Where They Lay

Oct 8, 2024 8:40 AM

Author:Earl Swift

Where They Lay

The US government has an unspoken pledge with every man and woman it sends into battle: you may be wounded doing your duty, you may even be killed, but you won't be left behind...

On 20 March 1971, during the largest helicopter battle in history, an American chopper on a daring rescue mission exploded in the skies over Laos. Its scorched remains fell onto terrain about which allied forces knew little except that it was hostile - jungle so dense with North Vietnamese that going after the dead crewmen was out of the question. And so two highly decorated pilots and a pair of gunners who had each earned the Silver Star for heroism earlier that day were left where they lay: four among the 2,583 US servicemen whose bodies remained unrecovered at war's end.

30 years later and a team of soldiers and scientists ventures back into that battlefield to dig among the unexploded bombs and landmines, in ground slick from monsoon rains, in jungle infested with leeches, giant centipedes and poisonous snakes, to find those four crew and to bring them home. Its mission is one of dozens conducted every year, in Asia, Europe and the scattered islands of the Pacific - to locate and bury America's war dead and to put a name - the right name - on each headstone.

WHERE THEY LAY tells the story of this recovery team and its elusive employer: the U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory - the world's largest forensic science lab. Part history, part travelogue, part scientific adventure, it chronicles the years-long effort to find the remains of those heroes, culminating in an expedition into a land that even today is virtually invisible to the world at large. It has all the makings of a classic of modern warfare - and its aftermath.

Reviews

'A poignant tale of one war and four lost lives. And the story of all who never came back'

—— JAMES BRADLEY, author of Flags of Our Fathers

'Skillfully weaving personal and archival history, The Last Mission gives us a haunting glimpse of just how close we came to the brink of waging a final desperate war on Japanese soil'

—— Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers

'The Last Mission is an exciting, highly readable, minute-to-minute account of the last air raid on Tokyo, which, according to co-author Jim Smith, a participant in the attack, foiled a Japanese army attempt to prevent the emperor from surrendering to the Allies and a Soviet plan to occupy Japan'

—— Dan Kurzman, author of Fatal Voyage

The Black Jacobins is one of the great books of the twentieth century ... one that wrote the history of a people supposedly without history.

—— Catherine Hall

James is, quite simply, the outstanding West Indian of the twentieth century.

—— Caryl Phillips

A starting point and an intellectual inspiration ... a classic of masterly historical writing.

—— James Walvin

James is not afraid to touch his pen with the flame of ardent personal feeling - a sense of justice, love of freedom, admiration for heroism, hatred for tyranny - and his detailed, richly documented and dramatically written book holds a deep and lasting interest.

—— New York Times

Revolutionarily, the book abandoned the old narrative of black victimhood in favour of accenting the agency of the formerly enslaved who, fuelled by a desire for liberty, fought to achieve autonomy.

—— Colin Grant , Prospect

The standard and the main text through which the Haitian revolution is studied ... a book I've read back to back many times ... An incredibly brilliant book, an undeniably magnificent contribution to scholarship.

—— Akala's Great Reads

Reading and rereading The Black Jacobins, I am struck by its incredible wit and humanity, and James' determination to write a history of slavery in the Caribbean in which people of African descent appear as thinking, feeling human agents - in other words, as the protagonists of their own history and not background characters in an essentially European story.

—— Dr Liam J. Liburd, Assistant Professor of Black British History, Durham University

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