Team Estill From the Field

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A Rosette, A Movie: A Finale in Two Parts
Part one: The Rosette

The train from Bruges, Belgium with a quick change in Brussels, took us to Mastricht, Holland, on Friday, 25 May 2007. It was the start of the Memorial Day weekend at The American Cemetery in nearby Margraten. Two ceremonies were planned – one, the traditional Memorial Day honoring of American war dead; the other, a fulfillment of a promise made on a still-winter day in March 2001 when I saw my father’s name on the Wall of the Missing for the first time. Hans-Guenther Ploes and I were about to embark on our journey across three countries in search of my father’s long-missing crash site. A bit over six years later on a somewhat warmer spring day, and after countless subsequent journeys, Hans-Guenther and I were meeting again at my father’s name on the wall.

In 2001 I knew only that I wanted to find my father and to bring him home. It remained unclear how (but not IF) that would happen. I was on the cusp of shattering the long-held belief that he would never be found or his fate determined. As I stood by the Wall, witness to the engraved evidence of my father’s life and death, I noticed a curious thing. A tiny bronze flower was set into the wall to the left of a few names. I inquired about this occasional deviation from the pristine symmetry of the wall and the cemetery beyond to learn that the tiny flower, a rosette, meant the person named was no longer missing.

That tiny indicator became my mission talisman. I ran my hand over the sturdy deep letters of my father’s name, carved at the very bottom of the row, and traced each letter on borrowed typing paper - like a museum rubbing of a precious artifact. Hans-Guenther helped me hold the paper in place and, despite the elements, we made a perfect tracing of my father’s name. As we stepped back from the wall, I told him we would come back one day to put a rosette by my father’s name. He had only just met me and had miraculously been convinced to be my guide on this quest for illumination. He warned me that this was a mission of time, patience, and deduction and that if (I always thought “when”) the crash site was found, the excavation was another challenge altogether. Because I believe that you don’t have to see the whole staircase to climb the stairs, I calculated the probability of success and I knew that I had miraculously and circuitously found exactly the right person with whom to transit this unknown terrain.

Hans-Guenther’s cautionary tale about the difficulty of finding the crash site of a lone fighter pilot and his plane shot down at the end of the war, was no exaggeration. Indeed, it took time to unravel the twisted myths and facts of a decades old event. But on that day at the Wall, we took hopeful pictures of us standing by my father’s name, got into the rental car, and headed back into Germany to accomplish the improbable.

During the subsequent search, discovery, excavation, repatriation, and burial of my father in Arlington last October, I met countless people along the way. Among those who shine the brightest is Mike Yasenchak, the Superintendent of the American Cemetery at Margraten. Before the Elsnig excavation in August and September 2005, I emailed Mike to tell him we were expecting to bring my father home and when that happened, I would like to know what documentation was required to order a rosette. Mike followed the excavation via this blog and email, and looked forward to placing that rosette order as much as I did to seeing it next to my father’s name. Five years and nine months after countless miles traveled, obstacles overcome, magic acknowledged, discussions held, plans hatched, negotiations navigated, films produced, and friendships forged, that tiny bronze flower was finally ordered for Lt. Estill. It was 61 years 11 months from Friday, April 13, 1945.

By the time we arrived in Margraten this time, the upcoming ceremonies were planned and in rehearsal. Mike and I had weighed options and finalized details over the last year plus a few months. Ernst Eberle, of the original German search team and extraordinary friend, guide, and translator, would be driving from his home in the German Eifel Mountains to take us to the American Cemetery on Saturday afternoon. The formal military ceremony to place the rosette by my father’s name was scheduled to follow the dress rehearsal for Memorial Day celebration, attended by thousands of visitors. Hans-Günther, Wally Busch, and Traudl Thiel, my dear German friends and charter members of Team Estill, came from Aachen, and Elsnig, Germany.

It was an overcast rainy day with dim skies that were the antithesis of the brilliant austere clear day in Arlington seven months earlier. The occasion was auspicious and solemn in that ceremonious way I have learned to expect; the cemetery in full bloom and gorgeous even in the drizzle was energized by anticipation of Memorial Day.

Our smaller but no less significant ceremony had become a press event and I was scheduled to speak to the media - television, newspaper, and radio -about my missing pilot father. I agreed in advance that the press and any members of the public visiting the cemetery would be welcome to witness the ceremony. Also in attendance were the Honorable Mayor of Margraten and Mrs. H.J.G. Van Beers, and Ambassador and Mrs. Roland Arnall, the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands. Among several of my fellow war-orphan siblings and representative of the American World War II Orphans Network, was Gerry Conway Morenski, who traveled from Massachusetts, to honor her father, Cpl. David L. Conway, KIA 4/14/45 in Weissenfels, Germany and buried in this American Cemetery at Margraten.

Press interviews are always revelatory and those arranged that day were no exception. I am, even after all these years of similar interviews, amazed by the historical knowledge and deep awareness of the reporters who tell my father’s story. His story, told and retold in many languages, has become a microcosm of hope – a quest with a discovery; an ancient saga with a new ending; someone lost and found again; answers closing a questioning circle; dreams realized; honor paid in full.

The backdrop for the interviews were the 8302 cross-market graves of American WWII dead, plus 1722 names
on the Wall of the Missing, of whom 48 listed have been recovered and identified. Tiny U.S. and Holland flags had been placed at each grave. It occured to me that 62 years of history may separate us from WWII but Holland remains
grateful for our liberation efforts on their behalf.

Our little rosette ceremony for the 48th person recovered and identified, began at 4:00. In exquisite detail and exact sequence, Mike recounted the story of my father’s last flight and the subsequent search and recovery leading to that day’s events. Though I was nearly speechless, I managed to respond by telling the story of the promise made in 2001 to give my father a rosette. But mostly, I wanted to acknowledge that we wouldn’t be gathered on behalf of my father that day if it weren’t for the brilliance and persistence of Hans-Guenther Ploes, Air Historian, my excellent friend, and a man of patience, generosity, and mysterious deductions.

Hans-Guenther is not a man who seeks or welcomes attention though all of that changes if he’s discussing WWII aircraft parts. At my request, he came from the crowd to stand with me as the long-awaited and envisioned rosette was tapped into the wall next to my father’s name. We knew how far we’d traveled.

Then, in his glorious voice, Mike sang the Star Spangled Banner for my father but also for those who came to Margraten from all over the world to honor the American WW II war dead resting in this American Cemetery. My father was indeed honored, as was his grateful daughter. I realized how like at Arlington I was unable to express the depth of my gratitude for such exhaustive and exquisite planning on my father’s behalf. As if all of this wasn’t enough, at the end of the ceremony Mike presented me with another rosette which I will keep in the tri-cornered box that holds the flag from my father’s casket.

To look out into the crowd that day knowing that what remains, after all, are those who walk with you on such a quest. Each are my father’s gifts to me. “See,” he seems to say, “I am always here.” He surrounds me with people willing to take me into their lives and to watch after me when I forgot to breathe. This was perilously close to one of those days. There we were - gathered again on my father’s behalf – old and new members of Lt. Estill’s team.

When I imagined finding my father, I could not have envisioned the scope of what else I would discover. The day of our ceremony was also the German television premier of our Der Spiegel documentary. We planned to leave for Aachen with my German friends right after the ceremony to have dinner together, and then watch the film. We were all curious to see what Der Speigel made of our adventure.

Aachen, Germany is historic, fascinating, beautifully restored, artfully preserved, and full of good restaurants. Hans-Guenther wanted to return to the restaurant where we had dinner on the evening before we embarked on the search for my father. In the end, I don’t know if we found it but we were in the same neighborhood and it was Italian, our favorite during our travels. With the exception of a sub-basement-level Russian restaurant in Weimar, we knew how to find pasta and pizza throughout Germany.

We laughed as we remembered the people and events that defined our journey; we took silly and serious pictures; and, at Hans-Guenther’s insistence, had gelato for desert. The film was showing at 22:30 after which Ernst would take us back to Margraten, swearing that he liked driving enough to navigate mountain roads in the middle of the night. This generous declaration from a friend who always goes way beyond what is expected or deserved.

The film was, in a word, surreal, and also in German. To sit with the people who helped make this story a reality and to comment on our intermittent appearances on the very screen we were watching was something out of my ordinary. It was apparent that producer, Kay Siering had done an stunning job of showing and telling my father’s story and we pronounced it moving and powerful. It had been a long day, indescribably wide with emotion and action, but much remained in the days ahead. It’s always sad for me to say good-bye to Hans-Guenther but I do so with certainty that we will meet again for anther adventure.

Part two: The Movie

Hamburg is a full day’s train ride from Margraten via Liege and Koln. We arrived at the historic Fairmont vier Jahreszeiten Hotel, which was under heavy guard as the official hotel of the EU Counsel of Ministers meeting prior to the G8 Summit. I figured it was either the safest or the most dangerous hotel in Hamburg. Kay Siering came by the next morning to take us to the Der Spiegel offices for a private showing of the film. We walked from the hotel to his office in the rain which did little to mar the beauty of Hamburg along the way.

I was privileged to meet Hauke Ketelsen, editor of the film which is entitled, Love in Times of War: The Last Flight of Lt. Shannon Estill. Throughout the film, excerpts from my father’s letters are read along with reenactments of scenes pertinent to his life and death. The film will be translated into English sometime this summer.

Watching the film at Der Speigel minus the German narration and dialogue but with Kay Siering telling me the story in English, gave me a good idea of its impact. It goes far beyond what I could have imagined and is a visible link to my father unlike any other. With continued good fortune, it will be shown in the U.S. market and at film festivals worldwide.

Kay had arranged a celebratory dinner for the last evening in Hamburg with the incomparable Theo, our enthusiastic cameraman, who was involved with every scene and event along the way, and who always managed to put things into perfect historical context for me; and Christopher Gerisch. who competently and skillfully filled in for Kay while he awaited the birth of his second child. Over five years of filming, this group of creative souls became my friends, fellow-travelers, and collaborators in placing the pieces of the emotional puzzle I was solving.

So, is this the end of the story? Probably not and here’s why: I am working with artist, Jim Hartel, on a project for children based on my story of father-loss in war. The impact of the translated film released in the U.S. market sometime this year is anyone’s guess. There’s another larger writing project that will be adapted from this blog and contain the fine details that are the rest of this story. As always, and what has served me well, I remain active in the creation of my own present and future and in the belief my father’s sweet memory should be honored along with the memories of all those who died, as he did, in service to our country. I never forget that this story can be told only after paying the highest possible price for the rights to do so.

Thank you for joining me on this trek and check in once in a while because
I still don’t believe in “closure” in any traditional sense.

2006-11-14T23:54:00.000-07:00

My handsome Uncle Wes

(Photos by Dennis Kan)

2006-11-14T23:09:00.000-07:00

With Paul at Library of Congress

Emma and her Mannie, Jonathan Wes, Wes, & John Estill

Filming in Rock Creek Park & Emma
Justin & Jonathan

Andrea, S., Pat's Mom, & Pat/Delaney, Alexis, & Noah/ Raymond & Laura

Shannon, Kathi & Shayne Estill / Bud Holcheck/ Paul Hissey & Ben Schick

Jonathan, Neecy, Sharon & Pat
Nick and Laura
My father's cenataph/memorial marker and permanent gravesite with temporary marker
Der Spiegel crew: Kay, Theo, Bastian

2006-11-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

November 10, 2006. What follows is the story of an event that was never supposed to happen. Considering my geographically divided life and the range of people, surprises, ceremony, and magic I needed to include, it has taken me a month to get it from my head to your eyes. For those of you who were there, I hope I have done it justice. For those of you who were there in spirit, no matter what I write, it will be insignificant compared to what happened…………
On Tuesday, October 10, 2006 we celebrated my father’s life by honoring him with a full military funeral at Arlington National Cemetery and the Old Post Chapel at Ft. Meyer, Virginia. When I arrived in Washington before the start of my father’s WW II fighter group reunion and his funeral scheduled for the end of the reunion, it was amidst driving rain and dark skies. We were meeting the Der Spiegel TV crew, Kay and Theo, and sound engineer, Bastian, the next morning at the Library of Congress for the first filming of the weekend. We gathered under the portico at the downstairs entrance to the Library before it opened for the day to meet with our host, Sheryl Cannaday.
The Library of Congress is architecturally and historically majestic. In order to film in the main reading room, Der Spiegel gained advance permission along with a strict timeframe. We had an exactly an hour to make it look like I was doing historical research about my father’s squadron’s activity in WW II Belgium and Germany. This is years after I actually did that research but nonetheless, there I was at one of the reading stations, illuminated by soft reading lights and the brighter television camera lights and lenses – “reading” the 428th Squadron history. We shot for our allotted time and then the crew was permitted to film from one of the ornate balconies above the reading room, usually off-limits.
Rain precluded the possibility of any outside filming, so we drove to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland where we were met by our guide, Laura Diachenko. By prior arrangement, Der Spiegel was permitted to film me researching my father’s service records. We filmed first in the room where microfilm records are stored including the original Missing Air Crew Report (MACR), written after my father’s plane was shot down. I was supposed to be seeing it for the first time. Early in my search for my father, the MACR was one of the first documents I received so it was familiar to me, but it was as meaningful to me that day at the National Archives a decade later as it was years before. It is a pivotal document that contained the information that identified my father’s plane in the field in Elsnig. I didn’t know how important it was until I stood above the excavated imprint of my father’s crashed plane the day we found the first engine data plate.
Our work at The National Archives included reviewing movies taken in January of 1945 of my father’s squadron at the airfield in Euiskirchen, Germany - the airfield from which my father took his last flight. As the first reel wound onto the spool, silent black and white images filled the tiny screen. I was seeing living, breathing, walking, and working images of young pilots I now knew well as men in their eighties. On the screen, as a P-38 belly landed on the snow packed airstrip, a pilot crawled out of his crumpled plane. As they towed away the wreckage, it symbolized what I might have hoped was the case in my father’s crash. Of course, I have become a full realist when it comes to knowing the end of that story, but up until I participated in the excavation of my father’s crash site, it was an improbability I dared to consider.
There wasn’t time to watch the films, but in one brief frame, a pilot emerged from his plane and joined another pilot walking toward a waiting jeep. They were both wearing fur-lined leather flight jackets and they were walking against a brutal winter wind. The airstrip was covered with snow and the tents, where the pilots and crew lived, were visible. As some of my father’s friends tell me, their home prior the tents at Chateau Beauchein in Belgium, was at least a solid roof overhead. No heat or running water there either but some protection against the harsh last winter of the war. As I watched the two pilots cross the landing strip, either I wished it were so or there was something familiar about the tallest pilot. I could have been seeing my son, Justin. This familiar face was surprisingly serious but I knew it was possible that, for the first time ever, I was seeing my father in life. My father coming home from work, I thought. I don’t know if what I saw was what I wanted to see or if, indeed, I have seen my father in life and in death. The good news is that the film is always there in the National Archives when I want to be sure.
We filmed scenes of me driving to and walking into the main archives building and then we headed to Ft. Meyer and Arlington Cemetery to meet with Leah Rubalcaba, from the Ft. Meyer Public Relations office. Leah arranged for us to drive the route to my father’s gravesite that the funeral procession would take on Tuesday and to visit the actual gravesite. The rain was less persistent but it had turned colder and the grass, across which we walked among the endless white markers, was sodden. My father’s place there would put him amongst 250,000 brave souls, many of whom had died as he did, in battle while defending our freedom. I didn’t like the muddy track of road that ran along the end of that row but Leah assured me (as she would about a million other things), that it provided only temporary access to new gravesites and it would eventually be seamlessly connected to the surrounding landscape. This graves section was, in fact, becoming an historic site where a WW I solder had only recently been repatriated and buried.
After a final logistical planning session for Tuesday’s funeral in the Ft. Meyer Public Relations office with the Der Spiegel crew, and a visit to the Old Post Chapel where we would have the funeral, Leah drove us back to the hotel. It was impossible to walk through the hotel lobby (also the site of the 474th FG reunion) without seeing plenty of relatives, friends, or my father’s squadron mates. Among them was my former student, teaching and research assistant, and incomparable friend, Jonathan Mackey, who arrived early Saturday. I love and admire and am somewhat dependent upon Jonathan’s capability and humor when he accompanies me to speaking engagements and keeps me on track in class. We are a great team and I am certain after this weekend, that I can never possibly repay him for his kindness, truth, ability to see all sides of an issue, loyalty, and insight. Also, I learned that he had hidden talents that would not be revealed until Monday morning while filming at Rock Creek Park.
On Saturday afternoon, Der Spiegel conducted an interview with my father’s friend, Paul Meier who told a story I’d never heard about my father. Apparently seven pilots, including my father, arrived in Paris to await their squadron assignments. They learned they had been assigned to the 474th Fighter Group and the 428th Fighter Squadron in Belgium but that they had been reassigned as ferry pilots. Determined to fly the P-38, they decided to show up, with their original orders, at their squadron anyway. Paul Meier said none of them wanted to be ferry pilots but he also speculated that if my father had taken the ferrying job, he might be alive. In the end, nothing could stand between these pilots and their airplanes – even orders to the contrary. Paul said they figured that good ferry pilots were easier to find than great P-38 pilots.
Sunday morning arrived with the sun and it was time to do the outside establishing shots at the Library of Congress, postponed due to Friday’s rain. A major marathon nearly prevented us from getting there for shooting during the allotted and assigned time. In the end, I was mostly filmed walking up or down the steps a few hundred times. We drove from there to Reagan Airport where we found a road lined with old growth trees along a picturesque sailing lake, where I was filmed driving while being interviewed by Kay. Somehow, I managed to drive, answer questions about my father, and navigate through Old Alexandria traffic on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. All that remained was to await Tuesday and the funeral. By the time Der Spiegel dropped me back at the hotel, Laura, Nick, Emma, and Justin had arrived.
Filming in Rock Creek Park was scheduled for Monday. Paul, Laura, Justin, and Nick headed for the Holocaust Museum and I took Emma to the park. The endlessly talented Jonathan volunteered to accompany us as Emma’s temporary “manny.” Emma adored him from the start and he never flinched at her constant and perceptive questions. He observed that Emma is indeed, four going on 24.
By the time we returned from Rock Creek Park, it was afternoon and my college friend (circa 1964 and beyond), Moreen, had arrived from Manhattan, as had my other dear pal (circa 1970), Denise, from Chicago, and my mermaid sistah, Dr. Pat Weyer from Seattle, and her mother, Patricia Leigh from Connecticut. I am blessed with enviable girlfriendships.
By Monday night, Andrea was there along with my son, Raymond, daughter-in-law, Evelyn, and their spectacular kids, Delaney, Alexis, and Noah from Kansas City. Having all my kids in one place is my favorite thing in the world. Some of us attended the official reunion banquet that night where Congressman Ike Skelton spoke about the bravery and patriotism of the squadron members present in and absent from that room. We’ve lost many of them this year – two who were special to me: Bill Capron, in January, and Jack ‘Radar’ Zaverl, on my birthday in March. Incomparable men, incredible friends, and brave pilots to the end. They are primary players in the cast of people who joined with me in this quest to bring my father home. Jack was the first one from the squadron to call me after I tracked down my father’s crew chief, Henry Ham. Jack always called me “daughter.” The first time I met Bill Capron it was because he had arranged a private visit for us at the Champlain Air Museum in Mesa, Arizona where I was allowed to sit in a P-38. I have been blessed with precious and extraordinary friends among my “adopted dads” of the 474th Fighter Group.
The guest I most anticipated seeing was my Uncle Wes Estill, my father’s brother. In his sweet demeanor, I always see my grandparents and this time, my Nana’s hands. Son, Tom, who was about to start his lifelong dream job at NASA, was his father’s escort.

The day of my father’s funeral was sunny from the start. I didn’t sleep much that night so I watched the sun rise over the city and the new Air Force Memorial just outside my hotel window. I knew it was a magical day and that whatever happened would be exactly right. My friend Pat and I were, however, still awaiting the arrival of the tribute bowl she made and carved for me in Seattle. It had, in some quirk of Fed Ex fate, been erroneously routed to Jacksonville, Florida. Pat demanded and received a do-over and it arrived in time to be taken in the limo to the funeral. We unwound layers of bubble wrap and sifted through white peanuts within more boxes that held a glorious
22- pound glass bowl created and hand-etched with my father’s wings and a tiny P-38 chasing clouds. On the larger section below, Pat engraved an excerpt from one of my favorite letters written by my father on Easter Sunday, 1945, just weeks before his death. What a loving and magnificent friend and artist Pat is! From the first time she heard me speak of my father in our doctoral colloquium in early
2000, she completely understood why I needed to find him. We relate as our father’s daughters and women who have survived great father-loss.
The plan was to display Pat’s bowl at the post-funeral luncheon at the Ft. Meyer Officer’s Club. Inside the bowl would be a dozen smooth green river rocks engraved with the names of the people in my father’s family – his parents, his brother and sister, my family, and, of course, Pat. Unfortunately, the stones didn’t arrive on time but everyone who attended the funeral had a chance to sign a card with their name if they wished to have stone for them placed in the tribute bowl.
Despite all my worrying in advance, everyone found their way to the Old Post Chapel at Ft. Meyer which is just outside one of the Arlington National Cemetery gates. At the foot of the chapel altar, was a small table upon which my cousin, Shannon, had placed the portrait of my father that always hung in our grandparents’ home. As a little girl, a teenager, and later as an adult and mother, I would stand in front of that photo and feel my father’s presence. It was my grandmother’s favorite and she never passed it without running her fingers over the glass in a gesture of complete love and grief. Now that same portrait hangs in Shannon and his wife, Kathi’s home. Their darling 7- year old daughter, Shayne, has been raised, as I was, under the watchful eyes of my father.
I wondered, as I looked at that familiar picture of my father, if I would have the courage to stand up before this gathering crowd to tell them how much I loved this smiling, devastatingly handsome young pilot who was my father, my mother’s only true love, and the lost crown prince of my grandparent’s family.
The weekend rain was replaced by a day resplendent and representative of my father’s brief, shining life. My immediate family gathered in the waiting room adjacent to the altar. Those who were there to remember my father with me, were seated in the chapel – his squadron mates, their family and friends, my oldest and dearest friends from around the country, my dear local girlfriends, Deb and Lizbeth, and the nearly-dozen Estills, including my father’s brother. Also there were the special people who had literally made this funeral possible. Among them, Leah Rubacabala, (I swear the woman has wings) who saved me from certain meltdown many times in this process; Paul Bethke, the former boss of JPAC and now the Army Casualty Office’s gain and the person who scored an amazing fly-by of two A-10 Thunderbolt II war planes; our dear musicians, Dan and Jerry who don’t normally attend the funerals they play music for at the receptions, but made an exception in this case; and Alan and Gloria Layne, the former AWON president and my ally in the war against unfounded beliefs and illogical rumors – who also lost her father in WW II.
Also present and very busy was the ever-efficient and amazing Der Spiegel crew – the three of them performing their intricate dance of camera work and timing while being in at least six places at once. They were truly a moveable feast and the very picture of German efficiency and elegance.
Dennis Kan, the extraordinary artist who photographed every second of the funeral provided incomparable photographs that captured each moment of the pageantry and precision of the day. Dennis’ generosity was one of the sweetest moments of my life. A sample of Dennis’ excellent work on my father’s behalf can be admired at: http://www.mbkshowcase.com/show/estill//. In all, he gave me nearly 300 photos.
At precisely 11:00 a.m., I was escorted to my seat by the same soldier who would later carry my father’s urn into the chapel. (F0ur-going-on-24 Emma asked who was getting married.) It was while walking with the soldier, that surrealism intersected with pure joy and sorrow. I realized the enormity of what had been accomplished with the support of the mortal and ethereal, and how this day, in reality, far exceeded my vision of it. I knew beyond a doubt that my father was truly present in that chapel.
We stood as my father’s urn was brought to the front of the chapel. Though I’d spent countless hours in the presence of that lovely wooden box, it had taken on a new energy in the hands of the soldier who held it. He placed it on the little table next to the portrait of my smiling father, and Chaplain Creamer took his place at the podium. The funeral, long awaited and planned, had begun. He welcomed everyone and then introduced Rev. Brad Collins, the chaplain of the 474th Fighter Group and one of my father’s squadron mates in Belgium and Germany.
Rev. Brad is the sparkling spiritual inspiration for the dwindling troops of the 474th and has attended every reunion I’ve attended and more before that. He has always inspired me with his carefully chosen words of inspiration at our banquets and ceremonies. His presence exemplifies the phrase, “man of God.” So, when asked, without hesitation, Rev. Brad graciously agreed to speak at my father’s funeral. Everyone present and in his worship community in California knows he is our national treasure. He spoke lovingly of Lt. Shannon Estill and of his place in the squadron and how the loss of one of them was the irreparable loss of family.
Because their correspondence illuminated my parents’ life together, I decided to write my father a letter and read it at his funeral. It wasn’t the first, nor will it be the last letter I’ve written him. I’ve found comfort and answers to hard questions in this practice for years and I wanted to tell him a few things on this day of days.
It was difficult only at first when I read the names of those who are already with him - his parents and grandparents, my mother, my sister, Chris Waters and our son-in-law, Brian Olson, among others. The next names I read were of those I love most dearly and to whom I owe the success and realization of the day. Thereafter I entered a zone of certainty that what I’d written was incidental to what I felt. I hoped my feelings would carry me through to the poem I included at the end. Kisses, written by Thomas Lynch is included here because it captures the essence of what I feel about my parents. It’s as if the poet wrote it with them in mind.

My father turns up in a dream
Sometimes on roller skates
Sometimes in wing-tip shoes

He’s smiling
Impeccably dressed

Himself again

I am delighted to see him

Maybe I was only dreaming is what I tell myself inside the dream

No, he assures me wordlessly
The facts are still the facts

He’s dead

He and my mother have been to the movies
She’s gone ahead of him to make the coffee

He lets me hold him
Hug him
Weep some
Awake repaired again

He says he’ll take my kisses home to her.

As I returned to my seat after reading my letter, I felt intense pride and unequivocal relief. At my request, Paul sang ‘Let There Be Peace on Earth,’ a song we chose for our wedding in 1977. As I heard it again, I had renewed admiration for and awareness of Paul's musical gifts and for his "voice of an angel.” He makes it sound effortless and elegant, the way people with innate gifts often do.
Justin followed his father to the altar to read Gillespie Magee’s poem, High Flight. My grandmother read it to me as a child, and I was later given a framed copy by Jack Zaverl. To hear it spoken by my son at the funeral of his grandfather, gave it even deeper meaning. I will always associate “touching the face of God” with my father and the pilots before and since who have “slipped the surly bonds of earth.”
At exactly 11:30, my father’s urn was taken from the chapel and into the brilliant day. A flag draped casket on a caisson with six black horses waited for him. The urn was placed in the casket and the final walk to the gravesite began. It was the last full mile of this long and loving journey for me and the last moments my father would spend suspended in time and place. I was, finally and proudly, walking him home.
I knew then as I know now that my father’s spirit may always be divided between the field Germany and Arlington Cemetery. But, this last walk behind his casket represented the integration of those two realities. It would never have been enough to leave him in Germany even though the people of that sweet village now know the name of the American pilot who rested in their field for nearly 62 years. My dear sister in father-loss, Traudl Theil, will always bring flowers to my father’s crash site for her father and mine. In the end, I knew that my father should be among his courageous comrades here at home, where his family could always find him.
My grandchildren walked with me in the funeral procession as did my kids, my husband, my friends from near and far, all my dear Estill cousins, and everyone else who was able and knew, as I did, that we walked with purpose and in honor of my father. In reflecting upon the scene, illuminated so perfectly in Dennis Kan’s photographs, I see my cousin, Wes, carrying the framed photograph of my father. It reminds me of the families of the disappeared walking to protest the unknown fate of their loved ones. I thought of how long my father was among the disappeared, and how far this day went toward making him visible to us!
A fly-by of the A-10 “Warthogs” was what a long held wish and dream. I envisioned military planes flying over the gravesite in tribute to my father, to his squadron, and to my father’s greatest love after my mother and his family – flying. As we arrived at the gravesite, flying above us, in perfect tribute to my father, were two magnificent U.S. war planes. I wondered who the pilots were and if I could ever tell them how much it meant to us to see them in all their splendid glory. My father could never have envisioned such a progress in flight.
We gathered at the gravesite where my father’s urn had been placed on a small draped table. Behind the table were white crosses far into the distance. All that remained was to watch the precise ritual of folding and presenting the flag. My Uncle Wes sat next to me holding my father’s photograph and my hand. Occasionally he leaned over and whispered that he loved me. I told him that I loved him too, and that my father was finally home. He and my Aunt Margie, who couldn’t travel from Boulder, knew my father in a way I never could and they are where his spirit resides for me in real time. To have my Uncle Wes next to me at that moment was the representation of everything I love about my family of birth. Many people expended tremendous effort to bring my uncle to be with us at Arlington that day and they did it with the certainty that his presence would add immeasurably to our sense of family. He is our patriarch. His presence was the expression of love by his seven children who, in the time-honored Estill tradition, take care of each other forever.
Rev. Brad read his final blessing which far exceeded my expectations. In fact, the entire day was more than everything I imagined and from a far higher order of existence. After the flag that had been on top of the casket was opened over my father’s urn and gravesite, it was folded by two lines of decorated soldiers, presented to me by Chaplain Creamer. It will be preserved in the flag case I received from Lt. Col. Roxanne Austin, the D.C. Casualty Assistance Officer. It reminds me of my father’s urn – smooth polished wood with the U.S. Army seal on the outside above a plaque with my father’s name. His medals and a replica of his silver wings are affixed to the inside lid.
I stayed at the gravesite until my father’s remains were in the ground. I was privileged to participate in taking him out of the ground in Germany and I intended to witness his long-awaited transition into American soil. I took a single rose from the massive bouquet at the gravesite and placed it in his American grave along with the urn. I sent him my love and my wish that he is with my mother and he finds spiritual peace in this sacred place. Only then could I leave him.
By the time I arrived at the luncheon reception at Ft. Meyer Officer’s Club, everyone was enjoying lunch, great music, and the bittersweet euphoria we all relish at the culmination of historical events. Dr. Pat Weyer’s Tribute Bowl was displayed at the entrance and I asked people to fill out a card if they wanted to have a stone engraved with their names, which would later be placed in the bowl. An unusual guest register, to be sure, but far more meaningful because of my dear mermaid sister’s gift. I am so proud to be her friend and to benefit from not only her artistic offerings but from her wisdom. Last year as I was heading to Hawaii for my father’s repatriation at Hickam Air Force Base, she gave me a Greek coin with the image of an ancient dolphin. She said it was a ‘psychopomp,’ and, if placed with the dead, it would ease their passage to the next world. My father’s urn contains the little dolphin psychopomp assuring his swift passage.
The reception, I hear, was great – for me it was mostly a blur. I showed the revised memorial video which is the second version of the video I made with James Horine in Kansas City more than a decade ago. As always, it moves people to tears, and my Uncle Wes who again sat next to me, identified each person in the old photographs we put on film. He saw his parents his little sister, himself as a young boy, and he and his brother careening wildly around a corner on one bike. He said my father was married to a “very sweet gal and we love her.” I didn’t watch the video as much I watched my Uncle Wes travel through time.
My work as a Der Spiegel diva wasn’t finished so when everyone else left Ft. Meyer, Kay, Theo, and Bastian, waited for me to return to my father’s gravesite for final filming. This would be the last of my involvement in more than 6o hours filmed over the past three years. I stood at my father’s grave alone. By putting the camera on a massive crane they brought from Germany and constructed on-site, they could pan over the cemetery in a final sweeping scene.
Pat, Paul, and Leah were there and, as if awakening from a complex but lovely dream, it was over. One final photo with the Der Spiegel team and we were off to visit my father’s cenotaph/memorial headstone one last time. It was still there – in the section reserved for the missing in action – two rows up from the memorial marker of my parents favorite 1940’s bandleader, Glen Miller. I placed a rose against my father’s cenotaph. Arlington destroys these markers after burial because those whom they represent are no longer missing. Arlington Cemetery always needs room for more who have not yet been, or never will be, found.
I’m sorry that I didn’t get to talk long enough or with any depth with the people who were there for my father. My dear pal, Paul Hissey, reminded me to “throttle back,” as all good pilots know. That didn’t happen until I stepped, once again, on the deck of my houseboat a week later. Actually, until I stood in front of my Marriage and Family class, I didn’t realize that I had just lived the full meaning of family. I also regret that I worried at all that this wouldn’t be as magnificent a celebration as it was. I should know by now that at some point, everything is out of my hands.
What remains are splendid memories which support my belief that much of life seems like an illusion anyway. Reporters like to ask if this is the end of my father-quest. I was told once never to say never and I wont’ say “never” now. What I will say is that I can’t imagine a life with my father actually present except that I believe he is present in a way no mortal father could ever be. That’s my reward, my grief, and my blessing. As for my mother, I would love to know what she thinks about all of this and if she has somehow been restored and healed wherever she is with my father. I believe they are together and have been, as they vowed, for all time.
The relief of completion is sweet. I continue to be blessed by the company of my family, good friends, new opportunity, I job I love, and the possibilities of each new day. I don’t doubt divine inspiration and the protection of my personal army of angels. I know these things and I know if my life ended suddenly, as my father’s did, I would have had it all!
What lies ahead is a trip to Germany and Margraaten, Holland where I will witness the placement of a rosette in front of my father’s name on the Wall of the Missing because he has been officially declared, “found.” This would not have happened without the work and intuition of Hans Guenther Ploes. It goes without saying that my life is richer for knowing him and my father is resting now in American soil because of him. I will forever hold each member of the Elsnig Team Estill (and all of JPAC) in my heart. Above all, I am grateful for the architects of this inspiration – my parents – who gave me wings and then taught me how to fly.

2006-04-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

April 7, 2006 - 1st Lt. Estill comes home

Top left: Staff Sgt. Williams

Top right: Art and the urn

Bottom left: Major Heigard, Justin, Sharon, SSG Williams

Bottom right: Thomas Humphrey

2006-04-16T08:04:00.000-07:00

Friday, 07 April, 2006: Celebrate him home!

For the first time – ever – my father is home with me. I stood in line with patience, persistence, tireless investigation, suspension of disbelief, and the passage of 60 years plus 358 days to write those words.
When the repatriation ceremony was held at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii last October, only the definitive DNA analysis remained unreported. Those of us involved in the discovery of the crash site in Elsnig, knew from the first moments of finding the aileron stabilizer in 2003 that my father was the pilot of the plane we knew rested in that German field.
In deference to the system that assures serious attention to claims such as the one we were about to make, JPAC (Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command) was immediately notified of our discovery. To JPAC’s credit, though it seemed a two year exercise in extreme patience, my father’s plane and what remained of my father, were returned to Hawaii last fall.
At last writing, I reported receiving the official ID Packet which officially determined in precise detail, my father’s identity. This is a copious report with color photographs, charts, graphs, measurements, descriptions, and baffling DNA analysis but does not include a single a photograph of my father in life. A curious oversight but perhaps a bit unscientific?
What we “knew” when we found the crash site years before was based then on hopeful evidence – numbered plane parts, eyewitnesses accounts of a crash that coincided with what was reported at the time, a growing collection of plane parts, an obvious connection between hope and of the coveted facts of discovery. “Mom, you know what you know when you know what you know.” (Justin Rocca wisdom, age 11)
In the realm of fanciful thinking, it was possible that my father’s plane crashed without him in it or perhaps he escaped the crash with miraculous movie matinee flair. What we chose to believe instead was that if he died with his plane, we had found him.
As I worked at the excavation site two years later, I watched the ACS buckets fill each day. I especially watched the buckets where we put materials that were possibly osseous material – human remains. Each day brought another discovery – some astonishing, others mundane but all precious and certain as they led us to the recovery of 1Lt. Shannon Eugene Estill.
I am often asked how I “did that” – I presume “that” means working in the dirt where my father died. The short answer is that I “did that” because it was my legacy and responsibility and because it wasn’t worse than living a life wondering what happened at 1:40 pm on Friday, April 13, 1945. It was a bit like the old band-aid theory my mother used on me countless times – “it’ll hurt less if I just pull it off really fast.” (Sure, Mom) I held only the slimmest romantic notion that my father had somehow eluded his certain fate. I’d spent too much time and energy with aircraft recovery experts by that time to believe he had been rescued or now lived in anonymity with soap-opera amnesia somewhere in Tuscany. That was my favorite fantasy but one easily relinquished after visiting a few unrelated crash sites where it became evident that we were searching for evidence of a catastrophic plane disaster. My father’s escape, no matter how I wanted it to be true, was the folly of my romantic wish. Who can truly blame the daughter of a classic romantic for being romantic?
My mother, of ripped rather than gradual band-aid fame, always told me with absolute conviction that if my father was alive somewhere in the world that he would find a way to come back to us. She even debunked the odd periodic rumor that he had been captured as a spy. Even then, she said, he would have found a way to tell her he was alive. I had no choice but to believe her thus fueling this passionate mission to find out what actually happened to my father, no matter how grim the details.
In the end, those exact details, though enlightening but sobering, were about what we expected in my mother Mary’s Heartbreaking School of Reality.' What remained of my father was a small collection of osseous material – modest and somber – a life ended tragically and in opposition to the sweet beautiful and vibrant way he lived his mortal life. All of this is now enclosed in a lovely wooden box, an urn they tell me but not in the way I envisioned an urn. This one has a brass plate on the front inscribed with the raised seal of the U.S. Army. The smaller plaque beneath reads:

Shannon Eugene Estill
June 26, 1922
April 13, 1945
1st Lieutenant U.S. Army Air Corps*

* Actually this line says U.S. Army, but I’ve respectfully reminded the U.S. Army that my father flew for the U.S. Army Air Corps.

For my father’s last official homecoming ceremony, I asked JPAC to appoint a member of the German excavation team as the courier for this mission. The first and most insistent person to volunteer was SSG Glendale Williams with whom I shared many hours sifting the soil of that Elsnig field and learning to appreciate rap music.
SSG Williams is exactly my father’s last age and carries with him, as my father did, the brilliant light of possible heroism, humor, military dignity, and high capability. He is a young man of generous soul and spirit with the bearing of a proud soldier with a truly incomparable magic smile. Also, he looks gorgeous in his uniform. When you meet for weeks in the dirt of a field in an uncharacteristic hot October in Germany, nobody wears medals or starched shirts. SSG Williams will forever be connected in my mind and memory to this glorious homecoming. My father saluted him on that day, as did legions of fallen soldiers before him.
As luck and fortuitous timing had it, my friend, Thomas Humphrey was also with me that day. He was on his way to Los Angeles to complete two months of training as a Bikrahm Yoga instructor. He and I survived graduate school a mere 13 years ago and then together managed an adolescent addiction recovery unit in a Kansas City hospital. I realized recently that Thomas has been with me at every major family event since.
Justin took time from his primary weekend task of supporting his girlfriend Christina’s preparation for an Ironman competition the following Sunday to be there for me. (She finished victorious in 15 hours. Justin ran the last 10 miles with her. It’s apparent that he’s cut from the same adventurous and creative cloth as his grandfather and he excels in the fabulous boyfriend department, as did his grandfather before him.
Those who were with me from an immortal plane were crowded in the entryway watching the transfer of my father’s remains. Among them was my mother, of course, smiling and telling me she was proud of me; his parents, my Nana and Banka Estill, his ancestors, the others who died in the wars before and since who held the same certainty of purpose; and countless others who have missed him dearly for six decades. But, nearest and dearest to me on that day from the ethereal realm, was my sister, Chris Waters, who somehow arranged for my father to be returned to me on nearly the exact anniversary of her death a year ago. Thanks, Chrissy. You always knew how to get things done. Good one, my sistah.
Many things occurred to me the morning my father came home. One of them was the awareness gained while working with JPAC in the field and on the Army base in Geissen, Germany that U.S. military is impressive in many ways, but not the least of which in how they memorialize and create ceremony. Where the repatriation in Hawaii was powerful with symbolism and meaning, it was a public occasion. Having my father’s remains brought to me by a member of the team who helped find him, having one of my dearest friends and youngest son standing with me, and to receive my father into my home, was intimate, bittersweet, and a vision in military excellence.
Earlier that morning I decided that I would keep the urn until it is time to deliver it to Arlington National Cemetery, on the top shelf of my desk credenza. It is the place where I’ve always kept my father’s original art; two of Justin’s drawings: one of his pilot-grandfather with a little red monkey smoking a cigarette on his shoulder, and a pen and ink drawing of a P-38 suspended by marionette strings; and a precious recent addition, the painting of me with my father done by my friend of 35-years, artist, Jim Hartel. My father’s urn is surrounded by the art of three generations of important artists. This is a fitting placement about which I hadn’t decided or determined until my father’s arrival home was imminent.
Trained well and over time in the ways of Der Spiegel TV, I hired a film crew to be there, freeing me to simply manage the event from my heart rather than from my head. Cameras were rolling as Major Tony Heigard, a local Army Casualty officer, and SSG Williams marched to my front door with flawless military precision, with SSG Williams carrying the urn, Major Heigard, the folded flag. Such bearing and dignity engenders the grief of the world over time and defines but doesn’t contain the quiet insistent power of loss. Nothing manages loss better than, and less than, the passage of time.
SSG Williams presented me with the urn and a statement of respect and acknowledgement for my father’s ultimate sacrifice for his country. I received the flag from Major Hiegard. I handed Justin his grandfather’s urn so that I could hold my father’s flag and feel the energy that I knew it held along with the price paid for both. Then, we did it all over again for the film crew from every possible combination of angles and nuance of light. It will always be the first best and unfilmed take that remains true – receiving the remains of my father that I sought and fought to hold from the hands of a friend.
My father rests in a new place today. His uncertain fate is known, the German earth has reclaimed what couldn’t be salvaged. A part of him, as Dr. Fox said at the last hour of the excavation, will always remain in Germany. What stays constant is the certainty that he deserved to be brought home if not as the smiling victorious pilot at the end of the war in 1945, as the hero he always was to me.
On October 10, 2006 at 11:00 am, my father will receive his final tribute in a full military funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. The funeral will coincide with his squadron’s reunion weekend in Washington, DC. We will host a luncheon reception at Ft. Meyer’s Officer’s Club adjacent to ANC that afternoon. The benefit of being connected to my father’s squadron is that there are many high-ranking retired Air Force officers among them. Among them is Lloyd Wenzel who made it possible for us to entertain in this manner after the funeral. In the ranks of adopted dads, Lloyd is one of the best and I love him dearly.
That’s the latest in my journey reported over these lingering months since the excavation in Germany last fall. As I write, Hans Guenther Ploes (still the god of aircraft parts) is visiting the field in Elsnig to determine whether the crater located near the fence line of the field and discovered in an aerial surveillance photo taken the week after the crash, contains anything significant. As definitive as the ID packet may be and as certain as we are that my father is headed to his final resting place, there will always be an footnote of lingering wonder attached where so much remains unknown. This is where acceptance steps up to take her place among the feelings called upon to bridge the final gap between speculation and knowing.

My father has been returned to us. Celebrate him home!

2006-01-25T03:55:00.000-07:00

January, 2006
Updates, ID packets, choices, and revelations:

By popular demand – or should I say demanding readers, I can report that the saga of Team Estill continues. Early this month, I was visited by two Army Casualty officers who delivered my father’s official identification packet.

The packet was a review of the entire process of discovery and recovery, comprehensively prepared by JPAC. I’ve often marveled at how huge stories and events laden with emotion and drama, eventually evolve into flat facts. My father’s identification packet is a stellar example of this evolution. Between two black covers and an ordinary spiral binding (the Army could use me as a creative presentation consultant), is the story I helped create and lived to tell. Though most of the information was familiar to me, some of it was revelatory. I hadn’t realized that we found a piece of his uniform, for instance, and that the maps I watched the archeologist draw in the field would become stunning computer versions of themselves.

My current task is determining a date for my father’s funeral in Arlington National Cemetery. In October, the squadrons gather there during for their next reunion. I want to have the funeral during that time so the guys my father flew with can have the option of attending. A reception/gathering/Irish wake will be held at Arlington the night before the funeral with the full military service scheduled for the next day. Dates are yet to be determined but I’ve requested a Friday night and Saturday morning in early October.

The actual service will include, with proper advance planning, a casket brought to the burial site on a caisson (remember JFK?), escorted by an Army band and an honor guard. We will have a Catholic funeral mass and possibly the thing I’d love most: a fly-by of military jets in the missing man formation.

My friend, former member of the U.S. Navy band, and now-famous jazz trumpet player, Tracey Hooker, has offered to come from Olympia to play taps as he does every summer night at our marina. This is the stuff I love. Especially, when I’m told not to expect to have it all. The only thing I left off the list is the fly-over of a lone P-38 Lightning. THAT would be having it all! There are many small details, decisions, and organizational choices to be made. I could leave it all to the Army Casualty office, but this is understandably difficult to relinquish even into expert hands. In the end, this is simple compared to what it took to get here. The sound you will hear at Arlington in October is that of the circle closing.

Along the way, I always hoped, and on some level knew, this day of planning would arrive. In fact, I counted on it without knowing what would be expected of me or what would be provided. As it turns out, everything is provided by the government, and my remaining task on behalf of my father is to choose dates, invite guests, design programs, and determine the mode of burial. I think I’ve written about my vision of collecting my father from the field in Germany and bringing him home. When the vision becomes reality it involves the practicality of caskets and urns – bronze or wood, caisson or hearse. Now or later?

I realized when I returned from Germany, according to protocol, without my father’s remains that I wanted him here with me before his final burial in Arlington. Therein lies the symbolic sense of completion and restoration – for him and for me. There’s also a proprietary feeling associated with this accomplishment. I am, in essence, claiming my father and assuming my role as his daughter by expressing these wishes and having them granted. I learned that daughters attend to these things when I made similar arrangements in 1991 for my adopted dad. I had the same daughterly inclinations and protective feelings. This is the stuff of eventual flat facts that define my experience of father-loss.

In the months since my return from Germany, I’ve been writing an article (among other things) about the search for and recovery of my father’s crash site. Literary editor, John Parsley has created an appropriate and interesting on-line publication, The LOST Magazine: Where Loss is Found. LOST can also be found at http://www.lostmag.com/ and I am excited to report that my article will appear in the March issue.

Work continues on the Der Spiegel documentary. The crew who filmed my father’s repatriation ceremony in Hawaii in October was so moved by the experience that the length of the film has been increased and actors will be used in re-creation scenes. We will meet again at Arlington Cemetery in October. Release of the film to the German and U.S. markets is scheduled for after the funeral and final edits. All preliminary reports from the Der Spiegel group indicate that they are very pleased and enthusiastic about what they have filmed so far.

What remains for me to decide is whether I will return to Hawaii and escort my father’s remains home or if he will return with a military escort. If I escort his remains, we are limited to a wooden urn because of airport security and concerns about civilians with impenetrable metal containers. If a military escort is involved, a metal container isn’t a problem. I’ve decided that a military escort makes sense but that I’d like him or her to be a member of the excavation team from Germany. Hopefully, one of them is just hanging around Hawaii with a few spare days to bring my father to me. Put that possibility squarely in the symbolism column.

Life continues post-Germany and is directed toward writing the end of this father-story chapter but not the end of the story. As long as someone wants to hear it, read it, or paint it, it remains a viable part of me. I hear the word closure these days as in presuming I will soon have it. Usually I am polite and agree that closure is eminent. The truth is my educated and instinctive guess is that closure is elusive and probably non-existent. New stories, like connected memories, are already appearing. I learned, for instance, that I may be able to buy the house where my father and his siblings were born and raised – the house my great grandparents built in 1910 - my Nana’s house. It would, if nothing else, be preserved and would provide a comforting place for Estill family visits. All 12 cousins and their innumerable cousin-kids could make new memories in that sweet old house.

In my experience, closure gives way to new interconnected versions of the same theme. As for this daughter’s story, my father’s return to me and then to Arlington, will write the final chapter of his life. Nothing could be written without knowing what happened in Germany in 1945. The rest is symbolism and ceremony. My father deserves those things and more and so do I.

As things progress, I will post them here.

2005-10-26T12:33:00.000-07:00

Heather & Chris Johnie Webb & Brig. General Flowers

2005-10-26T12:06:00.000-07:00

Jp
JPAC photos 10/20 & 21, 2005

2005-10-26T11:28:00.000-07:00

A marching general, an honor guard, and a transport plane for a hero’s return – October 20 & 21, 2005: Just when I think I’ve done all the work a daughter can do on behalf of her father, (consider the field in Elsnig and what it took to get me there), the next astonishing thing happens. A few weeks ago, I unexpectedly learned that JPAC/CILHI (Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and Central Identification Lab Hawaii) was repatriating the remains of European WW II missing retrieved this summer. Just as suddenly, I planned a trip to Hawaii that I didn't exepct to take until sometime next year.

When my father’s plane was shot down by German anti-aircraft fire five months after he arrived in Europe, our family was told that we would never know what happened on that day, much less expect to have him returned to us. This summer in Elsnig, I gathered fewer actual remains as precious pieces of information about my father’s last flight. Last week in Hawaii at Hickam Air Force Base, I waited on the runway for my father to be placed reverently on American soil once again.

It was a beautiful Honolulu morning, not yet as humid as it would become but Hickam is stunning with history and pristine beauty regardless of the weather. I had received the fully escorted tour of JPAC the day before which included a visit to the famous Central Identification Lab. Among the people I met again who have been essential to the success of my search and recovery efforts, was my dear patient friend and lifeline to JPAC, Johnie Webb. For me, he is to JPAC what Hans-Guenther is to aircraft parts. After being welcomed by him with a big Texas hug, the first thing he told me that my father’s name would soon be added to the Homecoming Commemoration wall behind us. It was filled with tiny brass name plates of the 1300 formerly-missing that JPAC has identified and returned home. Each tiny plaque represented a life story and my father’s is now one of them.

I have always been fascinated by forensics and I suppose that is why I find the study of people so endlessly fascinating. We are not so different in death, I noticed as I observed the bones in the lab, only more quiet. There is definitely an energy emanating from them in their perfect state of protection under JPAC's watchful eye. 1100 active and inactive cases are catalogued and stored there, many of them, unsolvable. The table holding the familiar results of our work in the Elsnig field was the second from the front on the far right. The bones and small things we found appeared as a shimmering mirage through the glass. I saw them first in the sifted dirt in Elsnig. I knew them intimately,and I recognized them as my legacy and responsibility. The other tables were heavy with nearly whole skeletons. Bones are the honored guests here and attention to detail and security for these precious remains is an obvious and serious part of JPAC’s work.

The ever-present and devoted Der Spiegel crew, Christopher, Theo, and Phillip, had braved a 30-hour nightmare in flying and lost luggage to join me in Hawaii and were already filming and setting up interviews. I tried to string together cohesive answers to Christopher’s question. but the experience of being at JPAC, seeing the famous lab and being with my father’s remains again, was overriding any logic or continuity. I had been warned by the team in Elsnig that this place, representing the reclamation of the indescribable results of death in war, would be humbling. It was that and more. I’ve seen many of the world’s wonders, but the Central Identification Lab is the most wonderful. Tender exacting work is done there with highest respect and consideration. Their business is to name the long-dead and lost and connect them, if possible, to those who wait. Hope and joy coexists with death and loss. These are the seekers of the messages in the bones and identifiers of the artifacts of a life. Everyone should visit there at least once to examine their own mortality, if nothing else.

After visiting the lab, I saw my friend, Chris McDermott, JPAC historian, with whom I’d been corresponding for several years and finally met in Germany last summer. He is also a good friend of Hans-Guenther’s and is to history what Hans-Guenther is to aircraft parts. In the JPAC archives he introduced me to his wife, Heather Harris, who is the goddess of all saved things. (To describe them otherwise would be inadequate in light of the work they do and why) Heather told me that the archival boxes of files represented each case and would I like to see my father’s file?

His now-familiar Deceased File was in the beige box identified by his Missing Air Crew Report (MACR). As always, these collections of obscure information tend to include something new just when I think I’ve found it all. What was news to me this time was that my father wore a size 10 ½ shoe, had his appendix and three wisdom teeth removed, and was 5’11”. Those things are precious to know but I also saw the original typed correspondence written by my mother and my grandfather begging the government for information about my father. Each of their letters was attached to the same vague response: “We regret that no further information is available about your husband/son. and if/when we learn something new, you will be informed. No grave/body has been found and he is considered missing/killed in action.” My family couldn’t call that reassurance but it was how they finally accepted their loss. Reluctantly, they closed the door but not their hearts to the possibility that he would be found. Still wondering why I did this?

The Repatriation Ceremony was to begin at 9:00 the next morning, Friday, October 21. The Der Speigel crew drove us to Hickam so they could get a “how are you feeling today?” interview while I was a captive audience. I realized that I was at a loss to name what I was feeling except to offer up: happy, sad, proud, delighted, excited, anticipatory, joyous, near tears, in tears, hopeful, and all emotions connected to what some people like to call closure. (Tom Humphrey and I had a poster with drawings representing feelings on the wall in a hospital where we worked with teenagers - where was that damn poster when I needed it?) Mostly, I realized that my father’s bravery and my love for him brought us all to this place in time. I was grateful to whatever forces made this possible – genetic, angelic, magical, ethereal, or governmental.

We navigated the full parking lot near the runway where the ceremony would happen. Awaiting us in the first parking space, reserved for Dr. Sharon Estill Taylor (daughters have privilege), was a JPAC contingent including Johnie Webb and Major Nelson-Green, the PR officer. The airfield was full of uniformed people including two veterans groups representing Viet Nam and Korea, everyone who works at JPAC who weren’t in the field, and a couple hundred others. I was delighted and surprised to see Rodney Acasio and Shane Bellis, the only two from the Elsnig excavation team who weren’t away on the next mission. They had a major part in the reason we were there. They knew it and so did I. Another gift to me from JPAC.

An enormous C-130 transport plane was parked on the runway. Johnie Webb asked me if I wanted to go aboard to spend a few minutes with my father’s casket before the ceremony. As we walked up the metal ramps into the open bay, I saw a wash of red, silver, and blue. The red harnesses and seats attached to the walls of the plane exactly matched the stripes on the flags fitted around three silver transport cases, holding the remains of the repatriated. My father was in the middle. The scene before me defied description except as colors, stillness, and finality. The Der Spiegel crew remained at the back of the bay as I cautiously approached this long-awaited hard evidence that my mother and my father’s family never had.

As I touched the silver box holding my father’s remains, I felt only deep sadness at the injustice of his death. All the patriotic logic we’ve attached to why he died and for what cause, momentarily disappeared. Yet, I knew, despite my sadness, that my father’s flag draped presence represented all war losses and that it was what informed my life and shaped my destiny. I was reminded that those of us who experience losing a loved one in war share a fragile bond made of pride and certainty, despite our pain. It’s always nice to know something of your life’s purpose.

As we took our places under the VIP canopy for the ceremony, the transport plane was to our left, and a blue Medivac bus waiting to take the precious silver boxes back to the lab, was on the right. JPAC’s Commanding General and five other commanding officers marched into the space between, following the uniformed honor guard. We stood at attention three times while my father’s military brothers and sisters saluted each flag- draped life as it was carried from plane to bus. My job was to keep breathing and remain present in the moment.

The men who would bear my father’s remains entered the open bay for the second time and reappeared carrying the second silver box between them. Though all the flag draped cases were identical, this one was definitely mine. I stood with my hand on my heart and welcomed my father home.

The last one took its place in the bus and the doors were ceremoniously closed. A soldier stood at attention in front of the closed doors and very slowly raised his arm into a perfect salute. A long-awaited moment stopped time. Then I remembered to breathe.

Photographs of that morning fall short of the sense of honor present in the event. The same reverence and attention to detail is customary with JPAC and has been present in all of my dealings with them. When I met General Flowers (a fellow KU grad), I said that he could be very proud of the people who are JPAC. His reply was, “I am, and thank you for letting us help you bring your father home.”

When I brought JPAC this crash site a few years ago. I had no illusion that my discovery would supersede any of the other JPAC cases. But, what I received as I awaited my turn (sometimes not patiently) was copious information, support when I needed it, and the friendship of people who fully understood my mission because it was their mission, too.
This ceremony that JPAC gave my father in Hawaii last week was a dress rehearsal for Arlington in 2006. I should have my father’s remains returned to me by the end of the year.

I have always been a fortunate girl. The dad who stepped in to raise me used to say that I would fall into shit and come out smelling like a rose. There have been a few time when things weren’t always rosy but this wasn’t one of them. I believe that next to the wound is the lesson and opportunity. That’s all I did here – look beyond the obvious, disbelieve what I was told to accept as truth, and create the reality that I would bring my father home. Thanks for traveling with me this far. I’ll write as things get interesting and believe me when I say, they always do.

2005-09-22T09:13:00.000-07:00

1. Paul & Wes Estill at Sundance/2. Sharon with Raynor Roberts/ 3. Marilyn Hickock /
4. Gene Hickock & Roy Easterwood/ 5. Lloyd Wenzel & S.
6. Gene Hickock, S., Disney Logo, Gary Koch/7. Justin & DS crew/8. S & Howard Darnell

2005-09-21T05:07:00.000-07:00

The Adventure Continues - Reunions, Movies, & Hard Questions, Wednesday, September 20, 2005: I'm beginning to realize I'm not in Elsnig any more. My laundry has been washed in the machine (rather than nightly by hand..my mother would be proud and astonished at my domestic ability); papers are sorted and filed; my suitcases are back in storage (for a week); I don't awaken at night wondering where the bathroom is in this hotel room; my desk is clear; thank-you notes have been written; Team Estill hats distributed; my summer clothes have been swapped for winter in tribute to a low temperature of 98; I have made the rounds of my favorite restaurants; I am drinking iced tea again every day; my dog and cat expect me to feed them now that they remember my true purpose in their lives; and 20 pounds of Haribo Gummi Bears have been divided and distributed (but for the Happy Cherries which are mine).

Last weekend I attended the 17th Reunion of the 474th Fighter Group in Salt Lake City and had lunch at the table next to Robert Redford at Sundance (he didn't even ask me for an autograph or a photo - very polite guy in the presence of a German film star), and spent five days being filmed for a documentary (that's the film star part). Though I barely have time to contemplate the impact of all I saw, felt, and did in Germany, I have begun an excavation of another kind - the discovery of feelings and conclusions. It's hard not to get mired in the minutia of daily living and resort to "thinking about it" without writing about it. Toward that purpose I will continue, as events unfold and are relevant, to share them with you in this space.

THE REUNION in Salt Lake City was the perfect venue in which to tell the story of the Elsnig field and to connect with the people who knew my father then, and who were there when he left on his last mission. The connection I have with my adopted fathers of the 474th is precious and strong. For me, this reunion brought comfort, joy, and that undeniable sense of being loved, validated, and supported. If I ever doubted that this story must be told (and I still do for at least an hour every day), I was reminded as I spoke to the group on Friday night, that this story isn't just mine but is part of a collective history and is a tribute to everyone who knows the impact of war.

Salt Lake City is beautiful, the air crisp and clear, and the landscape astonishing. The Little America Hotel has the name that makes the enormity of the apartment-size rooms a surprise. Maybe I've spent too much time in European hotels, but this place is huge. There were a few less than 200 of us in attendance. Honorary Dad, Lloyd Wenzel, our secretary, speaker, and organizer-rainmaker, told us that the original reunions were attended by more than 600 people. When I found the group in the very early 1990's, I was greeted then by 150 of my "adopted" dads from the 428th squadron.

This reunion, like all the others, was sweet and inspiring. The stories are still poignant, their step is a bit slower, but they remember how it was then and probably how, to this day, to fly a P-38. Making a presentation to this group was a humbling experience. Despite the presence of lights and cameras, I was able to give them an overview of our work at Elsnig, to invite them to attend my father's memorial service at Arlington next year, and to see and touch the labeled parts from my father's plane. As they listened, I sensed my father's presence in the audience along with his squadron friends who are not longer with us. I was truly in the presence of angels.

I spent the majority of my 10-hour flight home from London preparing 42 Powerpoint slides and an introduction written as the story of my father's last flight based on what we learned in the field. I also read them Tom Wolf's poem, The Right Stuff. Though I hoped they would like the story, I had no idea to what extent I would be affected. They provided me the opportunity to speak for my father. This is a rare and precious gift.

The good news about having the Der Spiegel crew with us at the reunion is that they were able not only to conduct interviews with three of the men who flew with my father, one of whom was his squadron leader on April 13, 1945, but to document the reunion. What I learned about documentary film making over the past month, is that this Der Spiegel crew are exacting, professional, and energetic artists. Except that I had to "enter" the reunion at least three times after I'd already been there a few hours, and that they taped my entire presentation along with most of the hugs I received and bestowed, it was a curious but interesting experience.

On Saturday, several of us went to Sundance, home of the film festival and Robert Redford. I joked with the film crew that I would be away for the day at Redford's place and if I didn't return in time for the grand banquet that night, they would know why. Considering my father's sense of humor at work in my life, why would it surprise me to actually SEE Robert Redford around Sundance? Why would I think it unusual that he was having lunch at the next table and why was I so certain that one day I WOULD have lunch with Robert Redford and we would be talking about the book I had written that would be made into a Sundance film? Considering the events of the past months, everything feels possible.

We left on Sunday accompanied by the Der Speigel TV crew who spent the next two days with me at home filming my collection of my father's stuff, and the documentation of my search for and discovery of his crash site. They saw the copious evidence of a lifelong quest constructed from the same kind of dreams of lunch with Redford and bringing my father home.

When the crew came for dinner on Sunday evening, they wanted to interview my artist son, Justin, about a painting he did which represents his grandfather's last flight. He painted it for me when I completed my doctoral dissertation in February, 2o02. It's an incredible tryptic depiction in oil on canvas of his grandfather's last flight which he graciously shared with Der Spiegel. As I listened, I was reminded of Justin's deep connection to my father. They are similarly constructed of the same sweet material, build, and temperament. Justin has always brought a whisper of my father to my life.

Monday was a 12-hour day of lights and cameras. When I say that I have empathy for what film people, behind and in front of the camera, I do not exaggerate. What appears effortless in the finished product, is not only tedious but without patience, impossible. That's why they have trailers, make-up,wardrobe people, and difficult personalities. I knew my part of the story is important to the film but getting there was sometimes less than linear or comfortable and something as simple as walking six feet down my own hallway, can take an hour. (Especially when I feel like I have marionette strings attached to my arms and legs and that I'm walking in clown shoes.)

A long day of filming ended with a formal and highly lit interview in which reporter, Christopher Gerisch, asked me harder questions than I have ever asked myself concerning the impact of my father's absence in my life. I told him he would be a good therapist and was reminded of skill it takes to ask exactly the right thoughtful question to evoke the most meaningful response. I was grateful for the experience but exhausted from the sheer effort it took to consider my place in all of this while speaking in the most intimate way about my mother, my grandparents, my father who raised me, my children, how my father's presence in my life has or has not affected my relationships with men, my hopes and dreams, my need to find my father's crash site, how I feel about war, and about a hundred other things that I responded to with no memory of what I said. It felt like therapy with lights and no way out but through it. Nothing like being asked to conduct a little self-analysis for the German people to watch on Sunday night at the movies.

The finished documentary (with the memorial service at Arlington Cemetery to be added later), will be shown on German television five times at the end of January, 2006. Sometime thereafter, it will be sold for distribution in the U.S. market. Overall, it takes 1000 hours of film to arrive at the appropriate and perfect 5o show-time minutes. Hopefully, some of the 950 hours will include my abilty to walk and talk on cue.

Photos of the reunion are forthcoming. I wanted to get this posted before I leave for Olympia and my boat next week. Stars and Stripes called today for a preliminary interview which will be included in a story they are doing about JPAC. So, the interest continues and my work begins. Is there "closure" at the end of this? I doubt it. There will always be the memories, the experiences, and the fact that my father died in "the war." If closure exists, it will be in the feeling of satisfaction that I gain from telling the world about my father's sacrifice and knowing that his brief life has not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. For now.....

2005-09-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

Wall of the Missing Margraten
Wall from a distance
Symmetry
Rosette = Found
Inscriptions at memorial

Hans-Guenther & Ernst

Abby de Maredret
Formerly Louie's place
Ernst with helpful Belgian
At the gate to chateau
Chateau entry road
Florennes Airbase

The Eifel, Margraten, Falaen, Florennes, Aachen and beyond, September 4-10, 2005: In the week since I’ve been in West Germany, I have gathered new threads into the fabric of my father’s story. I knew when I planned this hopeful itinerary that I would want to collect the last missing impressions of my father’s life before his fateful flight in April, 1945. That included a visit to the American War Cemetery in Margraten, Holland, and a last attempt of three to find the elusive, now-demolished, Chateau le Beauchene. Enfolded in those plans, was my primary agenda which was to learn the procedure to have a bronze rosette placed next to my father’s name on the Wall of the Missing in the American Cemetery in Margraten. I remembered noticing the rosettes on my last trip with Hans-Guenther and feeling a twinge of envy and wonder for those whose knowing families. There is no cachet inherent in living without answers – the rosettes placed beside those names designate a solemn resolution of doubt. I wanted that resolution.
It was a very different visit this time to Margraten. First, I knew to purchase flowers in Aachen enroute to Holland. For my father’s place at the bottom of the Wall of the Missing in the section where all the names begin with the letter “E,” I chose two cream and peach roses with pink petal tips – from my mother and me. For my friend’s uncle’s grave, I chose a bouquet of unusual fragrance. I looked very purposeful with my bundles of blumen wrapped in yellow paper – a woman on a mission.
For me, war cemeteries evoke conflicting feelings. It is impossible not to be impressed with the sheer symmetry of the place. The geometric possibilities, to say nothing of the advanced planning, plotting, and planting necessary to achieve this result, are endless and astonishing. The Wall with the A-Z names of the unfound souls is, much like the Viet Nam Wall in its cause for humility in the shadow of these simple names and home states. Each inscription is individual but identical. The first time, I made a rubbing on paper as I’ve seen people do at the Viet Nam wall, and hoped to one day know what happened to my father. This time, as I placed the two roses beneath his name, I realized my father was no longer missing. It was there, in that orderly place – everything in a line and suspended in black marble, that I sensed the sacred passage of time and the accomplishment at Elsnig.
I ventured into the field of endless crosses to put the other bouquet at the site of a friend’s uncle. I stopped at the gravesites of the others from my father’s squadron and fighter group. Hans-Guenther kindly provided a list of each man from the group and found our way to the crosses. I recognized some of the names from my father’s letters. He flew and died with friends.
Amidst my conflicting feelings lay a paradox in that Margraten experience. Though a sense of extreme order and beauty exists in the place – everything is, by design, perfectly symmetrical – I recognized the contradiction. The evidence found in the dirt of the humble Elsnig field belied this sense of perfection and peace. It told, if you will, the back story to what I saw at Margraten. Elsnig was the reality, the event, the coming apart of a life with the concurrent ripple across time for all generations who follow. The field in Elsnig held the evidence of a catastrophic violent event wherein everything was destroyed beyond ordinary recognition. Everything was obliterated or reduced to its most common denominator – pieces, rubble, and melt. It was a shocking and horrific event, as all war deaths are, even the single sniper’s accurate shot in the middle of the day that finds its mark.
As I stood entranced by the variations of the patterns in the planned order of the Margraten Cemetery, flashes of Elsnig intruded. I saw it all as if I were watching a split screen: on one side the measured order of Margraten’s endless crosses and on the other the shattered intrusive reality of each person buried there. Perhaps because I had just come from the other side of the screen, I felt a twinge of anger at the injustice of it all. Why, I wondered, are we still going to war? Haven’t we learned that this is the inevitable outcome? Why is this still acceptable? I grieved more at that realization than any one before it. The names of the people who are buried there and those who are not, all became as important to me as my father’s name listed among them. As if I heard a collective sigh, I told them they were not forgotten. The sad truth of it is that I didn’t know (nor did my mother or my father’s parents or siblings) that my father’s name was even ON the wall at Margraten until I met the men of his squadron a little more than a decade ago. [My soapbox is officially re-folded and back in the corner]
All of this happened on September 5. On September 7, my thoughts were divided between two young men, close to the same age and of certain kindred spirit. One was celebrating his 28th birthday and walks on the cusp of his own success as an emerging and important artist. The other was killed in Iraq last year on this day as he stood by his jeep with the people he held in his care and command. Both of these brilliant and shining souls bring light and hope to our world. One just gets to do it on this level for a while longer and the other has moved ahead of us but is missed and loved by many people including me, who attended his memorial service and gained a precious friend in the process. Here’s to Justin and Tim on this auspicious day! A German beer is raised in your honor on September 7 now and forever!
From Margraten, we made another day-trip to Belgium in search of the chateau, the Abby and the airfield. Chateau le Beauchene was located just a few kilometers (within walking distance according to my father’s letters) from the village of Falaen. Falaen was the home of Louis’ Pub in which my father’s squadron (known locally as the “wild boys”) spent endless hours and Belgian francs. Haircuts were also available.
We arrived in Falaen and one of two men on the street knew exactly where the chateau was located, when it existed. He immediately led us there (a long walk by anyone’s standards so we drove) and escorted us into the woods asking us to imagine (in French, translation courtesy of the ever-talented & multi-lingual, Ernst) that the entry was just beyond this half of the gate still remaining and that the chateau sat just “here” to the left and overlooked a field that is just behind all those 60-year old trees. You get the picture. I walked down the road that was certainly the same road my father and his squadron mates walked a million times to come and go to Louie’s or to the Abby or just for a walk. Certainly, their transport trucks took them to their airfield from that same road. I felt the collision of recognition and familiarity as if my father was walking with me. I strongly sensed his presence again at the Abby later that day. We made our way from the chateau site deep in discussion about the validity of the accommodating Belgian man’s information. His directions were validated by an excellent detailed map prepared for me several years ago by one of my honorary fathers, Jack Zaverl, for just this occasion. His diagrams and descriptions are artful and exact.
Our next stop was the Abby de Maredret where my father attended Mass and befriended the nuns-in-residence throughout his stay at the chateau. He wrote often of his trips to the Abby and of buying my mother and his mother a St. Theresa medal, the patron of flyers, identical to his own. As odd luck would have it, we couldn’t actually enter the church, though I had visited it with HG on a prior visit. I did manage to find a St. Theresa medal, however, which now occupies the same chain as my tiny silver P-38.
Louie’s has been sold to a new owner who may or may not remember the Geyser Gang of the 428th Fighter Squadron. Though the façade of the place has changed, there is a small garage to the right of the entrance that reads, Garage Louis, in pale blue letters.
The surprise excursion of the day was at the suggestion of Hans-Guenther who had a Spitfire Museum in mind. We wound our way from the Abby to Florennes Airfield (known as, A78 in my father’s time) to see what remained of the airfield from which my father and his squadron flew their missions. It remains a viable air base today with F-16s constantly flying into and out of the very active field. We managed with the help again of Ernst’s French, to get onto the base as long as we only visited the Spitfire Museum. The surprise was within. The display cases surrounding an actual Spitfire, contained photographs and acknowledgement of the presence in the late 1940’s of the 474th USAAC Fighter Group. The Disney squadron insignia and the group insignia were all there along with photos (identified in French, of course) of anyone who had contributed to the display. I presented a photo of my father to the museum curator and asked that it be placed in the display. They offered to make an entire page about my father in the memory books they keep there. It was a good day made better by unexpected gifts.
I was enchanted by a brief, but relaxing, respite in the Eifel Mountains near Ernst and wife, Helga’s, meticulously restored (the hard way: brick by brick) farmhouse. From there, we made the trips to Holland and Belgium and from there that I traveled to Frankfurt, to London, and next week, home. My next trip is the 474th Reunion in Salt Lake City the weekend after I return home. Der Spiegel TV is coming to film the event and interview the guys who flew with my father. They also intend to film my presentation on Friday night which will hopefully be finished in pristine Power Point format by the time I touch down in Phoenix. One of my Estill cousins will meet me at the reunion and I have Team Estill hats to distribute that are sewn on the back with the inscription, Honorary Dad. This reunion is dedicated to the families of the squadron members. As always, when I attend these reunions, I am conscious of the gathering of angels just at the edges of the crowd – watching us thoughtfully and knowing all the answers to the things about which we can only wonder. This will be the first reunion without my most honorary dad, Bill Capron. I’ll save you a place at my table, Bill, and tell you the story myself.

I don’t know if I included this correction in the last post, but the correct address for Hans-Guenther’s website is: http://www.cablecutter.de/ The other one is the site for his aircraft parts collection.

2005-09-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

What lies beneath?
Rick & Greg presenting Frau Jansch with JPAC Appreciation
Capt. Emmons and Frau Jansch, field tenant farmer
Butterstrasse Road

Just a few photos that wouldn't attach to the last posting.

[The excellent photos of the finished crash crater, the tractors restoring the field, and awarding Frau Jansch the certificate, were taken Linda Miller, queen of all Air Force photographers]

2005-09-03T08:05:00.000-07:00

Restoring the field

Overview of engines, cockpit and wing impression
The field restored
Last time I stood there 01 Sept.
With Petra & Peggy,the gracious women of Hotel Central
The Internet Cafe
Heidelberg Monkey with mirror
200 steps above Heidelberg
Leaving Heidelberg

A last walk on the field of my father, 02 September 2005: Now that it's over, the field has been restored, and I am once again an ordinary tourist, I am ready to take the next steps. Hans-Guenther took me to the field one last time yesterday on our way to Liepzig-Halle Airport. I wasn't there when the the field tenant's sons came with the big green farm equipment and piled the dirt over the crater and into the remaining trenches. I tossed a handful of dirt into the crater when I last stood there on Monday. There are just so many things I can do to express my willingness to consider this finished and to walk away from this place of such meaning to my family. I will always look back and see that field in action with the screens, the trenches, and the JPAC team doing their excellent and incomparable work. Oh, and I'll hear the music, too. I now know more about rap music than I ever expected and I have grown to love Rascal Flats thanks to Craig Daniels!

As HG and I walked in the dirt and marveled at the lack of evidence of all that transpired there over the past weeks, I asked him to show me the place where it is believed that more parts may be buried. It looks as it always did - a few meters to the left of the bushes that grow along the fence. The question, "what lies beneath?" may forever be unanswered or maybe in the Spring, when HG is in the former East Germany for another dig, he will come by Butterstrasse Road and wave his deep penetrating metal detector over that unexplored place in the field.

In microcosm, I am like an inquisitive explorer who has tasted a bit of this curious and compelling kind of sucessful quest, and I am determined to find more. In order not to cause anxiety among my family and friends, the truth is, I will wonder a little about that unexplored place but I am charged now with doing something with what we have found and writing about all of this. By the time I am summoned to Hawaii to collect my father's remains, I will know what the procedure is at Arlington for his memorial service. I've already spoken with a few people about a missing man formation fly-by at the time of the service. This falls into the semi-difficult, but not impossible category.

I believe in setting my intentions and when I do it in a thoughtful and meaninful way, the most amazing things happen. There is always a little of being careful for what you wish for woven into that process, but I'll take the risk that whatever I get is exactly what I need.

A day trip to Heidelberg on the Underground and the train from Frankfurt Main, yielded some interesting photos, a few of which I have included here. I paid .50 to climb 200 steps to the top of the highest and most curving tower stairs in a Catholic church to gain a 360-degree view of the ancient city. At the entrance to the city through the gates at the Nekar River bridge is a sculpture of a bizarre looking monkey (with a baboon-like face) and a high imposing tail. He is holding a mirror which is supposed to represent the similarity of all people. "We are all monkeys in the same world," the woman in the art shop told me. Makes sense to me.

Navigating Europe is just a matter of asking questions and realizing that no matter how it turns out, it's ok. For instance, while feeling confused about which bus to take to Heidelburg Castle, I made friends with a nice Japanese couple. They approached me because they thought I might speak English but he is a linguist who has taught in several American universities including the University of Illinois. He noticed my Team Estill hat and wanted to hear the story. The world is small and surprising.

Another realization crossed my weary brain last night and that is that even though we won the war and Germany did not, their cultural integrity is still very much in tact and thriving. They did not become Americanized or like the Brits,though Russia had a deep and profound influence on the former East Germany, in ways that remain evident today. I know this because, in my experience, this isn't a country where everyone automatically speaks English. I like that and it keeps me conscious of where I am and of my status as visitor. I will forever be grateful for the gracious way we were all treated by the people of Elsnig and Torgau.

Next stop: The American Cemetery in Margraten (www.abmc.org) and a little search for the chateau site. If I have access to a high speed connection before I am in London on 11 September, I'll post some pictures of the cemetery and the Wall of the Missing. Til then....................

2005-09-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

(Team photographer: Linda Miller's collage)
Hans-Guenther cleaning the data plate
Another Linda photo of Torgau roofs
Last time at the crater
Rick the barbeque expert
Front of the button
Signed team flag
Parachute silk
Last conference with Dr. Fox
Boot eyelet
Old Elsnig train station
Herr Bohrmann, one of our favorite visitors

2005-09-01T06:58:00.000-07:00

Bomber mit dem Babyschuh, Thursday, 01 September 05 - This was the headline of the last article about the excavation written by Korrespondent Bischoff for Morgen Post. The Bomber with the Babyshoe. Even if a P-38 was less bomber than fighter, I was reminded of the baby shoe my father wore on his helmet while he was flying. Lost forever now but, for a moment, I wondered why, if a scrap of parchute silk survived, why not a baby shoe? I hoped for that but will be content (if that is the word in this case) to hold onto the notion of my father attaching my baby shoe to his helmet and flying into the clouds while considering his pending fatherhood.

There a couple of websites you might find interesting especially if you've been with me throughout this saga:

www.web-birds.com has photographs contributed by the members of my father's fighter group (474th) and his squadron (428th). Click on474th and navigate from there. Photos of the now-demolished chateau are posted there. I will make one last attempt (this will be the third) to find what remains of the land on which it was built and inhabited by a group of American flyers in 1944 & part of 1945. From my father's letters written at that time, I have a fairly clear picture of the landscape minus 60 years of vegetation and weather. A hill, woods, and a 6-holer........

www.JPAC.mil is JPAC's website which contains, among other things, information on excavations past, present, and future. Capt. Emmons tells me 10 worldwide missions are scheduled each year (not including Viet Nam and Korea and a few others I am forgetting at the moment) and the teams work year round except for December. The rotation of a JPAC team member is three years after which they must accept a new job outside of JPAC. From what everyone on this team says, this is a wonderful, rewarding, rigorous, and labor-intensive assignment. With that, I never heard a complaint or sensed any resistance from any team member despite the nearly constant back breaking labor. Dig it up, check it out, put the dirt back. They are my new heros.

www.staurohr.de is Hans-Guenther Ploes (God of Airplane Parts) website. Photos of the parts we found in 2003 are included along with photos and reports of the other crash sites he has discovered.

Tomorrow on our way to the Leipzig Airport enroute to Frankfurt, I will stop by the field one last time. The team tells me it looks as if it has never been disturbed. I intend to leave the cross there and perhaps have a metal plate attached so that whoever wonders about it will know that an American pilot died there. I was thinking about that cross and wondering how long it will withstand the elements. I know dear Frau Thiel takes care of it but time will affect its beauty. That's the point, I suppose. If it were forever new, who could measure the passage of time. It is where part of me will always remain here with my father. The rest of both of us is coming Home!

Some guy yelled at me this morning for taking pictures of the intricate wrought iron fences and gates around the grander Torgau residences. He said something that ended with, "verboten." I smiled my best American girl smile at him and considered myself officially scolded by a stranger. Won't be the first or the last time. The fence photos I continued to take are great, by the way.

On to Frankfurt and the last leg of this journey. When I planned this, I knew I would want to visit my father's name on the wall in Margraten, Holland. There is always one more thing to do, to see, to be sure of, and to experience. The next time I write here will be from the Frankfurt Arabella Sheraton in the heart of downtown Frankfurt. As I recover from culture shock, I will post the last of the excavation photos. Til then, I remain, your humble Korrespondent of the Babyschuh.

2005-08-31T07:32:00.000-07:00

Funny thing about endings, Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - Yesterday was the first day without a reason to go to the field. JPAC was there to deconstruct the screening equipment, to sweep and photograph the crash feature, and to arrange for it to be refilled with its own dirt minus the treasure we have claimed. I expected the day to contain a bittersweet center surrounded by an elusive sense of accomplishment wrapped in the absence of action. It was the latter I dreaded most.

As usual, Ernst took me to the field around 9 a.m. for one last look at the crater that contained so much, but in the end, offered only a small measure of its worth. As I stood there for the last time, I wanted to fly above it and see it as I knew it must look from above - just like a P-38. My father's fighter group uses such an image on their newsletter. It is indelible for me now in its symbolic and concrete message. If you knew it was a P-38 that had an unfortunate landing here, you could be shown the lines in the dirt below the surface of the working field. Simply amazing.

There I was, feeling at "sixes and sevens" and somewhat startled at this sudden-after-60-years ending of this quest, WHEN, Hans-Guenther, God of Airplane Parts, invited me to accompany him to Dresden and Meissen. Meissen has, among other things, the oldest pottery manufacturing plant in Germany. I had, in fact, discovered a shard of pottery stamped with the crossed swords mark of Meissen in one of the screens. I agreed to go because I enjoy HG's company, we are seasoned traveling companions, and it seemed like a great way to avoid certain malaise. I realized, too, that a good many questions remained unanswered and a day trip with this particular expert was fortuitous, indeed.

As Dr. Fox and I held our last meeting at the crater's edge late Monday afternoon, he told me about another possible place in the field, along the boundary fence, wherein it was rumored that airplane parts and possibly remains had been buried two weeks after the crash. He considered it possible, he said, but improbable. A decision was made not to explore that area because enough had been gathered from the existing site to prove, beyond a doubt, that this was the place where my father's plane crashed the afternoon of Friday, April 13, 1945. The amount of material taken from the site is estimated at one-half ton give or take a few kilograms.

This is where my day with HG gets interesting. Inspired by the final moments of seeing the crater as no one would ever see it again (but for future archeologists who will unearth it differently, if at all), we left for our overland excursion. We began with the question, "What went away from the plane as it crashed?" HG's reply was that the plane was probably spinning toward the earth. Spinning can be, as one might imagine, described in infinite ways. As it applies in this case, it was at an unknown speed at a steep or flat angle. The plane was most likely hit by anti-aircraft fire just over where the crash occured. It looks to the trained eye (not mine) like the speed of the spin determined the shallow depth of the crater. Most of the damage happened at the point of impact and as a result of the subsequent fire due to stored ammunition and fuel supply.

The sheared off front landing gear was found between the engine and cockpit craters and was not moved after the crash. This MAY mean that the airplane landed right side up. If it were the other way, the front wheel landing gear would have been on top and probably salvaged for its valuable steel.

The question of what fell away from the plane remains a mystery. HG believes that there is possibly another 6 x 4 meter hole containing these items along with another hole said to be located at the other end of the field near the adjacent road. This was where one of the engines was supposedly found but the crater we excavated shows evidence of both engines landing there. A part of one or both engines which measured 1.5 meters would have protruded from the ground. This calculation is based on the depth of the crater and the known circumference of the engines. Those parts were taken away by the farmer so he could continue his plowing.

Both ailerons were found in the crater plus the counterbalance weights that were attached to the wing tips. No main landing gear was found which logically should have been present along with the rest of the plane, nor were the superchargers, and most of the cockpit along with what it contained.

The above mentioned 4 x 6 hole may have served as a field grave which would have included anything that didn't bury itself in the crash or was deemed valuable. If this field grave exists, no remaining eye-witness to the event has come forward.
HG believes that nothing was thrown back into the main crater after the crater was filled with whatever was found there and has been left undisturbed, except for occasional relic hunters, over the past 60 years. One variation on this theme is that both machine guns from the plane were dug up in the late 1940's and handed over to unknown American officials. He assured me that speculation and rumor always swirls around crash sites and that facts are only determined through excavation. He feels that a full and complete job was done in the found crater. He also said he would bring his best deep penetration detector to the scene "just for a look."

There may be more than 100 P-38 crash sites still left to be found in Germany. Only a few are associated with MIA pilots. Many of the pilots bailed out and were either rescued or forever lost but are no longer with their plane.

You may notice the number of times I use the words "possible" and "may be" in this brief report of loss. That is because everyone is involved in the practice of highly educated deduction along with intuitive guessing, in conjunction with sorting and filing of accounts that may POSSIBLY be skewed after six decades of recollection and telling. The crater evidence is irrefutable.

My feelings are this (sínce every reporter in Germany seems to ask):
If my father's crash site alowed people of this area to forage for metals and materials (including my father's possessions), he would have wanted something useful to come of this catastrophe. He would have encouraged them to take what they needed to sustain themselves in their country that was without economy at the end of the war. I like to think that the pieces of the aircraft were recycled and made valuable again in some way we cannot imagine. Even if his watch and ring were taken by someone who found them irresistable, my father would want that.

I didn't know my father from seeing his face, by touching his hand, looking into his eyes, or hearing him laugh, but I know from the letters, from his constant presence in my life, through my children - his grandchildren and great grandchildren, his parents, his sister and brother and their children, through my mother. He would have handed out every part of himself and his plane in order to ease the suffering of others and to do the next right thing. That's the truth of it.

Am I sad because it is over? If it is as HG suspects, a possible second or third site may remain but the major work is done. The inventory of found parts accounts for my father. If there is more, it doesn't discount the inherent value of what the JPAC team brought up for me and for my father. A few parts that miraculously appeared in the dirt (the exact color of the dirt making the parts even more miraculous), will accompany him on his trip home. They are: a single green folded over button, a swatch of parachute silk, a tiny section of parachute line, a few boot eyelets with a lace piece still attached to one, and a few things yet to be determined. Am I satisfied? Yes. Does this change anything for me? It inspires me to fully consider things and people as even more fascinating and complex. My father's field taught me that what we see on the surface is nothing compared to what lies beneath. And then, it is up to us to determine how what you find is valued. I value every tiny fragment of this grand challenge and I have a precious little folded green button and a handful of boot eyelets and parachute silk to prove it.

From here, I fly to Frankfurt and on to Cologne to Ernst and his wife, Helga's, home in the Eifel Mountains. Our plan is to visit the American Cemetery in Margraten, Holland where my father's name is engraved on the Wall of the Missing. I will begin the process of placing a gold star added in front of his inscription, indicating that he has been found. Then we will go to Belgium to search again for the former site of the chateau where my father's squadron lived. HG and I attempted to find it a few years ago but we only found the Abbey where my father attended Mass.

My father's remains and anything considered personal effects, will be taken to Landstuhl, Germany for certification and examination and then to Hawaii. Once the Central Identification Lab conducts the necessary tests and writes the reports, I will be notified. My hope is to go to Hawaii and escort my father home myself. In the interim I will be making arrangements with Arlington National Cemetery for a full military funeral complete with a missing man formation fly-by. You know by now that I believe in possibility. Just takes good planning.

I will have access to room service and in-room Internet connection by Friday! I am hopful about having picture uploading under my own control once again. Also, more may be revealed. It's only been sixty years..........

2005-08-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

Elements of time and a good faith effort, Monday, 29 August, 2005: But for the final restoration of the field, the excavation is complete. Our work today was significant and conclusive. After finding the main data plate yesterday and with it the certainty that this was my father's crash site, all that remained was to complete the excavation of the two engine craters and the cockpit crater. The imprint of the plane, how it fell, and to what extent it was buried and in all probability, dug up for its valued metal after the war, was clearly evident today in the soil. I want to devote some thought and careful attention to this final post so I will gather my thoughts tonight and tomorrow and make a post promptly at 4 p.m. tomorrow when the Internet Cafe opens for business. It seems I will have plenty of time to attend to this as well as to meet with Hans-Guenther in order to identify and label the parts I am bringing home. Let us pray that customs is disinterested in the precious metal in my suitcase. The end of this story, wherein the smallest little part is the most important, is yet to be determined.

2005-08-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

Engine parts
With Frau Thiel
Main engine data plate
JPAC & German team
Window frame from canopy
Strut for front landing gear
Kay Siering & Der Spiegel TV team
Crash dragon
Armor piercing ammunition box
Hotel Central, Torgau
Belly rub
Herr Bormann & Ernst with dog
Herr Bormann's hunting dog
ACS on tarp

2005-08-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

One centimeter at a time, Sunday 28 August, 2005: Today we were joined by Kay (pronounced Kai) Siering and his team from Der Spiegel TV. Three years ago Kay contacted me to see if I was interested in having Der Spiegel make a documentary film about my father's last flight. This excavation is key to the creation of the film. Kay and his team came on a monumental day in our world of searching and finding.

At 11:15 a.m., Dr. Fox was laboriously scraping at the side of the crater between the engine crater and what he hopes will prove to be the cockpit crater. He slipped a small flat irregular rectangular piece from the dirt, tapped it a few times, and jumped to his feet calling for Hans-Guenther (God of Aircraft Parts). He had retrieved the one piece of evidence that unequivocally identifies the crash site as that of my father. He found the Main Engine Data Plate. What makes this a magnificent discovery is that the numbers visible on the plate (considering fire, destruction, and a 60-year hiatus in the dirt) exactly matches the numbers in the Missing Air Crew Report (MACR). It was a great moment which, like winning at the slots, caused everyone to gather around and wonder if we would win again.

The fates continue to bless us today. Shortly after finding the Main Engine Data Plate, the bottom frame of the left canopy window emerged with shards of glazing still attached. The shards, like so many of the pieces we are finding, are charred but recognizable. Due to fortuitous materials choices by Lockeed, the frame is made of stainless steel. I see its indestructibility in the shine of this twisted remnant.

Despite the return of summer heat, we worked all day, bouyed by our good fortune. Dr. Fox was our leading man of documentary interviews with Hans-Guenther as his knowledgeable co-star. I was able to take some notes as Dr. Fox explained the excavation process to Kay Siering. What I heard is included here for your contextual reference. I won't swear to my stenography skills or that this is a sequential or comprehensive report.:

1. The crash materials are spread out over approximately 80 meters
2. The dig started with survey trenches which I described in an earlier entry
3. Each trench was one meter wide and trench sites were chosen according to eye-witness testimony
4. Fortunately, the first trench hit where one of the engines was found. The other engine and one wing fell across the field.
5. The engine crater was excavated first and the trench was expanded outward
6. It is possible that a wing or tail boom also fell into this crater. The engine went straight down into what is now the pit. (Intertia at work)
7. Throughout this crater, 20 mm incendiary explosive rounds are found which probably "gang fired" at the point of impact causing this widespread catastrophic result. Even the protective armor plating that was just in front of the pilot below the instrument panel, was broken into pieces.
8. The excavation will continue in one meter wide segments and work will cease in each square only when sterile soil is reached.
9. Even after the entire area of the engine and cockpit craters are excavated, digging will continue around the edges for remains, personal effects, and material evidence that may have been taken away by the plow.
10. All soil will be replaced, seeding done if the farmer requests it, and the land will be restored to its original condition. Meanwhile, the field is being treated as if it were our own.

I have more stuff about soil colors and integrity which I can not decipher but one of the standards by which the soil is judged is checking for color, consistency, and compactness. The soil is evaluated in descending layers: natural sand, burned soil, and turquoise decomposed aluminum. The P-38 was fully loaded with aluminum.

I am growing quite fond of my personal ACS collection to which I have added, the gun camera with film still intact around the edges of the lens opening. Even the small gears that make it a camera rather than a lug nut are visible on both sides. I also have the entire mechanism that was part of the instrument panel that allowed my father to see that oxygen was flowing into his mask - cleverly named The Oxygen Flow Indicator. I now own a large piece of the windscreen in which three shades of varying shades of blue glass are still discernable. There are about a million pieces of broken glass associated with this piece which I will contemplate with my dear glass artist friend and Sister-Mermaid, Dr. Pat Weyer.

If the devil is in the details, I have probably missed a few, but you get the picture. It was a great way to spend a Sunday. We have gathered enough evidence to ascertain that we are bringing home the right guy. I never doubted it based on the exhaustive research, expertise, and intuition of Hans-Guenther Ploes, but hard evidence beats conjecture, wishin' and hopin'. I close with a quote from Hans-Guenther upon discovery of the Main Engine Data Plate: "A wish is the father of the thought." Yup, this was our wish, now granted.

(I will impose upon the nice man wth the computer and ethernet cable tomorrow night at 8 p.m. to upload the photos I have selected and prepared for this purpose. I will include photos of the above events as well as one of Herr Boormann's dog)

2005-08-26T10:43:00.000-07:00

Behold the engines, 26 August, 2005: With the presence of Hans-Guenter Ploes comes the orderly organization and placement of the found parts. This morning enough parts to recognize the bulk of two engines was arranged neatly at the edge of the crater. A cowling piece from the outside left of the plane was scraped and prodded from the dirt later in the morning. HG showed me a diagram of the cowling from his P-38 parts catalogue and compared the diagram to the found piece. They are an abstract match to my untrained eye but he is the God of Parts and who am I to disagree? A picture will be included in the next post depending upon the kindness of the guy who allows me to connect to his computer. The same guy, Ulf, has promised to put ALL the photos taken by anyone he knows who has visited the site on one big DVD so I will have them. I will spare you the full complement of pictures or slide shows except by special request.

The part of the crater that contained most of these engine parts is nearly exhausted and the next move will be in the presumed direction of the cockpit. I overheard Dr. Fox tell a reporter today that he expects to wrap this up in five to seven days! As I understand things, once the cockpit area is defined and excavated, there should be enough of what JPAC needs to consider this a successful mission. The focus remains on finding my father and his personal effects.

Even though that's the obvious goal, I love the little pieces that are possible to identify and if not by anyone else, HG knows what they are and then they are even more cool and amazing. There are these little aqua corroded pieces attached to delicate wiring that was used throughout the complicated electrical system of the P-38 that survived still braided together. I also watch for the black bakelite pieces that were the front of his instrument panel and I am a complete sucker for switches and dials. We found one today that very clearly reads: A U D I O. See what I mean about wunderbar?

Doc Fox decided to abandoned the screening this afternoon in favor of filling in the trenches that would not be used. Everyone shoveled the dirt off the blue tarp into the nearest trench. The sky was an astonishing clear blue with massive white clouds and the sun was brilliant but it was cool. Can't beat that for a collaborative moment in time. Fortunately, all the shovels were in use, so I took pictures and looked at the parts in the screens. At the end of the trench refilling, everyone gathered IN a trench for a group photo. They invided me to join them and then included the helpful and well-versed Germans (Wally, Hans Guenther, Ernst) These, too, will be uploaded for your viewing pleasure.

After the photo op, I noticed Herr Bormann the formerly unhappy farmer who owns the field, walking onto the site. I notified Ernst and Capt. Emmons that we had an esteemed visitor. We all held our collective breath for a minute. I had invited him to come to the field after our meeting on Saturday but he said then that he didn't expect to have time. Apparently, he finds our work interesting (I thought "hmmm, bygones") and he stood with me while our picture was taken. He has also invited any of the hunters in the group to join him for an early morning or evening hunting expedition for the boars that are runining his sunflower crop. That won't be moi, but if it saves the excavation, gimme a gun. I still vote for love vs. war.

In between the engine unearthing and the trench filling detail, Dr. Fox and photographer, Linda Miller mapped a 3-D diagram of the site. Lots of careful measuring with string hung with a tiny level. Measuring, moving the string, saying numbers, shifting the level and voila! a diagram that I also photographed but cannot post because it is part of the official report. Sorry.

Have you all gotten the idea that I am enjoying this despite the fact that it is a mission of great love and deep feelings? I expect that the cockpit excavation and what emerges from there may up the emotional ante just a bit. I notice that I spend most of my time now sitting at the edge of the crater just watching the laborious scraping and smoothing. I am drawn to the heart of the crash site for obvious reasons. I feel as though I am in attendance to my father's honor and his essence. I am his escort back to us if only in spirit and tiny earthly remains. Nonetheless important than it would have been if the team sent in the 1940's to find him had succeeded. The only difference would have been the Estill present at the site. Knowing my grandfather as I did, he would have found a way to be here. I am just doing my daughter-thing which is one of the only direct things I can do for my father and nothing compared to what he has done for me.

By the way, this is the best way to get into shape. We can call it the trench digging, part sorting, and dirt hauling diet. Too bad the Germans are so good at bread and beer. Til next time, probably tomorrow.

2005-08-25T13:01:00.000-07:00

A moment of levity
Team Estill banner
The God of Airplane Parts
Alexander, photographer & Bischoff, HG
Posing with ACS for media
The crater deepens
Rick in front of screens
Herr Guenter & Reporter Bischoff
Rodney, Shane, HG, Ernst. G., Craig, David
Ready for the screen
Interview in the crater with Dr. Fox
Der Spiegel team

2005-08-25T12:45:00.000-07:00

Probable engine parts
Jeff with molten pieces
Ammunition from crater
Rodney at screen
H.G. with engine mount
Hans-Guenther Ploes & Ernst Eberle
21 Aug end of day ACS
Dr. Fox with Reporter Wendt
Buergermeister Grossman & Ernst
Strategy meeting with Ernst
PhD conference

2005-08-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

Wally & Ulf
Crash feature outline
ACS emerging from the crater floor
Craig Daniels in crater
Metal corrosion in crater

2005-08-25T12:25:00.000-07:00

.50 Meters beneath the crater surface
The lovely latrine
Frau Thiel, Wally, David, Rick, Rodney
Frau Thiel with father photo
Herr Thiel, Linda, Frau Thiel, Frau Taylor, Wally

2005-08-25T12:01:00.000-07:00

Linda, photographer & trench digger
Dinner at Pizzeria Napoli with team
Screens and trenches
ACS in bucket
Dr. Fox in his field office

Trench digging

2005-08-25T11:40:00.000-07:00

Top: Trenches
Right: Field before dig
Left: Survey measurements
Bottom: 96 meters of trench

2005-08-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

Time as an illusion. 25 August, 2005. If time is an illusion as it feels these days, yesterday was a week. Not a week in a bad way but multi-layered and astonishing. Far too much to have effectively written about it at 11:30 last night. Due to diligent work on behalf of Hans-Guenther and Ulf Podbielski we may have figured out the photo thing or will by tonight. All I know it involves an ethernet connection and reducing the photos to a manageable size for uploading. Thus, I’ll dutifully report on the fullness of yesterday and consider today’s events when they happen. It’s just 7:00 am here and I will go to the field at 10:00 today to meet with a television reporter from Dresden.

In posting the list of yesterday’s ACS, a few salient points emerge. In and of themselves, the parts listed are most probably listed accurately as determined by educated opinion, some speculation, and brazen guessing based on what has been seen and learned from exhaustive study of P-38 parts catalogues. Remember: my father and the pilots like him had to know their planes well enough to fix them and my father enjoyed working on his own plane. Thus, the parts catalogues which serve us so well now, were his plane bible.

The point of all this part sorting and sifting is to determine when we are finding parts from the cockpit. The cockpit is the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. All the parts that I and the German wreck hunters hold so dear are inconsequential to the team’s goal except as indicators. All the pieces that emerge from sifting are tossed into buckets, looked over and sometimes licked (yes licked) by the archeologist. He mutters something about scientific spit, makes a decision, and usually and summarily tosses them into a discard pile. Discard meaning nobody can have them until conclusions are drawn and everything has been assessed.

Each day I find a piece that speaks to me in a meaningful way. Yesterday, it was a little jagged flat shard of bakelite (pre-plastic used in the 1940’s) which Hans Guenther told me was from the instrument panel. He said it would definitely have been one of the last things my father looked at in his life.

As time expanded yesterday to include all that happened along with a copious amount of discovery at the “crash feature,” (remember the definition from yesterday? There will be a test later) I stand firmly in the midst of this distortion– this oblique distortion wherein I am rooted in the moment while drawing from history. Paradoxical thinking is the requirement for having this make sense. There is no way even with technology and adjustment to time and place to do it with less complexity. It’s simply surreal work – going backwards in time and piecing history together in this way. It’s scientific and intuitive. It’s emotional and factual. It’s dissociative and concrete. It’s joyous and devastating to find important stuff in the screens when each indicate my father’s catastrophic death.

The plane parts are from a magnificent plane my father called his “iron bird.” To anyone else, it is a pile of rubble. The engine parts are still daunting and heavy, now covered with rust and corrosion. It is easy to imagine their former-power. For the P-38 pilots who flew with my father, my adopted dads, it won’t take much imagination to remember the definitive sound of these huge Allison engines.

As I work in my father’s field, the guys from my father’s fighter group are with me. I swear I saw Bill Capron yesterday leaning against the fence telling a story about flying over France. I wonder what they would make of this if they were here and if it makes them sad when they read the list. This was a complex and mighty piece of machinery built to fly low and fast. The pilots were brave, smart, and competent beyond description. On the field, we speak of these men, of this plane, and we see both quite clearly as we work. It is a plane smashed into a million pieces yet we think of it as whole. It’s mighty spirit lives on in each fragment and rivet we find.

I moved between parts and being part of a documentary film. It is a far less daunting experience than expected due to the professionalism of the Der Spiegel team. They were easily integrated into our daily rhythms and were facile in their ability to be where the action was which was copious yesterday. They did two days of filming in one day and they will return within the week for the rest. We all enjoyed having them around and Dr. Fox declared them “unobtrusive.” That’s like receiving a blessing from the pope.

Reporter, Christopher Gerisch and I had lunch at a nearby fine restaurant yesterday: McDonalds (they have ice). Christopher tells me that the last scenes of the documentary will be filmed at Arlington National Cemetery where I hope to have my father’s memorial service. He also told me that they will prepare an English version for American sale and distribution. I suggested that Robert Redford c/o Sundance should surely be sent a copy. (smiling a diva smile)

The German way of making documentaries is not to emphasize the dramatic with big music and slow-motion action scenes but to create more of an historical yet personal story. I expect the stories told by the people and the camera are dramatic enough in this case.

In the middle of all that swirled around me yesterday, I chipped one of my teeth which is beginning to seem like an annual European event. The last time I did this I was standing in the middle of St. Peter’s in the Vatican and had to find a Roman dentist who charged me 300 Euro. Needless to say, I expected the same yesterday when Ernst found me a local dentist, made the appointment, and then accompanied me to the office. The dentist did his Bondo and light magic (I know what to expect) and pronounced the entire procedure “free for the American piloten’s tochter.” I had no choice but to hug the surprised dentist and give him the Team Estill hat I was wearing.

As though I hadn’t received enough presents, Rodney, our medic, presented me with one more when he said, “Mam, I know you don’t have your father’s dog tags so I want you to have this.” From the chain holding his own dog tags, he removed another one on which was inscribed on one side with these words:

PEOPLE FIRST – MISSION ALWAYS
JPAC STANDARD
DO WHAT’S RIGHT
ALWAYS CARE THE MOST
OPERATE THE BEST
GET BETTER EVERY DAY

[On the other side it says]

“Until They Are Home”
JPAC VALUES
Commitment, Integrity, Respect, Compassion, Honor
I am overwhelmed with this gift. I hope it gives you as a participant in this mission an idea of the kind of people on the JPAC teams. To a person, these code of ethics and beliefs have been expressed to me and were made clear to the documentary filmmakers yesterday. How, I wondered, could there be any more bittersweet joy in this event for me?

I will close this reporting of miracles and surprises with this small inadequate nod of appreciation to my dear friend and constant companion, Ernst Eberle. Due to Ernst’s generous spirit and selfless donation of time and patience, I am flying in a place where I would otherwise flounder. He is easy to be with and always speaks his truth. I am grateful beyond compare for his generous wisdom and language.

To be continued………………….

Rain is the only problem on 25 August: Work stopped in the middle of a rain storm that arrived around 3:00. We were off t he field by 3:15 and I finished my interview with Alexander Bischoff, Correspondent (a real one) from Morgen Post. We were all part of the television news as Sylvia Krause a freelance journalist photographed and interviewed everyone. Local reporter, Nico Wendt, wrote an interesting article for today’s paper in which he invited anyone who might be have acquired any of my father’s personal possessions after the crash, to anonymously leave them at the newspaper office. He wrote specifically about my father’s missing pilot’s watch and a ring another eyewitness saw at the crash site in 1945.

This is one of those things where it occurs to me to pray to Tony or to wonder at my own sanity for having any hope that these items would be returned. One reporter shook his head in amazement that I would even consider this possible. I suggested that he glance out the window at the field and tell me what is impossible. I have great faith in the good people of this community. If those items (and/or others belonging to my father) still exist and the article is read by the right person, they will be returned to me. If not, I can live with the fact that an attempt was made.

The parts from the deepening crater are large and ominous. There was a large piece of one of the engine mounts and after it was somewhat cleaned, the engine piece that fit into it matched perfectly. The metal plate identifying the aircraft would have been on one of the engines. That would be an important find.

The collection of bone fragments grows as does the importance of careful and laborious screening. It’s imperative to stay vigilant and not to discard anything questionable. There is much consulting about this.

As to when is this finished, a question I ponder each day, I can only surmise that when enough is found to make a case for identification or conclusion, the field will be restored. For now, we are still in the process of finding what lies beneath the “crash feature.” Some of the stuff is so unidentifiable that Dr. Fox calls it “very very fine dirt stuff” or a “a fine piece of canoodle.” It’s all good for the quest where levity and humor are required, not optional.

My final gift yesterday came from Chris McDermott, a JPAC Historian with whom I have corresponded for several years. He brought me his little thumb drive (which is exactly the miracle my dear son-in-law suggested) on which he had stored a file he shared with me. It is entitled, 14201 Deferred Search File. It contains surprising proof that a team much like JPAC in composition and mission was sent to Europe in the years following the war to search for crash sites and missing men. This was news to me as our family was unaware of this effort. My mother told me that they heard rumor to this effect but nothing that would lead them to think a search had ever been conducted on my father’s behalf. It seems fitting and honorable that JPAC is here now to finish the job. It is also important to mention that through the efforts of Hans-Guenther Ploes and his team (which included enthusiastic and hopeful moi), JPAC knows where to dig.

Tomorrow is another day in Torgau and perhaps we will have pictures.

Die Tochter eines amerikanischen Piloten

2005-08-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

Normal ist das nicht. 24 August 2005: I have only time to tantalize you with a brief list of what we may have found in the "crash feature" on this day. (A crash feature is also known as a non-transportable artifact of human behavior..ponder that.) Among the things discovered are:
Intake and exhaust valves
Solenoid to trigger machine guns
Engine generator from one engine
Rocker boxes for valves
Pieces of instrument panel and possibly one part from barometric instrument
Gear pump for hydrolic or lubrication of engine
Rubber hosing of various length and dimension
Pieces of oxygen mask and hose
Armor plate from front cockpit area near pilot's feet
Back plate from machine gun with steel spring
Pieces of leather and webbing
Glass for altimeter
Plexiglass
250+ .50 and 20 mm ammunition rounds with some links
Unburned fibre board (this discovery may bode well for other things)
Gasket from exhaust pipes
Switches
30 cm bolts for engine
Electric wires
Gears with teeth

This great list is courtesy of Hans-Guenther Ploes, the researcher who found the site and who is known by his counterparts as the God of Aircraft Parts. He arrived at the site this morning as did the documetary crew from Der Spiegel TV. It was a busy and productive day about which I will happily report in detail tomorrow.

In order to maintain my reputation as a careful and precise foreign correspondent, I named one of the team incorrectly in my last post: Craig's last name is Daniels and Rick THOMAS is our linguist.

My lingering memory of today is the smell of the crater as it is revealed. It is filled with burned parts of the plane and, after 60 years, it still smells strongly of something recently burned. Many of the parts we examine are chunks of molten metal. The screening process has become more tedious. Tomorrow is another day, another television station visit and I promise a full report then.

Translation of first line which I noticed on the bumper of a car today:
This is not normal.

2005-08-23T12:24:00.000-07:00

Press Secretary Required - Still Tuesday, August 23, 2005 around 9:30 pm: Today's Torgauer Zeitung ran a lengthy story about our project in the field. The photo of me screening was o.k. but they identified me as a 61 year old woman! This will never do.

Bad weather entitled us to a day away from the field which allowed me to walk around Torgau, visit the castle, and finish a great historic novel about the artist, Raphael (The Ruby Ring). In response to the many emails expressing interest in photos, believe me when I say I am trying everything I know to make that happen. I spent several hours today adding captions to the photos I have so they can be transferred to this space. Perhaps tomorrow.

Two of the team guys with whom I had dinner tonight told me that the major moment of the excavation will be when the cockpit is uncovered. The reasons are obvious and I expect it will be a moment of mixed emotions for me. I have assured the team that I wish to hear the truth about what they find. I had a lengthy and honest discussion with the team leader and with Dr. Fox about this issue and the team has been told that thez should take me at my word. I suppose it seems strange that I can approach this possible discovery in such a manner but I will only know how it feels when it happens. Above all else, I am not doing this alone.

The warmth of the local people is incomparable. It is as though they have watched over my father for all these years. I romanticize perhaps but I am grateful. Today Frau Theil sent fresh flowers to the cross on the site. It was a glorious burst of color in a very gray day. Tomorrow, sun willing, Der Spiegel will begin the interivews at the field. Each person on the team is interesting and has a great story. This is the 22nd mission for Craig Thomas, one of two people who are clearing the impact site. From here, he goes to Laos. He says the team members are away from home on an average of 200 days. Who says there is a shortage of adventurers?

A dear friend and daughter of a missing Naval Commander from WW II, wrote that this is a "field of honor." The honor extends to the people who do this work for the satisfaction of bringing home the missing. I am in good company, indeed.

2005-08-23T01:54:00.000-07:00

Rain delay, Tuesday, 23 August 2005: It's not just raining, it is relentlessly drenching all of our work and rendering it impossible to know the difference between a rock, a piece of metal, or a bone fragment. Thus, work is suspended until further notice. A scout will return to the site at 13:00 to see if it has, by chance, stopped raining there. We wait......

The documentary crew from Der Spiegel TV showed up late yesterday afternoon. The cameraman immediately began sifting with us. He is a war plane enthusiast and from my conversation with him later, a expert in German history as well. There are three of them: the main reporter, the cameraman and the sound guy. They have just comleted work in the U.S. on a story about an American Thunderbolt pilot who crashed his plane in Austria in May of 1945. This was possibly the last plane crash in the war. He survived the crash and the Der Spiegel team filmed his story and reunited him with his plane after 60 years.

Yesterday's energy in the field was different from the first day after our reprieve. The work centered around sifting which, according to Dr.Fox, is the bottleneck of any excavation. It takes far longer to sift and sort than to dig the dirt. He worked all day on what he believes is the impact crater and the imprint of what lies beneath is becoming more apparent. A piece of twisted metal protrudes above the surface as do several clumps of wire. Material that looks like battery acid litters the site - evidence of corroded metal in the soil. As the soil is laboriously peeled back, the footprint what is hopefully the cockpit and the fuselage, will emerge. It is called a "crash feature."

I am reminded by the focus of the work that the point of this excavation is to retrieve my father's remains. Airplane parts (ACS)are only puzzle pieces that may or may not prove important unless they are parts from the cockpit. As Dr. Fox sorts through the accumulated and sorted ACS at the end of the day, most of it is tossed into a screen and saved until the end of the excavation. In the midst of piles of rubble, he found a tiny piece that was the pilot's headphone connection. This is a valuable find. Among all the hundreds of pieces of leather,webbing, twisted and molten metal, rivets, bakelite, clear glass shards, and questionable material, the tiny radio connection was designated the MVP of the day. Also, we all found bone fragments - I found two - but their origin will be determined at the Central Identificaion Lab. For now, we can only speculate. Linda, our photographer, found a gopher tooth which is clearly non-people variety.

So, we have a growing collection of evidence and a hopeful place to dig. If the possible crash feature proves fruitful, the cockpit will be present, and so will the majority of remains. Allowance is made for the passage of time, the direction the field was plowed over the decades in between, and whatever pieces have been retrieved from the site already by relic hunters and necessary disposal by the farmers. To further intrigue us, a new eyewitness came by yesterday, with stories of a "golden ring with a dark red or black stone." Each day brings news from the past from local people who remembered or were there to watch the wreckage burn and explode for three days.

It was a catastrophic and traumatic event for the tiny village of Elsnig amidst a more daunting force that was constant war. They continued to plow their fields and plant their crops despite the possiblity of fighter planes exploding overhead. No wonder their generous spirit touches me. Today, Mrs. Thiel sent over another bouquet of gladiolas for my father's cross. Each day I am reminded of how time heals wounds even though this is a blunt reminder for everyone of the effects of war.

Last night Ernst and I were telling the Der Spiegel crew about our negotiating adventures with the angry land owner. Our conclusion is that we solved this problem with "love not war." I vote for that.

2005-08-21T10:56:00.000-07:00

96 meters of trench, all in a Sunday's work, 21 August 2005: It threatened to continue raining this morning but stopped and gave us blessed cloud cover for a few hours. While the JPAC team dug trenches in a grid, I sat in one of them and smoothed the bottom with trowels and scooped up the dirt in buckets. The trench dirt is tossed onto blue tarps surrounding the field to be sifted later. We had the usual onlookers and Ernst is always gracious in meeting and greeting them. One of the eyewitnesses brought a basket of beer but this isn't work that is best done with a cocktail.

We began finding some interesting parts but the best stuff was discovered in the afternoon. As we find parts and pieces, and if they are not ordinance material (bullets exploded or unexploded), everything is tossed in a black bucket for inspection by Dr. Fox, the archeologist. It felt a bit like a treasure hunt with emotional attachment. Someone uncovered a large piece of the skin of the plane which I can easily identify by the rivets in a row. I took it with me to my room in all its sixty year old glory. It was the outside of my father's plane and therefore a worthy relic.

We broke for lunch in the shade which was growing narrow by noon. I was happily dirty which reminded me of playing outside as a kid and stopping for a flattened peanut butter and jelly on Wonder Bread. The afternoon's work revealed a stash of parts in one trench that was interesting enough for another trench to be started across it. The field from the air must look like a Scrabble board. In fact, I'm curious enough about the topography of the field and in seeing what my father's sqadron saw that day in 1945, that I've decided to find someone to take me flying over the field. Linda, the team photographer, will request permission to accompany me. I think it will only become a more interesting view as the days pass.

Because the stuff we were finding in the extended trench looked like cockpit pieces, we all began sifting leaving the archeologist to prepare the trench for careful excavation tomorrow. Six of us took over sifting screens, one of the guys loaded dirt into the screens from a wheelbarrow, and we separated the dirt from the rocks and ACS (AirCraftShit), as they say. In nearly every shovelful of dirt, some small or medium size piece emerged. Several small bones were found but they may not be human.

We ended the day at 4:30 and met at Herrr & Frau Thiel's for coffee and beer. Coffee and beer was platters of meat sandwiches, hard boiled eggs, pickled cucumbers and onions, a cheesecake, brownies, cheeses, and Vodka for desert.

So, 96 meters of trench and it is possible we have the site of one of the engines and/or the cockpit. Tomorrow we will know. Dr. Fox and I sat on the edge of the last trench and examined the ACS. He looked them over and tossed them back in the bucket and told me to take them if I wanted them. I am now the proud owner of another bucket full to the top of my father's plane and miscellaneous crockery. Among the pieces is one that I kept in my pocket most of the day. We think it's a toggle switch that would have been on the instrument panel - a switch my father would have touched hundreds of times. Funny what becomes important in this business of recovering history.

The work resumed smoothly after our brief hiatus on Saturday wherein we were all reminded how much we want to do this and to find my father. This was a great day of physical labor unlike what most of us do on a regular basis. The reward is to look at the transformed field at the day's end and to know the possibility of miracles and the value of sweating the the sun and liking it.

We can find an airplane missing for 60 years but no one seems to know how I can download my photos from my laptop to this site. I believe we will also be victorious over the photo dilemma and soon you will be rewarded with visions of amazing accomplishment and effort. Seeking a shoulder and back massage and a beer.

2005-08-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

Hanging from the cliff - Saturday, August 20, 2005 It is a strange thing to realize how ironic life can be. Some days the dragon wins but this wasn't one of them. There are a few heros in this story. Among them, the Buergermeister, Herr Grossman, Ernst, JPAC's willingness to go to all lengths and make all amends, and the farmer-owners themselves. Herr Grossman arranged a 2 pm meeting for the team leader, the archeologist, the linguist, Ernst, moi, the farmers and Burgermeister himself in his office. My letter had been written and translated and set aside in case of fire. We gatherd in the meeting place and waited for the brothers to arrive. They shook our hands in turn and the elder brother began speaking. Ernst would translate but the message was the same - he was not inclined to give permission to continue the dig.

In the midst of the conversation (understood by half of us but body language and tone of voice is telling and I get an A in interpreting both!) Ernst took out my letter and began reading it to the farmers. Though I understand none of the words, his reading was somehow powerful and moving. The brothers listen attentively and then the Burgermeister proposed a private conference with him. They returned to the table and announced they would put aside their objections. They now had the feeling they were dealing with a person and not an anonymous institution. They were willing to do this for me as a result of my letter. Both brothers looked directly at me for the first time. The JPAC team offered profuse and sincere apologies for any offense they may have caused and assured the owners their field would be properly restored.

We all shook hands and I wanted to hug them both but refrained from such an American gesture. They touched my heart with their willingness to hear my story. I connected with them in my willingness to hear theirs.

Tomorrow is a work day at the field in Elsnig. I had a dream about my sister last night when I didn't think I was sleeping at all. She was sitting in my hotel room laughing. She said, "oh ye of little faith..I told you not to worry so much about small stuff." She was right. She wanted to be here and had taken vacation this week so we could do a sistah trip. Guess she got here from heaven. So, that is my story of drama in the field which I will be happy to do without from this moment forward.

2005-08-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

Surprises at the end of the day - Friday, August 19, 2005. Logistical issues have prevented me from posting the events of the day until this moment. It is a matter of obtaining the proper power cords, finding a place with Internet capabilty when no Internet Cafe supposedly exists in Torgau. Ernst to the rescue once again! He found a local pub that offers a few computers in the very back of the place behind the bar but near the pool tables. The atmosphere is smoky but it works!

Our victory was short-lived. Day two of the excavation began with the glorious and impressive construction of two pieces of sifting equipment resembling backyard swing sets. Each swing set is hung with rectangular screens made of mesh wire and framed in plywood. Each is supended with four canvas straps. No swings and slides. The screens swing back and forth and dirt from the survez trenches is dumped into the sifting screens. The dirt is sifted, evaluated, and discarded. I hauled buckets from the blue tarp where the dirt is shoveled in a process that awakened in me the strong desire to the the wiry little kid I was in the typing photo.

It is one of those jobs where you must be wary of the sun but remain in it all day. Germans like their drinks warm thus there is no way to fill an ice chest or to keep water cold so the work is hot and we all talk a lot about ice. The rhythm of the digging, filling, sifting, sometimes saving what was sifted, and hauling buckets to be filled again, consumed most of the morning. Ernst and a local man were measuring the premeter of the field nearest the road against measurements taken in a 1945 aerial photograph of the site. There was discussion about oblique distortion and of the shifting possibility of road improvements. Ernst is an engineer and the calculations were in his capable hands.

At midday, we headed back to Torgau to arrange for a team dinner at the oldest Italian restaurant in Torgau, Pizzeria Napoli. That accomplished to the obvious delight of the restaurant owner, we completed our errands including the purchase of warm mineral water and headed back to the site.

The afternoon was devoted to trench digging. This will enable the team to eventually find the crater which is point of everything. Everyone digs, no one complains, and the medic promises 800 mg of Motrin to all. He calls it vitamin M. I mostly watch this part (I know my limits) but it affords me opportunity for taking photos and asking lots of questions. Soon it is 4 pm and time to pack the equipment for another day. Ernst and I get into his car and notice a truck headed down the road. The driver is irate and signals to Ernst that he wants to speak with him. The man is the proprieter/owner of this field and he says no one has his permission or that of his brother, also an owner, to dig here. I noticed two things as I observed their interaction - Ernst looked concerned and the wind picked up in an ominous way.

For nearly an hour, things looked grave. The team linguist approached them but the man waved him away. Finally, the man returned to his truck and Ernst conveyed the bad news. The man said he carries the resentment of his ancestors for all the oppression and suffering of his family. Hence, he was denying permission for us to continue. This was not the mood in which we anticipated to enjoy our dinner that evening.

I returned to the hotel to worry and realized that I wanted to write a letter to the offended farmers. I would write it and then ask Ernst to translate it for me. The truth was, I felt powerless, unable to speak for my cause, and fearful that this might end here and now. Add that to the fact that everyone believed all permissions were granted. Was this a cosmic joke? A smíling photo of my father, stuck to the mirror above the desk in my room, provided no answers.

Through the realization and shock at the abrupt change of fortune, I sought to understand the historic suffering of the farmer. His lived experience included these resentments and we were not perceived as friends but as adversaries. What he was expressing in denying us permission was his only power over what had been decades of being abused by powers greater than himself. I wrote my letter. I told him of my journey to find my father and I apologized for whatever circumstances led to his anger. I implored him to allow us to continue the excavation.

For now, the work is stopped. All we can do is wait for the next move. If it ends here, I will be sad and I will leave Germany without my father's remains. The field will be restored to its original condition either way but I vote for the scenario wherein the field is no longer a gravesite.

I write this in the spirit of reporting events. I remain unconvinced that it ends here, nor am I certain we can convince a rightfully angered German farmer that a group of Americans should be allowed to finish their work. By the time you read this, we will have resumed working in the field or we will be packing to return home. It is just that simple and just that complicated. Hauling buckets of dirt to be sifted sounds like a good thing to be doing for the next few weeks. With love from your faithful reporter from her field of dreams.

2005-08-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

Thursday, August 18, 2005, First day in the field - This is incomparable work. It is as I imagined it would be yet, as I arrived at the site, I was momentarily overwhelmed by the reality of the marker flags, the equipment, the busy team, and the purpose of their industry. Today's work was educated and organized deductive guesswork - preparing for the excavation so the digging is accurate and purposeful. From what I can see of the archeological strategy it is a tedious and hopefully precise project. The intention is to locate and impact crater which lies perhaps three meters below the surface. Therein lies the richest store of artifacts and remains.

Ernst and I arrived at the field around 10 am. A row of cars, vans, and bicycles were lining Butterstrasse Road and a television crew was filming in an adjacent field. The site was splendid with little red, yellow, and lime green flags, indicating metal below the surface. Nine team members, including an archeologist/antropologist, a munitions expert, a medic, a photographer, several mortuary affairs guys, and a team leader, were busy measuring and setting flags. Everyone is military except the archeologist/anthropologist. The team leader, Captain David Emmons, has just returned from a difficult excavation in Viet Nam.

The media wanted stories and pictures but only a few are authorized to interview members of the JPAC team. The Torgau paper was represented by Nico Wendt, a reporter who has provided wonderful press coverage of our search and discovery of the site in early 2003. A reporter from Morgen Post in Leipzig came by on his motorcycle hoping to set up an interview next week. The documentary film company der Spiegel TV arrives on Monday for the week. It looked like a small circus had arrived waving their festive banners. Someone, not a fan of Americans, drove by and suggested we go home. That is the exception rather than the rule. The Germans are, as they have always been on my previous visits, gracious and welcoming.

It was also a day for P-38 model airplanes crafted by two local men and brought to the site for my inspection. One was at least an arm-span wide and is used in remote control plane competitions. The other was a tiny version of the standard silver model complete with Ninth AAC markings.

Ernst and I were invited to Herr & Frau Thiel's home for afternoon coffee. Frau Theil's family owned the field where my father died until she sold it a few years ago. Mrs. Thiel's father, a German officer in WW II, was killed in Romania in 1944. Today she showed us his photograph and told us that when she visits the cross on my father's field, she also does it for her father.
She has never been able to travel to Romania to see her father's grave so we share this one. This is an amazing spirit of the German people I know in this area. They are incomparable.

As I left the field late this afternoon, I glanced back at the day's work. Tiny flags were flying hopefully in a light breeze - a field of tulips. Surrounding the field now is ominous yellow and black tape posted with warning signs Betreten der Baustelle verboten! Eltern haften fur ihre Kinder! I think it is to dissuade unsupervised visitors. The team leader tells me they sometimes hire guards for the sites to avoid interference by relic hunters. Although that is not necessary in this case, it is a grave site and the preliminary work is tedious and important to the final success of the excavation.

So it begins. There is talk of sifting and sorting and evaluation. Some plane parts have already emerged along with a few bomb fragments and a tractor spring. Most of the stuff beign sifted indicates whether it is worth digging under that flag. Tomorrow work begins at 8 am. Permission has been granted to begin digging which was a separate permission from marking the field. The team expects this to take all of the alloted 20 days to complete the work. Whatever happens, I will be there. It is a time of attending to my father in the only way I can. He would have done it for me.

(When I figure out how to post photos the German way, they will appear.)

2005-08-17T01:42:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, August 17, 2005 - London to Germany. I have three minutes to say that I am well on my way to Germany after having spent the night in London. I took the Underground into the city and once again loved the feeling of being in London and Harrod's, of course. The Diana Memorial is incredible and powerful. I await my flight to Leipzig which will arrive later this afternoon. I hear from friend, Ernst, that the JPAC team is already there doing whatever it is that they do. I will continue to be in touch with everyone as I can. The adventure begins now.

2005-08-14T21:02:00.000-07:00

Sunday, August 14, 2005 This has been a week of amazing emails full of support and good wishes and with them, the reminder that my father's story is universal and important. Among them was a Press Release from JPAC. They send them frequently to announce the repatriation of a former MIA or the deployment of recovery teams all over the world. Mostly, I've read them with passing interest always believing that one day they the news would be about my father's recovery. When a JPAC Press Release landed among all the words of encouragement in my email box this week, I nearly missed it. "Release No. 05-29 August 12, 2005. JPAC Teams Deploy to Europe Hickam, AFB, Hawaii - Two recovery teams and one investigative team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command will deploy this week from Hawaii to conduct operations in five European countries to search for or bring home remains of Americans still missing from World War II. The first recovery team will deploy to Germany to conduct recovery operations East of Torgau, Germany and North of Hanover, Germany at two sites. One site is associated with a 1945 loss of a P-38J aircraft, while another is associated with a 1944 loss of a P-51D aircraft."

One sentence - a flat fact that carries with it the implications of war across time. Behind that sentence is the grief of a young widow, a mother, a father, a younger brother and sister, and a young daughter who would make it her business to bring her father home from the war. As a little girl, people would tell me I had pretty red hair or something and I'd always reply, "Thank you but my daddy died in the war." Not only was it my claim to fame but I was proud of my father's sacrifice and I had this fantasy that he would show up one day. I would wonder if my mother would choose her husband, my adopted daddy, or my father. When I'd actually be foolish enough to ask her who she would choose, she'd give me that "look" no amount of insistence would result in an answer. Still, I liked to think of us being scooped up by my father who would, of course, have a plane to fly us to our new life. The fact is, when I stood on the crash site for the first time and the evidence was pretty clear that this was where he died, my fantasy died that day. I've spoken to many men and women whose fathers never returned from WW II and they report the same hidden dreams that maybe their dads aren't really dead. Not difficult to understand considering the absence of evidence for many of us.

In lieu of waiting for my father's return, I'm bringing him home another way. I'm doing the best I can to complete the circle and to honor my role as the only daughter of an darling and amazing man. I know him mostly through his incredible funny, loving, playful, and poignant letters to my mother. He illustrated most of them and gave her frequent advice about how to manage the baby (me) when HE (Mike) arrived. He began writing to her when they were in high school religion class and wrote his last letter to her the day before he was killed. In all, there are 3,000 pages of correspondence. In that last letter he wrote: "As soon as the cable came about our daughter's birth, I took her little shoe out of the celluloid frame and tied it to the back of my helmet. Have carried it in my jacket pocket since my 10th mission and on the helmet since the 28th (I have 34 now). That is the cutest little boot - I'd love to see her in a pair just like it. You just stole my heart completely and never returned it, a fact for which I am so thankful. Sweetie, I guess I just love you too much. All my love to you TWO! Gener." As I do whatever I am assigned in my father's field, I'll be on the lookout for a little bootie. You never know. This is the stuff of miracles.

When I board that British Airways flight tomorrow night, I won't be alone. There will be a group of people with me who will remain unseen but who have walked with me every step of this journey. My parents gave me wings and taught me how to fly - it's a family tradition to be tenacious, inquisitive, and to take care of each other. In that spirit, I have included a picture of my parents taken around the time they were married June 26, 1943. Weren't they cute?

FYI: Today, there is one American missing from the Gulf War, more than 1,800 from the Vietnam War, 120 from the Cold War, more than 8,100 from the Korean War, and more than 78,000 from World War II.

2005-08-10T20:52:00.000-07:00

This is the field as I saw it for the first time in March, 2003. I thought it would be important to share the simplicity of the place that was forever changed on Friday, April 13, 1945. By the time I arrive there next week, the excavation preparations will be underway and the field will no longer look as it does in these photos. It is easy to see that the field has remained exactly as it was 60 years ago when a squadron of American fighter planes flew overhead enroute to their airfield. One of the eyewitnesses to the crash told me he was standing on the road in this picture when he heard and saw a squadron of fighter planes overhead. The next thing he knew, my father's plane was billowing smoke and spiraling toward the earth. He learned later than an anti-aircraft gun was positioned on the railroad tracks in the distance and my father's plane was the only target. He remembered wanting to run toward the burning wreckage but his father pulling him into a ditch for protection. They stayed there for hours until the explosions stopped. He cried as he told me how sorry he was that he couldn't do anything to save my father. Until we met that day, he didn't know who the pilot had been. I showed him my father's smiling photo and he hugged me and apologized again for being "only a little boy" and helpless to do anything.

I took the picture of the tracks with a clear view of the field. I was told that during the war the anti-aircraft guns traveled along the tracks all day searching for enemy aircraft. On the day my father's squadron flew over the field in Elsnig, he was flying the only P-38 painted black in the group. I have speculated with members of his squadron if that was why he was selected by the gunner on the tracks. Whatever the reason, these photos depict the field and the tracks exactly as they were then which leaves little to imagine except what it would have been like to be that little boy walking back to the field with his father after lunch to finish the days work.

2005-08-09T20:05:00.000-07:00

Greetings to everyone! By this time next week, I'll be spending the night in London prior to leaving for Leipzig, Germany enroute to Torgau and Elsnig. My dear friend, Ernst Eberle, a member of the German team, will meet my flght and drive us to Torgau. The JPAC team is expected to begin the preliminary organization of the field on Monday, 15 August and we will arrive the evening of 17 August ready to do whatever is required on Thursday morning. The Der Spiegel television crew arrives the next week which means things should be pretty operational by the time they show up. On my prior trips, the local press has done daily stories about "The American Pilot's Daughter" complete with front page photos and commentary Ernst will read to me upon request. This may well be my 15 minutes of fame or just a surreal experience. When I was there last time, I stopped at a local florist to order flowers for the beautiful cross one of the local farmers built and placed in the field. A picture of me holding a photo of my father was posted on the wall of the flower shop. It was a humbling moment in which I knew I was in the process of accomplishing the impossible. A lifetime ago, I worked for a private investigator in Indianapolis whose name is Chuck (Chuckles) Keenan. He always said, "the difficult will take a little while, the impossible takes a little longer." This is a classic case of "a little longer" but it is definately happening!
For the map lovers among you, I have included a map of the area where the field is located. This might give you an idea of how remote this area is, how rural, and how far away from any major city except Leipzig, about an hour away by car, and Frankfurt, a full day's drive. Shopping is minimal which is probably a good thing but there's cool castle, a famous bridge, and a decent Italian restaurant. Hopefully, the weather will resemble Washington state in the summer. I love receiving your emails in response to this effort and I take comfort in knowing you are out there supporting this daring quest. I'll be in touch and hope you are, too.

2005-08-07T13:06:00.000-07:00

2005-08-07T12:42:00.000-07:00

As I prepare to depart for Germany and the realization of a lifelong dream, I invite you to accompany me virtually back where my father, 1st Lt. Shannon Eugene Estill's P-38 fighter plane was shot down in an East German farmer's field on 13 April 1945. In 1993, I searched for and found the remaining members of my father's WW II squadron. My 150 "adopted" dads took me under their wings and enabled me through their loving support and wisdom to pursue this quest. I was led to Germany and Hans Guenther Ploes, a specialist in recovery of crashed WW II planes, with whom I traveled throughout Germany in search of my father's plane. With Hans Guenther's incredible knowledge of aircraft and crash sites in conjunction with his willingness to engage with this pilot's daughter in finding a P-38J that crashed at the end of the war, the site was identified in March, 2003. Next week, I will meet the excavation team sent from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command from Hawaii in the field in Elsnig, Germany, a village near Torgau where the American and Russian Armies met at the end of the war in their quest to defeat Nazi Germany. My father's life ended with this last mission. It is my intention to recover his remains and his plane, and bring him home to rest in Arlington Cemetery and Enid, Oklahoma.

The picture of the typist, circa 1957, is me in my early career as a foreign correspondent. In this spirit, I include you in the adventure in which I am the heroine, my father is the hero. This is how you will be able to follow this journey, post your thoughts, comments, suggestions, and sentiments.
Here we go.............