Students return from search for mass graves in Guadalcanal


VIRGINIA BEACH

The 66-year-old mystery surrounding the ill-fated Goettge Patrol of Guadalcanal lives on.

A team of Radford University anthropology and physics professors and students - including two from Virginia Beach - failed to find suspected mass graves of the 1942 Marine patrol that vanished early in that World War II island battle in the South Pacific, despite two weeks of scanning the ground with instruments and digging exploratory trenches.

"I think they knew it was like finding a needle in a haystack," said Sarah Clark, one of the Beach students, who returned home Thursday. "We bought shovels, and we had a pickax, and we dug a lot."

The team hoped to find Japanese-dug graves and bring closure to the 22 long-dead Marines' families. But they still learned much, Clark said, about the former battlefield's topography, coastline changes that may have swept away buried remains, and some promising spots for any future searchers.

"I'm not too down on this," she said, "because I feel like we just started something."

Matthew Bowers, (757) 222-3893, matthew.bowers@pilotonline.com

Ellie