Where They Lay

Description

The US government has an unspoken pledge with every man and woman it sends into battle: you may be wounded doing your duty, you may even be killed, but you won't be left behind...On 20 March 1971, during the largest helicopter battle in history, an American chopper on a suicide rescue mission exploded in the skies over Laos. Its scorched remains fell onto terrain about which allied forces knew little except that it was hostile - jungle so dense with North Vietnamese that going after the dead crewmen was out of the question. And so two highly decorated pilots, and a pair of gunners who had each earned the Silver Star for heroism earlier that day, were left where they lay. They are among the 2,583 US servicemen whose bodies remained unrecovered at war's end. Now, 30 years later, a team of soldiers and scientists is venturing back into that battlefield. Their job to dig among the thousands of unexploded bombs that litter the landscape, in ground slick from monsoon rains, in jungle infested with leeches, foot-long centipedes and poisonous snakes, to find those four crew and to bring them home. Its mission is one of dozens conducted every year, in Asia, Europe and the scattered islands of the Pacific - to locate and bury America's war dead, to put a name - the right name - on each headstone. WHERE THEY LAY is the enthralling story of this recovery team and its elusive employer: the U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory - the world's largest forensic science lab. Part history, part travelogue, part scientific adventure, it chronicles the sad, often frustrating, years-long effort to find the remains of those heroes, culminating in an expedition into a land that even today is virtually invisible to the world at large. Recounting a previously untold and unknown story, it will become a classic of modern warfare and its aftermath.

Earl Swift is an award-winning American journalist. Nominated three times for a Pulitzer Prize, his work has appeared in many US papers and magazines. A Fulbright fellow in New Zealand in 1994-5, he now lives in Richmond, Virginia.

'A poignant tale of one war and four lost lives. And the story of all who never came back' * JAMES BRADLEY, author of Flags of Our Fathers *