“Why are you grinning?”
“No reason,” I said. “On to Charleston?”
She nodded.
We took a gravel path that curved through gravestones and manicured shrubs.
“It’s such a waste,” Katy said. “Coop. Luis Alvarez. That Xander guy. They were all so young and full of life. Now they’re dead.”
I let her talk. We’d been over this, but I understood her need to vent.
“I even wonder about the two guys thrown off Makapu’u Point. And the guys who threw them.”
“That’s totally different. Those men made life choices, to both harm others and put themselves at risk. They hardly deserve pity.”
Katy’s face clouded. “But, at some level, there is a similarity. Decisions are made by young people that cause them to die.”
“It’s unfair to equate soldiers or cops or firemen with people who cause harm and place themselves in danger for personal gain.”
“Of course it is. That’s not what I’m saying. Soldiers like Luis Alvarez are selfless heroes. Bangers like Kealoha and Faalogo are self-serving scum.”
“I guess I’m missing the point,” I said.
“I don’t know.” Katy sighed. “I keep asking myself why one person takes risks to do something meaningful, while another takes risks to cause harm.”
“And why on both sides of the equation some live and some die.”
“And that.”
“People have been asking those questions since they started painting pictures on the walls of caves.” I reminded myself to get her a copy of the
As we exited through the big wrought-iron gates, I turned for one last look at John Lowery’s grave.
What a spider’s web you and Reggie wove, I thought. So much grief and deceit. So many people tangled in the threads.
Aloha, Spider.
Find peace here, Plato.
My Mazda was in the same place I’d parked on the day of the exhumation.
“Got your game on, tough stuff?”
“Ready for the play-offs.” Katy grinned. Bleakly.
“What do you suppose Coop left you?”
“I have no idea.”
“Let’s find out.”
FROM THE FORENSIC FILES OF DR. KATHY REICHS
UNTIL THEY ARE HOME
The mission of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, JPAC, is to locate Americans held as prisoners of war and to recover those who have died in past conflicts. JPAC was created in 2003 by merging CILHI, the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii, and JTF-FA, the Joint Task Force–Full Accounting. To date, the United States government has found no evidence of any POW still in captivity, so JPAC’s day-to-day focus is on the investigation of leads and the recovery and identification of remains.
On average, JPAC identifies six sets of human remains each month. The process is complicated, requiring substantial forensic expertise and multiple levels of review.
That’s where I came in. Back in the CILHI day, I served as an external consultant. My duties included analyzing the dossiers of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines for whom positive IDs had tentatively been established, and visiting the Honolulu lab twice yearly for oversight and briefing.
Hawaii. Midwinter. Think that was an easy sell to my department chair at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where I was on faculty with a full-time teaching load?
As Ryan complained to Tempe, the military loves its alphabet soup. At CILHI, I was issued a glossary of acronyms as thick as my arm. KIA/BNR: killed in action, body not recovered. DADCAP: dawn and dusk combat air patrol; AACP: advance airborne command post; TRF: tuned radio frequency. Or trident refit facility. I guess context is important for that one. But you get the idea. It makes a civilian want to join the AAAAAA: the Association for the Abolition of Abused Abbreviations and Asinine Acronyms.
While I’ve tried to provide a peek into some of the operations at JPAC, much goes on that I’ve not described in
Each year JPAC recovery teams travel by horseback, boat, train, and helicopter to recover the bodies of U.S. troops missing from World War II, Korea, the Cold War, and Southeast Asia. They slash through jungles, rappel cliffs, scuba dive into trenches, and climb up mountains, toting their weight in survival and excavation equipment. In comparison, my job was a stroll through the park. Physically, at least. Emotionally, it was gripping.
