‘FORGOTTEN GRUNT’ BECAME CAUSE FOR TEAM OF SLEUTHS
knocked at the Patterson home near Charlotte, N.C., where the private’s Purple Heart and dog tags have been on display for years near the front door. Mulligan, they said, had been found.
Until recently, the kind of detective work that brought the lost Marine home was largely handled by a small group of federal researchers at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the arm of the Pentagon responsible for finding and returning lost war dead. Now, though, terabytes of digitized military records can be searched and shared over the internet, and a growing number of war dead are being found by members of the public, often working in their spare time.
The search for Mulligan started with a blood-flecked Japanese flag that Dale Maharidge, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who teaches journalism at Columbia University, found among his father’s belongings after he died.
Maharidge’s father had been a Marine on Okinawa, and the flag was a souvenir taken from the brow of a dead Japanese soldier and signed by more than a dozen Marines. His father had come home from the war haunted by combat and unwilling to talk about it, but for the rest of his life, he kept a dog-eared snapshot of a buddy he lost in combat — Mulligan.
Maharidge decided to track down the men of the flag, and ultimately the man in the snapshot.
“I thought by finding Mulligan, maybe I could finally understand my dad, and put some of his demons to rest,” Maharidge said.
He hunted for years, cold-calling hundreds of men with names like those on the flag, and eventually found a few Marine veterans who helped him piece together what happened on Okinawa. He wrote a book about the search, “Bringing Mulligan Home.” But he finished it resigned to the idea that the man in the snapshot would never actually be brought home.
Mulligan worked in a textile mill as a teenager in Greenville, S.C., before the war and lied about his health to get into the Marines, hiding his hemophilia. He saw fierce fighting in Guam and then hit the beach on Okinawa, where his regiment fought for weeks to pry Japanese defenders from the hillside tombs they used as bunkers.
On May 30, 1945, Mulligan threw his fateful grenade into one of the tombs, not knowing it was packed with explosives.
“The whole hillside blew out at him,” a veteran told Maharidge. “He got hit in the face.”
Bridget Carroll, an amateur genealogist in Virginia, heard Maharidge give a radio interview and sent him an email offering to help. “I love a mystery,” she told him.
Before long, she had found Mulligan’s cousin, James Patterson. “We had his Purple Heart sitting here in the house but didn’t know a thing about it,” said Patterson’s wife, Jean. “But then I read the letters of his family trying to find him after the war, and it broke my heart.”
She joined the search. The family provided DNA to the agency that could identify Mulligan, and urged the agency to begin a search. But she said the agency seemed to do little. Two years later, she spotted a Facebook post announcing that dozens of Marine remains had been recovered by independent researchers on the island of Tarawa, and posted a comment saying she hoped Mulligan was among them.
Robert Rumsby, a former Army lieutenant who had worked on the Tarawa excavations, saw her comment and responded. He had developed a passion for World War II, and though he was only 26 at the time, he had already spent years indexing unknown graves from the war.
“This guy was a nobody, just a grunt everyone had forgotten,” Rumsby said of Mulligan. “But that’s why we had to find him. Nobody deserves to be left behind.”
Rumsby knew that World War II dead were typically buried in temporary cemeteries close to the fighting, in rows usually filled chronologically. He used an old map of the plots on Okinawa to look for unknowns buried shortly after Mulligan died. There were only two, and one of them, in a grave labeled X-35, looked promising.
After the war, the Army recorded details of each set of unknown remains in records known as X files that are now digitized and widely shared by researchers. The files showed that X-35 had been exhumed and sent to Saipan to be identified, along with thousands of others. Although the grave contained socks stenciled with the name Mulligan, no match was made, and the remains were reburied in 1950 in a U.S. cemetery in Manila.
Rumsby compared the file for X-35 to Mulligan’s personnel file in 2016 and found several points of agreement. A group of dentists then volunteered to examine dental records, and found that they matched.
The Patterson family submitted the findings to the agency in fall 2016 with fingers crossed, knowing that strong evidence was no guarantee that the agency would take action. Some seemingly rock-solid cases have languished for decades.
Pressed by the family and their senators and congressmen, the agency exhumed X-35 in spring 2017 and sent a section of tibia to the military’s DNA lab in Maryland to be compared with the sample supplied by James Patterson (he died in July 2017). The results were a match.
“I don’t believe in closure, I don’t think we ever really get over anything,” Maharidge said a few days after hearing the news. “But this feels pretty good.”
Earlier this month, Maharidge, the author who started the quest, walked through the ghostly marble headstones of Arlington National Cemetery with Rumsby, the researcher who had connected the crucial dots. They stopped at the grave of Maharidge’s father and Maharidge produced a bottle of respectable 10-year-old bourbon.
There was an empty plot three spaces to the north, where they hoped to bury Mulligan. The sun was setting, and in the distance, a bugler sounded taps at the Tomb of the Unknowns.
Maharidge poured glasses of bourbon, then paused to splash a bit from the bottle onto the grass.
“The dead drink first,” he said.