ACROSS THE RIVER STYX; LETTER FROM VIETNAM

CAROLINE ALEXANDER. The New Yorker. 

Padded ear protectors had transformed the thunking of the helicopter's blades to a bland white noise, enhancing the sense of dreamlike remoteness with which we drifted over fields of shining paddy. Standing starkly in one green field, a woman wearing a pale, conical hat shaded her eyes to watch us. Hills appeared and the ground became less lush, patched with raw brown and covered with the green scrub of secondary growth. Shortly afterward, we landed on the southern slope of the Dong Ma Mountain, in Quang Tri Province in central Vietnam. Thirty-six years ago, in April of 1968, a patrol of ten American soldiers was ambushed from this hill, and a young G.I. lost his life. The men and women I had come to meet were here to retrieve what they could find of his body.

A short trail led through scrub vibrating with cicadas to a rough shelter made of bamboo and blue plastic awning. It was a hundred and three degrees, and the humidity registered at sixty-three per cent. Beyond the shelter's blue shade, on a precarious slant, a small band of diggers subjected the hillside to a tidy but determined excavation.

The eleven members of Recovery Team 4 at work on Hill 328, as Dong Ma Mountain was prosaically called during what was known here as the American War, had been deployed in Vietnam by the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command (jpac). Operating under the Department of Defense, jpac is the largest of five units--with a collective annual budget of a hundred and four million dollars--that are dedicated to retrieving and identifying the remains of American military personnel across the globe.

Work on Hill 328 was monitored by Captain Charles Gatling. Tall, dark, and energetic, the thirty-three-year-old team leader could often be found in the pit, churning out shovelfuls of dirt with large, capable hands. He espoused a theory of leadership based on communication and "caring about your people." The latter point, he said, "is just part of your upbringing."

Every member of Team 4 was a veteran of previous recovery missions. "Most here have been in the military for seven or so years--they stay because they like it," Captain Gatling told me. "They are the kind of people who like getting on with people." Civilians, he allowed, could be more problematic, although the "doctors are very focussed"; the "doctors" were the civilian anthropologists, assigned to each recovery team, who direct the actual excavations. The "anthro" of Team 4 was Dr. Elizabeth Martinson Goodman, or Zib, an athletic, golden-haired woman in her early thirties. Zib grew up on an apple orchard in Washington State. She characterized the recovery excavations as "honest, healthy work."

"Archeologists usually excavate habitation sites, or burial grounds," she said, gesturing toward the pit. "There is a moral clarity to this kind of work--you are not plundering graves."

Mapped out into a grid of three-by-three-metre squares, the pit was cleared by a bucket line that extended up the hill to a screening station. The soil was dumped into one of twelve hanging screens, then passed through quarter-inch mesh and examined for artifacts and biological matter; most excavations turn up only fragmentary remains. Each hour on site was broken into forty minutes of hard work, followed by twenty minutes of rest, during which both American and Vietnamese workers retreated to the shade of their respective shelters. Under a kind of leafy bower on a ridge of the hill, Vietnamese government officials, who accompany every mission, had their own small camp, from which smoke or the steam of a pot on the boil occasionally escaped.

Along with the medic, the linguists, the forensic photographer, the Life Support Technician, and the Mortuary Affairs Specialist, an essential component of every recovery team is the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician, whose job is to handle those tricky situations which arise when a shovel hits suspect metal or, as happened on my first day, someone finds that the stubborn lump of clay dumped into his screen contains an unexploded grenade. Team 4's ordnance expert was Staff Sergeant Carl Traub, whose placid, unlined face belied his chosen trade. Traub described his decision to handle live explosives as a "career move."

"You want a critical job," he drawled in a Tennessee accent, through chewing tobacco. "It was this or counter-intel, but I didn't speak any language other than redneck." Sergeant Traub's principal preoccupation, much discussed during the breaks, was his desire to return home in time for his tenth wedding anniversary. Yet when a yelp of alarm was raised, Traub moved swiftly toward the object from which everyone else was fleeing, and grasped it with a practiced hand. The first grenade, an M-79 40-millimetre fragmentation, he declared to be inert; the second, a Vietnamese fragmentation hand grenade with a pin so rusty it might easily slip from its spoon, was another matter. "Has anyone got a penny?" he asked, and afterward pronounced the grenade "good to go." In all, fifty explosive devices were neutralized on the site. "They sometimes know only one thing," Gatling later said of the ordnance technicians. "But they are seriously good. Personal safety is not an issue for him," he said of Traub, matter-of-factly, offering a glimpse of the unnatural code required in war.

jpac is authorized to deploy up to four hundred and twenty-five civilian and military personnel, drawn from all branches of the services. The unit is headquartered at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, where jpac maintains the largest and most sophisticated forensic-anthropology laboratory in the world. There are also jpac detachments in Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. The four other units handle everything from policy issues to highly specialized forensic analysis, but it is jpac that is responsible for the actual field work of identifying sites and excavating remains, at an annual cost of more than fifty million dollars. jpac maintains eighteen professional recovery teams, of ten to fourteen members each, which are typically assisted by anywhere from ten to a hundred local laborers. The teams' areas of deployment span the earth: the forests of Panama, remote Pacific islands, Okinawa, Indonesia, China, and the jungles of Papua New Guinea; a sixteen-thousand-foot-high ice face in Nepal, a mountain ledge in Laos, Russia, the fields and forests of Europe, underwater in the Pacific, the deserts of North Africa and North Korea. With the exception of a lone M.I.A. from the Gulf War, the losses in Southeast Asia are not only the most recent but also the most politically charged.

"Vietnam was significant because it saw the beginning of grassroots and particularly family pressure on our government," Larry Greer, an official at the Defense P.O.W./Missing Personnel Office, one of jpac's four associated units, told me. Faced with anger over the mounting deaths--the final reckoning would reach more than fifty-eight thousand--the government dramatically expanded its commitment to retrieval. "This was a lobby group of wives," said Greer. "Frankly, what you're seeing today is a result of this; this was a generation that had come of age in the sixties, very vocal and effective."

The lobbying led to the establishment, in 1973, of the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, headquartered initially in Thailand and then in Hawaii, where it was known as cilhi. In 2003, jpac was formed when cilhi merged with Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, which had been established more than a decade earlier to address the issue of P.O.W.s and M.I.A.s in Southeast Asia.

"The United States is the only country that does what we do in the way we do it," Greer said. jpac's stated mission is to achieve "the fullest possible accounting of all Americans missing as a result of our nation's previous conflicts." The epic scale of this undertaking is revealed in blunt statistics. There are an estimated eighty-eight thousand unrecovered remains from the Gulf War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Second World War--the conflicts named in jpac's mission statement. More than half of these are acknowledged as being currently unrecoverable: an estimated forty-three thousand Second World War fatalities, for example, are, as jpac's language puts it, "entombed" deep in the Pacific. More than forty-five thousand are in theory obtainable. jpac identifies approximately a hundred and ten remains each year. At this rate, barring fresh losses in new arenas of conflict, it will take the United States government four hundred and nine years to make good its pledge.

In early April, 1968, during the rainy season, a ten-man patrol set out on foot from artillery firebase Camp Carrol for Hill 328, just north of Highway 9, where a North Vietnamese position was suspected under cover of an outcrop of rock. The patrol spent the night on the mountainside, and continued its way up at dawn; just after noon it was ambushed and the leader of the patrol was killed under heavy fire. Other members, badly wounded, had been unable to retrieve his body.

"He fell with a thud, and his armor clattered upon him"; "the spirit left him, and a dark mist seeped over his eyes." So the deaths of even minor players are commemorated in the Iliad, the definitive chronicle of war, and the reader is kept mindful that every casualty has a name, parents who will mourn, perhaps a wife, some small, frugal history. It is to the specifics of such often lonesome deaths within the grand campaigns that the jpac researchers first turn when commencing their investigations. Each Loss Incidence File contains everything known about the events that led to death--official reports, maps, anecdotes told by companions of the patrol, by enemy combatants, oral histories by local witnesses. In 1968, the members of the ambushed patrol had returned twice to recover their leader's body. In the second attempt, five weeks after the ambush, another marine lost his life. Of special significance are those jpac cases that can begin at a place where reliable witnesses locate the deceased as L.K.A.--Last Known Alive. Reminiscences that, decades later, are perhaps fuzzier, perhaps more burnished, are given full and serious attention: We scattered, we came together, we ran to the west, we crawled down. . . . I saw him lying ahead of me, he was running to my right under the ridge, he was moving toward the trail.

All the Southeast Asian cases have been physically investigated at least once, and many repeatedly (the identities and full details of each case are withheld, pending notification of the family). The general area relating to the case under Recovery Team 4's excavation had been investigated in 1993, and was revisited for investigation in 1996, when a villager came forward who claimed to have buried the remains all those years ago in a bomb crater near where the body had fallen. In 1997, with only days left to a mission, an item imprinted with the letters "-ta" was found, and identified by the team's Life Support Technician, an expert in military equipment of the time, as part of a military-issue jungle boot, whose brand name, Bata, was stamped on the sole. In 1999, jpac excavators returned to dig the depression but were unsuccessful. The site was again investigated in 2003, and a second crater was recommended for excavation, but when work resumed in March, 2004, this was soon identified, by its neatly finished sides and a cache of unspent 7.62-millimetre round cartridges, as an N.V.A. observation post. However, some distance north of the first crater, in a pit used by local scavengers, the team unearthed C-ration wrappers, the remains of a poncho, water bottles, insect repellent, a field protection mask, and the upper portion of the Bata boot discovered in 1997. On the second day of digging, excavators found a tooth.

With the threat of an approaching storm, Captain Gatling told the Vietnamese workers to leave early. From the hill's height of four thousand feet, we had a commanding view over the foothills immediately below, out to the expansive plain that bounds the Cam Lo River--the kind of broad, flat terrain on which, when conventional battles had been the rule, armies would have clashed. Behind us, on the other side of Hill 328, to the north, lay the D.M.Z. The topographical map of the region also listed defunct towns and hamlets: Dinh Dien Hoan Cat, Cam Chinh, Thon Minh Huong--all noted as "Destroyed." Below the hill, the departing workers could be seen descending in single file toward the plain. An aerial photograph of this terrain, taken in 1968, resembles a rare color image from the First World War--a blur of raw earth, the jagged stumps of blasted trees, everything washed with the sepia tone of mud. From the vantage of the hill, the patrol that had made its way toward the outcrop must have been visible long before the soldiers strayed into enemy range. Some of the workers now returning may have heard the story of the dead American before the arrival of Recovery Team 4. I had received only one directive from Mr. Sun, the Vietnamese official accompanying the team: "Please don't speak with the workers." This request could have been prompted by any number of reasons, but one, undoubtedly, was to forestall the predictable line of inquiry--"Did anyone in your village know about this dead man? What did your father do in the war . . . ?"

Recovery Team 4 was billeted in the town of Dong Ha, some twenty-two kilometres from the site, and the principal town of Quang Tri Province. An important combat base was formerly on its outskirts, where, during April and May of 1968--the time of the fatal patrol--the Battle of Dong Ha took place, ending with the loss of some twenty-six hundred lives, more than two thousand of them North Vietnamese. To a casual visitor, Dong Ha showed few scars of its recent war. It was now a bustling town, its dusty thoroughfare lined with handsome two-story houses built in French-colonial fashion, with ornate balconies on the upper floors. Open-fronted shops were packed with goods, and fresh fruit of the season--jackfruit, bananas, star fruit--could be bought in the market. The team stayed in two basic but pleasant hotels, where slow-turning ceiling fans gently batted mosquitoes away; guests wishing not to be disturbed could hang on their doors a sign bearing the all-purpose phrase "Please Don't Bother."

After the second day at the dig, I drove with Mr. Sun and other government officials thirty minutes north to the Truong Son Cemetery. Set on a hill amid landscaped parkland, the cemetery covered almost a hundred and fourteen acres and was, according to Mr. Sun, who knows Washington, D.C., the equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery. Short, youthful-looking, and shy, Mr. Sun became eloquent, and, waving toward the rows of neat markers presided over by a shrine to Ho Chi Minh, told me that "the people wish to honor the heroes." Each headstone bore two dates, those on the top line most commonly 1950, 1951, 1952, and, less frequently, 1945, 1946; those on the bottom, 1965, 1966, 1970-something. Sticks of incense filled the small containers placed on each slab. The cemetery, in a landscaped complex fashioned in the shape of a flower, contains the graves of 10,327 Vietnamese soldiers.

The exact number of Vietnamese killed in the war is unknown, but it approaches, conservatively, two million. The unrecovered military dead--the Vietnamese M.I.A.s--number approximately three hundred thousand. In traditional Vietnamese culture, the site of death is held to be of great importance, and so the missing dead are a matter of enormous religious as well as emotional concern for surviving families. If death occurs in an unfamiliar place, the soul of the deceased may take fright and wander, perhaps causing much mischief before it can be coaxed, by incense and prayer, to the family's ancestral altar.

"It is hard," one Vietnamese official later told me in Hanoi. "We go into villages and women appear saying, 'My sons are missing and you are looking for the American dead.' "

The ritual of retrieval of fallen warriors from enemy hands represents one of the few time-honored civilities of war, dating at least as far back as 750 B.C., the approximate date of the Iliad, ever the first and enduring authority on war. "Revere the gods, Achilles," Homer's King Priam says, imploring pity, as he begs the victorious Achilles for the body of his son, Hektor. "I have endured such as no other mortal man upon earth; I have taken to my lips the hands of the man who killed my child." It is not the hero's death but the petition for his body that is the epic's emotional climax.

The Americans' retrieval of their dead from Vietnam is accepted by both sides as a necessary condition for the normalization of relations between the two countries. Ironically, the previous lobbying for accountability of the missing had helped delay the rapprochement that would make this possible. Rumors of American P.O.W.s languishing in remote camps in the jungles of Laos continued to stoke anguish and distrust long after the war had ended. In 1991, the United States Senate, led by Senators John McCain and John Kerry, both veterans and McCain himself a former P.O.W., authorized an investigation of the P.O.W./M.I.A. issue. The conclusion--after eighteen months of intense, on-site investigation--was that there were no remaining P.O.W.s in Southeast Asia. In 1994, twenty-one years after the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement, and nineteen years after the fall of Saigon, normalization was begun with the lifting of the trade embargo. Nonetheless, even as relations progress between the two nations, any new P.O.W. "sighting" continues to be scrupulously examined.

"We have had two hundred or so live sightings investigated," Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Smith, the commander of jpac's Vietnamese Detachment, told me at a pre-mission briefing in Hue. "Not a single one was credible." One investigation of a group of Americans spotted wandering through the jungle found only another investigative team. The electrifying report of an African-American sergeant held under guard in chains in the forest turned out to be the son of a Senegalese Foreign Legionnaire, who used chains for a logging operation and armed guards to protect his hardwood.

The Vietnamese treat the American recovery teams not as mere visitors but, as Lieutenant Colonel Smith said, with the kind of deference that one would accord "a strange monk from a far distant land." He said, "They know we have something to do with bringing back the dead."

As we returned on foot from the excavation site at Dong Ma on the second afternoon, Zib Martinson Goodman described a discovery of what were believed to be American remains that had been found covered in parachute fabric before burial. "The parachute had been beautifully wrapped," she said, and stopped on the trail, by way of emphasis. "The body had been reverently wrapped."

jpac's work in any host nation is conducted under precisely determined conditions, but those imposed by the Vietnamese government are especially exacting. Not only must Vietnamese officials accompany all investigation and recovery missions but jpac personnel must wear civilian clothes at all times; Vietnamese pilots fly the Russian MI-17 helicopters into and out of the usually difficult-to-reach sites. ("I look at it this way," a senior jpac official told me. "I could fly with a twenty-five-year-old American hot shot or with a seasoned Vietnamese pilot who's survived twenty-five years of flying.") Each mission and site must be negotiated, and a cost for an agreed-upon field session, generally lasting thirty-five to forty days, is paid to the Vietnamese government, which pays the local workers.

When human remains are found, they are analyzed by both Vietnamese and American specialists. If both parties agree that the remains are "Western," they are sent to the Central Identification Laboratory at Hickam. There, the remains are examined again and, if possible, identified. Once identification has been made, family members are notified. The remains are then returned to them to receive a military funeral.

"My government will do whatever it takes to find out what happened to every fallen soldier and bring him home," Smith told me. But, he added, "The sites are getting harder and harder and harder. All the low-hanging fruit have gone." As a result, the measures taken for retrieval have become more extreme. An excavation of a pond in Vinh had required the building of a steel cofferdam to keep the foundations of an adjacent apartment block from collapsing. Jungle rivers had been diverted, and the entire fluvial contents run through a sieve. Perhaps the most elaborate mission had been the exhumation of an airplane from a swamp in the Mekong Delta, a site first identified by a local shrimp farmer who had reported "a place where nothing grows," and where traces of oil bubbled up from the silt. Retrieval of the plane had taken three weeks of preparation, followed by seventy-one days of hard labor to pump the contents of the swamp from one specially dug twelve-metre-deep catchment to another and then back again, aided by a bucket line of two hundred and thirty local workers; the pilot's class ring was the only relic discovered. In general, owing to the high acidity of the soil in Southeast Asia, the survival of substantial remains is rare.

By the end of Recovery Team 4's work on Dong Ma Mountain, no further remains had been found. A conclusive identification of the tooth recovered two months earlier would be made at the Central Identification Laboratory. The case was now closed. After approximately forty-five hundred hours of excavation, at an incalculable cost, the sole human remains recovered from the ambush of 1968 was a single tooth.

"Maybe it's not so noble," one jpac member suggested mischievously. "Maybe it's like the guy who drives his fat S.U.V., or the Texan who owns his big Magnum--it's because we can."

White clouds were closing in as we approached a remote site three miles from the Laos border, on the western slopes of the A Shau Valley. Flying just below the cloud ceiling, we passed over forested waves of highlands before landing in a rough clearing, where whole trees lay toppled as if they had been impatiently pushed aside. Stepping out of the helicopter, I was greeted by Captain Grover Harms, Jr., the senior officer of Recovery Team 5, and a graduate of West Point. A slim man of middle height in his early thirties, Harms had a quick smile and the bright, dark eyes of a small and friendly animal.

Up a forest trail, Team 5's base camp was a sprawling complex of bamboo structures and awnings. The scope and sophistication of the facilities reflected the fact that this circumscribed arena would be home to twelve hardworking people for twenty-three days. All food, fuel, water, bedding, clothing, personal effects, and excavation equipment had been flown in; camp amenities included a generator, a DVD player, and, most impressively, an inflatable shower, with water pumped out of a nearby stream and heated. There had been heavy rains in the early days of the mission, flooding possessions and miring the camp in mud. The damp, insinuating cloud that pressed around the mountains often lingered here; dry, clean clothes, I was later told, were a luxury.

A U-shaped catwalk, constructed well above the muddy ground and sheltered by bamboo-and-plastic roofing, formed the team's living and eating quarters, somewhat resembling a traditional longhouse. Set along its plywood-and-bamboo floor were a series of pup tents, which afforded each team member minimal privacy. A sign had been carefully printed and hung on a bamboo rafter:

Why suffer'st thou thy sons, unburied yet,To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx?Make way to lay them by their brethren.There greet in silence, as the dead are wont,And sleep in peace, slain in your country's wars!--"Titus Andronicus," Act I, Scene 1.

An undulating slope of slick mud, made tractable by bamboo steps and a railing, wound from the camp through a tunnel of greenery and bamboo, and ended on a muddy hill. A knot of Americans were digging near the base, the claggy earth carried up the hill by a bucket line of Vietnamese men and women, some seventy workers in all. On the summit, workers sifted the dirt through screens, and, as at the first site, an American inspected each pannier for remains. A significant portion of the hill had been scraped bare during a previous excavation and was, in the parlance of the profession, "sterile." From out of the disturbed earth and roots and hacked vegetation, three poisonous snakes had been found on this one day.

Working some distance from the screen line, approaching the hill's downslope, was the anthropologist August Goodman, a tall man of thirty with pale skin and a black beard and features one might see on marble busts of Roman emperors: his actual name, it turned out, was Augustus. Goodman, who is married to Zib Martinson Goodman, was responsible for the sign back at the camp.

He was from Mississippi, and before joining jpac he had worked for a cultural-resource-management firm, doing field work, above the Brooks Range, in Alaska, where he had dealt with old Bering Sea culture, dating back some two thousand years, and where he had been living, as he put it, "in a little bitty hut" in temperatures as low as minus forty degrees. Trained as a forensic anthropologist, he had written his thesis on using bone histology to differentiate between Asians and Caucasians. Practical application, as opposed to teaching, had appealed to him from the beginning.

The object of the search on this nameless hill was the pilot of a UH-IC, or Huey, gunship that had been shot down by heavy-calibre machine-gun fire while engaged in an extraction mission in May, 1967. In the words of jpac's report of "Circumstances of Loss," on being hit "the engine quit, then the helo received another burst of fire; the crew lost control, the helo crashed and rolled into a small ravine. Later the downed helicopter exploded."

Reports from other helicopters on the mission indicated that all four crew members had escaped and scattered into the forest. Over the next few days, searches were conducted by air and on land, and eventually three of the men were rescued. On two occasions, within twenty-four hours of the crash, rescue aircraft had spotted flashlight signals. The pilot, however, was never found. The case had been the object of five jpac investigations, and one previous recovery effort, dating back to 1991.

Local witnesses reported having seen the body lying on this hill. According to one witness, the body had been face down; according to another, it had been face up.

"The challenge is to funnel the witnesses' reports, the material evidence, and the geotopography," Goodman said. It was a difficult site. The hill's precipitous slopes, which ranged from thirty-five degrees to as much as sixty degrees, and the heavy rains of the region had undoubtedly insured that, after so many years, any remains had been carried down and away to one side of the hill or the other; and although the body had been seen on the ground, there was no report that it had ever been buried. Team 5, and the earlier recovery effort, had found fragments of equipment, such as a spring from a radio and an airplane's data plate. Just this day, a bayonet was unearthed in the farthest grid, and an unspent .45-calibre bullet was found in a second pit, at the foot of the slope.

The clouds had been edging lower and lower, and were now a white fog drifting over the tops of the towering trees that ringed our small hill, swallowing the forest, as the forest had apparently swallowed the downed man. At that moment, the task at hand seemed preposterous and futile, belonging more to the realm of myth than to reality. A man had been leached into the earth, and the earth was now being turned inside out to find him.

By dusk, rain had begun to fall. Back toward our camp, I was taken by Captain Grover Harms, the team's senior officer, to meet Colonel Khoi, the Vietnamese government official accompanying Team 5. Harms and Khoi had known each other since 1998, when Harms had first come to Vietnam. Khoi had his own substantial base camp, with family and colleagues often in attendance. Dressed in a singlet and shorts, he sat on a bamboo structure that formed a kind of bench, with the nonchalant authority of a genial James Bond villain. Harms enjoyed hanging out here, and, as he said, took advantage of the offer of many good meals. While Team 5 had airlifted in crates of tinned supplies, the Colonel had a small flock of live fowl sharing his quarters.

"If I could do this for the rest of my career, I would be happy," Harms said. This was the third mission he had led as a captain; on his first mission, in Laos, the remains of Governor Howard Dean's brother, Charles, had been found. For Harms, that had been a memorable experience.

"Even without their speaking, you can feel the appreciation," he said of the Dean family. "It removed any shadow of a doubt I might have had about whether the families find this meaningful."

Later, over dinner at the base camp, by the murky light powered by the generator, members of the team spoke of other missions. Staff Sergeant Tami Reeder had been on several in Papua New Guinea, for cases relating to the Second World War. Bodies from Second World War crash sites tend to be more intact than those of later conflicts, because the speed of aircraft was so much slower, and less destructive. In one case, according to Reeder, a body was found with eyeballs, flesh, and kidneys intact; "it was maybe embalmed with the fuel," he said. In Papua New Guinea, skeletal remains are found that have been left undisturbed throughout the decades; "nothing touched or looted," Reeder said. Taboos against touching the dead had kept the local populations at an awed distance. When jpac investigators requested assistance, the local people performed ceremonies of propitiation and absolution before they approached.

Before turning in to my tent, I stood briefly outside in the night. Darkness and mist had reduced the forest to the black silhouettes of the foremost trees, standing in sentrylike silence over the camp. Many reports by men who had served in the A Shau Valley during the war recall its "spookiness." Strategically, this cleft in the otherwise impenetrable terrain was of great importance, serving as an N.V.A. supply route and, at the northern extremity, as a staging area. From time to time, between the monsoons, American forces attempted to make inroads, but without lasting success, and at the time of the ill-fated extraction mission the valley was entirely in North Vietnamese hands. According to conventional military wisdom, control of the heights commands control of a valley; but in A Shau the heights were cloaked in a camouflage of triple-canopy forest and, more often than not, shrouded with clouds so steeply banked that helicopters had to push up as high as ten thousand feet in search of holes in the coverage.

"An eerie, dark world," as Lieutenant Colonel Smith described it. "You can see the little scratched-out bare spots of old firebases on the hilltops, like pitiful little life rafts swallowed whole by a vast green sea."

The rain became heavy during the night, and a damp, foggy dawn broke with the crow of the Colonel's doomed rooster. It was soon apparent that there would be no flying today. Local workers arrived and left on foot every day from their homes in the valley, and our small group took the route they used to get out. With a guide leading, and having been warned never to grab hold of anything without looking at it first, we set forth. Steep and slippery at the outset, the path levelled off after forty-five minutes, and then merged into a small stream, which we followed, ankle deep, all the while under cover of leaves and vines: no one looking down from above could have seen us; nor, because we walked in the water, did we leave any mark of our passing.

When the forest trailed off, we arrived at the valley floor, vivid and green and watered by the A Sap River. Across the river, I wrung out my clothes and checked for leeches, then turned to look back the way we had come. A line of scrub trees was visible, and behind it only white fog: the mountains and forest had disappeared.

Both August Goodman and Zib Martinson Goodman had spoken of the same incident: one of the excavations had yielded a single fragment of bone, the head of a humerus, which was duly turned over to the dead man's family. His grown daughter, Zib said, "had gripped the bone as if electrified." Her father had been killed before she was born, and this was her first and only contact with him.

"That's what it's all about--bringing answers to the families," Lieutenant Colonel Smith said. "When I salute, I hold that salute just a little longer--for the families." The occasions he referred to were the repatriation ceremonies for recovered remains, the joint-services honor and color guards and salutes over the flag-draped transfer caskets, upon their arrival on American soil, in Hawaii.

On my return to Hanoi, I made a tour of the jpac detachment quarters, where photographs of such ceremonies were displayed. The substantial aluminum caskets, designed to accommodate the body of the average American male, and borne by traditional pallbearers, belied their usually meagre contents--a single tooth, a fingernail-size fragment of bone.

"There's no problem with showing those, then?" asked a former British Army commando, who was also visiting. "What about the ban on photos of coffins coming from Iraq?"

The Lieutenant Colonel explained: "In the case of Iraq, it's intruding on the family's grief. In this case--" he gestured toward the photos on the wall--"we're giving something back."

"The life of a man cannot come back," says Achilles.

Of possessionscattle and fat sheep can be taken by force,and tripods can be acquired and tawny-headed horses;but the life of a man cannot come back, it cannot be taken by force, nor won back, once it gets past the teeth's barrier.

If repatriation is the compensation claimed by families, what is due the dead? The issue of "compensation" is one in which the Iliad has keen interest. How much bloodshed constitutes vengeance? How much for the ransom of a body? What is the value of a life?

For the Homeric hero, there was nothing to look forward to in the land of the dead, beyond the Styx; the only approximate compensation for death was kleos, a word usually translated as "glory," but the primary meaning of which is "rumor" or "report." "Glory," as such, is what is said about you after you have died. The kleos of Achilles is, of course, the Iliad; lesser heroes must be content with the little bullet-point histories that accompany their deaths. This, not the extravagant act of excavation, may be jpac's most enduring offering to the dead: the resurrection of a soldier's kleos, his Loss Incidence File, his L.K.A.--Last Known Alive.