A Himalayan Mission to Bring Closure to Kin of WWII Troops

Kuhles's trips have also inspired a local documentary filmmaker.

"Clayton is depending on the local hunters' knowledge and memory to bring healing to the families in the U.S.," said the filmmaker, Moji Riba, of the Center for Cultural Research and Documentation. "The plane crash and its debris have been part of the local lore in villages for six decades. And now Clayton's rediscoveries will also be part of their continuing story."

Kuhles's most dramatic sighting was of a B-24 bomber, a four-engine aircraft nicknamed Hot as Hell that was lying more than 9,000 feet above sea level. After a perilous three-day trek with a tribal villager, he reached the site on Pearl Harbor Day in December 2006.

"I found four digits sloppily hand-painted inside the wing compartment. It turned out to be the construction number that was assigned to it in the factory while it was being built. That helped me identify it later," he recalled. "There were eight men aboard."

Kuhles brought home parts of the cockpit control panel, engine parts and a dashboard. He used a book titled "The Aluminum Trail," given to him by the China-Burma-India Hump Pilots Association, to identify the plane and the crew members. As always, he sent a report to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) in Hawaii and posted the details on his Web site, http://www.miarecoveries.org.

Six months later, Gary Zaetz came across Kuhles's Web site during a routine Google search for information about his uncle, Irwin "Zipper" Zaetz, the navigator on Hot as Hell. Gary Zaetz, a computer specialist from Cary, N.C., teamed with other relatives of the Hot as Hell crew and lobbied Congress and the Pentagon for a full year to send a team to recover from the site human remains such as bone fragments.

Last month, Zaetz traveled to India to conduct a Jewish and Christian prayer service for the dead crew members at the spot where the plane was found.

"The Hot as Hell families had no idea what had happened to the plane," said Zaetz, 54, a member of World War II Families for the Return of the Missing. "Was it shot down? Did it collide with another plane? Did it crash into the mountain? Did it catch fire? Were the members taken prisoners? Did anybody survive? Where did it go down?"

Because of Zaetz's efforts, two Indian air force officers and an eight-member JPAC team -- including a forensic anthropologist, a medic and an explosives specialist -- are in Arunachal Pradesh to conduct a preliminary survey of the Hot as Hell site.

"The team will take a systematic sampling approach at one aircraft crash site in an attempt to determine the scope of the debris field," Air Force Lt. Col. Wayne Perry, public affairs director of JPAC, said in an e-mail. "This is especially important as each of these crash sites involves a large, multiple-engine aircraft and many crew members."

The findings will lay the groundwork for the recovery mission JPAC will carry out when it returns next year for a full-site excavation. Perry said the team will not bring back large pieces of wreckage. But small personal belongings -- rings, watches, identification tags and pieces of uniform -- will be returned to the families.

On a recent day, Kuhles met an 80-year old witness of the C-46 crash, Techi Takhi.

"It was a winter evening. I was hunting for birds when I saw a giant ball of smoldering fire in the sky," Takhi said, pointing to the eastern sky above the village of Karroi. "I saw many dead bodies strewn all around. One man was still alive. I looked after him for three days and handed him over to an American rescue team."

After a pause, he asked Kuhles, "Why has it taken you Americans 60 years to come here looking for your dead?"