Sandy Bonnyman's path to Santa Fe was anything but straight, and his stay in the city he called home was short. When he left, to join the American fight against Japan in World War II, he never returned.

"We always thought he was going to come back," said his oldest daughter, Frances Evans of Boulder, Colo., who was 7 when Bonnyman joined the U.S. Marines.

Gold lettering adorns a memorial stone just inside the main gate at Santa Fe National Cemetery, in recognition of his posthumously awarded Congressional Medal of Honor. But his bones still lie beneath the coral sands of Tarawa Atoll, where he died Nov. 22, 1943.

Now, thanks to the work of independent researchers and a U.S. military program to retrieve the remains of servicemen and women lost or left behind, 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman Jr.'s remains might one day come home.

In August, the Honolulu-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command undertook an archaeological exploration of six sites on crowded, polluted Betio, the island where the bloody battle took place in 1943.

The JPAC mission is expected to continue for at least the next two months.

As Sandy Bonnyman's only living grandson, I'd long wanted to go to Tarawa, where he battled scores of Japanese who were harrying Marines on "Red Beach Three," helping his comrades put the bunker out of commission.

So when I learned that JPAC would excavate areas where my grandfather's remains might lie, I made plans to visit Tarawa in August.

Nearly 67 years after more than 1,000 Marines — and nearly 5,000 Japanese — were killed and hastily buried, as many as 300 Americans may still lie entombed beneath the slums of Betio.

At least two independent, civilian military historians believe they have found my grandfather's final resting place, though they differ on the exact site. One is beneath pavement at the main intersection in Betio; the other is about 100 yards west of the bunker on private land, inland from Red Beach Three, where he came ashore.

Tarawa is oppressively hot, humid, filthy, overpopulated and poor. Garbage and human feces litter the beaches. The reef across which Marines waded 800 yards into deadly Japanese fire reeks like a sewer at low tide.

Hulking "Bonnyman's Bunker," where my grandfather died, still stands, covered by a weed-choked hump of sand and spattered with human waste.

Even so, seeing it made me shiver. Walking the long reef approach and seeing Red Beaches One and Two from 800 yards away gave me a deep, sad appreciation for the courage it took to wade into such a fiery, smoky hell.

JPAC did not excavate the potential Bonnyman grave sites while I was there Aug. 10-17, and it remains unknown whether his remains will ever be found. At any rate, the agency wisely does not discuss names or individuals when doing the hard manual labor and meticulous — even boring — work of archaeology.

"There is a long process we have to go through before we can positively identify any remains we may find," said Gregory Fox, lead archaeologist for the mission on Tarawa. And that can take months or even years.

If Bonnyman's remains are unearthed, his youngest daughter, Alexandra Bonnyman Prejean of Hana, Hawaii — who attended Santa Fe High School in 1955-56 — said she would like a ceremony to be held in Santa Fe.

"Santa Fe is where he lived, so it's only right," she said, adding that she would like to see his remains buried in his hometown of Knoxville, Tenn.

Bonnyman was born in Atlanta and attended Princeton University, where he played guard on the 1928 Tigers football team.

But Santa Fe was his last home, and there he cut a dashing figure.

Peripatetic, rangy — at 6-foot-1 he towered over a family of much shorter men — and handsome, he quit a job as a salesman for his family's Blue Diamond Coal Co. in Tennessee and hit the road in search of fulfillment.

He left his two daughters (Josephine is no longer living; Prejean was born in Santa Fe) and his wife, Josephine Bell Bonnyman, with her American relatives in Mexico.

"He went north through Texas looking for something to do with his life and landed in New Mexico," Evans said.

He bought the mine in Santa Rosa, but his wife refused to live there: "It was supposedly just outhouses," Evans said of the local plumbing.

Josephine Bell Bonnyman and her two young daughters stayed in the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque for a week. Then she turned her eye north.

"As soon as she went over La Bajada and saw the beautiful little village nestled at the bottom of the mountain, she knew that's where she wanted to live," daughter Frances Evans recalled. Bonnyman moved his family to Santa Fe in 1939.

He worked the mine during the week and returned home on weekends. The family lived in a series of rented houses, finally settling at 570 E. Garcia St.

Evans was just a small girl when he died and has few distinct memories of her father. She recalled attending church with him each Sunday at St. Francis Cathedral, now the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, and going to the Capitol Pharmacy afterward for a chocolate milkshake.

Although a devout Catholic, Bonnyman clearly had a wild side. Evans recalled when he came home after being shot in a bar fight somewhere in Santa Fe.

"I remember him lying on the couch with some kind of injury. But I don't recall the details," she said.

Bonnyman and his wife enjoyed playing tennis and socializing with friends in town, including the James Russell family and the Catron family. (James Russell took over management of the copper mine when Bonnyman left for the Marines. He later married Josephine; they divorced in 1963. Josephine Russell died in Santa Fe in 1976.)

Evans recalled that Pope Pius XII had given Santa Feans a dispensation from meatless Fridays because fish was so hard to come by. That didn't stop her father from taking his family on trout-fishing expeditions.

"We'd go up to the Pecos. We'd catch trout and cook them in a pan. They were wonderful," she said.

As a 31-year-old father of three and owner of a defense-related mine, Bonnyman didn't have to join the war effort. But as soon as he heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was little doubt that he would fight.

"He always wanted to jump right in," Evans said. "And he was very patriotic."

He entered the Marines in April 1942 in San Diego.

"I thought of you when I went to Mass this morning Baby and realized how much I would have loved taking you to Easter Mass at the Cathedral," he wrote to his oldest daughter in March 1943 from a "little country on this side of the world," probably Guadalcanal. "I know you went with Cassamira (the family cook) and I hope you went to Communion."

The last letter Evans has from her father is dated May 1943, just six months before his death.

"He was very loving and kind. ... I was very proud when I got to walk with him," Evans said. "We were all devoted to him and very sad when he left."

Contact Clay Bonnyman Evans at claybonnyman@yahoo.com.



Content for captions: Streets, a bowling alley, a bridge near Knoxville and a merchant marine ship (now decommissioned) were named in Bonnyman's honor.