J. Margos - Shattered Image

More interviews with locals and more research had pointed them to this new site. Here they had found fragments of bones, pieces of the airplane-some parts of it had been cannibalized by the locals for use in homemade farming equipment-and they also found other personal items that had definitely belonged to a U.S. serviceman. They sifted the soil in that location for months and collected everything they could find. Now they just needed a way to prove that what they had found were the remains of Captain Theodore P. Nikolaides.

As Irini had said, few teeth were recovered and the ones they found were only Ted’s good teeth and not the ones they needed to make a positive match to his dental work. The nuclear DNA had deteriorated, but that was expected. The mitochondrial DNA was totally usable, but there was no one with whom they could compare it. They had used that DNA, however, to match the bone pieces and the skull-that was a match. Knowing that all those parts belonged to the same person meant that once the ID had been made through my facial reconstruction, all the matching pieces could be said to belong to someone-he would have a face, a name, a history and a family and friends.

If these were Ted’s remains, he would get a posthumous Purple Heart and qualify for burial in Arlington National Cemetery. His family would have closure and his fellow American citizens would lay him to rest with full military honors. It seemed a cheap price for the life of such a man and it was long overdue, but it was more than a man like Ted Nikolaides would have ever expected or asked for his service. But then, that is the hero’s way and my friend Ted had been a hero long before he ever gave his life for his country.

Sergeant Major Tomlinson and I agreed that I would arrive in Honolulu at Hickham Air Force Base next week to begin my work. I would make my own travel arrangements.

It was three in the morning. I sat on the patio behind my house, barefoot, wearing my jeans and a pullover sweatshirt, with a mug of root beer in my hand. I was slumped down in an Adirondack chair gazing up at the stars and the elliptical track above me. I had picked out a couple of planets, but couldn’t remember which one was Mars and which one Venus. My brain was otherwise occupied and all other data had slipped off-line.

Teddy Nikolaides had great teeth and a brilliant smile to show them off. His smile was broad, engaging and completely sincere-consequently, it was absolutely mesmerizing. It was painful at this point to remember the joy of that smile.

The last day I saw Ted was supposed to be his last day in Vietnam, not his last day on this side of life. The weather had been incredible that day. Ted had orders to go home. He was supposed to leave for Saigon and then go on to Hawaii, where he would change planes and continue back to the mainland-to Chicago. There he would be with his beautiful Irini and their two children, Eleni and Gregory. Eleni was four and Gregory was almost two.

From the moment he got up that day, Ted had been more energetic than usual. He had been jubilant. He had to fly one more mission and it was supposed to be a short one, and then he was leaving. Before he boarded the plane, he had come to say goodbye to Jack and me. He wasn’t sure there would be time when he got back before he headed off for Saigon. The three of us talked of Ted’s trip home, of how Jack and I would get together with Ted and Irini in the States, and of all the incredibly good times we knew the four of us would have together. Ted was talking of moving his family from Chicago to Texas. He and Irini had already discussed it. Irini and I had talked on the phone and began to write one another. She wanted to move, to live in a place that was more like her home country.

As the three of us finished our conversation, there was a moment where sorrow almost overcame us, but Ted wouldn’t allow it.

“No tears,” he had said. “There will be such good times for all of us, and it will be soon.”

We all hugged and laughed as Ted made jokes. He walked out to his plane and climbed on board, pulled on his helmet and raised his hand high in one final greeting, beaming his beautiful joyous smile.

I tilted the mug over my lip and let the carbonated beverage flow in a long swallow. It was my second glass. In spite of the hour, I was seriously considering a third. After the two reconstructs I had done for CILHI, I knew what to expect in terms of remains. The skulls I had worked on previously had been put together from pieces-lots of pieces. The one on which I would do the reconstruct this time was only in five pieces. The forensic anthropologist had put them back together already. Apparently, the only reason there were pieces of the skull to reconstruct was due to some fluke of protection that had been offered by the pilot’s helmet, and the nature of the crash.

All that was left were just pieces of bones, bones of those long dead-dry bones.

I laid my head back against the chair and whispered, “Dry bones…”

I thought about death and life, about dry bones and prophecies of resurrection and the words of the prophet Ezekiel flowed into my mind: “The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry…”

They were very dry-a symbol for those long dead.

The prophet continues, “Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live… and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army…behold they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts…Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves…and shall put my spirit in you and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land…”

Place you in your own land…

The dead lie on the jungle floor for thirty years or more and what’s left by the time they are discovered and brought home is a pretty disheartening sight. The recovery teams mark off the supposed “burial” sites like archaeological digs. They trowel slowly and carefully within the dig and “exhume” each and every little piece of anything that looks as if it might have belonged to a human or one’s body. They tag everything, bag everything and ultimately bring it back to American soil. They bring it all back to the U.S. Army CILHI labs at Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii. There, forensic anthropologists, forensic odontologists, DNA lab technicians and, sometimes, forensic artists come together to help identify the remains of the missing. We are all the new undertakers of the post-Vietnam era. You don’t need a real undertaker just to put “rocks” in a box. Sadly, that’s what most of the remains look like.

That was what was eating at me now-rocks in a box. Now they might be someone I knew. It’s one thing to put your hands on the skull and bones of a stranger and try to ID them and bring them some level of peace, and their families some level of closure, but it is something else altogether to contemplate placing your hands on a skull that may have housed the thinking brain of a friend-a skull that held his eyes, ears, mouth and the nose through which he breathed the breath of life itself.

Teddy Nikolaides used to tilt his head back and laugh out loud with absolute joy. Did the skull I would cast in Hawaii once reverberate with that laughter? The burden of determining that answer now lay solely with me. If I determined the remains belonged to someone else, it would be a huge blow to me and to Teddy’s family. If I determined the remains belonged to Teddy, we would all have to deal with the reality of his death. Since that fateful day in Vietnam, his death had not been confirmed in any tangible way. There had been no real closure. He just flew off one day and never came back. I sighed and polished off the rest of the root beer that was in the bottom of my mug. I had another frosted mug in the freezer and it was time for a third.