“And I thought Southeast Asia was complicated,” he said. “Well, if this soldier was shot and buried on the sly, he’d have been reported AWOL pretty quick. And if he didn’t turn up in a month, he’d have been flagged as a deserter. We’ve got a database at CILHI that lists deserters. Let me call the office and have somebody take a look. So this was in Oak Ridge, sometime in the 1940s or 1950s?”
“Actually,” I said, “we think he was killed in 1945 or early 1946. He was buried sometime after a uranium bunker was built—that was in ’44—but before a tree started growing in ’46.”
Joe laughed. “Well, that should narrow down the list of potential deserters,” he said. “I’ll ask somebody to take a look and give you a call. Let me know how it all turns out.”
“Thanks, Joe. ’Preciate you. Sorry I woke you. Safe travels. Sleep fast.”
Two hours later, Peggy forwarded a call from Pete Rossi, an investigator at CILHI. “Our database turned up two deserters in East Tennessee in the summer of 1945,” Rossi said. “One was a guard from Camp Crossville, a prisoner-of-war camp up on the Cumberland Plateau where German and Italian officers were held. The guy from Camp Crossville was caught in Kentucky three months later and court-martialed. He claimed he was AWOL, not a deserter, and said he was gonna report back once his mama got well. He must have been convincing at the court-martial, because he got off with a two-year sentence and a dishonorable discharge.”
“And the other deserter?”
“The other was a corporal named Jonah Jamison,” said Rossi. “He was assigned to the Special Engineer Detachment—the military unit associated with the Manhattan Project—and posted to the Clinton Engineer Works. Never caught; vanished without a trace.”
“Clinton Engineer Works,” I said. “That was the army’s name for the Oak Ridge complex. That’s got to be our man.”
“Sounds like it,” Rossi agreed.
“How soon you reckon we can get his army dental records?” As soon as I said it, I remembered. “Oh crap. That might be a problem, huh?”
“Might be,” said Rossi. “Like the Pope might be Catholic.”
What I’d suddenly remembered was the fire. The National Archives stored tens of millions of military service records in a huge repository in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1973, a fire broke out on the sixth floor of the building, which contained two-thirds of the military files. By the time the blaze was extinguished, the files of seventeen million soldiers had been destroyed, singed, or soaked. To keep the waterlogged files from molding, archivists had put them all in refrigerated storage. Some of the damaged records were being reconstructed, by scanning their soggy pages to create duplicate files; however, progress was excruciatingly slow, and many records had been lost altogether. On two previous occasions, I had sought military dental records from the St. Louis facility. In one case, the records I needed had survived; in the other, they hadn’t. Eighty percent of the records from the 1940s had been destroyed, Rossi said, so he wasn’t optimistic about finding a dental record that would tell us whether or not it was Jonah Jamison’s skeleton laid out on a table in my bone lab.
“But I’m actually in St. Louis right now,” Rossi added, “looking through some Vietnam era records for Cusick. I’ll see if Jamison’s personnel file survived the fire.”
Statistically, the odds weren’t good—just one in five. But then I remembered Emert’s words. “Things come in threes. You’ll find it.”
Bless him: Emert was right. Jonah Jamison did want to be identified.
JAMISON MUST HAVE BEEN a scientist or technician of some sort,” I said to Thornton. “Isn’t that the kind of folks who were in the Special Engineer Detachment?”
“Most of them were,” said Thornton. The agent was on a three-way call from New Iberia with Emert and me. “Jamison was different, though. He was a writer.”
“A writer? What the hell was a writer doing in a scientific and technical outfit?”
“Immortalizing the great endeavor,” he said. “General Groves had one eye on Japan and the other eye on history. Or fame.” I thought back to the photograph Miranda had shown me, and her comments on how narrowly the general’s horizon was drawn compared to Oppenheimer’s. “Groves had still photographers and cinematographers scurrying around all over the place, capturing everything on film,” Thornton was saying, “but apparently he wanted the story set down on paper too, and in style.”
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. If the Manhattan Project succeeded, it would clearly play a pivotal role in human history. If it didn’t succeed, well, having the costly failure detailed on film and in print would likely be the least of the general’s worries. “So Jamison wrote for the Knoxville paper before the war?”
Thornton laughed. “Not exactly. Groves was aiming for greater glory,” he said. “Jamison was a New York Times reporter before the war. After he was drafted, he was assigned to write scripts for training films—how to clean your rifle, how not to get VD, that sort of thing—when Groves reached down and plucked him from the basement of the Pentagon.”