The Gleaners

ARMY & NAVY

The orders which the American Graves Registration Service gave its 200-man detachment in China were deceptively simple: they were to recover and identify the bodies of U.S. servicemen who had died there during World War II. But few soldiers had ever had a tougher peacetime assignment. Many of China's 3,700 missing U.S. dead had vanished almost without a clue, lay scattered in remote and inaccessible regions from Manchuria to the hot forests of Thailand. The most dramatic example: the 879 men who had died in the wrecks of 468 different airplanes trying to fly the cloud-hung Himalayan Hump.

The A.G.R.S. recovery teams soon found that they had to become rivermen, mountain climbers, explorers, bush diplomats and detectives. A.G.R.S. men, almost one-third of them Chinese-Americans, went out in groups of from three to ten. They traveled by jeep, mule, native pony, oxcart, sampan or on foot, were almost always supplied by air. Some of them headed west of Chungking toward Tibet, and into mountain country which no white man had ever explored. Others battled leech-ridden jungles and flooded rivers; one group swam a swollen stream to find the bodies of a B-29 crew, swam back, pushing their grisly burden on a raft.

Everywhere the search crews had to go through a slow and painstaking quest for information. Early offers of rewards backfired badly. Bandits dug up bodies, reburied them until sure of being paid, and sometimes claimed reward money for remains which were not those of U.S. soldiers. Most graves were found through the patient questioning of local natives. One body was traced through the discovery of a short-snorter bill, another after quizzing a woman who wore an identification disk as an ornament, several through coolies who were found wearing shirts of parachute nylon.

More than a few A.G.R.S. men fell into situations which savored of Terry and the Pirates. Communist detachments held some of them prisoner, in the belief that they were spies for Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces. One A.G.R.S. team crossed into Indo-China and found a blonde French woman leading a band of Vietnamese guerrillas. A C-47 crew, which crashed in the Himalayan hills, walked back 350 miles through bandit country. For fear of dysentery they lived entirely on boiled eggs until natives talked them into a meal of fried bees (which tasted like a cross between meat and nuts).

By last week the A.G.R.S. detachment in China had recovered the remains of about 2,800 U.S. military dead. But their work, like that of other A.G.R.S. groups who are searching for 17,126 bodies in former theaters of war around the world, was far from done. There were still 876 unrecovered bodies in China, and most were in distant and dangerous country.

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