Gone But Never Forgotten

By TAD BARTIMUS

Memorial Day is for public mourning. We collectively hang up the flag, pull weeds in the cemetery, fill mayonnaise jars with peonies from the garden and order wreaths for the graves. It's a holiday created to honor fallen heroes. This year there are more fallen heroes than last year. Next year, there will be more still, because the United States continues to be embroiled in dangerous conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The pain of losing a loved one, particularly in a distant war, never ends. That is the message of a new book by journalists Richard Pyle and Horst Faas, who still grieve for absent companions lost many years ago.

"Lost Over Laos: A True Story of Tragedy, Mystery and Friendship" (Da Capo Press, 2003) is the story of a 27-year quest by Pyle and Faas to find and honor the remains of four news photographers: Larry Burrows of LIFE magazine, Henri Huet of The Associated Press, Kent Potter of United Press International, and Keisa Shimamoto of Newsweek. During Operation Lam Son 719, one of the last major battles of the Vietnam War, enemy fire hit the helicopter the four were riding in, causing it to explode over Laos.

These photographers were among the best in the business when they died. They were deeply mourned, not just by those who knew and loved them, but also by strangers who admired their great pictures.

When the Vietnam War ended, in 1975, the remote crash site was sealed off by Laos' communist regime and most of those mourning the photographers resigned themselves to never knowing the rest of their story.

But Pyle, still with the AP in New York, and Faas, still with AP in London, held out hope that one day they would get permission to visit the crash site, "make a pilgrimage of the heart," as Pyle put it. Why? Because the living always promise the dead "you will never be forgotten." We mean it when we say it, often heartbreakingly so, at funerals and memorial services. Then months pass. Years.
Waves of grief stop swamping us. We carry on, as we should.

Faas and Pyle felt that someone who'd known the four photographers should go to the exact place where they'd died and say, "We are here. We have come to tell you that you are remembered, and well."

In March 1998, Faas and Pyle were allowed to accompany members of a Hawaii-based Pentagon team searching in Laos for the remains of Americans missing in action. They paid their own way, with no sure outcome.

"This (was) ... the real deal -- a speculative journey conceived, planned, and carried out, every element of our own doing, right down to the military rations that I had bought for $20 in an Army-Navy store on West 42nd Street in New York," Pyle later wrote. "There were no public relations news releases, no staged photo ops. Perhaps only journalists who had seen so much of those things could truly appreciate an adventure that was so random, so pure in its uncertainty."

Which is how, despite bad knees, extra poundage and slower gaits, Faas and Pyle -- like the best of journalists -- became witnesses to history and finally got to say goodbye to colleagues who never had a chance to grow old with them.

"I stood at the top of the ridge, looking down the steep slope, trying to absorb the scene in a way that would become an indelible memory, one of enduring clarity despite the inevitable tricks of time," Pyle later wrote in "Lost Over Laos." "I became aware of something indefinable. Not a voice, certainly, but a sense, a thought, perhaps a presence: WE ARE HERE.

"I told Horst, unashamedly, that the hill had spoken to me."

Despite all intellectual reason that tells us the person we loved has gone elsewhere, we continue to visit cemeteries, monuments and wilderness on Memorial Day. We do it not so much to achieve closure, but to make a connection. As Pyle concluded, "Spirits dwell in such places."

© 2003 The Women Syndicate

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