Where Soldiers Lie by Ian McPhedran

Author:Ian McPhedran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

13

A PEOPLE BUSINESS

An important aspect in the search for the remains of unrecovered war casualties is the need to deal thoughtfully and respectfully with the local people whose lives, towns, villages and even homes can be disturbed during the process.

Captain Gene Harb of the United States Marine Corps understands better than most the importance of building good relationships with the locals. As the mission commander of the DPAA team in Papua New Guinea in August 2018, Captain Harb was not only responsible for the safety and welfare and indeed results of his 10-person field team, but he was also the senior representative on site for the US government.

This responsibility did not appear to faze the likeable 30-something officer and father of an 11-month-old daughter (his wife is an army officer) as he negotiated the complexities of village politics in a place that is about as far removed from middle America as it is possible to be and still be on the same planet.

Captain Harb was born in New York City and raised in Virginia before attending university at Beaufort College in North Carolina, where he studied wilderness leadership and education.

‘I always had the goal of going into the Marine Corps and becoming an officer once I graduated college,’ he said.

Sitting on a log bench beneath a raised thatched hut in the village of Isoge in the Kokoda Valley, where he and his team had been given a right royal welcome, he said he had first heard about the work of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) after he graduated as an officer.

‘It sounded like a very powerful mission that I believed in and I wanted to be a part of and it was also a leadership position. I was very interested in finding a job that still allowed me to be a leader of small teams and to work internationally and develop my skills with other militaries and other cultures and also, to work in a joint environment,’ he said.

Both of his grandfathers had served in the US Navy during World War II and both were deployed to the Pacific theatre in amphibious operations, which meant delivering marines ashore in some of the hottest battle sites of the war.

‘Just hearing their stories about the war and what it meant and about the men and the friends they had that never made it home, that was part of why I wanted to come and do this job.’

Before joining the DPAA on a three-year posting he had a number of preconceived ideas about the job and while the small, agile team nature of the task was just as he thought it would be, he could never have imagined the challenges involved in recovering remains and the myriad complexities over and above just dealing with the local people.

‘We come out with all these specialities, explosive ordnance disposal and scientists and all these capabilities and we have a lot of expertise on our teams, but you can’t do this unless you have a good relationship with the communities, which you’ve seen today.

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