Recovery team hits battle site

Sixty-five years after he closed the eyes of dead young Marines on the beach in the Battle of Tarawa, Leon Cooper went back, and he didn’t like what he saw or learned then, either.

The Malibu, Calif., man, who ferried Marines to shore in a Higgins boat in the bloody Nov. 20-23 Pacific battle in 1943, had gone back in 2008 because he heard that Red Beach — where so many Americans gave their lives in World War II — was strewn with trash.

Once on Betio Island, the scene of the fighting in what is now the Republic of Kiribati, the news went from bad to worse.

"Just by happenstance, the officials from Kiribati said, ‘You are here about the bodies?’" Cooper, now 90, recalls. "I said, ‘Bodies, what do you mean?’ So little by little, the window opened up. They were referring to hundreds of guys for whom there was no accounting."

Independent filmmaker Steven Barber was along. The resulting documentary about Cooper’s visit, "Return to Tarawa," narrated by actor Ed Harris, was a hit on the Military Channel.

It led to appearances for Cooper and Barber on ABC’s "World News," CBS with Katie Couric, and CNN with Larry King.

It led to an amendment written into the House version of the U.S. defense authorization bill in 2009 calling on the Pentagon "to undertake all feasible efforts to recover, identify and return" the missing remains of 564 U.S. service members killed in the Battle of Tarawa.

And on Thursday, it led to a team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, based in Hawaii, getting on a C-17 cargo aircraft for a recovery mission to Betio Island.

Cooper, still spry and quick-witted, was in Hawaii last week to meet with JPAC members. Barber is accompanying the recovery team to Betio for a documentary sequel with the working title "Tarawa: The Unrecovered."

"We’re pretty confident there will be some remains recovered," said Air Force Lt. Col. Wayne Perry, chief spokesman for JPAC. "I just couldn’t tell you the amount."

The mission represents a small victory for Cooper amid a clamor of competing pleas across the nation for the recovery of a staggering number of Americans killed in combat and who were never returned home.

A total of 74,213 U.S. service members remain missing from World War II, with 19,000 deemed recoverable, according to JPAC. There are also 127 missing from the Cold War, 8,034 from the Korean War, and 1,723 from the Vietnam War.

The overwhelming statistics led Congress to mandate that by 2015, JPAC must make 200 identifications a year — more than twice the 95 identifications in fiscal 2009.

The 400-member JPAC, headquartered at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, has responsibility for investigating, recovering and identifying those war dead. In fiscal 2009, it conducted 69 missions. The command is in the process of expanding its identification lab and staff.

For Cooper, the fact that soiled diapers and other trash are dumped on Red Beach is an outrage. That U.S. Marines who died on Tarawa remain unrecovered is a travesty.

"A lot of these guys died in the prime of their lives, and the least I can do is prick the conscience of our nation — if not our stupid government — to finally do something about this," Cooper said.

Before the 1943 attack, a Japanese admiral had bragged that "a million Americans couldn’t take Tarawa in 100 years." The island was the most heavily defended atoll to be invaded in the Pacific.

About 1,000 U.S. Marines paid for breaching those defenses with their lives in the 76-hour battle.

Cooper was a 22-year-old Navy ensign on a landing craft. He remembers the smoke and flames, bullets whizzing by "like angry bees," mortars exploding so close they splashed water onto the landing craft, and all the men he saw fall.

He eventually went ashore.

"The beach was covered with the dead," recalled. "Here are dozens of guys lying there in pieces, many of them."

Palm trees were shattered from the fire.

Cooper was conscripted to be part of a burial detail, and he remembers closing the eyes of the dead, many of them teenagers.

On his return trip in 2008, Cooper found some of the missing Americans to be painfully close at hand.

He met an Australian who lives on Betio who claims to have had the remains of an American in his possession after a laborer dug them up in a septic field.

"He showed me a few things, including a helmet liner," Cooper said.

The liner had the name "Somes" and "USMC" on it. With the man’s remains were remnants of a uniform, a wristwatch and dog tags. Cooper said the Marine’s first name was Arthur and that he was a private.

The Australian made some inquiries about repatriating the remains, but when that went nowhere, he reburied them. Cooper said he knows where.

Perry, the JPAC spokesman, said the team of about 15 from Hawaii will be searching six sites for remains on the 45-day mission.

A nonprofit group called History Flight conducted research and used ground-penetrating radar on Betio in 2008 and found what it believed to be 139 American graves.

The ongoing war and airfield construction activity after the Battle of Tarawa led to burial sites being lost.

Perry said JPAC will recover as many remains as possible. He said "several hundred" Americans are likely still missing on Tarawa, but the exact number is not clear.

A Tarawa recovery was on JPAC’s "operational plan" for next fiscal year, and the efforts by Cooper and History Flight "probably made this particular mission leapfrog over some others," Perry said.

Cooper said the JPAC team members are doing a tremendous job with the recovery work they do. But, he added, "There just aren’t enough of them."