Writing about books, hiking, the Battle of Tarawa and more
I am out wandering the wild for a month, but am in town. I wanted to post links to excellent pieces about History Flight’s amazing work in recovering Alexander Bonnyman Jr. here while I have a few minutes online.
We are most grateful for all the excellent work by journalists on this story.
Looking forward to speaking with Colorado Public Radio, Radio New Zealand and more, soon.
NEW: Radio New Zealand National
NEW: “Checkpoint,” Radio New Zealand National
I am out wandering the wild for a month, but am in town. I wanted to post links to excellent pieces about History Flight’s amazing work in recovering Alexander Bonnyman Jr. here while I have a few minutes online.
We are most grateful for all the excellent work by journalists on this story.
Looking forward to speaking with Colorado Public Radio, Radio New Zealand and more, soon.
“History Flight is extremely pleased to announce the discovery and recovery of historic Cemetery 27 on Betio Island as part of its 10-year, multi-million-dollar effort to recover hundreds of Marines lost to history, their nation and their families in 1943,” says founder and director Mark Noah. “Our trans-disciplinary team of forensic anthropologists, geophysicists, historians, surveyors, anthropologists, forensic odontologists, unexploded ordinance specialists, medics and cadaver dog handlers excelled in difficult conditions to produce spectacular results.”
History Flight works in cooperation with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the federal agency tasked with recovering the remains of missing U.S. service personnel.
“We are very grateful for the efforts of Mark Noah and History Flight for the recovery of these Marines lost during the Battle of Tarawa. We are working with History Flight and the Marine Corps to repatriate these remains to the United States, after which DPAA’s laboratory will expeditiously confirm or complete the identities of the recovered Marines,” says Lt. Gen. Michael S. Linnington, director of DPAA. “This is a tremendous example of how private-public partnerships can contribute to our accounting efforts both now and in the future.”
The remains of at least 40 men killed in fighting on the north side of tiny Betio were recorded as having been buried at a site near the terminus of a Japanese-built pier. An American Graves Registration Service team returned to the island in June 1946 and exhumed some 500 Marines, but was unable to locate Cemetery 27. The men buried there were among hundreds officially declared “unrecoverable” by the Quartermaster General’s Office in 1949.
Among the Marines recovered and now positively identified are those of 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman Jr., one of four recipients of the Medal of Honor for actions at Tarawa, and the only one whose remains had been unaccounted for.
“The location of Cemetery 27 has been one of Tarawa’s most challenging historical puzzles. History Flight’s discovery and recovery of the site is a testament to the tenacity and professionalism with which it has searched for all the missing Tarawa Marines,” says Clay Bonnyman Evans of Niwot, Colorado, who was working with the team when his grandfather was recovered May 29. “Our family, including Lt. Bonnyman’s two surviving daughters — my mother and aunt — is deeply grateful to History Flight for accomplishing what nobody else could for more than seven decades.”
Bonnyman’s daughters have decided to have his remains interred in the family plot in Knoxville, Tennessee, next to his parents, two sisters and brother. The family is currently planning a public funeral service for sometime in the fall.
Few Americans were aware U.S. Marines were still buried on Betio between 1950 and the dawn of the 21st century. Noah learned of the “lost graves of Tarawa” while searching for a downed plane in the Betio lagoon in 2006. History Flight spent thousands of hours searching archives for clues before sending teams to the island for six weeks in 2008 to locate former cemetery sites and scan them with ground penetrating radar.
To date, History Flight has recovered a minimum of 120 individuals once declared “unrecoverable” from Betio’s sandy tombs. Among those recovered at Cemetery 27 by the recovery team are six sets of unknown and possibly unrecorded remains.
“It has been an honor and privilege to lead our recovery team and find these long missing U.S. servicemen,” says archaeologist Kristen N. Baker, History Flight Recovery Team leader. “These brave men made the ultimate sacrifice over 70 years ago, and they deserve the best possible repatriation that we can give them. I hope they that they will finally receive the heroes departure and welcome home that they truly deserve.”
The team will continue to work the Cemetery 27 site through the end of June in advance of a forensic review of recovered remains in July, including comparison with dental records and DNA of descendants of missing Tarawa Marines.
Family members of individuals still unaccounted for from the battle of Tarawa are encouraged to contact History Flight at www.historyflight.com or 1-888-743-3311.
“Although we have dental matches to known missing Tarawa Marines for more than half of the recovered individuals, we are seeking DNA reference samples from families of the Tarawa missing,” says Ed Huffine, board secretary for History Flight. “We plan to have all of these recovered heroes identified by the end of the summer.”
After nearly 20 years and 18 novels in her outstanding Wind River mystery series, Boulder author Margaret Coel finally has written a cowboys-and-Indians story. But don’t worry: This is no formulaic Louis L’Amour knockoff.
It’s just that Coel has given her fans a textured portrait of real life among contemporary Cheyenne Arapaho Indians — whose traditional home included Boulder County — on a Wyoming “rez” and the conservative, white cowboy culture that surrounds them.
But “
Night of the White Buffalo” isn’t Anthro 101. As always, visiting with Coel’s familiar sleuths, Father John O’Malley, priest at the reservation’s Catholic mission, and Arapaho lawyer Vicky Holden is a page-turner.
“Night of the White Buffalo,” by Margaret Coel. Berkley Prime Crime, 290 pages.
The story turns on a mythic Lakota tradition adopted widely by Indian nations and mystically revered by millions of non-Indians around the world: the birth of a rare white buffalo calf. According to the myth, a white calf transformed into White Buffalo Woman before the eyes of two warriors, promising to return in times of “chaos and disparity” as a hopeful sign from the Creator.
“Throughout the generations, White Buffalo Woman kept her promise, and from time to time, a white buffalo calf was born,” Vicky learns. But not often: According to the National Bison Association, only one in 10 million births.
Now the Wind River Reservation has been blessed with its first white buffalo calf, but to the consternation of the Arapahos, on a ranch owned by a white couple that refuses to hire Indians and treats their white cowboys badly.
Someone also is taking potshots at white cowboys as they drive the area’s lonesome highways — and the first white man actually killed is Dennis Carey, owner of the Broken Buffalo Ranch where the calf, Spirit, is attracting hundreds in search of blessing.
The novel actually opens with a mysterious encounter in the confessional, when a man in a cowboy hat on the other side of the screen tells Father John he wants forgiveness for murder, but refuses to repent. Nobody has turned up dead on the reservation of late, but the priest is haunted by the strange encounter when Carey turns up dead two months later.
Vicky, meanwhile, meets a Colorado cowboy, Reg Hartly, who is in search of a friend who disappeared after working for Carey and his wife Sheila. She soon learns he isn’t the only white, out-of-state Broken Buffalo cowboy who has gone missing.
As crowds flock to see Spirit, another shocking murder sends the priest and lawyer hurtling toward a harrowing confrontation at the ranch.
As always, Coel is excellent in painting a realistic, non-sentimental portrait of the Arapahos. In this novel she does the same for itinerant cowboys, who, despite society’s romantic notions, are no more (or less) noble than anyone else.
If there is anything missing here, it’s the illicit spark that once tempted Vicky and Father John. It would be implausible, even silly, to continue beating that drum year after year. But the “replacement” relationships — with Adam and the priest’s platonic friend, Bishop Harry — just don’t have the same juice. At least, Walks on Three Legs, Father John’s beloved rescued dog, is having a good time.
In the end, there is something almost elegiac in the longing felt by people struggling to keep afloat in the mercenary, disconnected currents of the modern world.
“She’s a miracle from the Creator. Don’t matter how bad things get, the Creator is still with us,” Lewis White Feather says, explaining why he is taking a pledge to abstain from alcohol for 60 days. “Spirit come to us to let us know we are not alone.”
And it’s not just cowboys and Indians—who doesn’t wish for some hopeful sign? Coel has deftly captured the zeitgeist of our troubled times.
Though perhaps not as neatly crafted as the best in the series, “Night of the White Buffalo” might well be the most poignant. But don’t worry: It’s also a lot of fun.
One of the great traditions in dystopian fiction is the “If this goes on …” story, in which an author plays out a current trend to its extreme conclusion as a kind of warning.
Author Paolo Bacigalupi, of Paonia, Colo., has made his well-earned reputation in that dark tradition. Reading his science-fiction short stories and novels for both adults and younger readers can feel like taking a punch to the belly. A very hard punch.
“The People of Sand and Slag” posits an environmentally devastated future in which humans have been genetically engineered to survive by eating minerals that leaves the reader wondering if such survival is worth it. Bacigalupi’s multiple-award-winning 2009 novel, “The Windup Girl,” takes place in an overheated world where global corporations have controlled agriculture and energy is stored in “springs” wound by hand (or elephant, in the case of Thailand, where it takes place).
In two novels for young adults, the National Book Award-nominated “Ship Breaker” (2010) and its 2012 semi-sequel, “The Drowned Cities,” young people are terrorized, enslaved and must fend for themselves in a mercenary world ruined by climate change. The latter is surely one of the most brutal YA novels ever written.
After six years away from writing for “adults” — the YA novels feature young protagonists, but are hardly kid stuff — the talented if gloomy Bacigalupi is back with a near-future enviro-thriller that is less science-fictional, more violent and more pessimistic than anything he has written before. And that’s saying something.
!["The Water Knife," by Paolo Bacigalupi. Knopf, 371 pages. $25.95.](https://i0.wp.com/extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site21/2015/0521/20150521__24DCPBKw~1_200.jpg?resize=200%2C298 ""The Water Knife," by Paolo Bacigalupi. Knopf, 371 pages. $25.95.")
“The Water Knife” takes place in the future he first described in his strangely beautiful 2006 story “The Tamarisk Hunter,” in which “Big Daddy Drought” has pushed the American Southwest into chaos in the year 2030. But where the short story takes place in the haunting, sere regions along the Colorado River, the new novel portrays a nasty, brutish, decaying urban world where powerful interests — whether criminal gangs, state governments or Mafia-like “water districts” — stop at nothing to secure scarce water for the “haves” who live in enormous, densely populated high rises. Mexico has devolved into “cartel states”; in the U.S., states prevent American refugees from crossing their borders with extreme prejudice, and powerful China watches America’s collapse from an ocean away.
In Bacigalupi’s imagined Southwest, the problem is one that exists today, exacerbated by the ravages of climate change: The Colorado River simply cannot sustain the teeming masses of humans in the deserts of Nevada, Arizona and southern California.
The novel brings together three protagonists in a Phoenix that Mad Max would find familiar, brought together over rumors of a 150-year-old document that could alter the water-rights landscape forever: Angel Velasquez, the “water knife” who sniffs out water sources and shoots first for his boss, Las Vegas water queen Catherine Case; Phoenix journalist Lucy Monroe, who puts off escaping to verdant Vancouver so she can document the effects of water wars; and an “illegal” immigrant from Texas, Maria Villarosa, whose dream of getting to California is thwarted by a criminal kingpin.
The novel isn’t didactic, but it does constantly remind the reader how this world came to be: “Nothing lasted forever, so why should she (Lucy) try to fight her own end? Phoenix would fall as surely as New Orleans and Miami had done. Just as Houston and San Antonio and Austin had fallen. Just as the Jersey Shore had gone under for the last time.”
The novel’s constant violence and degradation is extreme but never descends into the pornographic. Scarcity, Bacigalupi knows, breeds violence.
As Velasquez says, in his world, “Somebody’s got to bleed, if anyone’s going to drink.”
Less dense than the brilliant “Windup Girl,” “The Water Knife” is also less inventive, trafficking in action and plot twists more than ideas and atmosphere. But despite one key plot hole — in such a ruthless world, would anyone really defer to a 19th century piece of paper? — it makes for thrilling and compulsive, if often uneasy, reading.
