That was my first battle experience and, needless to say, I still carry the memory after all these 65 years. You never really lose the memory of the sounds, the smell and everything, including the blood running down your nose so you’re smelling blood instead of breathing.

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JW: How long did you remain there ferrying troops or wounded?

LC: Well, I made several trips back with the wounded. Then, on one of my trips, about the third day, the beach master – that’s the guy who is the principal organizer of the landings and the deployment of boats and troops and then later supplies and then carrying back the wounded to the ship – corralled me. I can’t remember why or what he wanted me to do on the beach. I think the battle was still going on, pretty much moderated by then. I can’t remember why I was there or what the hell I was doing except that it was for about a week or so. I wandered around, the smell of rotting bodies was permeating the air. That’s a smell that stays with you all your life. I carried some of the wounded from one place to another and worked on burial details, but I can’t remember much more that that.

JW: Okay, and then you moved on to, obviously, other operations in the Pacific.

LC: Yes.

JW: Did you make a conscious decision to go back to Tarawa at some point after the war? What led you to wonder what the condition of the battlefield was today and get the whole idea going about this operation that you’re now pursuing?

LC: I was doing research for one of my books, The War in the Pacific, and I happened upon an AP report that I still remember verbatim. It said, “Where hundreds of Marines died there are now millions of plastic bags, crumpled paper boxes and so forth.” Beside the AP dispatch was a photograph of a kid sitting on a garbage pile, a young Tarawan native, and I looked closely at the picture and recognized Red Beach, where I had been as a young man many years before. Garbage lay everywhere on what to me was hallowed ground, where I saw so many of my countrymen killed or wounded by Japanese.

So I set about writing emails and letters, sending faxes to the usual suspects in Washington, everybody I could think of, over 100 easily, and I got no response. I remember one email saying “Thank you, Mr. Cooper for your interest in this matter." (Laugh.) Finally, I decided I’m not going to get anything done by firing off missiles to Washington, so I took a camera crew with me a year ago this past February to film this outrage, this garbage all over Red Beach. But things I learned when I got there were far more disturbing.

I had credible evidence that the remains of Americans still lay in various parts of the island, not in organized gravesites. I still don’t know for sure, but I think one of them is Lt. Bonnyman (First Lieutenant Alexander Bonnyman, Jr.), a Medal of Honor winner. If true, that is surely the most disgraceful thing that could possibly have happened.

I met a number of people who assured me that, yes, they had uncovered remains of American Marines. I saw evidence of these discoveries; one in particular comes to mind. To get further information about the remains of dead Americans, I met with the president of Kiribati, the country that used to be called the Gilbert Islands, and he said, “Mr. Cooper, you ought to meet the biggest man in Tarawa.”

A day or so later, I had lunch with a guy about six-foot-eight, a transplanted Australian who goes by the name of “Big Louie.” He’s an Australian contractor working for the country of Kiribati, and he said one of his laborers was digging a trench for a septic tank on the island and uncovered the remains of a Marine, with a wristwatch, dog tags, and remains of his uniform. After 60-plus years, the metal of the helmet was gone, but the fiberglass liner remained and Big Louie showed me a photograph of it. The fiberglass liner said Somes, S-O-M-E-S, P-V-T-U-S-M-C.

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