Area men search in state for lost troops
BY CHRISTIAN HILL
THE OLYMPIAN
A recovery team from the U.S. military command charged with bringing the nation's missing war dead home is wrapping up a mission to recover remains at two World War II plane-crash sites in Washington state.
Dr. Bill Belcher, a 1980 Tumwater High School graduate, is part of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, team that arrived in Washington in July for its first mission to the continental United States in nearly a decade.
An Olympia resident, John "Cye" Laramie, a city sanitation worker, also has taken an interest in the sites and his amateur sleuthing led him to find and notify the wife of one of the lost pilots that her husband's remains appear to have been found.
Belcher, who lives in Hawaii near Schofield Barracks, where the command is based, is a forensic anthropologist and the sole civilian on the team.
The recovery mission encompasses two sites in the northern Cascades.
The first site is a downed SBD-5 Dauntless fighter in the Wenatchee National Forest. The aircraft and its two crew members, reportedly Ensign Matthew Richard McFarland and Lt. Jesse Raymond Battenfeld, were reported missing in February 1945 after taking off from a naval air station in Seattle for a training mission.
The team then shifted its focus to the Okanogan National Forest and the crash site of a P-38 fighter plane. The pilot, believed to be Lt. Kenneth Ambrose, was reported missing in 1942 after leaving for a maintenance flight from Elmendorf Air Base in Alaska.
JPAC deployed a team to the sites last year. It found physical evidence and, after evaluating archival records, recommended this year's recovery mission.
The command is cautious to reveal the identities of any recovered remains until the forensic analysis is complete. Asked whether remains had been recovered at the sites, Belcher declined comment but did say the mission "was successful."
Belcher will return home Sept 14 and remain in Hawaii for a couple of weeks before being sent to Vietnam.
His father was a longtime soldier, and his last duty station was at Fort Lewis. Belcher was born at Madigan Army Medical Center.
His motivation comes from the knowledge that family members are waiting back home to finally learn the ultimate fate of loved ones lost overseas.
"I have a debt for what my dad and his generation did for me in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and this is a way for me to repay that debt," he said.
Laramie learned about the P-38 from hikers who discovered it in September 1997. After months of sleuthing, he and others were able to confirm the wreckage as Ambrose's plane and locate the pilot's wife and daughter, who was a baby when her father went missing.
He also worked to verify that McFarland and Battenfeld might still be buried near the wreckage of the SBD-5 Dauntless.
"He's truly a professional, and I'm strictly an amateur," Laramie said recently of Belcher, whom he's never met. "Those guys go all over the world under just terrible conditions, jungles and bugs, and they just do a hell of a job. I have a lot of respect for those guys."
Christian Hill covers the city of Lacey and military for The Olympian. He can be reached at 360-754-5427 or at chhill@ olympia.gannett.com.