In the seemingly endless battle to recover the remains of his uncle, a decorated flier lost in World War II, Gary Zaetz had already bent some of the world's largest and most obstinate bureaucracies to his will: The Pentagon. The State Department. The Indian government.
Now the soft-spoken Cary computer expert and the other relatives of hundreds of U.S. troops who went missing in India are caught up in one of the world's oldest and most obscure border disputes. Zaetz believes their troubles are triggered by an unusually powerful enemy: China.
Gary Zaetz' saga of bureaucratic triumph and frustration began in 2006, when an Arizona adventurer found remains of a U.S. bomber in the Himalayas. The plane was one of hundreds of U.S. aircraft that crashed there in World War II, lost flying "The Hump," a route from India to China to supply Chinese troops who were fighting Japan.
About 430 U.S. planes are missing on the route, including more than 100 in India, about 100 in Burma - now called Myanmar - and more than 170 in China.
One of those planes carried Zaetz' uncle, 1st Lt. Irwin "Zipper" Zaetz, 26, and seven other crew members to their deaths. It had been nearly 63 years since their families had heard any news of their fate.
The adventurer, Clayton Kuhles, had found that plane. He documented the information and posted some of it on his website, which features information about the wrecks that he finds on his expeditions. Gary Zaetz stumbled onto it there.
The mystery was only partly solved, though: Without remains, the story can never be over for the family of the crew, including Irwin Zaetz' brother, Larry, who is Gary's father.
To say that they faced huge hurdles is an understatement. U.S. MIA recovery efforts had long been biased toward service members who went missing in the Vietnam War. And India had never even allowed a U.S. recovery team to enter the country.
Recruiting allies
Zaetz isn't a swashbuckling outdoorsman like Kuhles, but he knows how a work a keyboard, and he used his skills to quickly build lists of the names of survivors of missing fliers. He found genealogy experts and recruited them to help, searched online census records for the names of the missing troops' siblings, and emailed library researchers in the missing fliers' hometowns to get their obituaries, a rich source of survivors' names.
Then he and the other family members began a campaign to open India to U.S. MIA recovery teams. They contacted politicians, military officials and journalists in the United States and India.
They won. In 2008, the U.S. government sought and received permission from India for recoveries. That year, a small U.S. team went to Arunachal Pradesh, a state in the northeastern corner of India, to determine what it would take to perform recoveries at sites Kuhles had found, including the resting place of Irwin Zaetz' plane, "Hot as Hell."
Zaetz was so excited that he lost 35 pounds and, at age 54, left his cubicle at IBM in 2008 and trekked through the jungle and rugged foothills of the Himalayas. He walked for six days just to spend two hours at the site of his uncle's death before any recovery effort disturbed it.
In 2009, a full Army recovery team began work on the site. Gary and Larry Zaetz and the other family members were elated.
With the work only partly done, though, the brief window of good weather ended for the year, and the team packed up with plans to come back in 2010.
A border dispute
The recovery team's return didn't happen. The Indian government, Zaetz was told, declined to discuss it. He and the other families have officially received only unconvincing reasons, including that the area is far from infrastructure, is a disputed region and that there is political unrest.
None of that, he said, had changed from before the U.S. expeditions there, so they aren't proper reasons not to return. What's more, the recovery teams are accustomed to working in the world's most remote jungles and mountains.
Zaetz said at least one U.S. official had told him privately that India was having second thoughts because China, which has claimed the territory as its own for more than a century, had raised objections. The U.S. wasn't eager to press the issue because it, too, wanted to tread carefully with China.
Whatever the reason for the halt to the recoveries, it is a delicate topic. The public affairs office for the Hawaii-based MIA recovery unit didn't return several calls regarding the status of the India missions; nor did the spokesman for the Indian Embassy. A spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department didn't return several calls.
Maj. Carie A. Parker, a spokeswoman for the Army's Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office, wrote in an email that the Pentagon remains committed to recovering the remains of missing troops. The Indian government has indicated that it needs to develop some standard procedures regarding the recovery missions before allowing them to continue.
"We have been assured by Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs representatives remains recovery in India is not political and not policy but an internal bureaucratic matter of developing procedures that address the needs of all Indian ministries involved in the effort," Parker wrote.
Zhou Zhiyong, third secretary in the congressional liaison office of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said in an interview that the area was part of China and that the U.S. should request permission if it wants to perform MIA recoveries there.
"That is part of Tibet, and we regard all of Tibet as Chinese territory," he said.
Such a request by U.S. diplomats is unlikely, as it would be seen as a tacit endorsement of China's claim to the territory and cause a rift with India, a powerful and longtime U.S. ally.
Time is short
Gary Zaetz has also been making calls. An Indian official had simply told him to be patient. Which is perhaps the one thing that he can't do, because there isn't much time left.
Even if this is only a delay in the recoveries, the math it evokes is as simple as it is grim. Larry Zaetz will be 87 next month. Immediate relatives of other crew members, the ones who knew them and loved them, are even older.
It can take a year or more once remains from a wreck are recovered to identify them, if they can be identified. And there is no sense at all of when the U.S. recovery team could begin work again.
In recent weeks, Zaetz has sought help from the International Committee of the Red Cross and members of North Carolina's congressional delegation. The Red Cross said it didn't want to get involved.
A spokesman for Sen. Richard Burr, though, said his office is digging into the case, trying to figure out what had happened and why.
After all the efforts it had taken initially to persuade the Pentagon, the State Department and the Indian government, after getting close enough that the recovery work had actually begun, the new setback is staggering, Gary Zaetz said.
"The level of frustration at this point is just galactic," he said. "Every time we turn around, not only has something else come up to prevent the expeditions, but organizations we thought we would be able to rely on, it turns out that we can't."
