Entertainment, Movies - Navy Times

Cleaning up Tarawa leads Navy vet to a larger calling

Leon Cooper found his calling underneath a heap of disintegrating cardboard boxes, gull-pecked garbage bags and refuse on a tiny speck in the Pacific Ocean.

When Cooper, a World War II Navy lieutenant (senior grade), returned to Tarawa, an atoll in the Gilbert Islands, with filmmaker Steven Barber, his goal was to launch cleanup efforts on the beaches where more than 1,600 troops died in 1943 in the Battle of Tarawa.

As Cooper and Barber talked with locals, the focus of Cooper’s quest shifted to repatriating the remains of hundreds of troops buried in temporary graves in the wake of the battle and never recovered after the war.

“After spending several days at Tarawa, I learned things far more disturbing than the garbage on Red Beach. I learned that remains of maybe 500 or more, remains of Americans, were still there,” Cooper said.

Cooper’s discoveries on Tarawa set the framework for Barber’s 47-minute documentary, “Return to Tarawa: The Leon Cooper Story.”

The film sets a day-by-day account of the invasion, narrated by actor Ed Harris, against Cooper’s return to the beaches where he did battle. Black-and-white invasion footage mixes with images of abandoned material rusting amid garbage on a beach, as locals disclose evidence of Marines’ remains that still lay interred in the sand.

Cooper, a published war historian, is no stranger to activism: Before a chance meeting with Barber at a book fair, he was limited to a letter-writing campaign aimed at Congress to clean up the battle site that met with little success.

Since taking up the cause for repatriation, heading to the island and landing a screening of “Return to Tarawa” on the Military Channel this spring, though, Cooper hasn’t been so easy to ignore.

A pending House resolution concerning military funding for 2010 includes a call for the repatriation of casualties of the Battle of Tarawa, and in mid-September, a team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii went to Tarawa to locate remains.

The visit to the island inspired Cooper, who commanded a Higgins boat from the transport Harry Lee that took Marines to the front lines in Tarawa and five other major WWII battles, to broaden the scope of his activism.

“I got back home and looked into the matter and discovered that Tarawa was only a relatively small number of MIAs,” he said. “There were thousands and thousands more who were still lying where they fell in battlefields in New Guinea, the Philippines, the Solomons, the Marianas, Palau.”

Roughly 78,000 WWII servicemen are listed as missing in action, and an estimated 25,000 to 35,000 of their remains are recoverable, Cooper said. With two-thirds of those veterans his comrades in the Pacific theater, the 90-year-old veteran expanded his scope from a single battle to spearhead a movement to locate, identify and re-inter remains of servicemen still lost in the Pacific.