IN THE LAND OF THE LOST
Twelve thousand miles and 12 time zones away, Americans are embarked on the last mission of the Vietnam War: to find nearly 2,000 men who never came home.
Mountain tribesmen seeking the bones of a lost Green Beret scale a steep ridge in Vietnam's Quang Nam Province, where the American's helicopter crashed in 1966. The dig is part of the U.S. military's ongoing effort to account for those who failed to return, dead or alive, from the war in Southeast Asia.
Stories by EARL SWIFT; photos by VICKI CRONIS
© 2000 The Virginian-Pilot
THE CHOPPER SCUDDED low over mist-cauled ridge, past dragon's teeth jutting a mile high from the rice paddies. Inside, buffeted by rotor wash, three American Green Berets sat shoulder-to-shoulder with a squad of South Vietnamese commandos.
They were Recon Team Nevada, part of a ghost army trained to materialize behind the lines, meet the enemy, dissolve back into the jungle. On this July Sunday in 1966, they relaxed in the H-34's grimy, oil-slick cabin, homebound. Their day's work was done. Its danger was passed.
Or so it might have been, had the old 34 not pitched and tossed in a patch of turbulent air. Had the jostling not snapped a pin that locked the machine's hinged tail in place. Had the helicopter not folded in mid-air.
Its rear swung like a door into the fuselage. The rotor at its tip shredded metal skin. The chopper fell, smacked nose-first into a narrow ridge top, exploded, flung pieces and people as it burned downhill through a forest of mahogany, bamboo and teak.
Two other 34s circled over the fires, marking the place on their charts, and over the next few days commando teams ventured to the ridge top to collect the dead. They found two Americans. They did not find a Special Forces master sergeant from North Carolina, a 36-year-old, married father of three named Ralph Joseph Reno II.
Which is why, on a July morning 34 years later, another helicopter leaves a former American air base at Da Nang and cruises southwest, into the central highlands of Vietnam. Its cabin is piled high with sacks of rice and bottled water, supplies destined for the same mountains, the same ridge top.
For the soldiers and scientists, too young to remember the war, who are digging for Ralph Reno.
They have spent more than two weeks among the H-34's twisted remains, living in a camp of lashed bamboo pole and ripstop nylon, passing the days on an archaeological dig carved into the ridge's western flank.
It is steep, dangerous terrain. Temperatures run into the triple digits every afternoon. The humidity is withering. Underfoot slither poisonous centipedes and banded kraits and bright green vipers so venomous their nickname is ``Jake Two Steps,'' said to be how far a victim gets before dropping. The mosquitoes carry malaria. Tigers lurk in the night.
Ninety-five Americans are encamped here and at five other digs in the Vietnamese back country, scouring the ground where planes went down, ambushed patrols left people behind, men simply vanished. Their mission is unprecedented in recorded history: To find their missing countrymen from a war two generations past. To send home all they find. To put a name, the right name, on each of their headstones.
They have their work cut out for them.
Once they find Ralph Reno -- if they find him -- they'll have 1,991 cases to go.
Tens of thousands of soldiers died nameless in the War Between the States. National cemeteries are crowded with them, men who went off to fight Yankee or Reb, died in battle, were buried where they fell.
Some 78,000 American bodies were never recovered from World War II -- from the Solomons, from Bataan, from Anzio and Normandy, from Air Corps bombers and Marine squads, warships and trenches. Half a century on, there's been no sign of 8,000 men who fought, and most likely died, in Korea.
Next to such numbers, 1,992 might seem modest.
But Vietnam is a slow-healing wound in the nation's heart. Many a man who fought there lives today, and many lost friends who've stayed lost. Thousands of families lack proof that a husband, a father, a son, is gone. All yearn for closure.
So the United States has regularly sent teams into Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia since 1992. Each is a joint venture between two military outfits, the Army's Central Identification Laboratory -- the largest forensic anthropology lab in the world -- and Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, a puree of the different services that sets things up for the labs to dig.
The supply-laden chopper flying to Ralph Reno's ridge top is part of the 61st such mission in Vietnam alone.
It is Russian-built, exhaust-blackened, its belly emblazoned with a gold star on a red field, the flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Its cabin smells of exhaust. The sound of its rotor varies from whine to bone-jolting bass chord. Hot wind blasts through open portholes.
South and west it flies, across Vietnam's slender waist, leaving behind the coast's paved roads and electricity, its running water and tourists, for country seen by few Americans in 30 years.
A narrowing valley. Trees draw close, borne by rising ground. A Vietnamese crewman unlatches the chopper's door, opening the cabin to a shock of wind, and peers over the side as the engine guns. The helicopter trembles, yaws in place over a small clearing hacked from the woods.
And suddenly a group of people swings into view -- a ragtag bunch of barefoot mountain tribesmen in loose cotton pants and filthy T-shirts, a handful of much bigger Americans, all crouching and squinting against the rotor's downdraft, clothes flapping, dirt and twigs and leaves swirling around them.
The chopper hits the ground, skips, hovers, slaps down a second time. The pilot kills the engine. Tribesmen swarm the landing zone.
When Saigon fell in April 1975, 2,583 servicemen were unaccounted-for in Southeast Asia.
From the start, a quarter were next to impossible to find: They were aviators who crashed in deep water, GIs vaporized in artillery blasts. In the years since, investigators have hit dead ends in their search for nearly as many more, which, hoping for new leads, they classify as ``deferred.''
Over the same time, more than one in five of the missing have been found. Another one in 10 have been recovered from the field, but have not yet been identified.
That leaves 23 percent of the cases, or just under 600, open and active.
On the LZ, dragonflies dart over mahogany and pine stumps hacked with machetes, bamboo shoots cut into evil points. The ridge top is perhaps 50 yards wide; the actual landing area, a circle of tamped earth, is less than half that, and on it the chopper is perched with its cockpit overhanging a slope that dives at 50 degrees.
The trees below have been dragged off, the topsoil stripped, and a switchbacking trail dug out of the heavy, yellow-gray clay beneath. At the trail's foot, some of the 60-odd locals hired to work the dig are shoveling ground in a 13-foot-square framed by string and stakes.
Mountain people, Mnong tribesmen, are strung along the path, each taking buckets from the man or woman below, passing them to the one above, and in a swooning heat the clay thus marches slowly uphill toward other workers who strain it through metal screens.
Anything bigger than a quarter-inch across -- a bone or buckle, a scrap of fabric, a cockpit gauge -- won't fit through the mesh.
For all the technological wizardry the late 20th century has brought to the American military, accounting for its lost is a decidedly preindustrial process of digging, and dirt, and sweat.
Working the wire
Six Americans are working the screens, each with a Mnong partner. Few of the locals speak Vietnamese. The American team's linguists speak Vietnamese, but not Mnong. Conversation is spare.
Sgt. 1st Class Mark Newberg, a big, rock-hard Army lifer from Petersburg, Va., chops a lump of clay with his trowel, smears it hard against the wire. It is tinged green and reeking of fuel -- the H-34's fuel, fused over time to the ground on which it splashed when the chopper broke up.
Newberg forces the lump through the mesh, which is stretched in a wood frame and hanging on web straps from a rough timber trestle.
The woman opposite him, tiny and unsmiling, does the same. A solid lump emerges as she pounds her clay flat. She plucks it from the screen, pulls caked dirt from its folds, shows it to Newberg. He turns to escape his own shadow, eyes it closely. A monkey's fist of aluminum, smoothed round by heat. He tosses it into a bucket behind him.
On the next screen over, an inch-long shred of zipper appears. At another, a bent washer. ``So now uh,'' Newberg murmurs. ``So'' is his stab at the Vietnamese Xo, or ``bucket.'' ``Uh'' is a Vietnamese vowel that means ``yes.'' ``Now'' is English.
``Now uh,'' a tribesman responds. He is skinny, mid-20s, wearing a ball cap. On its bill is embroidered the word ``Lover.''
Newberg: ``So now uh.''
Several tribesmen: ``Now uh!''
Newberg: ``Now uh.''
He has the Vietnamese flip the screen. Spent clay falls into a shallow trench below. A woman in flowered pajamas dumps a fresh bucket before him. The new mound has the consistency of quickly drying cement.
Newberg swirls his trowel across its top, sees that the clay is laced with nuggets. He and the unsmiling woman cleave it, flatten it, pick out the pieces. Twisted, rusty metal. Knots of aluminum. Each winds up in the bucket.
Locals again flip the screen. Fresh clay appears on the wire. Newberg calls for a 10-minute break, and shambles carefully up the switchbacks toward the LZ. The path is veneered in a rain-slickened goo that instantly clogs the waffled soles of hiking boots. Slip, and it's a long tumble -- and where the slope finally starts to flatten out, the ground is studded with little red flags on wire stakes, places where the team's explosives expert has detected concentrations of metal in the soil.
They're not likely unexploded mines, a real hazard in Vietnam, but there's no telling what ordnance the H-34 was carrying when it went down. Teams have found piles of unexploded 105mm artillery shells on other digs -- found 155s, too, and plastique, and blasting caps.
The stuff has baked in the tropical heat for nearly 35 years, getting touchier all the while. Pick up an old shell the wrong way, step on one buried deep, and it can turn arms, legs, even an entire man into a puff of pink smoke.
Midday. A whine drifts down from the treetops, then blossoms into a prolonged shriek -- cicadas, a dozen times as strident as their American cousins.
Army Maj. Steve Bunch has to yell over the racket. ``This is one of the very difficult cases,'' he says. ``The weather phenomena can change many times throughout the day.''
The LZ, at 4,200 feet up, invites cloud cover. It blinds resupply and medevac helicopters.
``And this is an area, here, that's very sparsely populated,'' he says. It took four days for hired Mnong to hike up the mountain to cut the LZ, hauling their food and equipment.
Sharp-eyed, squared-away, 38 years old, Bunch leads Recovery Element 6, the military's designation for the 13 Americans encamped here. Like all teams in the field, his includes a civilian anthropologist who's in charge of the dig site, a Special Forces medic, some Army morticians. There's Newberg, the team's top NCO. A Marine Corps explosives expert. A photographer. And a Navy parachute rigger, Hector Padilla, who can look at a rusted metal snap or a swatch of torn nylon and say where on man or machine it came from.
RE-6 flew onto the cleared ridge top for the first time 18 days ago, and spent three days ferrying its gear in by chopper. Its members have spent every day since working the screens.
Building their camp, too. It's north of the LZ, back in the trees, a cluster of wall tents on bamboo platforms drilled into the ridge's sloping sides. All boast cots. Some have porches. Latrines are framed in bamboo and walled in nylon tarp, as is the cold-water shower. A generator kicks on at dusk, powering the mess tent's microwave, TV and DVD player. One soldier has lashed bamboo into a sectional sofa that surrounds two sides of the camp's fire ring.
While RE-6 was carving this lavish settlement from the woods, other recovery elements were settling into their own sites. On this 30-day mission, Recovery Element 4 is up north on the flatlands just south of the former DMZ, poking around a forest grown where a U-21 cargo plane crashed in 1971. Another team is fighting weather and treacherous footing to unearth a C-123 transport that slammed into a high cliff. Three other teams are shoveling and sifting in the jungles of central Vietnam.
While the six recovery teams dig, a party of investigators is chasing leads on 18 cases, interviewing witnesses to air crashes and firefights, visiting 10 provinces of Vietnam. Their goal: To pinpoint the places future recovery teams are likely to find something.
Another group of Americans, the Tactical Assessment Team, is eyeing seven sites already identified by the investigators, brainstorming on how to get them excavated. One is right next to a major highway. The TAT will have to come up with a plan for rerouting traffic and keeping the curious away. It will not be easy.
It's had tougher riddles, however. Last year the TAT found itself on the mountainous rim of a large reservoir, in the bed of which lay an American aviator. He had been buried not far from where his plane had crashed, in a valley that since had been flooded behind a dam. His grave was just a few yards beyond dry reach, under waist-high water.
The TAT hit on a plan. Earlier this year, a recovery team set down on an island in the reservoir's middle. Diggers boated to the valley's nearly vertical flank, and built a cofferdam around the grave. They found the pilot. They sent him home.
A long metamorphosis
Ten minutes. George Ribeiro, a Navy linguist, checks his watch and waves, catching Newberg's eye up on the LZ. ``It's time,'' he says.
``OK,'' the sergeant answers, nodding. He claps his hands, faces the tribesmen from on high. ``Break's over!'' he woofs. ``Lam di! Lam di! Lam di!'' Get to work.
A few squatting Mnong rise, take last hits off smokes, trudge to their places on the switchbacks. One passes Ribeiro wearing a ``Titanic'' T-shirt. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet have jet-black hair.
The workers return to digging. Buckets crawl uphill. All at half-speed. Too slow. ``We gotta get things going again.'' Bunch is crouched at the ridge top's lip, head tilted up to Newberg. ``Gotta get it going again. Look how things have slowed down. Look at 'em.''
Newberg nods silently and starts downhill, pulling on a pair of work gloves. ``OK,'' he hollers, ``it's time to ride the pine.'' He reaches a screen, pulls his trowel from his back pocket, whacks at clay piled on the wire. ``So now uh.''
``Now uh!'' Lover answers.
``So now UH.''
``Now uh!''
Ever so slightly, the pace on the hillside quickens. Newberg nods. ``Now uh.''
The scene around him, RE-6's presence on this hill, culminates a quest that dates back longer than many of the diggers have been alive. September 1966, the work began: That month the Pentagon created the Joint Personnel Recovery Center to bag and ship America's dead from the escalating war.
Newberg was an infant at the time. Bunch was a toddler. And Ralph Reno's case was fresh. That was two months after his H-34 went down. Two months after the green sedan pulled up outside his house in Fayetteville, N.C., where his wife, Lois, was raising the couple's three kids.
Over the next few years, Army mortuaries handled tens of thousands of the fallen. As the war neared its end, the military changed the unit's focus from processing fresh bodies to finding and processing the misplaced. With peace came permission for its teams to re-enter Vietnam in search of the unaccounted-for.
Just after, the Vietnamese released 591 prisoners of war -- all the living Americans, they said, in their custody. The number was far smaller than expected. While that disappointment was still sharp, Vietnamese troops ambushed a recovery team, killing its Army captain. Expeditions stopped.
At that point, Ralph Reno had been vanished for nearly nine years. He had been presumed dead for eight. What little hope his friends and family held out for his survival dwindled.
So things stood for more than a decade. The Vietnamese released some remains, but otherwise the United States made little headway in reducing its MIA caseload. The impasse didn't break until 1987, when negotiations yielded permission from the Vietnamese to resume the search.
Closing the files got a further boost in early 1992, when Joint Task Force-Full Accounting assumed command of recovery operations in Southeast Asia. The JTF moved into a windowless concrete building on a Marine post overlooking Pearl Harbor, where it amassed expertise in Southeast Asian languages and logistics. Its intelligence branch came to look and act a lot like a big-city detective bureau.
Across town at Hickam Air Force Base, the old recovery center -- renamed the Central Identification Laboratory and moved from Southeast Asia -- hired civilian anthropologists, real-life Indiana Joneses eager to mix hard science and high adventure. Under the JTF's wing, they and their teams returned to Vietnam.
They've been going five times a year since, and five times a year to Laos, and once to Cambodia. And between these visits, they've hunted for Americans lost elsewhere: Independent of the JTF, the lab's ``anthros'' have plucked World War II remains from 13,000 feet up an Indonesian mountain, from the Arctic, from Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, from Europe, from a slew of islands in the Pacific.
In fact, what might rank as their most spectacular find came on Makin's Atoll, part of the Gilbert Islands chain, when a team unearthed 18 members of a Marine battalion called Carlson's Raiders.
Buried there after a 1942 firefight with the island's Japanese garrison, their almost perfectly preserved skeletons still had helmets strapped to their skulls. Several wore combat boots, had live grenades hooked to their belts. A couple held M1 carbines, the bones of their index fingers hooked into the trigger guards.
That was late last year. By that time, Lois Reno had twice remarried, and she and her new husbands had died. At some point over the years, Ralph Reno's letters and pictures had disappeared. Her kids, grown now, had only snapshot memories of the man.
One daughter, Nancy, had little beyond a letter a family friend had written to her mother late in 1966. ``Lois, wherever Ralph may be, I am sure he is in charge,'' the letter ended. ``He is a leader for sure, and I have the utmost confidence in him. I'll bet his mind is working 24 hours a day on his situation, and he will find the answer.
``Please maintain your confidence in your wonderful Ralph. I honestly feel that it will take more than a few V.C.s to keep him away.''
The man they seek
The man RE-6 hopes to find on the ridge top was born in November 1929 to Ralph and Elanore Reno of Chicago. In his infancy, he and his family took an alias, Roberts; family lore holds that they did it to duck the mob.
What's known for sure is that in 1937, the family moved to Buffalo, N.Y., and a few years later, to Silver Spring, Md. Ralph Reno graduated from Montgomery Blair High School there in 1948, and worked nearby throughout his teens -- at a drug store, a five-and-dime, a laundry, an A&P grocery, a bottling plant. If he wasn't fired, which happened a few times, he'd quit after a month or two, move onto something new.
So it was with his military career, at first. At 18 he joined the Marine Corps Reserve, made private, got no farther. Six months after his discharge he joined the Air Force, which bounced him around the West, then shipped him to Okinawa. A friend says he flew bombers to Korea. This time he made staff sergeant, but didn't re-up.
Seven months after his discharge, he joined the Army. Before he reported for duty, however, he visited Chicago a couple times, and there met Lois Ann Hense.
Their first date was blind: Lois, striving to make a good impression, left her glasses at home. They went to a movie, ``Mutiny on the Bounty.'' She couldn't tell Clark Gable from Charles Laughton. When Ralph went off to boot camp, she had to see the movie again before she could write to him about it.
Lois was bright, lively, funny. She made Reno laugh. They eloped just after the Christmas of 1954.
Olive drab suited both of them. ``He was the Army, in and out,'' his older daughter, Mary-Eleanor Grier, says now. ``And she was the perfect Army wife. She backed him up 110 percent. She would starch his uniforms at home, and they'd be so starched he'd have to force his legs into his pants.''
They moved to Augsburg, Germany, Reno a member of an airborne field artillery battalion. Mary-Eleanor was born, then Nancy-Marie. They moved to Munich, then back to the States, to Fort Bragg, N.C. Within a year, Reno was named the 82nd Airborne Division's Outstanding NCO of the Month. ``In attaining this designation, you were competing against a group of the finest soldiers in the United States Army,'' Maj. Gen. Dwight E. Beach wrote him. ``You have proved your proficiency, personality, military bearing and other characteristics . . . surpass those of this select group.''
The years passed. Ralph III, ``Trey,'' was born. The family moved into Fayetteville, not far off the base. Reno got Top Secret clearance. He lost his hair.
``My girlfriend used to tease me that my dad spit-shined his head,'' says Mary-Eleanor, who was 10 when her father disappeared. ``What can I say? We were Army brats. And I was never ashamed to be called an Army brat -- we were all very proud of my father. We all considered him our hero. I used to think my dad was the strongest, the smartest, the fastest dad in the world.''
In 1964, Reno got orders for Korea. Bob Mutzabaugh, Mary-Eleanor's godfather, was there, too. Both men were approaching the time when they'd get new assignments. They often talked about how to wrangle another couple years at Fort Bragg, to keep the houses they'd bought in Fayetteville. The scheme on which they settled: They'd take the Special Forces exam.
Both passed. Before long, Reno was a Green Beret -- as Mutzabaugh puts it, ``a very, very serious soldier.''
And by the time he arrived in Vietnam -- on April 25, 1966 -- Ralph Reno was no ordinary Green Beret. He rode in the H-34 as a volunteer member of the Studies and Observation Group, a clandestine force designed to operate behind enemy lines, to steal across borders, to strike without trace.
SOG was so secret that Washington denied its existence. Its aircraft, including Reno's H-34, were painted plain black. Its troops wore no patches, no rank. They carried no Marlboros, no Zippos, no driver's licenses -- nothing that gave them away as Americans.
So RE-6 won't find much in the way of meaningful personal effects. And they won't find the most durable piece of equipment the Army issued Reno and the other Americans in the chopper.
Their dogtags.
When the JTF took up Ralph Reno's case in 1993 it was, as it is on all its missions, dependent on the good graces of the Vietnamese Office for Seeking Missing Persons.
This official arm of the Socialist Republic does not, despite its title, search for Vietnam's more than 300,000 wartime missing; it's actually devoted to looking for its former enemy. It's also paid for by the U.S. government.
Thus, Americans are beholden to an agency that exists because Americans pay for it. Odd as the arrangement might seem, it benefits both sides. The VNO gets American dollars. The JTF gets access.
But working with the VNO can be a tedious affair. To reach RE-6, to merely investigate the site, the JTF needed clearance from the central government, then the provincial officials of the Quang Nam, then the VNO representatives of Tra My District, then the VNO's man in Tra Leng Village.
The Vietnamese hold rigidly to this protocol. If a resupply chopper can't land at a dig site because the LZ's socked in, it cannot simply fly on to another dig; those aboard must return to Da Nang or Hue, and wait for their Vietnamese counterparts to clear the way. Sometimes they get the necessary permissions. Often, they don't. And the chopper runs $1,400 an hour.
Reno's H-34 had lain on the ridge top for 27 years when the JTF flew out to the southern Quang Nam for its first look. It did not get far. ``Due to the steep, mountainous terrain and dense undergrowth in the area, IE-3 was unable to reach the incident location by vehicle or on foot,'' the report from the trip relates. ``The team conducted an aerial search of the incident location maintained in U.S. records with negative results.''
Nearly two years later, another JTF team reopened Reno's file, again couldn't reach the ridge top. A third team took on the case two summers after that, interviewing the residents of a nearby village. One old man told the team that nearly 30 years before, he'd seen three American helicopters flying by, one of them ``on fire and trailing smoke.
``The smoking aircraft crashed and exploded on a hill known locally as Hop Dich,'' he told the team. A few days later he hiked there and found the chopper in pieces. He also found the bodies of South Vietnamese soldiers, but no -- he hadn't seen Americans.
More than two years later, after yet another failure to reach Hop Dich, the JTF scored a breakthrough. In September 1999, two members flew to within a couple hours' hike of the site, hoofed it through the jungle, and came upon scattered pieces of metal.
That opened the way for a full investigative team, which reached the ridge top eight days later. Its account of the experience: ``IE-2 conducted a 100-by-400-meter surface search of the area and recovered several pieces of wreckage correlating to an H-34 aircraft.''
The team's report ended with a recommendation: excavate.
Clouds have moved in at the ridge top, erasing shadows, tinting the hillside a sullen gray. From down on the switchbacks, the view uphill, toward the LZ, is of chewed clay and shredded bark and hacked stumps; it looks more pounded by artillery than canvassed by scientists.
Even minus the sun, RE-6 is sweltering. Newberg has fired up a boom box in an effort to boost the team's flagging spirits. Alanis Morissette is braying ``You Oughta Know'' when a Mnong tribesman approaches with a chunk of red rubber.
``What is this?'' the sergeant wonders. He turns it over in his hand. Its back side is scored in a herringbone pattern. Padilla, the parachute rigger, looks over Newberg's shoulder.
He starts to chuckle. ``Hey, Miss Moore!'' he hollers down the hill. ``I think I've found a personal effect!''
Ellen Moore, the team's anthro, hurries to the screens. She is a doctoral fellow at Tennessee's Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, halfway through a year-long stint with the lab. She plucks a Ziploc from her shirt pocket, takes the artifact from Newberg. Her eyebrows arch. She tilts her head, clearly struggling to make sense of the object. She blinks hard.
Padilla snorts. At the same moment, Moore realizes she's being put on. She laughs. ``For a minute there,'' she says, ``I was thinking, `OK, for some reason the soldiers on this helicopter were wearing flip-flops.' ''
She is turning to head back downhill when there's a yelp from over at a screen. Army Staff Sgt. Camala Townsend is hurrying her way, hand outstretched, in it a tiny cube of white. ``Looklooklook!'' Townsend squeals.
She drops the object into Moore's palm.
It is instantly familiar.
A tooth.
A back tooth, a molar, presumably human. Moore smiles broadly. ``Very good!'' she tells Townsend. ``Very good.'' She turns the tooth over. Its pulpy core is missing, clay in its place, but its enamel shell is intact. The knobs and creases of its chewing surface are well-defined.
Is it Ralph Reno's?
Out here, far from dental charts and X-ray gear, it's impossible to say. At first glance, it appears American: The local diet relies on rice, a tougher variety than Westerners favor, and it wears cups in the teeth of most Vietnamese. This molar has none.
Moore opens a Ziploc, drops the tooth inside.
The clouds thicken. A misty rain begins to fall. A gloom descends over the hillside.
It is deepest down at the trail's bottom, over what is left of the H-34.
A landing gear spar. Thick steel plate, rusted and bent, that once armored the cockpit. A smashed gearbox. A few feet of hydraulic line. And the 34s radial engine, wedged hard against a tree, cylinder heads jutting from its middle like fat spokes, their aluminum baffling crushed.
Up on the switchbacks, Vietnamese are still passing buckets uphill. Others at the screens are working the clay. Looking for more. Always looking.
But how much can there be?
How much, if these few pieces are all that says that a 4-ton helicopter crashed here?
If this is what's left of a metal machine more than 46 feet long and 15 high, what will 34 years have done to a man on this mountain?
PIECES OF THE PAST
Ellen Moore, left, and Hector Padilla examine the bounty of a day's search for a long-lost Green Beret in Vietnam: hundreds of fragments of the chopper on which the soldier crashed, but few signs of the man himself.
FOR 34 YEARS, ARMY Master Sgt. Ralph J. Reno has been a name without a body. For 33 years, he has been presumed dead in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. For seven years, his government has pressed the Vietnamese to account for his whereabouts. For five, the U.S. military has attempted to reach the spot where Reno and 14 others are thought to have died.
Finally, a team of Americans has been airlifted to a ridge in Vietnam's central highlands. They have spent two weeks digging into the mountainside's dense yellow clay. And the fruit of their labor, and of all the years that came before, would fit in an aspirin bottle.
Now late afternoon of the dig's 15th day is coming on. The sun, already sinking fast, has disappeared beyond the high knobs to the west. Army Sgt. 1st Class Mark Newberg, the team's top NCO, figures that everyone's had enough. ``Sgt. Ribeiro!'' he calls down the switchbacks. ``Set 'em free!''
George Ribeiro, a Navy linguist, barks a few short syllables to the Mnong tribesmen passing buckets of clay uphill: Day is done. Back here tomorrow. The workers trudge into the trees, toward their camp.
The Americans gather around Ellen Moore, the anthropologist supervising the dig. ``We had a really good day again today,'' she says, pausing to blow a strand of red hair from her eyes. Indeed, it has been good -- diggers found what appears to be a human tooth. But like every day the team has spent sweating on the ridge top, forcing the mountain's clay through metal screens, it has seen no gold strike, no discovery that cinches the case shut.
``Thanks guys,'' Moore says, eyeing the half-dozen mud-spattered soldiers and sailors clustered around her. ``Good job again.''
Most of the team straggles off in the direction of camp. Moore turns to Hector Padilla, who is squatting over a bucket of gnarled metal. The wrecked chopper has turned up in practically every lump of clay dug from the hillside. Its pieces have filled scores of buckets over the past two weeks, close to a dozen just today.
Now Moore and Padilla must go through the day's collected spoils, examining hundreds of marble-sized nuggets of steel and aluminum, zippers and snaps, muddy strips of nylon, frayed pieces of cable, giving each a second look.
Moore pulls a bucket near, reaches in, grabs a chunk of metal.
More than mere evidence
There are times on a dig when all are swept up in the science of the task at hand -- when a fragment of bone or broken denture, a twisted pair of wire-rim glasses, a shard of helmet are reason to celebrate.
There is, after all, a mission to accomplish. Success turns on finds, on artifacts. So today the members of Recovery Element 6, perhaps a little closer to closing the case, leave the dig in high spirits.
Back in camp, Metallica thumps from a boombox outside Newberg's tent. Spaghetti cooks on the mess tent's propane stove. The TV is on, a couple of soldiers struggling to follow the breakneck action of a chop-socky flick. Whoops echo through the forest.
But as evening gives way to night, a hush falls over RE-6. Some members of the team sit wordlessly around the fire, faces blank, staring.
They are tired: It's been a long, hot day. They are homesick: Newberg, who spends 250 days each year ``on the road,'' has a wife and four children back in Virginia. Padilla's 10,000 miles from his daughter in San Diego. Maj. Steve Bunch, the team leader, is 14 hours by air from his wife, Ann -- who will be flying out of town for a month just three days after he's due back.
They might be a little melancholy, besides. Success in this business is bound to be bittersweet, for the bones and teeth and personal effects the clay yields are more than mere evidence; they are fossils of lives once enjoyed, and personalities, and intersections on the great web of human relationships.
The diggers might tell themselves that this is merely where Ralph Reno died, not where he lived. That nothing dug up here will speak to who he was. That his life won't fit into a Ziploc.
They might remind each other that closing a case helps ease the hearts and minds of relatives back in the states. That recovery is a good deed, a healing.
And they'd be right, of course. Just the same, to pull a bone from the mud is to hear whispers of some terrible past. To know, with new certainty, that a tragedy happened here. That men died.
Here. On this spot.
This is what bones cannot say about Ralph Reno:
That on nights home in Fayetteville, he'd relax in an overstuffed easy chair, giving each of the kids a turn in his lap.
That every Saturday, he and Lois would enjoy a romantic dinner. They'd eat T-bone. And if the kids had been good, they might be called in, one by one, for a bite of steak.
That his disappearance hit his family hard.
Lois and the kids got the word after they'd had another Army family over for a backyard cookout. ``We had some leftover steak bones they were supposed to take, and they had forgotten them,'' daughter Mary-Eleanor Grier recalls. ``So when the doorbell rang, we thought it was them, coming back for the steak bones.''
Instead, two men stood at the door. A green sedan was parked at the curb. Lois immediately blurted: ``Is he dead?'' The men replied that they had to come into the house to talk with her. She shooed the children into the bedrooms, returning a while later to say there'd been an accident. Their father was missing.
``A couple of days after the military had come, I checked the mail and there was a letter, and I recognized his handwriting,'' Mary-Eleanor says. ``I didn't realize that it took a while to get from there to here. I ran into the house with the letter, yelling: `Mom! A letter from Daddy!'
``Honestly, I probably never gave up hope that he was alive until I was a young woman, maybe in my 20s,'' she says. ``I remember when they showed the POWs coming home on TV, and I watched that, just so intently watched that, looking for his face.
``It was almost like a fantasy, that he'd be there.''
Lost lives, missing bones
Missing. Years later, that word is still used by some to describe the nearly 2,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen who didn't return from Southeast Asia. In most cases, it is a misapplication: The Pentagon has no evidence that Americans are being held against their will there, nor evidence that any remained in captivity after March 1973, when Vietnam released 591 prisoners of war.
Every once in a while will come word of a Westerner in the jungle, speaking English, looking haggard. The men and women of Joint Task Force-Full Accounting take off in pursuit of the reports, but they've yet to find anything but tourists, European academics, the occasional foreign engineer.
The proper term for most of America's vanished is ``Killed in Action -- Body Not Recovered.'' Only in the sense that their remains are unfound can one say they are missing.
Local cases drive home the point. One: Capt. Humbert ``Rocky'' Versace, a Norfolk Catholic High School graduate who went on to West Point and a sterling Army career, was wounded in a 1963 ambush while advising a company of South Vietnamese irregulars. Captured, Versace was questioned at length by the Viet Cong, and when he didn't talk was beaten senseless, isolated from other prisoners, confined in a cage. He didn't bend.
In September 1965, North Vietnamese radio announced that he and another American prisoner had been executed in reply to the death of three terrorists in Da Nang. A number of sources, official and not, confirmed his shooting, and nothing solid has turned up to dispute it. The joint task force and its partner, the Army's Central Identification Laboratory, are actively seeking his remains. Neither, however, considers him missing.
Another: In May 1975, Marines were dispatched to an island off the Cambodian coast to rescue the kidnapped crew of the U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez. Among them was Pvt. 1st Class Walter Boyd of Norfolk, who with 25 other servicemen came under fire as he rode a chopper toward the island's coast.
The helicopter crashed just off the beach. Thirteen of the men aboard made it out of the wreckage; Boyd and a dozen others did not.
For 25 years, Boyd's body was unrecovered. He was not missing, however; the lab identified his remains last May.
In Ralph Reno's case, the Army made his death official on July 4, 1967, a year and a day after his H-34 crashed. ``An extensive search and continuous check of all possible sources has produced no positive evidence of his fate,'' Maj. Gen. Kenneth G. Wickham wrote his parents in a July 7 letter. ``However, the circumstances attendant to his disappearance, plus the fact that a year has elapsed since he disappeared without any trace, can lead only to the presumption that he is no longer alive.''
``I was just too young, really, to understand what life and death was about,'' recalls Ralph ``Trey'' Reno III, who was 6 by then. ``Basically, I just knew he was gone, and (over time) I realized he was never coming back.''
That fall, Lois Reno got another letter from Wickham. ``I have the honor to inform you,'' he wrote, ``that your late husband has been awarded posthumously the Bronze Star Medal.'' The enclosed citation said that Ralph Reno ``distinguished himself during the period 1 May to 3 July 1966 while serving as a team leader of a joint American-Vietnamese reconnaissance team.
``Demonstrating vast military knowledge and consummate skill, he personally conducted extensive training to mold the team into a highly competent and responsive unit.. . . Often placing the team security above his own safety, he rapidly gained their respect and admiration through his courage and aggressive guidance on combat missions.
``Because of his singular tenacity and perseverance,'' the document read, ``he has contributed immeasurably to the effective prosecution of the counterinsurgency effort in the Republic of Vietnam.''
Hurdles to success
Well after midnight, and the RE-6 camp is still. The generator was cut off hours ago, and with it the camp's lights. The mess tent is empty. The fire is dark and cooling. Blackness has descended on the forest, so that mahogany no longer stands out against the bamboo, shapes and colors are indecipherable. Tents a few yards off are formless blobs.
Laughter drifts from the Mnong camp, off through the trees. Crickets sing. The men and women of RE-6, lost in exhausted sleep, hear none of it. Those who stir tend to stay close to their tents: Twice in the past two weeks, the team has heard tigers on the prowl in the dark, and the latrine's a long, lonely way off.
While the night passes, a new workday -- the day just finished in Vietnam -- is beginning in Honolulu, 6,300 miles to the east and across the international date line. In an unassuming office building at Hickam Air Force Base, Sabrina Buck is hunched over bones, making notes.
Around her are 18 full skeletons, each carefully arrayed on a lab table. They are discolored by more than a half-century underground. A few bear gritty stains where a steel helmet rusted itself to skull, or a bullet corroded against bone. One has been deformed by the weight of the soil under which it was buried, its facial bones torqued slightly. Otherwise, they are nearly perfect, fit for display in a biology class.
To come upon such a sight is arresting, and not just for visitors: Buck and the lab's other anthropologists are as unaccustomed to working in this environment as outsiders are to seeing it. What they're used to is more accurately represented at the foot of one table -- a cone of bone chips, perhaps 10 inches across and six high. Most of the pieces are no bigger than the cap of a ballpoint pen. Many are quite a bit smaller.
This is what's left of the crew of a crashed American jet. And therein lies the challenge, and the frustration, of the lab's work in Southeast Asia, and of cases like Ralph Reno's.
Most of the unaccounted-for in America's previous wars were ground troops like the Marine whose complete sturdy skeleton Buck now examines. He was a member of Carlson's Raiders, part of the celebrated unit's invasion of a South Pacific atoll during World War II. Killed in a gun battle, he was buried intact in a hole covered with sand, coral and sea shell, a mix destined to preserve him well, and 57 years later a man who participated in his burial, by then 80 years old, was able to take the lab to the spot.
Many of those who fell in Vietnam, like Reno, did so aboard airplanes and helicopters. Their locations can't be pinpointed with certainty. And they were buried in conditions that conspired to hasten their decay.
An air crash wreaks almost unimaginable havoc on a human body. In jets, the forces involved don't break bones, they pulverize them. Consider the case of an F-4 Phantom shot down while flying at Mach 1. ``The fuel on board explodes,'' says Army Lt. Col. Franklin Childress, a spokesman for the JTF. ``The ordnance on board explodes. The engines, at the back of the aircraft, come through the cockpit. Then there's the fire that follows.''
Not much is left. In 1996, a Valujet DC-9 nosed into the Everglades with 110 people aboard. Rescuers were at the crash site within hours. Even so, the remains of only 57 people were identified. The others, almost certainly, never will be.
Ralph Reno's crash wasn't as hard as that DC-9's; it was, after all, a helicopter accident, played out at a much lower speed. But even if they weren't torn limb from limb, the people aboard the H-34 surely were broken by the craft's nose-first impact, and a fractured body presents more surface area to wear. Decomposition is speedy.
The lab has been lucky in some such cases. In June a 38-year-old anthro named Bill Belcher, a veteran of nine missions, led an expedition to the southeast coast of England, where for 55 years the wreckage of an American B-17 had jutted from a tidal mudflat.
The plane was the ``Tondalayo,'' one of several U.S. bombers named for a movie prostitute. In March 1945 it had been returning from a run over Germany when it was nailed by friendly fire just off the shore. Five of the seven crewmen had safely bailed out before the plane punched a hole in the mud 13 feet deep. Two others, the pilot and copilot, hadn't been seen since.
Belcher excavated the compressed wreckage, starting at the tail. He recovered eight of the plane's 13 machine guns as he worked downward through muck and mangled aluminum toward the nose. Some of the weapons were almost complete. One, cleaned up, might have worked.
He also found, laced among debris from the bomb bay, the remains of two people, both wearing or holding their parachutes, neither chute deployed before the crash. Aboard a flying B-17, the bomb bay was the primary point of exit from the cockpit; the two airmen had been scrambling to get out of the plane, and had simply run out of sky.
So well-preserved were the deeply buried portions of the wreck that Belcher recovered a silk survival map of northwestern Europe, its ink still sharp, stained here and there with the round, brown footprints of rusted .50-caliber rounds.
Such luck, unfortunately, is the exception. By the time a team reaches a crash site in Vietnam, it's usually been stripped by metal salvagers and chewed away by a harshly acidic soil that turns bones to powder, the powder to smudge. Bodies the lab gets out of the relatively benign soil of North Korea, where soldiers fell 12 to 15 years before Ralph Reno did, are in better shape than many in Vietnam.
``Some people expect us to go out and find whole human skeletons,'' Childress says. ``That's very rare. The elements, the animals -- so many things work against success.''
Building an identity
With a complete skeleton, the lab's anthros can figure out all sorts of things about the person once built around it. They can measure a leg's femur and tibia, and with those numbers calculate how tall their subject stood. They can distinguish male from female with a quick inspection of the pelvic bones, or features of the skull, or the ridges on leg and arm bones where muscles once attached -- they're almost always more pronounced on men. They can examine the bones of the nose, the skull's shape around the eyes, and judge the person's race.
They can even estimate the person's age, give or take a couple of years. Through early adulthood, bone is growing; as soon as it stops, it starts to slowly disintegrate. Old bone becomes lacy, pocked with tiny holes, with bubbles.
Buck won't be able to identify the Marine she's examining -- she is not the anthro who excavated the World War II dig, and is purposely working blind, unaware of whose bones are laid before her. What her measurements and note-taking will yield, however, is a detailed description of the subject, which with dental comparisons and personal effects will be placed before a group of senior military officers. That panel will make the call on whether the evidence adds up to an identification.
But the process is complicated in Ralph Reno's case. Even if the helicopter hadn't exploded and burned, even if the soil weren't corrosive, Ellen Moore's team would face long odds in its search.
For one thing, Reno may not even be on the ridge top. Minus its tail, his H-34 spun as it fell, and may have slung some of its occupants into space. Depending on how far it traveled after the tail's collapse, men and equipment could have been sown over a big swath of jungle.
Assuming that Reno did, in fact, ride the chopper all the way down, he was still just one of 15 people aboard the H-34. Remains on the ridge top could belong to any of them. Even were such remains found to be American, they're not necessarily Reno's: The two dead Americans recovered shortly after the wreck may have left teeth or other parts behind.
Finally, wherever his body wound up, it was difficult to find from the start; RE-6's search isn't the first on the ridge top, but the fourth, and the three previous hunts turned up nothing.
Within hours of the crash, a soldier was lowered to the downed H-34 from a hovering chopper. He recovered one body, but strong turbulence cut the visit short. The following day, four Americans led 26 South Vietnamese to the wreckage. They stayed overnight and found three more bodies, but encountered the Viet Cong. They were encouraged to retreat.
A day later, on July 6, 1966, two dozen soldiers reached the broken chopper. They, too, spent the night, and they, too, found three bodies. But during their search, a couple of the indigenous troops were separated from the main party. Their colleagues guided them back with shots fired into the air. The team couldn't stick around long after that.
So many years later, the prospect for success, for finding some identifiable remnant of Ralph Reno, is slim indeed.
Another day in Vietnam
Back at the ridge top, Newberg is up first. He strides from his tent and into a cool dun that envelopes the cedars and teaks and bamboo. ``Rise and shine!'' he bellows at the silent tents all around. ``Rise and shine! If you can't shine, you still gotta rise!''
One by one, RE-6's members roll out of their sleeping bags, shake out their boots, stumble to the mess tent or down the path to the latrine. Camala Townsend brushes her teeth at a washing station next to the showers. Hector Padilla shaves. Steve Bunch eyes the sky.
It is dark, steely, a shelf of heavy overcast. Wind gusts among the treetops. They sway, their leaves hissing. Rain? Seems a sure bet, and not far off. He leaves camp, walks uphill through the Mnong camp, past its bamboo hooches walled in woven palm and old bed linens, among its smells -- wood smoke and fish oil and feet.
Just beyond, at the LZ, the trees fall away. Bunch stands at the ridge top's edge, jostled by the wind, gazing out on the surrounding country. Clouds are shaving the tops from the mountains over on the Laotian border, a couple ridges to the west. The same seems to be happening to the east. Not good. Not good at all. Rain will likely suspend any digging for as long as it lasts -- the slope gets too slick, and with the wind looms the danger of hypothermia.
Before long, Moore, Newberg and the rest of the team hike out of the trees. They stand above the switchbacks, eager to get on with the day's work.
Perhaps, if they're lucky, they'll get a few hours in at the screens, and with greater luck, find more traces of the people who died here. And if they're very lucky indeed, perhaps they'll wind up with 5 grams of bone or tooth that once belonged to Ralph Reno.
Five grams. Less than a fifth of an ounce. A smidgen. That's all they need for the strongest scientific weapon in the lab's arsenal: DNA testing.
Every cell of the body contains DNA, the twin-corkscrew chain of proteins that serves as a manual for assembling the cell's owner. A person's DNA determines his or her every characteristic.
A human body can be identified with two types of DNA. One, nucleic DNA, is that with which most Americans are familiar: It is unique to the individual, and thus is used in paternity screenings, to prosecute rape cases, to second-guess juries before executions. Nucleic DNA is fragile stuff, however. It resides in the nucleus of the body's cells, which collapse as tissue and fluids decay. By the time a lab team finds remains in Vietnam, the nucleic DNA is long gone.
Which leaves the second type, mitochondrial DNA. It's found in a cell's mitochondria, its thick-walled power plant, and is far hardier: Years after death, it persists in bone.
It is not as exact as its cousin. It does not prove a bone belongs to a particular person, but does establish that the bone belonged to someone who most likely was related to that person. And given that Ralph Reno had no relatives in the H-34, a mitochondrial DNA match would work.
The question is: Will RE-6 find enough bone to test?
Two days from this wet morning, Ellen Moore will close the dig. RE-6 will have pored over 248 square meters of the ridge's flank. It will have exhausted the ground, and the site's possibilities.
Moore will pack the team's discoveries, which she is careful to describe only as ``possible dental remains'' and ``possible human remains,'' into a padded briefcase, and deliver them to a joint forensic review. American and Vietnamese anthropologists will examine them, and at month's end these scientists will rule that sufficient evidence exists to suppose that the remains found by RE-6 are American.
They will be placed in plastic bags, and deposited in a felt-lined, wooden box, made specifically for the purpose by the Vietnamese. The box will be locked up.
A few weeks later, it will be taken back out of storage and the remains placed in a metal transfer case. At a ceremony attended both by saluting U.S. representatives and uniformed Vietnamese, the flag-draped case will be carried aboard an Air Force cargo jet. The plane will fly first to Guam -- where, if the remains are, in fact, American, they will return to U.S. soil for the first time in 34 years.
Finally, on Aug. 28, they will land at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii. A ceremony of bands, flags and salutes will welcome them home.
Then will come the waiting.
The remains will be delivered to the lab's custody. They will take their place among remains recovered from dozens of other digs, in Vietnam and at sites around the world. Eventually they'll wind up on an examining table under the lab's bright lights.
Moore will take no part in the subsequent inspection of the evidence; her experience with the case disqualifies her from a role in the lab's blind testing. Other anthros will prepare the report on the remains. An odontologist will examine any ``possible dental remains.'' If analysis of the teeth produces a match with Ralph Reno's dental records, the lab will have taken a decisive step toward his identification. The odds are long against that happening, but it might.
Either way, if the lab can cull the remains for roughly 5 grams of useable material, the anthros will send it off to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Md. Reno's younger brother, Bill, will provide the people there with a blood sample.
All this time, the men and women of RE-6 will await word on whether their three weeks on the ridge top accomplished the mission.
And Ralph Reno's family will wonder whether it will achieve the closure so long denied it. It's a bigger family, these days: He'd have turned 71 earlier this month. He'd have six grandchildren, two great-grandkids.
All in the future. Right now, on the ridge top, the members of RE-6 stand at the edge of the LZ, wondering what the day will hold.
A few Mnong wander from their camp, stand smoking at the tree line in the morning cool. They eye the gathered Americans.
The Americans look skyward.
Everyone waits.
* Reach Earl Swift at 446-2352 or swift@pilotonline.com
Reprinted by AII POW-MIA with permission from the Virginian-Pilot ©2002