Celebrate him home!
Sunday, April 16th, 2006
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!
