Lost in Shangri-la

Chapter 6

CHARMS

MOURNING WOULD WAIT. As McCollom and Decker stood over Captain Good’s body, the exploding fuel tanks spread the fire closer to the three surviving women, threatening to trap them in a ring of flames.

Margaret saw the impending danger. She yelled to McCollom, who was still being shadowed by the woozy Decker: “Lieutenant McCollom, we have to get out of here. We’re going to be surrounded by fire if we don’t.”

Even as he hurried, searching for a path to safety, McCollom fought to maintain composure. No one under his command would panic. He responded calmly: “You’re all right.”

Margaret saw a small rock ledge at the edge of a cliff, some twenty yards down the jungle-covered mountain from the wreckage. She clawed her way toward it. From the sky, the rain forest had looked to Margaret like an inviting green cushion, but now on the ground she discovered it was something else entirely—a botanist’s dream and a crash survivor’s nightmare.

Covering its rocky, muddy, uneven floor was a snarling mesh of giant ferns, vines, shrubs, fallen tree trunks, and spongy mosses, always wet. Thorns and spines and saw-toothed leaves ensnared her legs and tore her clothes and skin. Huge rhododendron bushes filled the spaces where light shone through a multilayered canopy of leaves. Above her head was a jumble of trees—giant eucalyptus, banyan, palm, bamboo, yoli myrtle, scrub oak, pandanus, tropical chestnut, soaring araucaria pines, evergreen casuarina, and hundreds of other species—some more prominent at higher altitudes, some at lower, the tallest of them reaching more than a hundred feet into the sky.

Gnarled webs of thick woody vines, heavy beards of lichen, spindly climbers, and aptly named strangler figs knitted the trees to one another and hung from branches like beaded curtains. Orchids sprouted everywhere, in hundreds of species, with flaming colors and strange, erotic shapes. The lush flora created a luxuriant bouquet, as the jungle carried out its endless cycle of birth, growth, decay, death, and new birth.

In the skies and the trees were hawks, owls, parrots, rails, swifts, flycatchers, warblers, and perhaps the most wondrous avian creatures in Shangri-La: color-drenched birds of paradise. The jungle had no predatory mammals, but rodents and small marsupials scurried in the underbrush. Salamanders, lizards, and snakes worthy of Eden, notably a python that grew to fifteen feet or more, represented the reptile kingdom.

Many of the natural wonders had never been seen by anyone other than natives. Margaret could have discovered new species simply by reaching out her hand. But in a diary Margaret began to keep shortly after the crash, she admitted that she was too preoccupied to appreciate the show. “Everything in the jungle had tentacles,” she wrote, “and I was too busy fighting them to enjoy nature.”

AS MARGARET CLIMBED over the fat trunk of a tree mowed down by the plane, it dawned on her that she wasn’t wearing shoes—they’d either been blown off or burned away. She stopped in her tracks, sat down on the tree’s jagged stump, and took stock. She pulled off her half-socks to inspect her feet. Her right foot was badly cut and bleeding. To her surprise, her left sock didn’t have a mark on it, but the bottom of her left foot was burned—heat had passed through the fabric to sear her skin. Both legs had deep burns, and her right hand was cut and bloody. The left side of her face was blistered from the heat.

Margaret pulled off her khaki shirt. After that came her cotton bra. For a moment she was as topless as the native women she’d hoped to see. She put her shirt back on, buttoning it to the very top, as though readying herself for inspection during basic training back at Fort Oglethorpe. She tore the bra in half and tried to bandage her feet, but it did little good. Margaret unbuttoned her pants, slipped them down her burned legs, and set them aside. She bent over and pulled off the mud-brown rayon underwear that was standard issue for WACs—white underwear was banned by the military, out of fear that it would attract enemy bombers when hanging to dry on jungle clotheslines. Margaret pulled her pants back on over her naked bottom. She intended to use the panties’ silky fabric to make bandages for herself and the other survivors.

As she finished dressing, Margaret saw McCollom leading the way down the rough path she’d followed minutes beforehand, carrying Eleanor Hanna on his back, her arms draped over his shoulders. Eleanor’s clothes had been burned off, but somehow her Chinese coin bracelet still dangled from her wrist. On the way down, McCollom lost his footing, slipped, and landed awkwardly on a small tree. He picked himself up, brushed himself off, and pulled Eleanor onto his back once more. McCollom had emerged from the crash unhurt, but he had just suffered his first injury: a broken rib. He told no one.

Ken Decker and Laura Besley trailed close behind. When all five survivors were together, Margaret still wasn’t thinking clearly. Although she’d removed her underpants to make bandages, she immediately forgot about that plan. She asked McCollom for a handkerchief, which she used to wrap her lacerated hand, binding it tight to stem the bleeding.

As they walked on, Decker tried to help McCollom with Eleanor Hanna. When they reached the ledge Margaret had seen, the five of them sat there, catching their breath, collecting themselves, and thinking about what had happened—to them, to their friends, and in McCollom’s case, to his beloved twin. They were about nine thousand feet above sea level, and as they sat there, the late-afternoon temperature began to fall. Rain followed, and they learned firsthand why the jungle was called a rain forest. Small trees gave them some cover, but after a short time their clothes soaked through to their skin, chilling them to the bone and compounding their misery.

After a brief rest, McCollom and Decker left the three women on the ledge and climbed back up toward the wreckage. McCollom’s Eagle Scout survival training kicked into gear. He hoped to find supplies to build a shelter, and also food, clothing, and weapons. He had a lighter and a small pocketknife he carried everywhere, but those wouldn’t be much use if they ran into the giant, spear-carrying natives they’d expected to see only from the air.

McCollom recalled that one of the plane’s crew members carried a .45-caliber pistol. He’d also noticed that the plane carried blankets, jugs of water, and crates of Cracker Jack–size boxes of K-rations. The ready-to-eat meals might include entrées such as ham and cheese, or beef and pork loaf; hard biscuits or crackers; bouillon cubes; instant coffee; powdered lemon drinks; heat-resistant chocolate bars; hard candy; and small packs of cigarettes, books of matches, and chewing gum. Some K-rations might contain one of the greatest military luxuries of all: toilet paper.

But when McCollom and Decker reached the plane, they discovered that none of those items could be salvaged. The cockpit and much of the cabin were still on fire. Fed by the plane’s fuel, the wreckage would burn until the middle of the next day. The fire guaranteed that nothing would be left intact that hadn’t already been destroyed by a series of explosions following a two-hundred-mile-per-hour crash into a tree-covered mountain. As McCollom surveyed the scene, he understood that in one sense they’d been lucky. On one side of the wreckage was a fifteen-foot boulder; if they’d hit the rock head-on, no one would have survived.

Another piece of relatively good news was that the Gremlin Special’s tail section, after separating on impact, hadn’t caught fire or exploded. The tail rested at an odd angle by a ravine, jammed against a tree stump and swathed in vines at the edge of a steep drop. The jagged opening where the tail had torn away from the rest of the plane pointed upward toward the sky, like the hungry mouth of a baby bird.

McCollom climbed up to the tail’s opening and pulled himself inside. He found a duffel bag with a bright yellow, self-inflating life raft, two heavy tarpaulins designed as covers for the open raft, and a few basic supplies. He tossed the bag outside and climbed out. He inflated the life raft and took inventory of the supplies. He counted several small tins of water and a first-aid kit with bandages, a few vials of morphine, vitamins, boric acid to disinfect wounds, and sulfathiazole tablets to fight infection. The only food was Charms, fruit-flavored hard candies made from sugar and corn syrup that were a staple of soldiers’ rations. McCollom found a signaling mirror and, even better, a signal pistol he could use to draw the attention of searchers. There was just one problem: he couldn’t find any flares.

McCollom and Decker hauled the life raft and the supplies over toward the ledge. Along the way, the raft snagged on something sharp and deflated. When they reached the WACs, they cleaned and bandaged their wounds and gave them shots of water to wash down the anti-infection tablets. McCollom put the flattened life raft under Laura Besley and Eleanor Hanna and covered them with a tarpaulin. As he tucked them in, Eleanor smiled. Again, she said, “Let’s sing.” McCollom gave her morphine, hoping it would help her to sleep.

The ledge was too small for all five survivors to stretch out, so Margaret and the two men moved a few yards away to another ledge. Exhausted, they wrapped themselves in the second tarpaulin. A pack of cigarettes had survived the crash in McCollom’s pocket, so he flicked his lighter and they shared a few drags in silence. As darkness fell, they could see through the hanging vines and thick foliage that the plane was still aflame. They huddled together, bracing for a cold, wet night.

Several times that first night in the jungle, they heard a plane overhead and caught a glimpse of signal flares. But they had no way to let the searchers know they were alive under the thick canopy. Margaret wasn’t even sure the lights were flares; they were so far off she thought they might be lightning. They talked hopefully about rescue. Privately, McCollom had already begun wondering if they’d have to hike all 150-plus miles back to Hollandia.

Now and then, in the inky black night, the jungle erupted with noises that sounded to the survivors like the yaps and barks of wild dogs.

THE NEXT MORNING, Monday, May 14, McCollom rose first and went to check on Eleanor Hanna and Laura Besley. As he knelt by the injured WACs, what he found didn’t surprise him. He returned to the ledge where he’d slept beside Margaret Hastings and Ken Decker.

“Eleanor’s dead,” he said quietly.

McCollom went back to the other ledge and carefully wrapped the body in a tarpaulin. They had no tools for burial, and no energy to try, so he laid the remains of Eleanor Hanna at the base of a nearby tree.

The silence was broken by Laura Besley, who’d sat next to Eleanor on the plane and slept beside her all night: “I can’t stop shaking,” she said.

Hurt and in shock, chilled and wet, thirsty and hungry, sore and tired, Margaret and Decker realized that they were shaking, too.

They couldn’t do anything about Eleanor, and there was little they could do for themselves or each other. McCollom resolved to ration their water, so they each took a few sips with a vitamin pill and a few Charms to tide them over. Their shaking continued.

After their paltry breakfast, McCollom and Decker returned to the plane. Back in the tail section, they found two cots, another life raft, two more large yellow tarps and one small one, two compasses, a heavy cotton flying suit, more first-aid kits, a signaling mirror, and seventeen cans of water, each one containing about one cup of liquid. Decker dug into a tool kit and brought out a roll of black electrical tape and a pair of pliers. They carried their bounty back to the ledge.

Laura’s crying and shaking continued, though she didn’t complain of being in pain. McCollom gave her the flight suit for warmth and told her to lie on one of the cots. She was thirsty and wanted water, but each time she drank, she’d spit it up. She looked fine, and her burns seemed superficial. McCollom feared that she’d suffered internal injuries.

Margaret took a closer look at her legs and discovered rings of burned skin, three to six inches wide, around each calf. To her surprise, they weren’t as painful as they looked. That wasn’t the case with her bandaged feet, which hurt more with every step on the jungle floor. She worried that she wouldn’t get far on burned feet covered by cotton bandages. Margaret asked Laura if she could borrow her shoes while Laura rested. Laura gave them to her.

In Margaret’s diary, written in secretarial shorthand on scraps of paper and cardboard from their supplies, she confessed that she didn’t want to return her friend’s shoes. Later, upon rewriting and expanding the diary, she wrote: “Secretly, I wondered if—without shoes—I would ever be able to keep up with the others. I would have to give Laura’s shoes back to her before we started down the mountain. I was frightened that I would never be able to make it through the jungle in feet covered only by half sox and a layer of cotton bandage.”

The survivors had felt confident that search planes would be dispatched when the Gremlin Special failed to return to Sentani Airstrip as scheduled. That belief had been confirmed the night before when they heard a plane flying somewhere above them. But McCollom knew they’d never be visible in their current location. Their plane was a demolished, camouflage-painted speck in a dense swath of trees and vines. Still visible on the detached tail section was a five-pointed white star—the signature emblem of a United States military plane. But the leaves and fronds overhead made it impossible to see except from a short distance. From the air, the star was as inconsequential as a flower petal in the ocean.

Smoke from the wreckage might help to place the survivors’ location, but only if searchers spotted it before the flames died. Complicating matters was the fact that although Prossen’s flight plan listed his destination as Shangri-La, the Gremlin Special had crashed into a mountain miles from the pass that led into the valley. No one back in Hollandia could have known that. Alone at the controls and consumed by trying to keep the plane aloft, Nicholson didn’t place a Mayday call. In fact, no radio communication had been exchanged between the plane and ground controllers at the base after Prossen took off from the Sentani Airstrip.

Decker’s wristwatch had fared better than his skull, so they knew how slowly time was passing. At about eleven o’clock on Monday morning, less than twenty-four hours after the crash, they heard the distinctive sound of an airplane engine. McCollom grabbed the signaling mirror he’d found in a life raft and worked it furiously to flash snatches of sunlight skyward. It was no use. The engine sound grew faint as the plane flew away.

Still, McCollom considered it a hopeful sign. “Don’t worry,” he assured his companions. “I don’t know how, but they’ll get us out.”

Mist settled over the mountain by mid-afternoon, and with it came steady rain. They talked about their families, and Margaret dreaded to think how her father back home in Owego would take the news that her plane had crashed and she was missing. Margaret told her diary she felt relieved that her mother had been spared the anxiety of learning that her eldest daughter was lost in Dutch New Guinea. It was the first time she’d felt at peace with her mother’s death.

MARGARET’S MIDDLE NAME was Julia, her mother’s first name. Margaret’s youngest sister believed that Margaret was their mother’s favorite. In a school essay, Margaret described her mother as “the sweetest, kindest and the most lovable little woman who ever lived. My father, my two younger sisters and I all lived at home, and she was the very hub of our existence. At fifty-five she was a tiny woman, with silvery white hair, pink and white skin, fine features—much prettier than any of her daughters.”

In the essay, Margaret described how she’d learned from a doctor that her mother was seriously ill and would live no more than a year. “Onto my shoulders, so unaccustomed to responsibility, was thrown suddenly the problem of deciding how this crisis should be met. Should I tell my younger sisters, my father and my mother’s brothers and sisters? For days I debated the question pro and con, and finally decided to act in the way which would cause Mother the least unhappiness. I was sure she didn’t want to die—not when she was having so much fun for the first time in her life. I didn’t feel sure that I could rely on my sisters to act normally if they knew the truth, so I told only my father. To this day I don’t know whether I was right or wrong, but the decision was mine to make, and I did what I thought best.”

Her mother died three months later.

AT ABOUT THREE that afternoon, the four remaining survivors felt exhausted from their injuries, the lack of food, and the little sleep they’d managed the night before. They set up the two cots.

Margaret and Laura shared one, pulling a tarp over themselves and hugging tightly to keep from falling off. Margaret lay there, trying to sleep while at the same time listening for search planes overhead. Laura couldn’t stop tossing, so McCollom gave her morphine and tucked the tarp tightly around her. Margaret’s eyes burned from fatigue, and she was eager to sleep, but even after the morphine Laura remained restless. Her squirms on the narrow cot kept Margaret awake.

Hanging in the air was a rhetorical question Laura had posed to McCollom as he’d tucked her in. Looking up from the cot, she’d asked: “Everyone else is dead and we’re very lonely, aren’t we?”

Eventually, Margaret drifted into a fitful sleep. When she awoke around midnight, she felt an unexpected stillness. Laura had stopped fidgeting. Margaret put her hand on Laura’s chest. Nothing. She searched her friend’s neck for a pulse. Again nothing.

Margaret screamed: “Please, McCollom, please come. Laura has died!”

Roused from much-needed sleep, McCollom suspected that Margaret was overreacting. Clearly Laura was hurt, and her inability to keep down water was a bad sign. But he thought her injuries weren’t life-threatening. Decker was doubly sure, and he didn’t hide his annoyance.

“Don’t be a dope, Hastings,” Decker replied. “She’s all right.”

McCollom walked to the cot and felt Laura’s hands. Doubt crept into his mind. He searched in vain for a pulse. Margaret was right.

Without a word, McCollom lifted Laura Besley’s body from the cot. He wrapped her remains in one of the tarps and placed it alongside Eleanor Hanna’s body at the foot of a tree.

Even in their grief Margaret and McCollom knew how fortunate they’d been. Margaret had changed seats for a better view, and McCollom had boarded too late to sit alongside his brother. They ended up in the last two seats on the left side of the plane. They lived. Laura Besley and Eleanor Hanna, who’d sat across from them, died.

“I ought to have cried,” Margaret wrote in her diary. “I ought to have felt some kind of terrible grief for this dear friend. But all I could do was sit on the cot and shake. I couldn’t even think that Laura was dead. I just sat there and shook and all I could think was: ‘Now the shoes belong to me.’ ”

The death toll had reached twenty-one. The survivors of the Gremlin Special were down to three: John McCollom, a stoic twenty-six-year-old first lieutenant from the Midwest who’d just lost his twin brother; Kenneth Decker, a tech sergeant from the Northwest with awful head wounds who’d just celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday; and Margaret Hastings, an adventure-seeking thirty-year-old WAC corporal from the Northeast who’d missed her date for an ocean swim on the New Guinea coast. McCollom was the youngest of the three, but he held the highest rank and suffered the fewest injuries. Combined with his quiet competence, those qualities made him the group’s natural leader.

Margaret Hastings after the crash. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

The three survivors had known each other casually around the base, but were hardly close friends. As they rested in the shadow of their burning plane, they considered themselves no more than comrades and acquaintances who’d shared a horrible experience. For the time being, they’d follow protocol and call each other by rank, last name, or both, as in “Sergeant,” “Decker,” or “Sergeant Decker,” as opposed to Ken or Kenneth.

But women in the military were still a novelty, and calling a woman by her last name didn’t always come naturally. Unless McCollom was giving her an order or Decker was needling her, “Corporal Hastings” soon became “Maggie.” The truth was, she preferred to be called Margaret—she hated the nickname Maggie. But she never complained or corrected them.

After wrapping Laura Besley’s body, McCollom returned to Margaret, who’d remained fixed on the cot. He lit a cigarette and handed it to her. Then he sat next to her to share it. She wrote in her diary: “No night will ever again be as long as this one.”

John McCollom after the crash. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

Kenneth Decker after the crash. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

As the hours passed, McCollom lit several more cigarettes, the smoldering orange tip moving back and forth between them in the darkness. He remained with her on the cot until dawn. They didn’t speak.