Re: Remains of Another Day

Date: May 27, 2004

"Remains of Another Day

By Ellen Gamerman The Baltimore Sun

In a veterans cemetery Wednesday in Cheltenham, Md., a World War II pilot shot down over Luxembourg in the winter of 1944 will finally get his funeral. His coffin will be lowered into a plot between two wild cherry trees. His widow and daughter will mourn him. The grounds crew will shovel in the earth. Sixty years after his last breath in the cockpit of a burning P-47D Thunderbolt, the truth of 2nd Lt. John R. Dyer's death has come home.

Returning slain soldiers to U.S. soil and retrieving the stories of their deaths from the cloud of confusion that surrounds war is the work of the U.S. Army's Casualty and Memorial Affairs Operations Center in Alexandria, Va. This office handles the bureaucracy of death. Its business is bereavement. It knows the fresh grief over a soldier killed in Iraq. It knows the shadowy sorrow from a death more than a half-century ago. And it knows how the mystery of a loss can linger, promoting misinformation and stories that sometimes never get set straight.

But now, in that office, Dyer's name is penned in green ink on a board listing closed cases. Six decades after the Army declared his body ``nonrecoverable,'' the facts have returned with Dyer's remains.

Two years ago, the Luxembourg military alerted the U.S. Army to aircraft wreckage found near the town of Niederwampach. The United States sent a team to excavate the crash site, finding teeth, bits of cranium and Dyer's dog tags in a crater that for decades had been used for the disposal of dead livestock. As a result, the Army concluded it was wrong all those years ago when it reported that after Dyer's plane was hit by anti-aircraft artillery fire, the airman parachuted to the ground, was captured and later killed by his German guards.

The facts were simpler: There was a hit, a crash, a death.

While the nation focuses its attention on the latest casualties returning to the United States from Iraq, soldiers slain in every U.S. conflict since World War II continue to make a quiet march home. The Army's mortuary-affairs office, two floors below the room where Iraq deaths are processed, receives more than 200 inquiries into the deaths of World War II soldiers each month. With the official opening of the World War II Memorial in Washington this weekend, the staff expects even more questions about the 78,000 soldiers from that conflict whose bodies were never found.

Families want answers, even if they come almost a lifetime later.

``It was always a story, what happened to my father,'' says Carolyn Sowell, Dyer's daughter. ``Now it's a reality.''

The 59-year-old grandmother from Clinton, Md., was just 2 weeks old when her father was killed. Because her mother remarried, the Army considers Sowell the next of kin and has given her power over her father's remains and personal effects.

Now, the chance to bury John Dyer reaches a part of her past that has long felt inaccessible.

``There's actually going to be something I can do for my father -- to finally bring his life to closure,'' Sowell says.

She wonders what it will feel like to sit with her father's remains at the funeral home Wednesday. She recalls asking an Army official about those shattered bones.

``Can I open that package up and touch them?'' she asked. ``So I can touch my father?''

If it will help, he told her. If it will help.

Lt. Col. Ron Long can see the way grief changes over time, the way it stays the same.

As chief of Mortuary Affairs and Casualty Support, Long oversees the retrieval of remains of World War II soldiers and airmen as well as the recordkeeping for the dead and wounded in Iraq. He knows that families of soldiers slain in the Iraq war are often bereft, confused, angry; they want more information faster, complain there isn't nearly enough.

And he knows there can be more to learn. He tells his staff to take careful records. The Army has retrieved the remains of more than 290 World War II soldiers over the past three decades, thanks in part to reviewing old reports.

Sixty years from now, Long says, their Iraq files could be reopened, too.

The retrieval of information surrounding World War II deaths is important for families, of course, and for history. But in the brightly lighted warren of offices at the mortuary-affairs division, it also provides solace for the people doing the work -- it reminds them they are fulfilling the Army's promise to its soldiers, even if it takes decades to do so.

``I think, `What if it were me? What if it were my family?''' says Long, 41, whose military staccato carries evidence of his North Carolina youth. ``If I were in a situation any of these heroes were put in, at least I'd know that somebody would be looking for me. They wouldn't stop looking for me. They wouldn't stop taking care of my family.''

Long is sitting in the public-affairs office of the Army's personnel-services division, known as the U.S. Army Human Resources Command. At a computer behind him, a staffer types a casualty report for a soldier killed in Iraq. The report will be released at 6 p.m., exactly 24 hours after a uniformed Army officer has visited that family's home.

When the remains of World War II soldiers are found, the same protocol is followed. A uniformed Army representative knocks on the door of the next of kin -- although so many decades later, that often means a distant relative. Along with personal effects, the serviceman hand-delivers the report detailing the soldier's death.

Families often react the same way: They want a military funeral.

There is some basic bureaucracy that surrounds World War II ancient remains cases, as they are called. Some searches are more likely than others. Downed World War II planes with crews of eight or 10 people are more attractive because they promise the biggest return. And science affects the outcome, too. World War II skeletons, for example, are easier to recover than those from Korea or Vietnam because bodies deteriorate much faster in acidic jungle soil.

Sometimes the Army re-examines old sites with modern tools such as ground-penetrating radar to find more remains. It has sent climbers into the Himalayas and divers into the Bay of Tunis.

Lt. Col. Deborah Skillman in the Army's mortuary-affairs office expects her phone will ring even more after the World War II Memorial dedication, the way it did after the opening of the Korean and Vietnam memorials. With those ceremonies, families realized how little they knew about their relatives whose bodies were never found. Skillman understands why families crave the stories of these lost men.

``These are heroes,'' she says. ``Family heroes.''

The remains retrieved from John Dyer's crash site in Luxembourg are so few, they could fit in one hand.

But they carry with them the facts of a soldier's death.

In 1944, Dyer's flight leader had seen his plane burning and radioed him to bail out, but another airman from that mission testified that he never saw Dyer leave his plane. Still, that account did not prevail in the official record.

Instead, military investigators concluded the other airman's view was obscured and he couldn't see Dyer escape. That inquiry quoted witnesses saying Dyer floated to earth in his open parachute and was captured. The Army had concluded since Dyer's body was never found that he was murdered and buried by the Germans.

But with the recent reopening of the case, the Army noted that the physical description of the pilot and the account of his capture matched that of another pilot taken prisoner the month after Dyer's plane went down. Witnesses probably confused the airmen with each other, the Army now says, because the tails of both planes bore similar ID numbers.

That other pilot survived his captivity and returned to the United States after the war.

Dyer died that day.

At his funeral in Prince George's County on Wednesday, John Dyer's story will conclude with the truth.

The airman's 83-year-old widow, Elinor Davis, will no longer have to imagine his end as the Army first told it.

The daughter he never met, Carolyn Sowell, can know her father's death was almost certainly faster than she once thought -- that his plane was caught in anti-aircraft fire, rolled, hit the ground and exploded.

That telegram informing next of kin of the crash was once all Sowell had.

Now she has her father's dog tags, too.

And there is something else she can touch:

A grave, a tombstone on U.S. soil, a marker 10 miles from home.

©2004 The Repository"