On the morning that the crocodile was killed Kathy and Barbara had gone to the telecommunications office and sent another wire to the Peace Corps in Addis Ababa. They then went down to the river where the reptile was killed. It was 9 a.m. Kathy would write home, “In order to get to the place where the crocodile finally ended up we had to wade through waist deep water for twenty feet in two different places. The crocodile was big and ugly, about four meters, which is about 13 feet long. Barbara and I looked at it and left, she went back to the house and I went to the telecommunications office to wait for an answer to our cable. The rest is pretty gruesome.”
In his report, first published in 1973, Luthy would say what he found when he cut open the crocodile with his hunting knife. It is all  detailed in Eyelids of Morning. I won’t restate it. In his account Steve Buff would simply write: “Without speaking, I helped one of the other PCVs extract Bill Olson’s remains and put them in a box. Grisly as this task was, it was made somewhat less wrenching by our never having met Olson. Yet, he was one of us, an American and a fellow PCV, a young man killed by a monster, and I was numb. I moved the box a short distance and it was later taken back to Addis Ababa by Olson’s companions on an Ethiopian plane diverted to Gambella for this purpose.”
While EAL (Ethiopian Airlines) planes landed in Gambella only on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the Peace Corps had been able to reroute a flight from Dembidolla into Gambella to pick up the PCVs and the body of Bill Olson.
The plane was a a C-47, unpressurized and unbearably hot. Kathleen Coskran remembers the flight back to Addis as long and rough, and when they arrived in the capital at 6 p.m. Peace Corps staff members were waiting for them and they were all rushed to the Peace Corps office where they had to go through the whole story from the time they landed in Gambella to the time they left. On Saturday afternoon there was a memorial service for Bill Olson at the Lutheran church in Addis Ababa.
The PCVs who had been with Bill in Gambella wrote his parents and heard later that Bill’s family asked that all of his clothes and books be given away to students. Kathy would end her letter home to her mother with: “It was a horrible thing, but it was just an accident like any accident anywhere else, and Africa is not to be blamed for it.”
Steve Buff would finish his account, written some thirty plus years after the tragedy, with this observation:
“There is one image that remains even more vivid and constant than the rest. After I had finished my solemn task by the carcass of the crocodile, I looked up and saw Evelyn, the woman I would marry after our Peace Corps tour.
“She was sitting on a log a short distance away, weeping. Sitting opposite and facing her was an elderly villager, also silently weeping, possibly for relatives he had lost, for himself, or out of sympathy. There was no doubt that he was weeping in concert with her. In that most exotic setting by the Baro River, with people so distant from us in history and culture, those mutual tears that finally brought home to me the tragic death of our colleague, had a profound and lasting effect on both of us.”
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Thanks for sharing this transformative moment with us Steve and John C.
Wow. Your telling of this heartbreaking story honors the tragedy, John. That last scene just gripped my heart. Wow.
Thanks for the story.
Sad, difficult, and very well-told.
I met an RPCV who was there and he claimed to have slides of the autopsy on the croc. What he then described to me was too macabre and I never followed up on his offer to look at the slides. You should also know that crocs grab their victims and spin them in the water to disorient them, i order to immobilizes and subdue them. So, death would have been quick.
Once again , as we approach the 50th, we do not have a proper memorial for those that lost their lives in Peace Corps service.
David Crozier and Larry Radley , Colombia I ’s were the first two to perish in a plane crash in 1962. Crozier wrote his parents a week before the crash saying” He would rather die in the service of peace for his country than with a rifle in the jungle of Viet Nam.”
BTW, the last memorial plaque I saw was in the Peace Corps building , one of those plaques similar to the ” Employee of the Month,” found at most Burger King’s. I suppose the official Peace Coprs reply is ” the lawyers say we can’t spend money on a memorial to fallen PCV”s.”
DG
Colombia I (1961-1963)
Dennis,
There is a project to remember Fallen Volunteers. Here is the link:
http://fpcv.org/
I believe 281 PCVs had fallen as of December, 2010. A few of those died shortly after arriving home, the result of injury and/or illness. All of their names are included in Peace Corps Chronology 1961-2010. The new second edition has an improved index to aid researchers.
Hello John, It isn’t that it hasn’t occurred to people to remember these PCVs who have died during service, and afterward. And more than a plaque on the wall of a Washington office lobby.
I personally, with offers of help from a handful of individual RPCVs, had offered to create a small bronze medallion to be made available to families and survivors, which could be affixed to a tombstone, in acknowledgement of the person’s service. This idea was based on what military veterans’ organizations have done in the past, before the government started providing GI grave markers. The design would have a wreath for those dying during service.
This would be done solely at my expense, with assistance from any others who saw merit in the gesture. No cost to the government.
I got to the point of obtaining estimates from bronze foundries, and designs from artists.
The response I got from Peace Corps officials was profound indifference, which finally descended into warnings about whether the PC logo could be incorporated into the design, and NO suggestion that the PC Agency would ever make available the names of next of kin, without which the program could not possibly work.
The National PC Assoc graciously consented to allow THEIR logo in the design, but the idea never was allowed to reach the organization’s directors, even for endorsement and encouragement. No cost. OR it did, and they killed it. No suggestion ever came that this purported representative of RPCVs would argue the case with the PC Agency.
It tells us a little about what former Senator Chris Dodd was thinking, when he scolded the PC Agency in hearings for it’s excessive bureaucratisation of the ideal. The Senator should have included BOTH organizations. Even at no cost, it was a problem or waste of time, for all of them.
I remember poignantly, talking to the parents of an RPCV in my home state (NM) whose daughter had died in PC service, and then to China RPCVs who mourned the loss of a beloved host-country official, whom they credited with making the China project a success, and wanted to give such a medallion to her family, as a token from a grateful America. I could only say “I’m sorry”.
Statues in Washington that nobody ever sees, the big deal today, may be a great idea for the NPCA. Three million dollars is a trivial concern. But for me I would rather a person a century from now, walking through a country cemetery, would see a small medallion on a tombstone: “Died while a member of the United States Peace Corps, in the service of his country.” Her kids might ask, “What was the Peace Corps, Mom ?” And she might reply, “It was a long time ago, when people thought that peace in the world was possible, if everybody understood one another.” The child might respond: “They must have been nice people.” Then the child observes “His name is the same as ours !”
Best regards, John Turnbull NMPCA Santa Fe
Have you been touch with an organization called: “Fallen Peace Corps Volunteers Memorial Project, Inc.” If you google it, you can find their website. They might really be receptive to your idea.
Good Luck.
Replying to “Joey’s” question, yes, I had communicated with the Fallen PCV organization, and the founder expressed interest in receiving such a medallion, and affixing it, there was no gesture toward supporting the effort, suggesting to me that maintaining the web-site was pretty much the limit of their interest. A long time ago, before the NPCA came into existence, there was a thing called the “National Council of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers” where stuff like this might be entertained, but those days are long gone. John Turnbull NMPCA
Good luck with your efforts.
Bill Olsen was my cousin. His mother was my paternal aunt. She just passed away a very short time ago at the age of 91. I can remember hearing of Billy’s death at the time and finding it extremely hard to understand, but being that I was only a teen , younger than Billy , and the fact that I knew how devastating it was for his parents, I never asked anything about it. I am so grateful to finally know the story, as hard as it was to read. It will give me some sort of closure to a very sad chapter in our family’s history. I too find it very sad that our ancestor’s may not realize the meaning of the Peace Corps. May God bless you all.