You Are Not Forgotten Read online

  The pilots were a bit jittery about their prospects. For starters, the ship had been so weighted down with men and equipment—four squadrons and ninety-five planes—that upon its arrival a day earlier some aircraft had to be hoisted off before the Dauntless bombers could safely take off while the ship was anchored. The Corsair, meanwhile, was heavier than the bombers, and the prevailing winds were blowing directly across the deck of the Nassau.

  So Overend, as any good leader would do, went first. His plane coughed and sputtered to life and with the catapult’s combination of compressed air and oil eased off the end of the flight deck and over to the airstrip at Tafuna. The rest of the pilots soon followed, and at the end of the day Ryan penciled his first carrier catapult into his pocket-sized flight log with the brown canvas cover.

  The new skipper had interviewed all the pilots in the squadron aboard the Nassau to learn more about their individual flying experience in order to organize their on-the-job training in Samoa. By the end of the first week, the pilots completed a series of familiarization hops to acquaint themselves with their new planes and the surrounding geography. Takeoff, they quickly learned, was a bit too thrilling with the strong air currents funneled between the mountains overlooking Tutuila. Pan American Airways had once experimented with using Pago Pago as a way station but decided against it due to the strong wind currents. Meanwhile, the surrounding mountains required aircraft to climb very quickly to avoid crashing.

  The shortage of spare parts was proving to be a huge problem for the maintenance crews. Overend set a goal of keeping at least twelve of the squadron’s seventeen planes in flying shape, and even that was a struggle. Some planes were just used for spare parts and never flown.

  On October 12, after less than a week on the island, the squadron lost its first plane. Coming into Tafuna for a landing, a pilot nosed his plane over on the runway. Luckily, he only suffered a minor laceration on his scalp. But the plane was a total loss.

  Overend, determined to get the Hell’s Angels in dogfighting shape, pushed ahead with the training. The morning after the crash, several planes flew in a Lufbery Circle, a defensive formation dating back to World War I in which aircraft fly in a horizontal circular formation so that an enemy plane that tries to attack any one of them will theoretically come under fire from the plane flying directly behind. The Hell’s Angels practiced attacking the circle from above and drawing the planes out of position to make them more vulnerable. Overend’s verdict on their performance was positive. But when a few days later the squadron rendezvoused with some bombers to practice an escort mission, weaving above the formation at various altitudes, the daily report recorded that “a great deal of such work needs still to be done.” Yet with each passing day, the men grew more and more confident in the cockpit and tighter as a unit. To show their appreciation for the enlisted mechanics who kept their planes flying against long odds, the officers threw a beer party for them after their first week on Samoa.

  Along with Overend, a great influence on the men was Doc Wolfe, the flight surgeon who was quickly becoming the squadron’s surrogate mother. Lieutenant Russell Wolfe was a surgeon from Iowa who had been assigned as the squadron’s doctor. He played an instrumental role in helping Overend establish a new squadron spirit. He also spent a lot of his time counseling both the officers and the enlisted men, listening to their problems, trying to calm their nerves. Many of the men found comfort sitting on a cot in Doc Wolfe’s hut, where he was often seen doing cat’s cradles with a piece of string to keep his fingers nimble for his delicate medical work back home in the Midwest.

  But they were all focused on a singular goal: preparing for their turn to get into the fight. Overend sent them on strafing runs, showed them how to attack a Zero and how to get away from one, and had them fire their guns at an oil slick a few miles off the island. With rounds dipped in paint, they practiced firing their guns at a white banner towed behind another plane as a target.

  The pilots, flying in pairs, or sections, would practice a series of defensive maneuvers to confront attacking enemy planes. One primary tactic was to fly in a scissoring pattern, in which they weaved back and forth, taking turns covering the other’s tail. In another maneuver, two sections flew about half a mile apart. The planes on the outside, with their guns outward, maintained a 180-degree view of the sky. If they saw something, they would turn in, and the others would follow, keeping the Zeros from penetrating the formation.

  The section leader and his wingman needed to know each other so well that they could predict the other’s actions. When flying at night or in a tight formation or through a storm, “the wingman must trust his leader more than he trusts himself,” one Marine Corsair pilot explained. “If he wavers in his decision to follow his leader into what seems to be a hopeless situation and goes off on his own, he will be lost sooner or later.”

  The squadron was beginning to get its rhythm, but the incessant downpours on Samoa curtailed operations on many days. On other days the weather kept them completely grounded. They wiled away in their fales or sat through a “fighter direction lecture” by more experienced pilots. By the end of October, their flying had nearly stopped altogether. More than half of the planes were grounded due to tail wheel problems, and a cargo ship bringing repair parts was not scheduled to arrive for another ten days. It was on November 1, as they waited to get back in the air, that Overend told them they would be leaving Samoa in two weeks—first to the New Hebrides, an island chain to their south and west, and then “up the line” to the Solomon Islands. There, they all knew, the epic struggle against the Japanese was reaching its crescendo.

  Ryan also received some welcome news from home that gave him more reason to want to get this over with. His stepmother, Sarah, had given birth to his half sister. Her name was Jane.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A LOSS OF FAITH

  By Thanksgiving 2004, George found himself in a sprawling tent city in northwestern Kuwait near the Iraqi border. Camp Buehring, named for a New York soldier who had been killed in the opening salvos of the Iraq War, was one of four major staging areas where American units could get used to the desert climate, complete last-minute training, and make equipment repairs before “crossing the berm” into Iraq.

  In just the two weeks since George arrived, he watched the base quickly expand, the frenetic pace of construction a testament to the size and seemingly enduring nature of the conflict he had volunteered to fight. Before long, the place would be a self-sufficient slice of America, he thought. There was a small post exchange, or PX, to shop for personal items and another preparing to open in a few weeks. A nearby coffee shop would be at home in any American city, along with an Internet café and a gym. To his pleasant surprise, he found the food at the chow hall, a large warehouse-looking structure, quite acceptable. There was even a Burger King and a twenty-four-hour pizzeria. Much of the base was still a maze of big-top tents, but permanent structures were going up everywhere. George had just moved into a new barracks with eight rooms, four officers in each.

  “Not too bad!” he wrote to Ann after he arrived.

  There was little downtime, though. George’s days and much of his nights were filled doing three jobs. Each morning he reported to the Forty-Second Division’s tactical operations center, where he advised the assistant commander on how to employ helicopters in the division’s battle plans. After lunch, he headed over to the aviation brigade to fulfill a similar function for that unit’s helicopters. He was doing a lot of “coaching, teaching, and mentoring,” as he put it. Although most of the officers were quick learners, as part-time National Guard troops they were a bit rusty or had limited experience. “Unfortunately none of them have been in the active Army for over ten years,” George recorded, “and we have changed the way we do business drastically.”

  But the Forty-Second Infantry Division had battle streamers that would be the envy of any active-duty unit. The Army’s storied “Rainbow” division had been gassed in the trenches of Europe
in World War I and had liberated the Dachau concentration camp in Germany in the waning days of World War II. It was now made up of National Guard troops from twenty-eight states and territories, many of them police officers, construction workers, paramedics, schoolteachers, and firefighters, including some who had been on duty in New York City on September 11, 2001.

  George was uniquely suited for the role of mentor with his assignment in Korea and experience helping to train fresh pilots in Alabama. He felt as if he were making a critical contribution, preparing the Guard troops for the battles that lie ahead. But it was his third task, beginning each day in the late afternoon, that he looked forward to the most. That was when he went out to the airfield and reported to the “Cav.”

  The First Squadron of the Seventeenth Cavalry Regiment was an active-duty unit from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, usually attached to the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. The squadron was the most deployed Kiowa unit in the Army and over the previous two years had served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. On this deployment, it would be operating alongside New York’s Forty-Second. The 1-17 was a storied Army scout unit, tracing its lineage to the early twentieth century and the hunt for the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. The unit’s patch still displayed a soldier on horseback set against a Native American headdress. Many members treasured their cavalry Stetsons emblazoned with crossed swords. Only now they rode into battle with night-vision goggles in the cockpits of Kiowa Warriors. Although George had technically deployed to Kuwait with the Forty-Second’s Aviation Brigade, the Kiowa squadron soon plucked him up and installed him as their assistant operations officer.

  “It’s the only time all day that I get to stand back and observe and learn,” he wrote home to his mother. He was immediately impressed with what he saw. “They are uncommonly strong.… They may be one of the strongest command teams I have ever observed.”

  Before long he got another assignment—not the kind he bargained for. When the air cavalry unit moved north, it would need an experienced pilot, someone who spoke fluent “aviator,” to serve as a liaison with the ground troops—to be in the “hip pocket” of the ground commander when he needed to call in air support from helicopters operating overhead. The commander seized on George’s unique background as a pilot and an Army Ranger to fulfill the special duty. It meant he wouldn’t be flying. He would be “outside the wire,” patrolling with the infantry, face-to-face with the enemy.

  The “upside,” he wrote to Ann to give her the news, is that “I will be doing valuable work that will challenge me and will certainly keep the boredom at bay.” It would be a “really great experience,” he added, “the opportunity to participate in a way I hadn’t expected—and to potentially really impact the outcome of the battles for Samarra, Taji and Baghdad.”

  He was also proud to report that the assignment meant he would get to wear the combat patch of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, just as his father had in Grenada, instead of the Forty-Second, which was sure to help his career. Going into combat with a National Guard unit simply didn’t look as good on a résumé as such a premier unit in the professional Army.

  But he made no bones about the drawbacks of his new job. A guerrilla war was intensifying, and U.S. forces had recently invaded the restive city of Fallujah to dislodge insurgents who had taken control of several major population centers in the so-called Sunni Triangle, north and west of Baghdad. George would likely be right in the middle of it.

  “Downside is that I will be outside the security of the forward operating bases,” he told his mother, “in the streets … not the safest of environments.”

  As he waited apprehensively for the go order to move north, George received a touching letter from his stepbrother, Scott, who tucked inside a photograph of Little George and Big George taken around Christmastime when he was in high school. Father and son were sitting contentedly on the couch eating dinner, Dad wearing what he jokingly called his “birth control Army glasses,” the ugly wide-rimmed black ones provided by the government.

  “It was bittersweet,” he told his mother about it.

  George thought a lot about his late father, now dead seven years. He imagined what it was like back in 1991, when it was a fretful Lieutenant Colonel George S. Eyster IV who as commander of a helicopter battalion was camped in the same desert awaiting orders to invade Iraq. Still fresh in George’s memory was that somber image of Dad in the video greeting he mailed home to Fort Bragg at the time. So was the story of how difficult that time had really been for Big George.

  After his father died, George’s mother received a letter from Gordon Terpstra, who had been his father’s battalion chaplain during the first Iraq War. Terpstra wrote to Ann that he was deeply saddened by the news of the untimely death of his former commander. The two families had first met when they lived on the same street at Fort Bragg in 1989, where a teenage George played ball behind the house with Terpstra’s two sons. In his letter, written on the letterhead of the church in Washington State where he had become the pastor, Terpstra recalled how emotionally fragile Big George had been in those weeks leading up to the 1991 invasion. The two of them, who were exceptionally close for a lieutenant colonel and a junior captain, had been living in adjacent tents at their camp in the Saudi Arabian desert near the Iraqi border, where they often huddled on cold evenings over a wooden crate playing chess by the light of a kerosene lamp. As the 1991 invasion approached, Terpstra could see that his commander was on edge; on one occasion Colonel Eyster slammed his fist down on the chessboard before quickly apologizing for letting his frayed nerves get the best of him. Then, on the morning of January 14, 1991, Big George came into Terpstra’s tent and asked him to sit with him in the privacy of a nearby vehicle. He wanted to tell him something and didn’t want anyone else to hear. Almost immediately after they closed the doors, Big George, whose military bearing had inspired so much confidence in his men, hung his head and his shoulders slumped. “Today is the day my dad died in Vietnam, and today is the day we are launching an operation north,” he confided. “I’m scared. I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

  Terpstra clasped his commander’s hand and asked him if he wanted to pray. The chaplain then recited some verse from scripture, asking the Lord to protect him and his men on their mission. It was all over in a few minutes, and Colonel Eyster regained his composure and went about his duties. Later that day, when Big George and his men returned safely from their mission, he took Terpstra aside and thanked him for giving him the courage he needed.

  Now, almost fourteen years later, it was Little George’s turn to face the uncertainty of combat—on the front lines.

  George finally got his turn at one of the computer kiosks set up in tents around the base for soldiers to hop on the Internet.

  “Mom,” he typed into the small Yahoo! chat screen and hit the send button. He waited a minute or two to see if she was near the computer back in Tallahassee.

  It was about half past six in the morning on the East Coast, and Ann was still sleeping when her computer came alive with a ding.

  George tried again. “Are you there? Momma … are you there?” He felt a little guilty he might wake her up, but he was getting ready for another night patrol and didn’t know when he’d have another chance to reach her.

  After stirring for a few more moments, Ann realized in her half slumber the source of the sound and scrambled out of bed and across the bedroom over to her desk.

  “Yes,” she typed quickly and hit return. “I’m here.”

  “Hey there. I am so happy I finally caught you.”

  “Me, too. My hands are shaking. I thought I was dreaming,” she replied. “I have been worried about you because it has been a week since I heard from you.”

  “Sorry about that,” George typed. “I have been really busy. I’ve been trying to get off an email to you and every time I come in here we get attacked.”

  It was a week before Christmas. George was now at Camp Anaconda, the sprawling former Ir
aqi air base north of Baghdad that was now the largest American installation in Iraq, with some twenty thousand personnel and its own weekly newspaper. This was the first time mother and son communicated by Internet chat. Telephone calls, George had discovered, would be rare, but computers were set up all over the base for soldiers to communicate with family and friends back home. So he had given Ann instructions on how to set up the chat program so they could talk in real time—and how she could leave it on and update when she would return if she was out on an errand. It would be much more intimate than letters or e-mails, and as long as no one was waiting for a turn, or he didn’t have to be somewhere, they could “talk” as long as they wished.

  Ann was delighted to hear from her boy and wanted to know if he’d received the two packages she had sent. He got the books and magazines but no sign yet of the Christmas decorations Ann had collected to spruce up his bunk with some holiday spirit: a hand-carved Nativity scene; a small, American-flag-themed Christmas tree; and, for good measure, a DVD of a burning Yule log. Ann told him to also be on the lookout for his Christmas presents, which were on their way separately.

  How was his back? Did he need a hot-water bottle? Ann peppered George with all sorts of motherly questions. It was still sore, George reported, but it got better as the day wore on, as he started to move around. It hurt most when he woke up and at the end of the day, but he was managing. “I’ve weaned myself off the drugs and am relying on Motrin now,” he told her.

  George uploaded a photograph of himself, taken after a recent mission. Wearing dark sunglasses, he was outfitted in full body armor, his night-vision goggles perched atop his helmet and his gloved hands clutching his M4 carbine. He was standing next to a Humvee with a walled compound in the background.

  “Got it! It’s great! Thank you!” Ann responded after opening the attachment.