You Are Not Forgotten Read online

  Located in the southeastern corner of Alabama, near the border with Georgia and Florida, Fort Rucker was only a ninety-minute drive from Tallahassee, which meant that George could hop into his Audi sports car on Fridays and spend the weekend with Ann or drive a bit farther down I-10 to have lunch with Grandma Harriet in Atlantic Beach. Sometimes he would even drive to Ann’s for dinner during the week. The two of them grew closer than ever. George made her laugh with some of his favorite cartoon voices, well honed over the years. He liked to shower her with little gifts, scouring bookstores and art galleries across the South for scenes of South Carolina’s Low Country, her favorite. He also bought a small fishing boat to keep in Florida and took to calling it the Low Country Lady, a nickname of hers; some of their fondest memories were of weekends boating in the Chesapeake Bay when they lived near Baltimore and his father kept a motorboat. They now watched countless movies together—action flicks for George, romantic comedies for Ann—and took day trips to some of Big George’s favorite places. As 2000 turned into 2001, they were becoming best friends.

  In the summer of 2001, as a newly minted member of the air cavalry, George entered an exclusive fraternity of fliers. Kiowa Warrior pilots pride themselves on being the last generation of military aviators to manually fly their own aircraft. The armed scout helicopter is a remnant of the Vietnam War, where it was first introduced in 1969. It still has few automatic functions, and the two pilots, sitting side by side in the all-glass cockpit, manually control most of the flight operations with a maze of dials, switches, and green monitors that are a throwback to another era. Kiowa pilots liked to brag that all those other pilots were just pushing buttons.

  Built by Bell Helicopter, the Kiowa was named for the Native American tribe that originally hailed from the northern Great Plains and shaved the hair around their ears to prevent arrows from getting tangled when let loose from a bow. The aircraft, with its telltale dome-like structure above the main rotor, resembles a large mosquito bobbing up and down and darting quickly in and out of canyons. Sometimes flying a few dozen feet off the ground, the pilots’ mission is to enter enemy territory quietly and undetected—during the day or at night—to identify distant targets for artillery or other attacking forces. They are, in effect, the modern version of the horse-mounted cavalry. Under a secret program in the 1980s the helicopters were outfitted with weapons, which now include more than a dozen 70-millimeter rockets, a .50-caliber machine gun, and a pair of Hell-fire missiles targeted by the spherical laser targeting system perched on top.

  Compared with other combat aircraft, the Kiowas are exceedingly small, about the size of a large SUV. First-time pilots describe feeling as if they are strapping on the Kiowa, as opposed to boarding it. The cockpit glass comes over the top and wraps under the pilots’ feet, giving them greater visibility but also creating a sense of being suspended high over the earth. Strapped in nearly shoulder to shoulder, the pilots have virtually no extra space and are exposed to ground fire from both sides of the aircraft, protected only by a small swinging armor plate to cover their haunches and another underneath their buttocks. With no air-conditioning or heating, the Kiowa crew must contend with freezing temperatures or blistering desert heat, for up to eight long and stiff hours at a time. Both pilots can fly the helicopter and fire its weapons using the control sticks between their legs, but the one in the left seat, usually more senior in rank, is commonly hunched over the small display in front of him, which includes a recordable TV and a thermal imaging system, providing instructions to the pilot next to him.

  George found training to be a Kiowa pilot a thrilling experience and one that challenged him physically and mentally. Dad had been right. This was a thinking man’s pursuit. Getting through his course work and flight training took every bit of brains he had and all the study skills he could muster. Yet he still felt a strong connection to his infantry brethren. It was because of them, when the time came to choose the type of helicopter to fly, that he requested the Kiowa Warrior. He would be providing direct support to troops in battle.

  He was also beginning to feel a greater connection to his lineage and had a growing urge to delve further into his family’s past. He began to read the letters he had hidden away and was eager for Grandma Harriet to pass down more Eyster history. Now that he had decided he would make the Army a career, he wanted to know more about his forebears’ experiences, to learn from them. Early in 2001, George published a notice in the newsletter of Grandpa George’s old unit from Vietnam, the Black Lions, seeking to contact some of the men who served with him. He included his phone number and address in Alabama where they could contact him.

  Within a few months he received letters from several of them, all eager to tell him about their dealings with his grandfather. Some thought he was their former commander’s son rather than his grandson. They spoke glowingly—even lovingly—of a man whom they clearly revered. Despite his image of his grandfather as a stern disciplinarian, George learned that Grandpa George was also considered a sensitive man. One of his young lieutenants told of the patience and concern he had personally shown him after his unit was ambushed. The chaplain who had led a memorial service in Lai Khe, Vietnam, for Grandpa George and three of his soldiers also killed in action mailed George a worn copy of the program.

  “He was a kind and understanding leader,” the retired lieutenant Jay Whitcomb, who had served under his grandfather, told George in April 2001. “He believed in being with his troops.”

  After a long stretch of night flying, George was asleep in his two-bedroom town house in Enterprise, Alabama, on the morning of September 11, 2001. The telephone rousted him from bed with the news of the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. He quickly got dressed and in a few minutes drove through the gate at Fort Rucker, where he learned that all flights were grounded. George and his fellow pilots spent most of the day watching in disbelief the wall-to-wall news coverage of the attacks. As the day wore on, there was a deepening sense that this meant war.

  Two weeks later George was on his final nighttime checkout in the Kiowa. Under the cover of darkness, he was flying with an instructor out near Lake Tholocco in the middle of the sprawling base. Wearing his night-vision goggles, he was instructed to put the helicopter through its paces.

  “Fly the shit out of it,” the instructor told him.

  George took the controls and demonstrated a series of attack maneuvers he had learned in flight training. He performed “hover fire,” in which the weapons are released as the helicopter is hovering in a fixed position. He then moved on to “running fire,” when the weapons are released while flying at high speed, followed by “diving fire,” descending at a steep angle toward the target. When the instructor was satisfied, he told George he wanted to show him something new, something he hadn’t learned in the course. He wanted to demonstrate what he called “bumping fire.”

  The instructor took the controls and climbed high over the Alabama wilderness. When he reached about five thousand feet, he put the helicopter into a dive. He swooped down at high speed, and as he neared the ground, he pulled up and banked the helicopter behind some trees. Emerging into the open, he fired the Kiowa’s weapons. George watched in fascination. The maneuver, the instructor told him, was designed to use the terrain as a natural shield, as the Kiowa was notoriously vulnerable to enemy fire. Bumping fire could be used with virtually any terrain feature, including buildings.

  “Pay attention,” he instructed George. “This is going to keep you alive.”

  George repeated the maneuver several times before thick storm clouds started rolling in above them. Within minutes, visibility was so limited that they had to fly five feet off the ground to see where they were going. Finally, they had no choice but to bring the Kiowa down in a dry lake bed.

  Days later America was at war in Afghanistan, but George’s turn would have to wait. He didn’t have enough flying experience. He had never commanded an aviation unit. The best way to gain experience
, he was told, was to do a tour in South Korea. There he would get his first command of a Kiowa troop and have the opportunity to fly, both patrolling the demilitarized zone and in countless war games with the South Korean military preparing for a possible renewal of hostilities with the Communist North. George could have stayed at Fort Rucker but he was recently promoted to first lieutenant and felt he needed to catch up with his contemporaries in the field.

  “I’m stuck here,” he thought. “I could do this for another twenty-four months and not see combat.” So he volunteered for a tour in Korea.

  By the end of 2003, George was back at Fort Rucker, where he was frustrated to find himself serving as the operations officer of a training battalion instead of in a combat unit pulling duty in either Iraq or Afghanistan. He completed two consecutive tours in Korea, where he earned an Army Commendation Medal, won the “top gun” award for Kiowa pilots, and received high marks for commanding Dagger Troop in the Seventh Cavalry Regiment. By now a captain, he had been in the Army nearly six years and felt he had not yet done his part. Moreover, he knew, without a combat tour his career prospects would be significantly dimmer. The pull to get into the war was growing stronger and stronger.

  “I need to do that,” he decided.

  He soon found a way when he saw a bulletin from the Army’s aviation branch saying it was looking for helicopter pilots to volunteer for a tour in Iraq. The catch was that it was with the Forty-Second Aviation Brigade, part of the New York National Guard. The part-time soldiers needed SMEs—subject matter experts—to help prepare them and then deploy for a year in the war zone. They would be leaving in the fall of 2004 along with the rest of the Forty-Second Infantry Division.

  George immediately contacted a representative in the Army’s Human Resources Command to put his name in.

  “Well, I guess if this is what you want to do, man,” was the tepid response on the other end of the phone.

  Not every officer would jump at the chance to go to Iraq, let alone with the “weekend warriors” of the National Guard, who often had more limited experience than those on active duty.

  The decision to deploy the Forty-Second had sparked criticism in some of the local communities that its members hailed from, mainly in New York and New Jersey. The Forty-Second was the first National Guard division being sent into combat since the Korean War—just as anti–Iraq War sentiment in the country was moving beyond the fringe and becoming a key divide between the political parties in the unfolding 2004 presidential campaign.

  George had watched with interest from his perch in Korea as antiwar protests were organized at home and around the world in the lead-up to the war in the spring of 2003. Now, as he prepared to report for duty, the mood in the country was nearing a crossroads. It had been more than a year and a half since the U.S. invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, and no hidden arsenal of nuclear or biological weapons—President George W. Bush’s key rationale for the war—had been found. Meanwhile, U.S. casualties were steadily rising, and the price tag for the war was climbing into the hundreds of billions of dollars. In the spring of 2004, public anxiety about the war reached its high point when the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed evidence of torture at the hands of U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison. The scandal set off an uproar at home and around the world and marked a turning point in many Iraqis’ view of the Americans, whom they increasingly saw as occupiers, not liberators, and brutal ones at that. George was also closely following the U.S. presidential election, in which the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, was running to unseat Bush on a platform to end the war.

  “Public opinion in New York won’t stand for these guys to be extended much past a year,” he wrote to Ann. “It was very controversial to deploy them in the first place, so I’m not sure Big Army can afford the negative press.”

  Some of George’s fellow officers, meanwhile, were incredulous when he told them about his next assignment. “What the hell were you thinking?” was one common refrain. But he was committed to playing his part and saw this as his best opportunity in the near future to lead men into combat.

  Another question soon popped up: What would he do after Iraq? His energies were focused on getting things squared away at Fort Rucker before reporting to the Forty-Second, so it hadn’t yet occurred to him. But the U.S. Army is nothing if not good at planning, and his branch representative soon contacted him to talk about his future after his combat tour.

  George was told that his decision to volunteer with the Forty-Second would earn him a chit on the back end, and for his next assignment he had more choices than was traditionally the case. The Army’s Human Resources Command at Fort Knox in Kentucky sent him a list of possible assignments to read over the weekend. Several appealed to him. He could be an ROTC instructor, teaching military science on a college campus for a few years. Another was a position overseeing some of the training ranges at Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola, Florida, not far from Ann. Or he could return to Fort Rucker, where he now owned a town house, to be a flight instructor. After a few days going over the list, George was still undecided about which he should choose.

  In a follow-up call to inquire further about the possibilities, George was asked if he might be interested in another job, something a bit more unique. What did he think about being a recovery team leader in charge of searching for prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action? George asked the branch representative to read the job description. He would be responsible for traveling worldwide to recover the remains of MIAs and POWs. George assumed this meant another tour in Iraq or Afghanistan. It didn’t sound very attractive immediately after returning from a year in Iraq, he responded.

  “No, this is for guys lost in previous wars,” he was told. Vietnam, Korea, World War II.

  “How am I qualified for that?” George wanted to know.

  The Army’s aviation branch, the officer on the phone explained, had never recommended one of its officers for the position and was eager to do so.

  “You have the right background,” George was told, especially with a stint in the infantry.

  Moreover, George was informed that the branch representative in charge of placing infantry captains in new assignments was going to the same command.

  “If one of the guys in charge of placing officers in new assignments was going, it might be a pretty good gig,” he thought.

  Another detail intrigued him even more. The command he would be working for was based in Hawaii.

  Still, George wanted to think about it. He knew exceedingly little about what he would actually be doing. In all his years as an Army brat and after nearly seven years as an officer, he hadn’t been aware that military personnel—let alone a dedicated unit—were still actively searching for missing personnel from previous wars. To find out more, he logged on to the Web site for the command. He read some of the latest press releases about the search for MIAs and learned about the high-tech laboratory that was using DNA and other cutting-edge science to identify the remains, bringing long-awaited closure to families that, unlike his, never knew what happened to their loved ones. He was particularly interested in what the outfit was doing in Vietnam. The war in Southeast Asia was such a prominent theme in his life. It was a subject he wanted to learn more about.

  George had recently been reading about the tunnels of Cu Chi, where Grandpa George lost his life, and caught a documentary about the Vietnam War hosted by Peter Arnett, the war correspondent who had been with his unit that fateful day in 1966 and so movingly eulogized him in an Associated Press obituary at the time. George had also just finished reading We Were Soldiers Once … and Young, the Vietnam War memoir of the retired three-star general Harold Moore and the war correspondent Joseph Galloway recounting the Battle of Ia Drang, the first major U.S. engagement of the war. It took place just weeks before Grandpa George was killed and set the stage for a conflict that would drag on for ten more long and bloody years. George was fascinated read
ing about Moore and Galloway’s experiences returning to the scene of the battle twenty-five years later to meet some of the very men Moore had fought.

  “Wow,” George thought, “I could have the opportunity to wander around in Vietnam on the battlefields where my grandfather had fought. Who gets that opportunity?”

  He had every reason to say yes to the assignment. He called his branch representative back to tell him.

  “I’ll take it.”

  Soon it was official. At the end of 2005, George was to report to Honolulu and the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. But that was more than a year away. First he had to report to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where the Forty-Second Aviation Brigade was preparing for its yearlong tour in Iraq.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PREPARING FOR WAR

  On July 8, 1943, Ryan stepped out of the hangar and into the sweltering heat. He was wearing his summer flight gear—lightweight flight suit, boots, flight jacket, and unlined helmet. A face mask and goggles clung to his forehead, along with a headband to hold his radio assembly in place. He strolled over to his assigned plane, tail number 17419, climbed the ladder on the right side, and stepped into the open cockpit. He settled into the pilot seat and fastened his seat belt, and adjusted the seat height. He was instructed not to slide the canopy shut with the bright yellow handle until he was airborne, in case he had to get out quickly.

  In front of him, on the outside of the aircraft, a member of the crew inserted a cartridge, about the size of a shotgun shell, into a small breech. He pressed the starter. With the sound of a muffled pop, the large propeller started to turn, and the aircraft’s 1,850-horsepower engine coughed and sputtered to life.