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U.S. searches for missing World War II pilots - International Herald Tribune

WARANGOI, Papua New Guinea: Allan Harrison was alone in his one-seat fighter, chasing Japanese Zeros through dark clouds, when his plane began its final plunge into the jungles of New Guinea.

Now, 64 years later, all that is visible of Harrison's plane is its rusted, weather-beaten Pratt & Whitney engine, sitting upright in the mud.

Army Major George Eyster, head of a U.S. recovery team made up largely of combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, examines the site and makes a mental assessment of what might have happened: The scattered bits of debris indicate that the plane broke up - and possibly exploded - before it struck some palm trees and hit the ground.

That much Eyster can tell. But as a combat veteran himself, one who had two pilots under his own command perish in Iraq, there is another scenario that's vivid in Eyster's imagination: What those last minutes must have been like for the 19-year-old Harrison.

Before his own combat experiences, Eyster didn't quite understand what it was like to completely risk one's life, even though he came from a family of soldiers, and even though his own grandfather had made the ultimate sacrifice.

Now he knows, and that knowledge is part of what bonds him to the memory of the young fighter pilot who disappeared on Feb. 11, 1944, three weeks before his 20th birthday.

"You go into harm's way, but it doesn't really connect in your brain that you are absolutely a very vulnerable human who can die at a moment's notice," Eyster says. "It is at those moments when you have seen someone else killed or maimed that you know that you're really vulnerable."

Eyster was flying helicopter gunships in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, and it was on that tour of duty that the two pilots under his command were killed, both of them young, like Harrison.

"The relationship to that day and this is still there," says Eyster, who is 32. "While we all kind of know in our minds that the desperation of the Second World War" was greater "than the desperation of what we find ourselves in right now, it's still the same in that this was a 19-year-old kid, out there doing something that just almost defies reality."

The kinship between generations of soldiers is what drove Eyster and 30 other soldiers to come to Papua New Guinea and undertake this mission.

Harrison is one of 2,228 Americans missing in the chain of islands, which were home to numerous Japanese military bases. The six-week search for the remains of Harrison and another pilot, Marion McCown, is part of an expanding effort to locate some of the 78,000 service members unaccounted for from World War II.

The recovery team found human bones very quickly at the site of McCown's wreck. But finding identifiable remains of Harrison would require every tool and technique available to Eyster and his team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command.

Their interviews with villagers suggest that Harrison's remains were carried off from the crash site. Some villagers say Harrison was buried in what is now a potato patch down a 30-degree incline from the place where his plane hit the ground. Local lore holds that his skull was used in rituals.

The plane's wreckage was scavenged by locals for scrap metal, including the piece of the plane stamped with Harrison's tail number - 55908. It had been photographed on the site by a local forest surveyor in 1986 but has since disappeared.

And unlike the place where McCown crashed, beside a river, there is no nearby water source to help the recovery team fully screen the soil for any fragments of possible human remains.

But for Eyster, a seventh-generation army officer who knows firsthand the harsh realities of war, he believes that bringing Harrison home is the least he can do.

"He's a buddy," Eyster says. "We may never have known him, but he did what we did."

Eyster carries with him a case file on Harrison that includes a diagram of his fighter plane and a terse description of the man and the circumstances under which he went missing.

At 19, Lieutenant Allan Harrison III was the only child of Cora and Allan Harrison II. His father was a Procter & Gamble salesman, and the family had a simple house on Lidstone Street in Houston.

When the war came he left the University of Houston and joined the Marine Corps Reserve, setting off for flight school in Corpus Christi, Texas, and soon shipping off to the Pacific.

He wasted little time in making his mark. In less than two years in uniform, he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and credit for numerous "kills" of Japanese fighters.

On February 7, the Houston Post, Harrison's hometown paper, extolled him as a hero who helped "bag 21 Zeros." But just four days later, with heavy cloud cover reported between 4,000 and 8,000 feet, his plane disappeared.

Harrison "was last seen at 1055 at 20,000 feet over Bitagalip with a Zeke on his tail," his squadron's official war diary stated. "He did not return from this action and must be considered missing in action."

The paved road out of Rabaul quickly disappears into a muddy track that winds through banana plantations. Eyster, at the wheel of a Toyota 4x4, dodges chickens, pigs and a few barefoot children holding machetes before gingerly traversing a bridge of wooden planks.

After nearly an hour, past bamboo shacks built on stilts, the bumpy route turns through a thick patch of cocoa trees and finally banks off onto what is little more than a walking path.

A short distance ahead and down a slope sits the rusted engine of Harrison's plane.

When the recovery team arrives at the site, the members clear a wide area around the engine and scan for any metal hidden under the surface, a likely sign of additional aircraft wreckage. Then they rope off the site into grids, with little flags indicating where metal had been detected under the surface.

"I use a mix of archaeological and crime-scene investigation techniques," says Paul Emanovsky, the team's forensic anthropologist, who analyzed crime scenes for the Chicago police and has led MIA recovery missions around the world.

After more than a week of backbreaking work in the equatorial heat, team members are still digging in the area where they first began, a crater believed to be where the burning plane hit the ground. Others continue to dig at a separate location nearby, where some local people say a pilot was buried after the crash.

The signs aren't all bad.

"We have found some things that might have been on the pilot, like hardware from the parachute and a torso harness," Emanovsky says. But so far, no bones or other human remains have turned up.

Frustration begins to set in.

"We should've probably found some bone by now," complains Master Sergeant Jon Couturier, 36, of the Marines, the leader of the U.S. troops and local helpers digging at the site.

Eyster, who moves between this site and that of McCown's plane, checking on progress, starts to become concerned. At the McCown site, they are already bagging remains.

Team members play word games to help pass the monotonous hours sifting dirt through fine-mesh screens in search of Harrison's remains.

"We are doing it day-in, day-out for months at a time," says Sergeant Danna Forester, 35, the team's photographer, as she runs a gloved hand over a screen piled with fresh earth. "But it's worth it because families back home may get some answers."

A short time later, as the midday sun hits its zenith, an excited Sergeant Christopher Mayberry, 24, thinks he has found something.

Sweat pouring down his face, he dashes up the hill to where Emanovsky is looking through scraps of rusted metal.

Mayberry, holding a fragment he found between his fingers, is hoping to earn the bragging rights - and free beer from Emanovsky - for uncovering the first "osseous" material, or bone.

After a close inspection, however, Emanovsky dashes his hopes: It is a piece of pumice, not bone.

"Bone can be different colors, depending on the environment," Emanovsky explains. "It can be ivory, or it can even be blue if it has been lying near oxidized metal. Bone can look like burnt bamboo."

The digging and the sifting continue, punctuated by breaks every 40 to 50 minutes for water and insect repellent.

A short time later, as the team is preparing to call it a day, Forester picks though a bucket filled with shards of metal and other debris set aside earlier by the screeners. Her determined expression melts away and eyebrows rise up when something catches her eye.

Emanovsky is called in. He presses the fragment gently in his fingers and turns it over several times.

The team members wait anxiously for his verdict. It is a piece of skull, he finally announces, setting off high fives and backslapping. It is too small to extract DNA, he says, but nevertheless exactly what they are looking for.

Two days later, more pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

The team digs up two .50-caliber machine guns, along with a serial number confirming for the first time since the recovery began that the plane wreck is indeed Harrison's.

And near where the skull fragment was found, the team locates what is still considered the holy grail in making a positive identification: a human molar.

On May 14, the suspected remains of Lieutenant Allan S. Harrison III and Captain Marion R. McCown, United States Marine Corps Reserve, were placed in specially designed transfer cases and carried into a small chapel at the headquarters of the Papua New Guinea Defense Force, in the island nation's capital city of Port Moresby.

A U.S. military honor guard - recovery team members in their full dress uniforms - draped the cases with American flags, stood at attention and saluted their fallen comrades.

The solemn repatriation ceremony marked the beginning of the pilots' journey home to the United States.

The first stop will be the Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu, where scientists will test the bones for DNA and examine the teeth for markings consistent with each pilot's medical records.

Then, if positive identifications are confirmed, the pilots will buried, in a family plot, perhaps, or in a military cemetery.