Earl Swift: Where they lay

In March 1971, a 1-H Huey troop-carrying helicopter was destroyed in combat over Laos, as the United States pushed on with its misguided attempt to cut North Vietnamese supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The burning machine and its crew of four crashed to the ground in terrain controlled by enemy forces and inhabited by venomous snakes, rippling centipedes, belligerent scorpions and bloated leeches.

Was it forgotten? Absolutely not. Like the other 2500-plus US military personnel whose bodies were left behind when America pulled out of Vietnam, the Huey's crew became the responsibility of the US Army's Central Identification Unit. Three decades after their deaths, the Army came back to find them.

Recovery Element 1, comprising military personnel, linguists, anthropologists and medics, travelled to the crumpled jungle highlands along the Laos-Vietnam border to find the remnants of Case 1731 — four humans and one machine.

With them came Virginia journalist Swift, and in this florid, fascinating forensic narrative, he follows their search.

It was conducted like an archaeological dig — 15sq m of cratered ground, mostly oozing mud, divided into squares and sieved through wire screens.

Swift describes days of exhausting, monotonous work with no guarantee of a happy ending. The nasty native fauna were still there, along with all sorts of disintegrating bombs, mines and grenades. The rain fell in grey walls.

Interspersed with the progress of the dig are accounts of the chopper's last moments. We are told about the crew: the blue-collar Baptist from Georgia; the one who eloped with a 15-year-old; the teenage Southerner, already a veteran; the wayward, dyslexic, Californian car-whizz. We hear about other forensic missions, finding World War II remains in New Guinea, Italy, Albania.

In conditions where humidity, termites and soil acidity mean the rapid destruction of anything organic, Laotian workers slosh and dig for US$2 ($2.76) a week. By their standards, it's riches. Nothing is tossed aside: a filled molar may identify a victim; a .30 calibre round may pinpoint an aircraft.

The searchers' personalities and proficiencies emerge. So does Swift's style, a form of lower-case Hemingway which doesn't take long to grate. There are posturing paragraphs; over-wrought cadences; mangled metaphors.

The book won't win friends in far places. Laotians are "sullen ... all hagglers". The country itself is a "xenophobic throwback". But behind the over-writing and under-thinking, a full-frontal evocation of the Vietnam War and its closures forms.

Since the mid-1980s, Washington has gone to remarkable lengths to bring home all those who died in what Laotians call The American War. Swift suggests this may be a belated apology for a tragically botched involvement. It will probably all have to be repeated in Iraq.

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.

* Bantam, $27.95