Lost in Shangri-la

Chapter 16

RAMMY AND DOC

FLYING IN A C-47 over the survivors’ clearing, Earl Walter was sweating.

The plane carrying him and the medics Rammy Ramirez and Doc Bulatao took off from the Sentani Airstrip around 8:00 a.m., Saturday, May 19. During several passes over the intended drop zone, it looked more treacherous than Walter remembered from his first view, two days earlier. Adding to his concern was the unpredictability of the mountain winds. Already he’d dropped five wind dummies—weighted bundles used to assess turbulence—without any benefit. “The reason I dropped five,” he explained, “is because every one of them changed direction, so I had no idea” which way the winds would blow the medics.

Walter pushed the medics’ equipment out of the cargo door over the jungle near the survivors’ campsite, so they wouldn’t have to carry the supplies the entire way from the landing area. The cargo drops provided no more useful information about the wind conditions. As he watched the dummies and the equipment crates spin and twist in the shifting currents, Walter kept his fears to himself.

“I never told Ben or Rammy because, well, it wouldn’t have done any good,” Walter said. “I mean, it didn’t make any difference. We knew we had to put two people in there, no matter what.”

The young captain knew that Bulatao and Ramirez were about to become what paratroopers call “human wind dummies.” If they’d been officers like Walter rather than enlisted men, they would have earned the more formal moniker “turbulence testers.” Either way, the swirling winds added another danger to an already frightening jump.

Walter’s biggest worry was the drop zone itself, an area of four-foot-high brush, jagged rocks, and sharp-topped tree stumps that looked as though it had been the scene of a recent lightning fire. “I can remember flying over there at roughly a couple of hundred feet because I wanted to get down and see what it looked like,” he said. “And it looked like hell. Pardon the expression, but it did. I mean, there’d been fires, there were rock formations, stumps, trees that had been broken or whatever. I don’t remember ever hearing about a drop zone like that.” An ideal landing area was flat and soft, wide open, with little or no breeze; this was the opposite.

Reluctantly, Walter chose the area because it was within two miles of the survivors’ campsite, and it was better, though not much, than parachuting into a full-fledged jungle. Jumping into the campsite itself wasn’t an option because it was too small a target.

Walter’s plan called for the medics to exit the plane only a few hundred feet above the ground, to reduce the chance that they’d drift miles from where the survivors desperately needed their help. But improving the odds for the survivors meant increasing the risks for Bulatao and Ramirez.

Cords called static lines ran from their parachute packs to an anchor cable inside the plane. If everything went as intended, the lines would ensure that their chutes would deploy automatically after the men stepped out the door and were clear of the plane. But jumping so close to the ground meant that they’d have no time to deploy a reserve parachute if their main chutes failed. The mountain altitude added to the peril. They were more than eight thousand feet above sea level, which meant the air would be thin and they’d fall faster. They’d have little opportunity to steer themselves away from trees or other hazards by pulling on the nylon straps that linked their harnesses to the cords leading to the parachutes’ umbrella-like canopies.

A light man in thin air with a twenty-eight-foot-diameter parachute might descend at a rate of fifteen feet per second. If that rate held true, from the time they left the plane, Ramirez and Bulatao would be on the ground—or stuck in a tree, or impaled on a jagged stump, or lost in a rocky gorge—in less than thirty seconds. That is, if the winds didn’t spin them around, tangle their lines, and turn their parachutes into narrow “streamers.” Without a reserve chute, a streamer meant almost certain death.

Walter and the pilot conferred about wind speed and direction, then agreed on what they thought would be the best approach. Both knew their calculations were only slightly more useful than expert guesses.

Ramirez and Bulatao rose from their seats and did the paratrooper shuffle to the jump door to keep from losing their balance with their heavy loads. Walter “stood them in the door”—paratrooper lingo for preparing to jump—and again checked their resolve.

He shouted over the engines and the wind: “Are you ready?”

In unison, Ramirez and Bulatao answered: “Yes, sir!”

Describing the scene more than sixty years later, Walter’s eyes misted with pride.

The medics leaped into the void, one after the other, their parachutes opening as intended and filling with air. At first, they seemed to be headed toward an area below the clearing where Walter thought they could make a relatively safe landing. Then the winds shifted again, blowing them off course.

MARGARET, MCCOLLOM, AND Decker awoke that morning anticipating the medics’ arrival. “It was patent to all of us now—though we never once mentioned it—that Decker might die and I would surely lose my legs unless the medical paratroopers reached us immediately,” she wrote.

All three were “wet, miserable and aching” from the rainstorm the night before as McCollom served her and Decker cold breakfast rations. Their ears pricked up at the sound of the plane, and McCollom manned the radio. “They told us the two medical paratroopers were aboard,” she wrote, “and would jump two miles down the valley as soon as the plane had discharged its ’chute cargo of pup tents, ponchos, blankets, more medical supplies and food.”

A radio operator on the plane assured them the medics would be taking care of them within forty-five minutes. When McCollom relayed the message, Margaret rattled her lips in a Bronx cheer. McCollom and Decker joined in. “We had some intimate knowledge of the jungle by this time,” Margaret wrote, “and we knew that even over a native trail it would take hours for the medics to make the two-mile hike.”

The survivors watched as two small figures left the plane and their parachutes mushroomed in the sky. A single thought crossed Decker’s mind: “God bless you.” He considered the medics to be “the difference between life and death for us.”

When they lost sight of the paratroopers, Margaret wrote, they knew there was nothing they could do but wait and pray. “I said more ‘Our Fathers’ and ‘Hail Marys’ in the next two hours than ever before in my life.”

Watching from the plane’s open jump door, Walter did the same.

ON THE WAY down, struggling against the wind in a futile effort to get back on course, Camilo “Rammy” Ramirez gained a more complete understanding of what he’d volunteered himself into. “We were about a hundred feet above the jump zone,” he recalled. “I could see the stumps and the rocks. I said to myself, ‘There’s all this—it’s dangerous.’ So I tried to face away from the wind. I tried to pilot the parachute toward the woods, where I could see no rocks in there. I missed the stumps, but I did not miss the rock.”

He stumbled as he landed, painfully wrenching his left ankle. After discarding his parachute, Ramirez examined his ankle and was relieved to find that the bone wasn’t broken and he wasn’t bleeding. Doc Bulatao landed safely nearby. That was the good news.

Immediately upon the medics’ landing, they were surrounded by natives. Ramirez reached for his rifle, a semiautomatic M-1 carbine with an eighteen-inch barrel and a fifteen-round clip. “The natives have spears, and bow and arrows,” Ramirez said. “And I had my carbine cocked, in case somebody acted to throw the spear, or bow and arrow.”

Out stepped a native man Ramirez called “the chief of that village”—Wimayuk Wandik, whom the medics would soon know as Pete. They didn’t understand each other’s language, but using hand signs and body English, Ramirez explained himself. “I expressed my mission. That an airplane crashed. Catch on fire. I’m here to help.”

Wimayuk nodded. He called over a group of boys and instructed them to lead the two medics to Mundima, the place by the river Mundi where the survivors were camped. “We followed them, just like rabbits, through the jungle,” Ramirez said. Hobbled by his twisted ankle, Ramirez couldn’t keep up with the nimble barefoot boys, who hopped from stump to stump, scampered across fallen logs wet with moss, and saw trails where anyone else would have seen none. Bulatao hung back with his friend. After several hours of losing and regaining sight of the boys, trekking through, over, and around the ferns and vines and trees, they arrived at the clearing.

Margaret, McCollom, and Decker rose to shake hands with the medics. “When I got close to them,” Ramirez said, “Margaret was crying. She hugged me, and I kept smiling.” Margaret recorded the scene in her diary:

When I spotted them down the native trail, I couldn’t keep the tears back any longer. They spilled out of their own volition and poured down my one blistered cheek and my one good cheek. Leading the way and limping slightly was Corporal Rammy Ramirez, medical technician. Rammy had a heart of gold, we came to know, and a smile of the same hue. Even as he came limping up the trail, his face was split in a wide, warm smile, and his two gold front teeth shone resplendently. Rammy was better for morale than a thousand-dollar bill. I felt better just looking at him through my tears. Sergeant Ben Bulatao, medical technician, brought up the rear. When the sergeant walked into camp, there arrived to take care of us one of the most kind and gentle men God ever put on earth. . . . I want to say right now that when better men are born, they will undoubtedly be Filipinos. If ever they or their islands need aid or a champion, they only have to send a wire to enlist me in the cause.

Rammy rummaged through the jungle, gathering the supplies Walter had tossed from the plane. Favoring his bad ankle, he “hopped around on one foot like a cheerful sparrow,” Margaret wrote. He built a fire, pulled up a dozen or so sweet potatoes to roast, and boiled water. He shaved pieces of chocolate into a canteen cup and made hot chocolate—the survivors’ first warm drink in nearly a week.

“It was heavenly,” Margaret wrote. “We gulped down the first cup like ravenous animals, and then held them out for more.” By the next morning, Rammy and Doc would be waking them with the rich aromas of hot coffee and fried bacon.

They wolfed the hot potatoes, too, amusing Rammy with their excitement about a vegetable that had been under their feet the whole time: “I find out that they came from the city. And in the city, all you can see is lots of fruits, but no trees. So they don’t know how they grow.”

Starting with Decker, the medics poured peroxide and an antibacterial powder called sulfanilamide into his wounds and onto the gangrenous burns on his buttocks. The gash on Decker’s head was spread too wide to stitch. Doc Bulatao—who took the lead on medical matters, with Rammy assisting—gently massaged the skin around the wound, pushing the two sides closer so they could eventually be knit together. Rammy worked on Decker’s broken elbow. He fashioned a splint from tree bark and held it against Decker’s arm as he wrapped it in bandages, immobilizing it. The medics decided not to set the break, fearing that without X rays they might do more harm than good.

They turned their attention to Margaret and spent the next two hours working on her legs. The bandages McCollom had applied were stuck fast to her burns. Doc Bulatao knew that removing them would be torture.

Sergeant Ken Decker in a makeshift latrine in the jungle. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

“He would try to work the bandages off without hurting me too much,” Margaret wrote. “But he winced as much in the process as I did. ‘You ought to see the way I rip them off!’ McCollom encouraged him. ‘But I’m afraid I’ll hurt her,’ Doc would reply.”

Margaret was more worried about losing her legs. “If I were back at Fee-Ask,” she told Bulatao, “the G.I. medic would yank the bandages off and then scrub my legs with a brush. Go ahead, yank.” So he did. “Not until long afterward did he tell me how shocked he was at the sight of me,” Margaret wrote. “I was skin and bones. I doubt if I weighed ninety pounds at that time.”

Bulatao knew there was little he could do that first night to treat the gangrene on Margaret or Decker. It would be a slow, painful fight. He and Rammy would cut away the rotten skin, wash what remained with peroxide, daub it with ointment, dress the wound, then repeat the process day after day. If it wasn’t too late, eventually the gangrene would retreat and healing could begin. Otherwise, they’d have to consider more drastic steps, including amputation.

“Doc must have read the fear in my heart,” Margaret wrote. “In the middle of bandaging up my sorry-looking gams, he smiled at me and said, ‘You’ll be jitter-bugging in three months.’ But I knew he wasn’t sure, and neither was I.”