Late in the dark hours of Friday night, a Marine Corps C-20G “gray ghost” jet landed on the tarmac at Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe Bay.
It was returning from the Solomon Islands with a special assignment — bringing back what are believed to be the remains of Marines killed fighting on Guadalcanal more than eight decades ago.
The plane was greeted by more than 100 Marines and sailors at the base as it pulled near the air terminal. They saluted as service members wearing white gloves carried boxes of the remains, each topped with a folded American flag, from the tarmac to a van that would take them to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
The DPAA sends teams around the world to find the remains of missing service members and bring them to Hawaii where experts at the world’s largest forensic skeleton lab work to identify them using a mixture of science and historical detective work. On the island of Guadalcanal alone, the U.S. military lists about 374 service members still unaccounted for since the end of World War II.
Marine Staff Sgt. Stephon Smith, an explosives expert, was part of the team and carried one of the boxes of remains as he exited the plane. An Okinawa-based Marine, he is trained in identifying and disposing of World War II-era U.S. and Japanese explosives — skills that proved critical in retrieving the remains he held from the former battlefield.
Even 80 years after the war ended, as many as 20 people are killed or seriously injured in the Solomon Islands per year by unexploded ordnance left behind by Japanese and Allied forces that fought each other across Pacific archipelagos.
The DPAA team was searching for Marines believed to have died during the Battle of Edson’s Ridge, where Marines repelled an attack by Imperial Japanese forces trying to retake the strategically important Henderson Airfield from the Americans. An estimated 111 Americans and as many as 800 Japanese troops are believed to have died in the fighting — sometimes also called the Battle of Bloody Ridge.
The service members who came to greet the remains Friday night stood still and silent as the boxes containing them were brought one by one to a van. The chaotic nature of historic battles and the amount of time that has passed make it hard to know for sure who the bones recovered actually belong to — or if they’re even human bones — but they are treated with reverence regardless until DPAA knows for sure.
“One thing that’s really impressive about all the Marines (is that) all the Marines know their history,” said John M. Figuerres, the DPAA’s acting deputy director for operations. “They are schooled in their history, they’re schooled in their battles … whether it’s Guadalcanal, whether it’s the Chosin River, whether it’s Khe Sanh in Vietnam. … So for us to tell these Marines, there are Marines potentially — we have to ID them — that are coming back from Guadalcanal, they know the struggle that their brother Marines did.”
As the ceremony concluded, Lt. Gen. James Glynn, commander of Marine Corps Forces Pacific, told the service members in attendance that while many regard the Marine Corps motto “Semper Fidelis” — Latin for “always faithful” — as a slogan, “what you demonstrate tonight is that it’s a way of life, it’s a family, that there actually, truly is faith between Marines.”
As the van drove away, Smith and Staff Sgt. Zachary Bailey, an Army medic and mountaineer, were awarded Joint Service Achievement Medals for their roles in retrieving the remains.
Smith worked with the DPAA team but is not officially assigned to the agency; he had been brought on to help as a member of an investigative team that was on Guadalcanal searching for potential remains. The team began its mission in February.
“The scientific research experts, the anthropologists, the amount of brains and research and work that goes into really finding out where these guys are, and then going in to actually get them, it’s a lot of work,” Smith told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
“But it just tells me, and it sure made me feel great, because the country and this agency is committed to bring us home, even if it’s many, many years after, you know, we have passed away.”
Smith said that helping to retrieve the remains was an honor, noting that “investigation teams aren’t typically digging.” But when they found the site, they realized a nearby river was washing it away and potentially moving the remains. They decided to work fast, and Smith got to work identifying and clearing World War II-era munitions, identifying both American and Japanese explosives in the vicinity.
Ultimately, Smith said, “We were able to do digging and bring our guys back home.”
The DPAA has been both a mission to bring fallen American troops home and also a diplomatic mission. It was through the program’s operations that the United States reestablished relations with Vietnam, ultimately leading to normalization and paving the way for friendly relations and trade.
The agency also has worked in North Korea and China retrieving and identifying war dead. A mission in China is planned for this summer to look for the remains of World War II American service members.
As the assembled troops who came to welcome the remains to Kaneohe prepared to leave, Lt. Col. Jeremy Smith, the DPAA’s deputy director for Indo-Pacific operations and senior Marine officer at the agency, told them that “every one of you also participated in this mission because you are here tonight, on a Friday night when you could be anywhere else, telling the American people and telling the families that we will never stop searching for their missing service members.”
