Uncomfortable facts about the AT hiker’s vanishing

 

Geraldine "Gerry" Anita Largay on the left.

Geraldine “Gerry” Anita Largay on the left. Photo courtesy of the Maine Warden Service.

This week marks two years since Appalachian Trail hiker Geraldine “Gerry” Largay disappeared in the woods of Maine, so reporters are filing their obligatory follow-up articles. Astoundingly, but not unpredictably, none of the mainstream media accounts I’ve seen this week mention the disturbing revelation contained in Hutch Brown’s cover story for The Bollard this month: the fact Largay vanished right where the trail borders a secretive Navy training facility made infamous for its program’s association with torture.

To be clear, Brown found no direct evidence that staff, employees or students at the Navy SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) School in Redington Township were involved in Largay disappearance. But he was troubled by the utter lack of curiosity about the program’s potential connection to this case displayed by law enforcement agencies and the Maine media. As the guy who helped Hutch research his story and then published it, I certainly share his concerns.

I learned something profound about human nature in the mid-1990s when I was an activist with Greenpeace, knocking on doors all over upstate New York to tell folks about environmental problems and raise money for the organization’s efforts to keep those issues in the public’s consciousness. The principal reason people don’t want to acknowledge, much less actively address, very real threats to our way of life (be it nuclear war, climate change or dioxin pollution) is because doing so is a bummer, to put it mildly.

To put it less mildly, it can literally be crippling to contemplate the horrors associated with nuclear or ecological catastrophes. So we avoid thinking too much about facts that make us uncomfortable and allow ourselves to be distracted by the bread and circus of everyday life (“Hey, look — a cook at a diner yelled at a screaming baby!”).

This behavior doesn’t mean we’re bad people; it just means we’re people. But we can be better people by doing what we can to help others and clean up the messes we’ve made.

Before that can happen, however, we have to know there’s a problem. That’s where the media and groups like Greenpeace come in, pointing out uncomfortable facts that we don’t want to hear, but need to know.

Here are some uncomfortable facts about Largay’s case. Other than fellow hikers — most, if not all of whom have been accounted for — the only other people we know were in the area when she vanished were at the SERE facility. Much as we like to believe that members of our armed forces are unfailingly virtuous and honest, the uncomfortable fact is that some of them are not. It’s also a fact that some trainers and students at the Redington facility are not enlisted personnel, they’re private contractors — and soldiers of fortune are also capable of very bad behavior.

I can hear some of you protesting already: the military would never cover up something like this! Sorry, but the facts don’t support that comforting belief. Our military has a long and sordid history of covering up or denying things it’s done that would cast it in a bad light. In fact, that’s exactly what happened at the SERE facility in Redington in the 1970s.

As this paper reported on its front page in 1976, officials from the Navy on up to then-Sen. Margaret Chase Smith accused a Maine Times journalist of lying when the publication ran the account of a Navy diver who escaped from the Redington facility in 1972 and revealed that he was tortured there. Many people simply refused to believe that our government was torturing our own troops (an uncomfortable fact, to be sure); others, like Smith, likely knew better and were simply lying to protect the program from unwanted scrutiny and criticism.

The terrible shooting rampage last week in Chattanooga brings up another disquieting possibility in this case. Like military recruiting offices, Maine’s SERE facility is a “soft target” for anyone determined to harm our military. CNN reported Wednesday that shooter Mohammad Abdulazeez “was displeased with the U.S. government, particularly its war on terror.”

As I wrote in last week’s column, the SERE program is closely associated with the aspect of this ongoing war that’s outraged people here and abroad: the torture of suspected terrorists. If someone with Abdulazeez’s views harmed Largay inside or just outside the SERE facility, the only way their act of terror could succeed would be if people knew about it. Accordingly, the only way to ensure such an act failed would be to keep it from the public.

That’s a deeply troubling possibility, but someone has to explore it. In my view, continuing to report on this case without even mentioning the SERE facility’s existence goes beyond irresponsibility into the realm of potential complicity.

Chris Busby

About Chris Busby

Chris Busby is editor and publisher of The Bollard, a monthly magazine about Portland. He writes a weekly column for the BDN.