Verne Strickland USA DOT COM:
October 13, 2014
Richard
Bean stares at his dining room table that is covered with items found
with the body of his uncle. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
After seven decades, a missing World War II soldier’s remains are buried in Virginia
By John Woodrow Cox October 3, 2014
After
the veterans with “POW-MIA” inscribed on their black ties saluted the
casket, after the chaplain talked of time and healing, a man in a dark
suit slipped on reading glasses and rose from his pew. He walked to the
stage of a Northern Virginia funeral home and pulled from his pocket the
tribute he had written the night before.
“Seventy years ago, our
uncle, he died for our country,” Richard Bean, voice quavering, read to
a small crowd of about 75 people. “One year ago, an incredible journey
came to know him as a hero.”
That uncle, also named Richard Bean,
grew up in and around Manassas. In 1941, just months before the
Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army. He deployed the
following year with the 105th Infantry Regiment, which was in the first
wave of units sent into Pacific Theater combat. On July 7, 1944, while
fighting on Saipan, Bean and his comrades faced the largest suicidal
banzai attack of the war and, at 24, he was reported missing in action.
Three years later, the military declared him dead. Posthumously, he was
promoted to sergeant and awarded the Bronze Star.
Decades ago,
his family gave up hope that his body would be recovered. But early last
year, an organization searching for Japanese casualties discovered
Bean’s remains in a mass grave where four other American soldiers have
also been found.
The journey Richard spoke of ended Friday with Bean’s funeral in Manassas and his burial at Quantico National Cemetery.
For
Richard, Bean had always meant something special. They never met, but
Bean was the man for whom he was named, the uncle who went to war and,
as his nephew heard over and over, never came home.
Haunted by missing details
As a boy, Richard knew his uncle through a single photograph.
It
hung beside an organ on the den wall of his grandmother’s home in
Haymarket. It showed a young man in a crisp uniform with his arms held
behind his back and his stare directed
family
For
Richard, Bean had always meant something special. They never met, but
Bean was the man for whom he was named, the uncle who went to war and,
as his nephew heard over and over, never came home.
Haunted by missing details
As a boy, Richard knew his uncle
off-camera. His jaw was square,
his eyes confident.
Taped to the photo’s plain wooden frame was a Purple Heart.
For
one week each summer, he and his siblings would visit their
grandmother, Rosie. Each day, after fixing them lunch with the bounty
from her vegetable garden, she’d sit at the organ and point to the
photograph of her boy.
“I’m going to play a song for Richard,” she’d say, and her fingers glided across the keys and the pipes breathed out a hymn.
The
day the Army officials came to tell her he was missing in action, Rosie
“cried like a baby,” she told them. For years, she kept a box of his
letters in a shoe box.
Richard
Bean holds the dog tags of his uncle, Richard N. Bean found
on the island of Saipan.
Rosie’s
grandchildren never heard her express doubt about the Army’s conclusion
that he had been killed, but the missing details — how he died, to whom
he last spoke, what happened to his body — haunted her. Still, she and
his siblings rarely discussed him. Richard knew only that, like all
eight of Rosie’s kids, Bean’s youth was arduous. He had quit school to
work as a farmhand, either steering ploughs behind horses or planting
seeds in their wake. Bean’s father, Richard said, was an abusive drunk.
He and Rosie eventually divorced, and she moved to the house in
Haymarket.
Rosie died a half-century ago, when Richard was still a
teenager. Only one of her children, Everett, 78, is still alive, but he
remembers little more than sitting on his big brother’s lap.
Decades passed. Life moved on. The memories of Bean faded.
For years, Richard seldom thought of his namesake until, in October 2013, he got a call.
‘It has to be my uncle’
The backhoe had just scraped away another few inches of dirt when Usan Kurata spotted a bone.
Kurata
is the founder of Kuentai, a nonprofit group that for the past four
years has searched Saipan for the remains of Japanese soldiers killed in
the war. Tens of thousands of Americans who fought in World War II
remain missing as well.
Kurata ordered the machine to stop, and a
fellow researcher began to brush away the earth. They found a fork.
Then, dog tags. Etched into a thin piece of rusted metal were Bean’s
name, his mother’s name and his hometown of Manassas.
“I was just so shocked,” said Yukari Akatsuka, a member of Kuentai. “He was the first remains I’d ever seen.”
In
September 2013, she and Kurata traveled 13 hours to Virginia in search
of more clues. They went to Manassas City Hall, a visitor center and a
museum before meeting Tish Como at the Bull Run Regional Library. Como
scoured county records and tracked down Richard in Nokesville.
She
left him a voice mail, and he called back the next day. Como told him
what the Japanese researchers had found. He was stunned.
“It has to be my uncle,” he told her.
With
photos of their findings, Kurata and Akatsuka returned to Virginia in
November, nervous that Richard might be angry that their ancestors had
killed his.
He wasn’t. For three hours, they talked, and sometimes cried, around his kitchen table.
The U.S. government later used dental records and DNA to confirm Bean’s identity.
Two weeks ago, a FedEx box arrived at Richard’s home. It held everything found alongside his uncle’s bones.
On
Thursday, with his back to a sign on the kitchen wall that read “God
Bless America,” he again unpacked the box’s contents and spread them
across his table: a razor, a shaving kit, a pocket knife, a dagger, a
1909 wheat penny, a pair of boot soles, an Army ring, a Japanese brooch,
a Detroit-made cigarette box with an “R” carved into the side, a
fountain pen that Richard wants to believe was used to write those
letters in Rosie’s shoe box.
He often paused as he considered
what lay before him. Richard, 65, is a serious man who speaks in a low,
steady tone. A keen hunter, his trophies include a collection of bucks’
heads and, near the front door, a stuffed black bear. He has worked in
construction for 46 years and has the calloused hands to prove it. He is
not prone to emotion, but his uncle’s decaying objects left him
overwhelmed.
“Sitting right here,” Richard said, “I get the feeling he’s looking down on us.”
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In fact,
“It
became apparent in the early ’80s that you could get AIDS from a blood
transfusion,” Brooks explained. “There was a lot of criticism that the
blood collection industry dragged its feet to keep their gay blood
donors from donating and from developing a test, the idea being that gay
blood donors were excellent blood donors. They would come in every
eight weeks, and they didn’t want to lose them. They didn’t want to hurt
their feelings.”
Nonetheless,
a petition a WhiteHouse.gov, created in November by students at the
University of Michigan, claims the FDA policy is “discriminatory and
inadequate.” The students want the federal government to merely ask
prospective donors, “Have you had unprotected sexual contact with a new
partner in the past 12 weeks?”
Although experts say it’s rare these days, HIV-contaminated blood has infected transfusion patients.
