The story of a long-lost Marine, by his grandson
To the casual observer, the story of the Battle of Tarawa during World War II might seem too far away, both geographically and temporally, to warrant more investigation now. Tarawa was the U.S. Marine Corps’ bloodiest battle at the time, but it was surpassed by bigger battles in the Pacific Theater, where there was much fighting for writers to pen into outlines between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. So much ink has been spilled about the war in the decades since it ended. Hasn’t the history already been written? Aren’t the dead long accounted for and buried?
The answers to those two questions are no, and, perhaps surprisingly, no, and the latter is what drove Clay Bonnyman Evans to go searching for his grandfather’s missing grave on Tarawa, a wisp of an atoll in a remote expanse of the Pacific. (Well, that and a journalist’s nose for a great story.) Seventyone years after Marine 1st Lt. Alexander “Sandy” Bonnyman Jr. died there, his grandson watched a forensic anthropologist brush sand away from the Medal of Honor winner’s skull in a long-missing grave. In that moment, an exciting and previously untold chapter in the story of Tarawa finally closed.
It’s a tired cliche that journalists write the first draft of history, but in “Bones of My Grandfather: Reclaiming a Lost Hero of WWII,” Evans shows why journalists write those drafts, then chase unanswered questions, sometimes for years, to write better drafts of history. There are always more answers to the dark questions left in the wake of battle. Through years of painstaking research and half a dozen visits to this farthest-flung of locations — and riveting writing — Evans uncovers how the story of the missing Marines of Tarawa is still unfolding, through the efforts of a handful of civilians searching for their remains.
“Bones of My Grandfather” is a well-documented nonfiction tome, but it’s also part memoir, out of necessity. Bonnyman had three young girls at home when he went off to war after Pearl Harbor, and the missing war-hero father cast a long shadow on generations of the clan, including Evans, who is the son of the oldest of the three girls. Evans grew up admiring the grandfather he never knew, but a deep interest in his story was piqued in adulthood, when he learned that researchers believed his grandfather’s remains were still on Betio, the tiny island in the atoll where U.S. Marines fought a pitched battle against dug-in Japanese soldiers.
He takes an offer to go to Betio; it turned out to be the first of a half-dozen trips to Tarawa. “From the moment I decided to go, I was consumed with taking up the role of paladin of my grandfather’s legacy,” Evans writes. “As a kind of penance for my long neglect, I embarked on a quest to exhume my grandfather’s life, and, if I were lucky, perhaps even his body. After all, if my family hadn’t even known he still lay sleeping beneath the sands of Tarawa, what else was I missing?”
Evans (a past colleague of this reviewer who readers might remember as an editor and writer for the Camera over many years) decides to find out, digging in to verify or banish larger-than-life legends about Sandy, even if it isn’t always a pretty picture. Did his grandfather really get shot in a bar fight, near the copper mine he ran in New Mexico? Is the memory of one Tarawa survivor, documented in another book, that diminishes his grandfather’s heroism an accurate portrayal of his grandfather’s actions — and did he deserve his Medal of Honor? And then there are the unflattering facts about how government agencies have mishandled everything from taxpayerfunded initiatives to bring home the remains of fallen soldiers to basic communication with their families.
The Bonnymans were one of those families. Sandy’s parents and children were alternately told over the years that he was buried at sea, and at Hawaii’s “Punchbowl,” the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. Later, when Evans and his family learned he was probably on Betio, they arrived at a new and frustrating informational crossroads — Bonnyman was believed to be in Cemetery 27, but no one knew where Cemetery 27 was.
The unknown location of Cemetery 27 was a slice of the larger problem: Of the more than 1,000 Americans who died in the battle on Tarawa in 1943, the graves of about half were lost after the Marines took the island. Evans acknowledges the situation in an early chapter: “So how could more than five hundred gravesites have gone missing on the flat, featureless, 1.2-square-kilometer sandy spit that is Betio? Multiple factors played a role.”
The government is now committed to finding them with the help of the civilian group History Flight, an organization that helps Evans with his search from the start. One of their forensic anthropologists, Kristen Baker, is the one who brushed the dust from Sandy’s jawline and declared “Gold” when she spotted his distinctive fillings.
How History Flight’s founder, Mark Noah, navigates bureaucracy as a civilian is another integral part of the story of the search for Sandy Bonnyman — and all of Tarawa’s missing Marines. With the History Flight crew, Evans unpacks a nearlylost story decades in the making in a touching, heart-stopping finale that reveals how passion coupled with diligence on the part of so many civilians lives up to the high standard of the Marine Corps motto: “Semper Fi.”