Emory Nakashima-Rook, Who Went Back Down The Shaft, Dies At 70

BAYARD, N.M. — Emory Nakashima-Rook was twenty-three years old, a combat engineer with a mine rescue certificate from Beckley, West Virginia, and for nine weeks in the summer of 1979 the United States Army does not say where he was.

It says who he belonged to. Det 4, Security Support Element (Provisional), unit identification code WKQZAA. The Army's Organizational History Division holds no lineage for that designator, no station of assignment, and no successor unit.

He died on 3 August at his home in Bayard, New Mexico, at 70. His daughter says the cause was heart failure.

In April 2024 he gave this newspaper eleven hours on the record, across four sessions, on a single condition: that we wait until he was dead. We waited twenty-six months.

The man at the lift

Between 1993 and 1995 the engineer Phil Schneider gave a series of public lectures describing a firefight underground in 1979. We hold eleven of those recordings, borrowed from a private collection and transcribed in full.

In nine of them he describes the man who got him out — a Green Beret who put a hand on his chest and shoved him backwards into the lift. The account does not change in any material particular across two years of telling. Schneider never gave a name.

For forty-five years, researchers who had worked out who the man probably was got the same sentence out of him. Four of them have given us their notes. The sentence is: "I've got nothing for you."

What he said

He was told it was mine rescue augmentation. He was briefed at Fort Carson, flown to Kirtland, and driven roughly four hours in the back of a covered truck laced shut at the rear.

There was a detail on the level that was not his. Men in a uniform he did not recognise, carrying rifles, who did not speak to him and were not introduced.

He rode the cage down three times.

On the second trip he carried two injured men into the cage himself, one over his shoulder and one dragged by the collar, and sent them up alone.

On the third he went back along the drift for a man he had been told was still in there, and came out without him.

The engineer we hired

We paid Vivienne Okonjo-Halvard, who spent thirty-one years on hoisting plant, $2,400 to read a transcript with every date, place name and proper noun taken out of it. She was told only that it was an account of an underground emergency.

Her report runs with this story. He says cage, not lift. He says the chairs came out under the deck. He says the men on the landing had self-rescuers on their belts and one of them was upside down in its pouch. Those are not the words of a man describing a building.

From his stated cage cycles — two minutes forty at what he calls man speed — she puts the hoisting depth between 590 and 780 metres, and says plainly that this establishes he was down a deep shaft and not which one.

One caution, and it is ours rather than hers. He first read the Bennewitz material PX-1930 in 1991, and told us it was "wrong the way a drawing of a horse by somebody who has only heard about horses is wrong". Those papers put level seven at 790 metres. He had that number available to him for thirty-three years before he gave us a cage cycle, and a reader is entitled to weigh it.

We weighed it, and it does not fall the way a reader might expect. Okonjo-Halvard's window is 590 to 780 metres, built from a timing whose significance he was never told. The one figure he could have copied is the one figure his own account rules out.

The nine weeks

His daughter released the record unredacted. Every other entry on it is ordinary — schools, ratings, a company, a station, a signature.

Between 12 June and 14 August 1979 there is a code and nothing else.

He came back to the same platoon with a hearing profile entered as H3. In May he had been H1.

What the Army says

Genevieve Oyelowo-Stanhope, who runs the Organizational History Division, wrote to us twice. She denies that WKQZAA identifies a unit in any sense her office recognises, and explains convincingly why. Her letter is printed below, entire.

She also volunteers this, unasked: that her files hold forty-one codes of the same pattern dated between 1974 and 1984 with no station, no strength return and no closing document; that she cannot tell us what any of them did; and that a code with no station is not an oversight, because the station field is not optional and somebody has to sit down and enter nothing in it.

The stairs

He came home, finished his time, and welded for forty-one years out of one hall in Bayard.

He would not use a lift. Not once, his daughter says, in the whole of her life. In 1994 he climbed thirteen floors of an Albuquerque hotel in a suit to watch a nephew graduate and arrived wet through and cheerful.

He is survived by her, by a son in Silver City, and by four grandchildren.

He never got a name for the third man. He asked twice, in 1979, and was told to go home.