Clay Bonnyman Evans was 5,000 miles from home, deep in a pit on the Pacific island of Betio, when he heard the words his family had awaited for so long.
“It’s gold,” announced Kristen Baker. With a brush, the archaeologist gently swept the sand off an unmistakable shape: a human skeleton — with a mouth full of gilded fillings.
“It’s gold.”
Two words to end a 71-year wait. Two words to solve a mystery that had vexed Evans’s family for four generations. Two words to give a long-lost war hero the happy ending he deserved.
First Lt. Alexander “Sandy” Bonnyman Jr. was finally coming home.
For the better part of a century, the Medal of Honor recipient was literally lost to the chaos and carnage of World War II. His grave said “Buried at sea,” but his family knew better. Sandy Bonnyman was entombed — somewhere.
A World War II hero
The story of how Evans, a 53-year-old freelance journalist from Niwot, tracked down his grandfather’s remains is almost as incredible as Bonnyman’s heroics. It involves gunfights and flamethrowers, radar and drones, mass graves and a cadaver dog named Buster.
“It is incredible,” Evans said. “Just incredible.”
The tale begins on Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Sandy Bonnyman was a miner near Santa Fe, N.M. He had already served a stint in the Army and was now 31 years old. But when he heard the news, he re-enlisted, this time in the Marines.
By the time he landed on Tarawa Atoll, a string of strategically important islands in the middle of the Pacific, Bonnyman was the executive officer of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines’ Shore Party.
For three days in late November 1943, the Marines tried to take the island of Betio from the Japanese. Bonnyman led his party across the island, destroying enemy outposts as he went.
“On the second day of the epic struggle for that strategically important piece of coral, 1st Lt. Bonnyman, determined to effect an opening in the enemy’s strongly defended defense line, led his demolitions teams in an assault on the entrance of a huge bombproof shelter which contained approximately 150 Japanese soldiers,” according to the Marine Corps’ official biography. “This strong point was inflicting heavy casualties upon the Marines and was holding up their advance.”
After a day of attacking the shelter, Bonnyman led a full-on assault. Using flamethrowers and explosives, he and his men forced the Japanese into the open. Most of the enemy were shot as they left the shelter, but several attacked Bonnyman.
“Assailed by additional Japanese, he stood at the forward edge of the position and killed three of the attackers before he fell mortally wounded,” Marine Corps records state. “His men beat off the counterattack and broke the back of the resistance. The island was declared secured on the day of 1st Lt. Bonnyman’s death.”
Wartime burial
His family back in Knoxville, Tenn., received news of his death a few weeks later. Bonnyman’s wife and 12-year-old daughter, Frances, traveled to Washington to receive his Medal of Honor.
But if the story of Bonnyman’s heroics was well recorded, the location of his body was not. As the Marines moved to press on through the Pacific, they hurriedly buried their men in mass graves. And so started a mystery that would stretch out for 71 years.
Bonnyman’s parents desperately tried to discover where their son had been buried.
“They got all these stories, that he was buried here or there,” Evans said in a phone interview from Colorado. “Until finally, my great-grandfather gave up and bought a headstone that said ‘Buried at Sea.’ It kind of shattered their family.
Evans grew up believing that his grandfather was buried in an anonymous grave at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. But in 2009, he learned that the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, was planning to return to Tarawa to try to identify the remains of American Marines there.
When Evans looked into the project, however, he learned that it was really being pushed along by a small, Florida-based nonprofit called History Flight. Evans reached out to the organization’s founder, Mark Noah, who agreed to meet him in Tarawa.
Finding determination
In August 2010, Evans flew to the archipelago in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Evans admired Noah and his team at History Flight. The nonprofit has found scores of veterans’ bodies across the Pacific theater.
“I reached a conclusion that I was going to hitch my cart to this little bitty nonprofit because I could see the dedication and the determination there,” Evans said.
Over the next five years, Evans would go back four more times to the now-overcrowded island to volunteer for the organization — digging holes, taking DNA samples, anything they wanted.
“I’ve been happy to do it, because they’ve gotten results,” he said. Results meaning bodies. Lots of them. But never Sandy Bonnyman.
Finally, in late March of this year, Noah called Evans and said he thought his team was close to finding his grandfather. Using ground-penetrating radar, old military maps, the latest GPS technology, remote-controlled drones and Buster, a cadaver dog from California, they had found a trench — dubbed Cemetery 27 — where Bonnyman was thought to lie. Evans flew to Tarawa once more, but a lot of work remained.
“It’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” he said. “In archeology, six inches is as good as a million miles, because if you miss what you are looking for, then you missed it.”
Finally, on May 28, archaeolgist Kristin Baker was inspecting body No. 16 when she spotted another skeleton barely a foot away. She carefully scraped away the sand from around the skull, then began to brush the dirt from the century-old teeth. That’s when she spotted the gold.
“I definitely had tears in my eyes thinking about my great-grandparents, who lost their son, and my mom and my aunt, who lost their father,” Evans said.
“A full human life”
The mystery was over, but the story wasn’t complete.
Evans helped Baker finish excavating body No. 16. The next day, May 29, they spent hunched over Sandy Bonnyman’s bones. It wasn’t until May 30 that Evans could properly reflect on the achievement. He went for a morning run, and then he did something that surprised even himself.
He climbed into the grave.
“After I got done with my run, I went back to that grave and I sat there and I did my meditation there,” he said. “That’s when I allowed myself to have more feelings.”
Evans said he couldn’t take much credit for finding his grandfather’s remains. That, he said, should go to Noah and History Flight.
“This little organization did in 2½ years what my family has been told for the past 70 years couldn’t be done,” he said.
Evans is now finishing a book about Bonnyman’s life and his own efforts to locate his grandfather.
“It’s an attempt to give him back a full human life rather than just that little Wikipedia legend that everybody knows,” Evans said.
But even as Evans and his family celebrate finding Bonnyman, the Marine’s bones remain on Betio. Although his body has been identified from his dental records, JPAC must follow certain procedures in removing and investigating it.
Evans said his family plans on finally laying Bonnyman to rest on Sept. 26 in Knoxville.
“We’re going to bury him under that headstone that says ‘Buried at sea,'” Evans said. When asked if he was going to change the inscription, he replied: “Hell no. “I think it’s a delicious historical irony that should stand for all time,” he said.
“It never offended me that he was on that island. That little island took incredible care of him for the past seven decades.”
