oath.

  AESCHYLUS

  High on a slope in New Guinea

  the Grumman Hellcat

  lodges among bright vines

  as thick as arms. In 1943,

  the clenched hand of a pilot

  glided it here

  where no one has ever been.

  In the cockpit, the helmeted

  skeleton sits

  upright, held

  by dry sinews at neck

  and shoulder, and webbing

  that straps the pelvic cross

  to the cracked

  leather of the seat, and the breastbone

  to the canvas cover

  of the parachute.

  Or say that the shrapnel

  missed him, he flew

  back to the carrier, and every

  morning takes the train, his pale

  hands on his black case, and sits

  upright, held

  by the firm webbing.

  DONALD HALL, “The Man in the Dead Machine”

  PROLOGUE

  On an autumn afternoon in 2009, two old friends, both approaching ninety, stood a little taller than usual beneath the glass-paned spire of the National Museum of the Marine Corps. Richard “Cosmo” Marsh and Eugene “Vic” Smith slowly lifted their eyes toward one of the restored fighter planes hanging from the ceiling. It was a Corsair, just like the ones they had flown in the South Pacific. Both men were now frail after lifetimes of living, loving, working, and raising large families. But they still burned with the inner fire sparked more than six decades earlier while fending off swarms of Japanese Zeros in a hailstorm of burning metal and lead. The pair of fliers—two of just six surviving members of the forty “Hell’s Angels” who set sail for war in September 1943—made this pilgrimage to the gleaming new museum in Quantico, Virginia, to complete one final mission.

  Cosmo, who had left Yale University to join the Marine Corps after Pearl Harbor, had earned his nickname for his “cosmopolitan” background. Nearly as wispy as he had been as a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant, he still worked part-time in the Washington, D.C., law firm he co-founded after the war and where he had penned the squadron’s newsletter, kept up the Christmas card list, and planned the reunions—the last one held in California in 2000. On one wall in front of his desk hung a nearly life-sized black-and-white photograph of the Hell’s Angels, taken in the Solomon Islands in December 1943, all of them young and vigorous and looking invincible as they prepared to enter the jaws of the enemy.

  His companion Vic Smith was still the perennially grinning Ohio farm boy who signed up for flight training as a student at Ohio State in the aftermath of the surprise Japanese attack. Though his once-taut muscles had atrophied, he still exuded the pep and wide-eyed exuberance that had made him a squadron favorite. Smitty, as many called him, had flown home after the war in a Stearman biplane, landing on a grass field near his rural boyhood home, where he still lived and helped run his machinery and warehousing business—that is, when he wasn’t traveling to San Diego to visit his grandkids and sail in his beloved schooner. Back in 1987, Vic and his wife had sailed across the South Pacific, returning to the scene of some of those ferocious battles.

  Vic and Cosmo had cemented an especially strong bond when they seemed destined to die at Rabaul like so many of their comrades but their fates intertwined to save them both. By late January 1944, the Hell’s Angels had already suffered many losses. They had been assigned another mission to escort B-25s on a bombing run over the Japanese stronghold on the tip of New Britain Island when Vic’s Corsair was hit by debris from a nearby Allied plane that was riddled with anti-aircraft fire. He had to ditch in the dreaded channel, and none of his fellow pilots saw where he went down. To avoid being spotted by the Japanese, he waited until nightfall to deploy his lifeboat, floating for hours with only the aid of his life preserver. Night turned to day with no sign of the hoped-for flying boats, or Dumbos, that served as rescue planes. Tuckered out, Vic finally fell asleep under more stars than he had ever seen. He was dreaming of hunting raccoons with his uncle back in Ohio when he was startled awake by the barking of sea lions surrounding his small inflatable raft. He had been resourceful, but he was also lucky. December and January were the only months when the current in St. George’s Channel traveled northwest to southwest, away from Rabaul and the Japanese torturers. All day and through the night, he drifted nearly fifty miles, until he could make out the landmark of New Ireland.

  Back at their base in the Solomon Islands, Cosmo took off on another bomber escort. Approaching the target, he experienced engine trouble and also splashed into the channel near Rabaul. This time, his wingman saw where he went down and swooped in to get a better look at the surroundings, taking readings off the nearby mountains. One of the Dumbos was swiftly dispatched to search for him. Along
the flight path the crew spotted Vic, still floating in his life raft from the previous day.

  The crew landed and swiftly pulled Vic in before continuing on to Cosmo’s reported position. When it was Cosmo’s turn to be pulled through the gun ports to safety, Vic greeted his surprised—and doubly relieved—friend with a broad smile. For the rest of his long life Vic liked to quip that the best thing that ever happened to him was that his friend Cosmo had crashed off Rabaul. If he hadn’t, he probably never would have been found. He showed his appreciation by making trips to Washington, D.C., every few years to visit his friend in the Maryland suburbs and bought him gifts, such as a winter jacket with the Marine Corps seal on the back.

  More than six decades after the war, their journey this day to Quantico, the “Crossroads of the Marine Corps,” was for a singular purpose. Cosmo and Vic had come to bestow a special honor on the comrades who went “up the line” with them but weren’t so lucky—the ones deprived of the full life that they had embraced with the vigor of men who had watched their friends die and had come perilously close to losing it all themselves. The toll that first tour had taken on their rookie squadron was painfully evident by the two group photographs—the one hanging in Cosmo’s office, taken just before they went into combat, the other aboard the USS Guam, just after that first tour in the South Pacific. The first had all forty pilots, the other just twenty-three. In their brotherhood of fighter pilots, where the cold simplicity of mathematical odds had reigned supreme, Vic and Cosmo knew the Hell’s Angels who never returned lost in the grandest poker game of all. But in a real way, they also felt those who hadn’t returned had played their last hand so that the rest of them didn’t have to. For every one of the cots that were swiftly removed from their tents when one of their fellow Hell’s Angels hadn’t returned from a mission, Vic and Cosmo knew their own odds improved. Their comrades had died for the country, yes, but in a very real way they had also died for them.

  As their skipper had written to the distraught mother of one of them, “We live for each other a great deal out here, much more than they do at home, I fear—and sometimes we also die for each other.”

  Now, before they joined their lost comrades, Vic and Cosmo needed to make sure they were remembered. They came to Quantico to purchase bricks etched with their names at the Marine Corps museum’s Semper Fidelis Memorial Park.

  There would be one for Newton “Zombie” Blount, the former boxing champion who had been killed in action right after they arrived in the combat zone. Another was for Harvey Carter, the daredevil pilot with the mustache who seemed invincible before he disappeared after a dogfight with a Zero. Nearby would be engraved the name of Roger Brindos, the debonair card shark, who tragically died in captivity when the Japanese POW camp where he was imprisoned was hit by Allied bombs. Vic had owed Brindos four hundred dollars in poker losses when he went down—money he duly sent home to his widow, Patricia. Another spot was reserved for Robert Marshall, whom they remembered as a quiet kid from Louisiana with a toothy grin and gentle southern manner, who had crashed into nearby Simpson Harbor and died either in the crash or from his injuries in a Japanese POW camp. No one really knew for sure. His body had never been recovered, either. In all, there were the names of sixteen Hell’s Angels who were either killed or missing.

  One memorial stone they donated, labeled 12203, was placed along the plaza in front of the museum. It was etched with “Captain Marion Ryan McCown Jr.”

  Vic could still picture “Pop” McCown, or, as others in the squadron called him, Mac. How in his genteel manner, a corncob pipe often perched on his lip, he watched over the younger pilots, lifted their spirits with much-needed words of encouragement, and always tried to see the silver lining in what were mostly miserable conditions. McCown was a more experienced pilot who helped give fresh-faced lieutenants like Vic and Cosmo confidence that they would get through this. They flew with Pop McCown on several combat missions and to search for signs of their comrades who had been shot down or crashed. All three of them—Vic, Cosmo, and Pop McCown—were among the swarms of Corsairs that went looking for the iconic Gregory “Pappy” Boyington when word reached the camp that he was missing over Rabaul.

  Vic and Cosmo never had a chance to say good-bye before McCown was gone, too. They had heard so many stories of what might have been his fate that day when dozens of the enemy appeared out of the blue, but the mystery was never solved. Ryan McCown was just one of the countless names of those who were missing in action from the war.

  The brick etched with his name was Vic and Cosmo’s way of bidding him a final farewell and saying thank you. It was also a way, perhaps, for future generations to remember what he had done. They didn’t know it that fall day in 2009, but Vic and Cosmo weren’t the only ones who had not forgotten Ryan.

  PART ONE

  The human soul can always use a new tradition.

  Sometimes we require them.

  Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE LEGACY

  Almost from the day he was born, July 2, 1974, George Senseny Eyster V thought everyone’s dad wore Army green to work. The first time he held him in his arms, in the maternity ward of the base hospital at Fort Carson, Colorado, George’s father was wearing the uniform of a second lieutenant and the maroon beret of the Army Airborne Corps. The backdrops for George’s baby pictures were the trappings of Army life: as an infant donning “Big George’s” drab-green Army cap, or as a toddler grinning on his father’s lap in the passenger seat of an Army jeep.

  His mother, meanwhile, was the epitome of an Army wife. The former Ann Pate, with her southern charm and beauty-queen good looks, was the daughter of a retired Army Air Corps pilot who had been serving in the Pacific during World War II when she was born. She spent the first year of her life being taught to kiss a framed photograph of her poppa. George’s father had been captivated by her when he met her as an ROTC cadet at Florida State University. They were soon married in the base chapel at Patrick Air Force Base on December 28, 1971. Ann, who had a son, Scott, and a daughter, Teri, from a previous marriage, quickly took to her new role, hosting coffees for other Army wives, coordinating sewing demonstrations, and organizing the unit Christmas party when her husband was a young company commander.

  “Little George” was born just a few months after a historic shift in the American armed forces: the end of the military draft. Growing up an Army brat in the all-volunteer military meant coming of age in a largely closed society that only occasionally interacted with the outside world. The military was the Eyster family’s life, which meant moving every few years to a different assignment, where there were sometimes as many old faces from previous posts as new ones. By the time George was eight, in 1981, the family had moved from Fort Carson to Stuttgart, Germany, to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Most of the kids George went to school with, and nearly all his friends and neighbors, also had parents in the Army. In addition to photographs of him blowing out birthday candles, the family scrapbooks were filled with shots of George standing awkwardly in front of the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall, landmarks of the Cold War that he was learning was his father’s duty to prevent from becoming a full-blown one.

  When George was ten, he began to more fully understand what being a soldier meant. His father was flying helicopters in the Eighty-second Airborne Division at Fort Bragg and came home one day that fall to tell him he would be going away for a while. It was October 1983, and President Ronald Reagan was ordering American combat troops to the Caribbean island of Grenada, where a military coup backed by the Cuban and Soviet governments threatened American citizens living there. The family’s tearful good-bye as Big George—Major George S. Eyster IV—went off to Operation Urgent Fury was a formative experience for Little George. The fighting only lasted several days and ended with an American victory over the military government. But nineteen U.S. soldiers were killed and 116 wounded. George would never forget the anxiety on his mother’s face as she
awaited her husband’s return.

  But it was not until the following spring, when George was almost eleven and finishing fifth grade, that he realized that the faint sound of the bugler playing reveille each dawn was also for him, when he first heard the family ghosts mustering him to the march. It was a Saturday morning in early May 1984. His father was stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where they were living on a tree-lined street of simple brick homes on the sprawling frontier base along the banks of the Missouri River. George was flipping the dial on the living room TV looking for a cartoon. His parents were busy in the kitchen preparing to host a Kentucky Derby party later that day. George was barely paying attention to the changing channels when he heard the television narrator, his voice recorded over grainy combat footage, call out to him.

  “GEORGE EYSTER.”

  At first, he didn’t understand what he was watching. He stood there transfixed, unable to move, his right hand motionless on the dial, as the sounds from the television set filled the room. With the crackle of automatic weapons fire, the program quickly trained on an anguished-looking soldier, shirtless and slumped over, as he lay dying on the jungle floor, felled by a sniper’s bullet to the neck.

  “Mom!” George broke into tears as he ran from the room. “I think Grandpa’s on TV.”

  George never knew Grandpa George, once described as a lean, laconic man of few words who resembled film actor Gary Cooper in a military uniform (which was always freshly pressed, even in the jungle, so the story went). Lieutenant Colonel George S. Eyster III was killed in combat in Vietnam seven years before George was born. But George felt as if he knew him. The void his grandfather left behind was palpable. It defined his own father’s identity and before long George’s, too. Grandma Harriet, a tall, regal-looking southern lady with a warm disposition, spoke adoringly of her late husband whenever her favored grandson came to visit. Grandpa George’s lingering presence could be felt at Thanksgiving dinner, on birthdays, and at other family celebrations. At times his loss brought a deep sadness to Harriet’s sparkling blue eyes, but her feelings were usually well hidden. Instead, her face would grow bright when she spoke of the profession he had chosen.