Where They Lay : A Forensic Expedition in the Jungles of Laos

In this gripping true-grit adventure story, award-winning journalist Earl Swift accompanies an elite scientific team on a search for a military pilot lost thirty years ago in Southeast Asia. The recovery mission is part of an effort by the military's Central Identification Laboratory--Hawaii (CILHI), the largest forensic lab in the world, whose methods combine the latest in forensic technology with old-fashioned bushwhacking, archaeology, and detective work. The quest to find Major Jack Barker and his three-man helicopter crew brings the team to deeply impoverished Laos, where they comb the jungle floor for clues to the decades-old crash amid vipers, monsoons, and unexploded bombs. Expertly recounted, Where They Lay is a suspenseful, often harrowing tale of mud, sweat and science.

Earl Swift joined his first recovery mission in Southeast Asia, as a staff writer for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, in July 2000. He was taken by chopper to a dig site in Vietnam’s Quang Nam Province, along the border with Laos, to join a team searching for a Green Beret sergeant lost in a freak air accident in 1966. He returned to Southeast Asia twice in 2001, once on assignment for Parade and once to camp in the jungle of southeastern Laos. The only journalist ever to accompany a search expedition from start to finish, Swift has also flown two missions in Papua New Guinea to visit recovery teams in search of missing World War II air crews. He is currently a staff writer for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, and his work has also appeared in Parade and The Best Newspaper Writing 2000. Where They Lay was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.