---
title: "Emory Nakashima-Rook, Who Went Back Down The Shaft, Dies At 70"
dek: "For forty-five years he neither confirmed nor denied that he was the soldier in Phil Schneider's account. On tape, embargoed until his death, he places a uniformed detail on the level and carries two injured men into the cage."
kind: obit (Obituary)
desk: Off-World
author: Ambrose Teague (fictional)
published: 2026-08-25T07:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/obit-emory-nakashima-rook
tags: obituary, Dulce, Phil Schneider, 1979, service records, witnesses
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

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

*For forty-five years he neither confirmed nor denied that he was the soldier in Phil Schneider's account. On tape, embargoed until his death, he places a uniformed detail on the level and carries two injured men into the cage.*

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.

> I did not push him. I had my hand flat on his chest and I walked him backwards into the cage, and I have never once said that out loud.
>
> — Emory Nakashima-Rook, second session, 14 May 2024

## 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.

> **Figure:** Where the Army says he was, 1974 to 1981, and the nine weeks it does not — see https://theyburied.com/article/obit-emory-nakashima-rook

## 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.

## Sources (invented)

- Emory Nakashima-Rook, Combat engineer, U.S. Army, 1974–1981; journeyman welder — Interviewed at his home over four sessions, eleven hours recorded, on the single condition that nothing run until after his death (April–September 2024)
- Alta Nakashima-Rook, His daughter and executor — Released his DD-214 and DA Form 20 unredacted; confirmed the embargo in writing (5–11 August 2026)
- Genevieve Oyelowo-Stanhope, Chief, Organizational History Division, Department of the Army — Written questions twice, with a photograph of the form and the designator attached; replied in writing at length both times (12 and 30 July 2026)
- Vivienne Okonjo-Halvard, Retired shaft engineer, thirty-one years on hoisting plant — Paid $2,400 to read a transcript with every date, place name and proper noun removed; report published with this story (June 2026)
- Eleven recorded Phil Schneider lectures, 1993–1995, Private collection: four cassettes, two VHS transfers, one reel — Borrowed and transcribed by this newspaper; transcripts published in full alongside this story (March 2026)

## Documents cited (invented)

- PX-1930: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1930

## What we could not confirm

- The third man. Nakashima-Rook went back along the drift for him and never had a name to give us, because he says he was never given one. We asked three commands for the roster of the provisional detachment. All three returned no records responsive, which is a statement about their filing and not about the roster.
- Where the shaft is. He would not give a location and we do not believe he had one to give — he travelled both ways in the back of a covered truck with the rear laced shut. Our reconstruction from his stated drive times and one remembered cattle grid gives an ellipse about forty kilometres across. Archuleta Mesa is inside it. So are two gas fields, a ski area and a great deal of nothing.
- The burns. He described two men with injuries he could not account for and declined, four separate times, to say what he thought had caused them. We asked four times. This newspaper has no independent evidence on that point and is not going to supply any.

## Right of reply

**Genevieve Oyelowo-Stanhope, chief of the Organizational History Division, Department of the Army** (Replied both times. Printed entire and unedited, including the passages about this newspaper.):

> You have written to me twice and both times you have used the word gap. It is not a gap. Your own photograph shows a code in the box. A gap is an empty box, and this division spends a good part of its working life on empty boxes, which are usually a clerk with a cold.
> 
> WKQZAA is a unit identification code. It is an accounting device. It tells a finance office where to charge a man's pay and it tells a personnel office where to send his file. It is not a unit in the sense my office uses the word, and this is the distinction your questions keep walking past. Lineage and honors are prepared for units that are constituted — that is, brought into being by a document, given a number, given a history that can be carried forward. A provisional element is not constituted. A commander with the authority to do so forms it out of people he already has, it does the thing, and it stops.
> 
> So when you ask why there is no successor, you are asking why a thing that was never born did not have children. Nothing succeeds a provisional element. That is the whole of its administrative attraction and always has been.
> 
> I will now tell you something you did not ask for, because I would rather you had it from me than from the second half of your own reporting. There are, in the files this division holds, forty-one codes of this pattern bearing dates between 1974 and 1984 against which we hold no station, no strength return and no closing document. I cannot tell you what any of them did. I am not being coy; I do not know, and the papers that would tell me are not in this building and may not be in any building. What I will say, because it is a fact about forms and I am the person who understands forms, is that a code with no station entered against it is not an oversight. The station field is not optional. Somebody sat down and entered nothing there, and entering nothing is a decision that a person makes.
> 
> That is as far as I can go and it is further than my predecessor would have gone.
> 
> On the rest of it. I have read your draft. Mr. Nakashima-Rook's hearing loss is real and is on his record and I am sorry for it, and I would ask you to consider how many ways a twenty-three-year-old combat engineer can lose two steps of hearing in a summer, most of them dull. A man's assignment history is evidence about the man. It is not evidence about a mountain, and the second half of your story treats it as though it were.
> 
> I am sorry for his family. I would not print the last four paragraphs. I expect you will.

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They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.