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14 February 2009
Special announcement: Today we finally posted the full 2008
BentProp mission report, over which Pat Scannon, its author, has labored
for almost a year. Here's where
you can read the P-MAN X Report.
If your Internet connection has seemed a little slow the
last few day, it's probably because of the flurry of last-minute message
traffic being exchanged among the 2009-expedition team members. Several
of them this year are making their first trip to Palau with BentProp; one
of the newbies has previously been there as a sport diver.
The newbies seem to have self-selected themselves into two
groups. One group has been approaching the tirp in a relatively calm, cool,
deceptively sophisticated way. They're NOT the ones who have been sucking
up your Internet bandwidth. The other group is now pretty much at the point
of
running around
with their hair on fire, 24/7, mildly to severely panicked, and alternating
between shopping blitzes at outdoor stores and bouts of anguish over
what they're sure they've forgotten.
As I write this, Molly Osborne is actually the first team
member to be under way for this year's expedition. Being from southern
Arizona, she's the only one who doesn't cringe at the thought of the high
temperatures in Palau. I'm not convinced that she fully appreciates how
NOT-dry that Palauan heat is ... but she will, shortly. She'll be the first
to arrive in Palau - tomorrow evening. Tuesday evening, Flip
(this
year's
mission
commander)
and Paul
arrive.
Thursday
evening,
Pat, Mark, Katie, and Wil arrive. And Rick arrives Friday evening. The
notion of having people dribble in over a period of almost a week is a
substantial
departure from our usual well coordinated team arrival. We'll see how that
goes.
Most of them have
agreed to make periodic contributions to these progress reports; we'll
see how that goes, too. Molly is the first to actually send words designated
as a "mini-update."
Molly:
"...I leave [Saturday the 14th] with arrival
Sunday night in Palau. I have lots of reading to do on the plane-including
manuals
for
2 new dive computers
(one on loan) & a new camera. Esther is going to pick me up!
Can't beat that!
I can't wait. I have been planning this for a while & I am so
lucky work let me go for so long - I am SO lucky for this chance
of a lifetime!"
Flip Colmer is somewhat
more wordy than Molly, and he just chimed in with the first of this year's
masterpieces, which I'll excerpt
below.
As always, the full version, probably with legible photos, will appear
in
his "blog"
at
flip.
He presents below some expanded information about this year's team members
to supplement the bio sketches that I assembled in Progress
Report #2.
Flip:
One more work day, and a night at home and then I am off
to Palau. We have a great mission planned and we hope to give you great
news during our adventure. We have a lot of new team members and a new
search plan to help us find those warriors who did not make it home from
the war. I hope to inform and entertain you through my updates. But first,
everybody’s favorite section, Lessons Learned!
Lesson Learned (Already. Again.)
- Don’t sign up for Facebook 5 days prior to going somewhere where
bandwidth is precious and email is only checked once a day at best.
Who would have thought all those notes would come crashing in.
- A bathing suit, pair of gloves and two bandanas puts you over the
70 pound weight limit for Postal Service shipping. Okay, the 150
feet of network
cable might have contributed as well.
- Once again, I remembered a few items to put in once the bag was
past San Francisco.
- It’s a down economy and still the airplanes are full on the
specific days you want to get somewhere on standby.
- No, you cannot use that U.S. Postal Service tracking number
to actually track your bag once it leaves the country.
- You need the same amount of stuff for a three-week mission
as you do for a four-week one.
The Players:
 Pat
Scannon, Team Leader, El Jefe,
SMF #1, Fearless Leader. Founder of
The BentProp Project. Pat has been going to Palau in search of the
MIAs since the early 1990s. He takes us places that we may never have
gotten to on our own. Pat’s job this year is to oversee the entire
project like the admiral on the bridge of a ship. He makes his wishes
known and we carry them out. This is part of our new methodology to
hopefully find the hard-to-find warriors who are missing in Palau. |
 Flip
Colmer, Mission Coordinator, breakfast chef, team photographer, loser
of GPS, advance man. I have been going with Pat to Palau since 2002
with only one year off to recover from a skydiving injury. My job is
to make sure that we have everything we need logistically so that we
can go after targets both on the land and in the water. Keeping with
the Navy analogy I started with Pat, I am the air wing commander. Okay,
an Army or Marine analogy might work better but I was in the Navy so
what do I know about grunt stuff? |
 Mark
Swank, Land Ops Leader. Mark is going to lead us on the ground this
year. He’s one of our squadron commanders. Mark lives in Maryland
and has been going to the National Archives for us for a long time.
He is hot to find the executed POWs on the big island of Babelthuap.
And he has a plan. Sounds like the Cylons, doesn’t it? This will
be Mark’s first visit to Palau and he will only be spending two
weeks of our three week mission with us. He’s a government employee
so we think he’s trying to suck up to the new Boss by returning
early. |
 Rick
Smith, Water Ops Leader. Rick is going to lead us in the water this
year. Rick is our other squadron commander. He is a technical diver
from the Seattle, WA area. He has been going to Palau for a number
of years and actually attended one of Pat’s briefings at Sam’s
Tours. He made contact with us and has developed a plan on how to investigate
the red circle map we have. These are marks on a map saying where the
Japanese saw airplanes go down. We really needed a side scanning sonar
(SSS) for this and we were not planning on having one. So Rick was
going to go along with us on the land mission to learn about BentProp
so that one day when we were on the water, he’d be more prepared.
Well, now we do have a SSS so Rick will be gainfully employed on this
year’s mission. |
 Katie
Rasdorff, Head Archive Researcher. Katie has also been working the
National Archives for us. She has uncovered lots of nuggets of information
when we thought we were close to exhausting what the Archives had.
She also started the Lost Patriot website which is a repository of
all things archival. She will be making her first trip to Palau and
is keen on finding everything that hasn’t been found. Former
Marine. She’s going to keep us in line the entire time. |
 Molly
Osborne, GPS and Google Earth Guru. This will be Molly’s first
trip to Palau. She has been interested in going with us for quite some
time and this is the year for her to join us. She is a dietician by
training and will keep us from consuming chunky fish ice cream. She
works at a V.A. in Arizona so she has had lots of contact with veterans. |
 Paul
Schwimmer, Head Navigator. Paul’s business is finding
stuff on the land and in the water. He’s a professional surveyor
and he pestered me enough to warrant an interview with Pat. During
the course
of his intense interview, he mentioned he had a side scanning sonar.
Did I mention we are getting to use one this year? Thanks Paul. Paul
is a former Special Forces guy, hunter, fisherman and man about town.
He also has a hobby dear to my heart which I did not find out about
until I got this photo. If he had told me this earlier, I would not
have made him interview. This is Paul’s first trip to Palau and
his first task is to finish his scuba certification. [Anybody ever
see the old movie "Donovan's Brain?" - Reid] |
 Warren
Bruce, Land Safety and Provost Marshall. Warren is a current U.S. Marine
F/A18 Hornet pilot. He heard about what we were doing from Derek Abbey
who is another Marine and went with us two years ago. He rushed Pat
and how could Pat say no to another one of our modern day warriors
who is willing to spend his time looking for the warriors from yesteryear.
Warren recently completed a ground tour in Iraq and is eagerly waiting
to get back into a cockpit. |
 Wil
Hylton, writer. Wil wrote an article about the B-24 we found a few
years ago and the Doyle family. You remember them. They came out to
dive the B24 before JPAC and the Navy divers did the recovery mission. Wil’s
article appeared in GQ magazine. Wil has a long writing resume
and when the opportunity arose to join us, he jumped at the chance.
He will not only be doing research and writing, but he’s going
to get his boots muddy helping us in the field and in the water. I
was going to remove the red eye from his wife’s eyes, but that
is a bit problematic. Somehow I think I am going to pay for using this
photo. Sorry Wil, I lost the other one. |
 Jolie
Liston, Resident Archeologist, car loaner agency and knowledge of all
things ancient Palauan. Jolie was the expert assigned to the Compact
Road Project. This was a new road built all the way around the big
island. IF they came across anything that was ancient Palauan, Jolie
would tell them to move the road. When she went hiking with us, she
would point out ancient Palauan artifacts that we thought were just
rocks and hills. Hey! If it’s not metal, why would we know about
it? |
 Joe
Maldangesang, Captain, Master Guide, betel nut tree climber, interpreter,
teacher of all things Palauan, modern and ancient. No list of participants
is complete without Joe. Joe has been working with BentProp for many,
many years. We depend on Joe to keep us out of trouble, point us in
the right direction and make sure we do not step on any toes. It also
makes a difference that he finds everything we are looking for. |
Our methodology for P-MAN XI (Palau- Marines, Army Navy, mission #11
for you new people.) has changed significantly. In the past, after a year’s
worth of headwork, Pat would layout our mission goals, tasks and targets.
It has worked really well in the past and BentProp has been very successful
in finding crash sites and MIAs. However, Pat recognized that the low
hanging fruit has been plucked and the remaining MIAs will not be easy
to find. We felt that maybe, our last missions to Palau were on the horizon
unless we got some new intel, or a new way to ‘attack‘ our
targets.
Two folks of many have made significant finds at the National Archives:
Katie Rasdorff, our head researcher, and Mark Swank. They got so excited
about what they found that they are both going with us this year. In fact,
Mark got so excited that he drew up a plan of how to find the executed
POWs. Well, if you make a plan, you better carry it out. So Mark is in
charge of prosecuting our land work this year. This gives a new set of
eyes, and no preconceived notions, towards the task at hand. The old hands
who are going, Pat and me, might have a tendency to say, ‘Oh we looked
over there. There’s nothing to be found.’
Rick, as I mentioned, is in charge of the water ops. Once again, Pat and
I could easily say, ‘Oh, we looked around that coral head. There’s
nothing there.‘ But Rick is really eager to find stuff in the water.
So we asked him if he were in charge, how would he carry out this mission.
He drafted a plan and we told him okay. Once again, if you’re going
to create a plan, you better be prepared to carry it out.
This is our plan and as you all know, a plan is just something to deviate
from.
Can you feel this thing starting
to roll? Stay tuned...
- Reid
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