Lost in Shangri-la

Chapter 17

CUSTER AND COMPANY

AS MARGARET HASTINGS was enduring the removal of her bandages in the mountainous jungle, Earl Walter finally got a chance to experience danger serving his country. It wasn’t a combat assignment or a spy patrol in the Philippines, but it was the next best thing: a rescue mission in Shangri-La.

Colonel Elsmore and the planners at Fee-Ask still weren’t sure how they’d attempt to get everyone out of Shangri-La, but in the meantime they were certain they needed more soldiers in Shangri-La. They wanted Walter and five members of his paratrooper team to set up a base camp in the main valley, hike through the jungle to the survivors’ clearing, collect them and the two medics, and return with everyone to the base camp to await pickup or further instructions. While Walter and his group were en route to the survivors’ campsite, the other three paratroopers would stay in the main valley to maintain the base camp and to level and create a makeshift runway by clearing brush, trees, mud, quicksand, and other obstacles.

The runway idea emerged as planners continued to narrow their options for rescue. A helicopter had already been ruled out because of the inability to fly a whirlybird over the mountains. Elsmore’s team also nixed a suggestion that they use an amphibious plane; unaware that Richard Archbold had landed on a lake near the valley with the Guba seven years earlier, they mistakenly believed such a plane was unsuitable for the mission. Marching the hundred and fifty miles to Hollandia was among the last resorts, along with the idea of piloting a U.S. Navy PT boat up a river from New Guinea’s south coast to within fifty or so miles of the valley. Among a half dozen remaining options, some more outlandish than others, were landing a C-47 in the valley—a dubious prospect because of the conditions—and the equally implausible idea of dropping motorless gliders into the valley, loading them with passengers, and using low-flying planes to snatch them back into the sky.

In the meantime, at ten o’clock on the morning of Sunday, May 20, Walter and eight of his men, weighed down and clanking with parachute packs, guns, ammunition, bolo knives, and sundry supplies, climbed aboard a C-47 at the Sentani Airstrip destined for Shangri-La.

Walter told the pilot, Colonel Edward T. Imparato, to take the plane in low—a few hundred feet above the valley floor. Walter, about to make his forty-ninth jump, didn’t want the swirling winds to turn their parachutes into kites and spread him and his men miles apart. He also hoped that a low jump might escape the natives’ notice, as opposed to a long, slow descent that would be seen by every tribesman for miles.

For a drop zone, Walter and Imparato chose an area with no huts or sweet potato gardens in the immediate vicinity, a relatively flat stretch of land in the shadow of a soaring rock wall, with only a few trees and shrubs and small knolls between hundreds of otherwise uninterrupted acres of kunai grass. Shortly before noon, with Imparato flying only 350 feet above the valley floor, the paratroopers tumbled from the plane like dominoes off a table. Their parachutes deployed as designed, and all nine men reached the ground without incident.

They gathered in a defensive formation they’d planned beforehand—in close proximity to one another but not bunched together. Walter had heard radio reports from the survivors and the two medics that the natives near the crash site were welcoming, but his landing site was fifteen to twenty air miles away from that happy scene. The natives in the main valley of Shangri-La could be different altogether, and far less hospitable.

“When we first landed,” Walter said, “everybody was spread around different places. Not far apart, but I wanted them to be spread out a little bit so we didn’t all get speared or whatever to start with.”

His wish for a stealth landing proved a pipe dream. Even before the parachutes reached the ground, scores of men with spears and bows and arrows came running from all directions into the landing field. Walter estimated that more than two hundred Stone Age warriors surrounded him and his men. Master Sergeant Santiago “Sandy” Abrenica put the number at three hundred.

Walter tensed. He grabbed his carbine. Abrenica was at his side, equally ready for combat.

“Captain,” Abrenica said, “you know what this reminds me of?”

“No, not really, Sandy. What?”

“Custer’s last stand.”

Stifling laughter, Walter held the carbine under one arm, his hand near the trigger. In his other hand he held a .45-caliber pistol—a gift from his father. He sensed that the natives were hostile but hesitant to attack. Walter shouted to his men to stay ready but to hold their fire until he gave the command.

“For God’s sake,” Walter called, “don’t get itchy fingers and pull the trigger just to scare someone. I don’t want anything like that to happen. If we hurt any of them or kill any of them, then we’d really have a problem.”

Abrenica didn’t like the natives’ trilling alarm cry, a “frightening, weird sound like the call of the Australian kookaburra.” Abrenica mistakenly thought the sound came from natives rubbing their spears together, but, in fact, it arose from their throats.

Although they were outnumbered more than twenty to one, Walter believed the superiority of their firepower put them squarely in control. “Of course we had a lot of weapons,” he said. “No mortars or anything like that, but we had machine guns and submachine guns and our own carbines.”

Said Abrenica: “We had jumped fully equipped for a combat mission, so we hastily erected a barricade and set up our machine guns behind it. We thought we’d have to shoot our way out.”

In the middle of Shangri-La, the modern and prehistoric warriors stood their ground, locked in a standoff.

WALTER AND HIS men had landed in the northwest part of the valley, in an area known to the natives as Wosi. Specifically, they were in the part of Wosi called Abumpuk, not far from a village called Koloima. No huts were nearby because the paratroopers’ drop zone was smack in the middle of a no-man’s-land—a designated battlefield—that separated the neighborhoods of two warring groups of Dani tribesmen, the Logo-Mabel clans on one side and the Kurelu on the other.

The Dani people in this part of Shangri-La were separated by distance, heritage, and politics from the Yali people of Uwambo and the clans that lived near the survivors’ clearing in the jungle. They hadn’t seen or heard anything about the Gremlin Special crash. With enemies all around them, an event that took place twenty miles away might as well have happened in China. That is, if they knew China existed.

Like the Yali people near the crash site, the Dani people around Wosi had grown accustomed to seeing planes, which they called anekuku. But they hadn’t made a connection between the noisemakers that flew over their valley and the nine strange-looking creatures in their battlefield. Instead, like the people of Uwambo, at least some of them thought the strangers were embodiments of an ancient legend.

“When we saw them, we thought they were coming down on a vine from the sky,” said Lisaniak Mabel, who witnessed the paratroopers’ arrival as a boy.

Although some natives thought the visitors were spirits, others believed that they were warriors like themselves who’d escaped a massacre of their people. The coverings on the strangers’ bodies reinforced that impression. When Dani people mourn, they cover their shoulders or their entire bodies in light-colored mud. Surely, they believed, the strangers’ khaki-colored coverings must be made of mud.

The men and boys surrounding the paratroopers were from the Logo-Mabel clans, and their leader was a powerful warrior with many kills in battle and a large collection of “dead birds” captured from fallen enemies. He was a Dani, but his name was Yali, and he was from the Logo clan.

As Yali Logo and his clansmen studied Walter and his men, they felt certain of one thing: the strangers weren’t their Kurelu enemies, so they had no immediate need to kill them.

WALTER HAD NO idea what thoughts passed through the minds of the spear-carrying, penis-gourd-clad men surrounding him and his troops. But he sensed that the eyes upon him were filled more with curiosity than with hostility. None of the local people moved to throw a spear or notch an arrow. In turn, none of the soldiers used a firearm. This museum-like diorama of first contact continued for three hours.

Before the jump, Walter and his men had been told by the rescue planners that a universal sign of friendship among New Guinea natives was to wave leaves over one’s head. As the face-off lingered on, Walter tried it.

“I waved those damned leaves for hours,” Walter said, “and then when I got no response I began to realize how foolish I must look, and I quit.”

Finally, after what Walter described as energetic “motioning and beckoning,” both sides relaxed and lowered their weapons. The paratroopers made a fire to gather around, and the natives followed suit nearby.

“When we first started to get acquainted with them, I think they realized almost as soon as we did that they had nothing to fear from us,” Walter said. “And we realized we had nothing to fear from them because they were definitely not cannibalistic, at least not to us. As far as we could figure out, they only ate people from other tribes that they were fighting. That’s where the cannibalism came in.”

Writing that night in the journal he updated daily throughout the mission, Walter recorded his first impression of the locals: “Natives wear nothing but hollow gourds over the penis and tie their testicles up with string, suspending the whole works from a string which goes around their midsection. Seem very healthy, teeth are in excellent shape, feet are badly misshapen from constant barefoot walking. Some have long, matted hair and look like French poodles, some short and are all kinky. So far no malformity of the body. Believe each family has different markings and hairdos. Some, doglike features; others, slightly anthropoid in appearance, and still others are as finely featured as the average white race. We are the first in this valley from the outside world.” Walter noted that the natives, redolent of pig grease and sweat, seemed to be people who “never bathed.”

When both sides were at ease, the natives studied the soldiers’ appearance, too. In a journal entry, Walter described a particularly flamboyant inspection by the men and boys of the Logo-Mabel clans that bloomed into a classic cultural misunderstanding.

As the two groups came close for a good look at one another, the natives gently stroked the soldiers’ arms and legs, backs and chests. They also engaged in what Walter described as “a lot of hugging. It drove my men wild, because they couldn’t figure out what the hell.” The natives murmured as they massaged Walter and his men up and down.

Earl Walter speaking by walkie-talkie with a supply plane after parachuting into the valley. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

Uncomfortable with the apparent shows of affection, Walter and his men concluded that the natives had somehow arrived at the mistaken conclusion that the paratroopers were women. What other explanation could there be for nearly naked men to rub their hands over the bodies of other men?

This touching scene went on awhile, until Walter and his paratroopers had had enough. The six-foot-four captain, towering over the natives as well as his own men, tried to forcefully communicate that they were male. No luck. The rubbing resumed. It reached a point that Walter described as “making love.”

When the tribesmen showed no sign of ending their laying on of hands, Walter devised a strategy of decidedly unconventional warfare, unknown to any military handbook. First, he unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants to show that he had the necessary equipment to wear a gourd of his own, if he so chose. After revealing himself several times, Walter realized it wasn’t working. He ordered his entire detachment of the 1st Recon to join him in World War II’s most unusual show of force.

“God damn it, let’s take our pants down,” Walter told his men, “and show them that we’re men, not women. I’m tired of this.”

Walter stripped off his shirt, pants, and underwear. His men followed suit. They walked around nude for the next several hours while the natives wandered among them, more modestly attired in penis gourds.

“First time I ever had to do that to prove I was a man,” Walter said.

Bringing out the heavy artillery, Walter pulled from his wallet a photo of his wife, “and they went wild with interest.”

As far as Walter was concerned, this two-pronged display of his manhood and his mate did the trick. No longer did the natives “make love” to the paratroopers.

IN FACT, THE Dani people of the valley weren’t at all confused about the soldiers’ gender. If they were confused about anything, it was about the paratroopers’ sudden nakedness.

When the men of the Logo-Mabel clans came in close after the standoff, they learned to their surprise that the strangers weren’t covered in mud for mourning, after all. Narekesok Logo, who witnessed the scene as a boy, explained that he and the other men and boys were intrigued by the coverings on the men’s bodies. Having never before seen clothes—he said the Archbold expedition didn’t pass through their neighborhood—they were fascinated by this soft, apparently removable second skin.

Another witness, Ai Baga, said: “We came close and felt the clothes and said, ‘That’s not mud!’”

Equally perplexing to the Dani people was the soldiers’ response. From the time a male Dani is about four years old, he never fully exposes himself in public. Even if the gourd doesn’t fit, he wears it. What seemed like near-nudity to outsiders like Walter and his men was quite the opposite to the Dani men who surrounded them. Penis gourds, or horim, are worn at work, at play, at war, and even while sleeping. They only come off in private: for urination or sex, or when a man inside his hut exchanges one horim for another. A man wearing a horim is modestly attired in Dani culture. A man without a horim is caught in an embarrassing state of undress.

To the native men and boys in the battlefield that day, Walter and his men were making spectacles of themselves.

Word spread quickly about the soldiers’ “show,” said Lisaniak Mabel. More people flowed into the area from distant villages the next day. But after that first display Walter and his men kept their clothes on, and the latecomers returned home disappointed. Those natives who did see the naked soldiers told the story, laughing, for the rest of their lives.

AFTER DRESSING, THE paratroopers set up camp, scouted the area, and collected the equipment and supplies dropped from Colonel Imparato’s plane, which he called The Queen. They also searched for a source of fresh water. By gulping from their canteens and pouring out a few drops, the soldiers expressed their need to the locals, who led them to a freshwater spring nearby. Walter and Sergeant Don Ruiz hiked near one of the villages, but the Dani people shooed them away, making it clear that the strangers weren’t welcome inside the fence that ringed the huts and courtyard.

After dinner and a few Lucky Strike cigarettes around the campfire, Walter fended off swarms of dive-bombing mosquitoes. He organized his men into guard shifts that rotated every two hours. “No evidence of any hostility, but still do not want to take any chances,” he wrote in his journal. Feeling better than he had in months, Walter could have stood the nightlong watch himself. “Too excited,” he wrote. “Having a hell of a time getting to sleep.”

THAT SAME DAY at the survivors’ camp, Doc Bulatao followed breakfast by getting back to work on Decker’s wounds. Margaret described the scene in her diary: “For six hours, he peeled the encrusted gangrene from the sergeant’s infected burns. It was a very tedious and painful process. All of Doc’s gentleness could not lessen Decker’s ordeal. The sergeant lay rigid on his pallet. Decker was a very sick man, but never by a flinch or a whimper did he reveal the torment he was enduring. . . . There wasn’t any anesthetic nor even a stiff drink of whisky available to ease Decker’s pain.” Margaret noted with surprise, and perhaps a little disappointment, that they found no evidence the natives had learned how to distill their crops into alcoholic drinks.

Decker’s agony was difficult for McCollom to bear. Only half-joking, he suggested they “hit him in the head and put him out of his misery for a few hours.” Margaret noticed that the lieutenant was as drenched in sweat as Decker and Doc, just from witnessing the excruciating procedure.

Also interested was Wimayuk Wandik, Pete to the survivors, who watched in rapt attention from nearby along with “his mob of natives,” as Margaret described them.

The people of Uwambo were growing ever more relaxed about the survivors and the medics in their midst. With each passing day, they also became less afraid of the low-altitude supply drops that initially sent them running into the jungle for cover. They scoured the jungle for crates and parachutes, then hauled the supplies back to the survivors’ camp.

One young man became entirely too comfortable with what he’d seen.

“A native came running into our camp,” Margaret told her diary. “He was terribly excited and upset. He motioned for the men to follow him with such urgency that we knew some crisis had arisen. Our men hurried after him to the edge of the jungle. The native, in great distress, pointed up to the top of a fifty-foot tree. There was another native, with an open parachute preparing to make a free jump!”

The fall might have killed him, and the survivors and the medics feared that the people of Uwambo would blame them. Only after a great deal of yelling and pantomime negotiation would the young man relent. He gave up his dreams of flight and climbed down from the tree.

WHEN THE SUPPLY plane passed over that day, the radio operator informed the survivors and medics that Walter and eight enlisted paratroopers had landed in the main valley. The pilot underestimated their distance, saying they were about ten miles away. McCollom later estimated that the base camp was more like thirty air miles away, while Walter put it at twenty miles. The pilot told them that Walter and five of the paratroopers would soon start their hike to the jungle camp.

“They will be with you by nightfall,” the radioman said.

Margaret, McCollom, and Decker dismissed the promise as cockeyed military optimism.

Margaret felt more energized by another message relayed by the radioman, this one about Walter “Wally” Fleming, the sergeant with whom she’d planned a swimming date the day of her trip to Shangri-La. She told her diary: “My beau, Wally . . . had been too frantic to talk coherently about the accident, even after he learned that I had survived by a miracle. Up to that moment, I had worried constantly for fear Wally would be terribly upset by first, the accident, and then my present predicament.” The radioman’s message changed her tune. “As soon as I knew he was worried half to death, I was pleased as punch!”

MENSTRUAL CYCLES WERE notoriously out of whack among WACs in Hollandia, a byproduct of tropical climate, weight loss, stress, and any number of other factors. Sometimes WACs would have their periods twice or more in a single month, and other times they’d skip several months. When WAC officers at the base learned that one of the survivors was a woman, they ordered the supply plane to have McCollom ask Margaret the dates of her last period. When she reported that it had been a couple of months, McCollom told the supply plane to drop a box of sanitary napkins, just in case. An act worthy of Abbott and Costello ensued.

When he returned to the base, radio operator Jack Gutzeit went to the WAC commander’s office like a husband sent to the drugstore on an awkward mission.

“Maggie wants a couple boxes of Kotex,” he told the top WAC.

She brushed him off, telling Gutzeit that medical supplies for the rescue were the responsibility of the hospital commander. He trudged to the base hospital, where the hospital commander said, “Go see the WAC commander. They’re supposed to take care of all the women’s stuff.”

After more back-and-forth, Gutzeit got fed up with the pass-the-napkin game. He returned to the Sentani Airstrip and asked a telephone operator to place calls to the WAC commander and the hospital commander. With all the moxie of his native Brooklyn, the sergeant told them both:

“This plane is leaving in one hour, and if I don’t have Kotex from you folks, I’m calling General Clement at Far East Air Service Command Headquarters!”

That day, the cargo drop included a half dozen boxes of sanitary napkins. In the days that followed, the supplies doubled, then tripled.

“I bet we had twenty boxes of Kotex down there every day!” McCollom said.

CARE FOR THE survivors’ spiritual needs also came with that morning’s supply drop. Major Cornelius Waldo, the Catholic chaplain from Indianapolis who’d been on the B-17 search plane that spotted the survivors, assembled a package with a Bible, prayer books, and Margaret’s rosary beads. The religious supplies came in handy when Doc and Rammy went to work on Margaret.

“It was the same peeling process, and after five minutes I clutched my rosary and gritted my teeth,” she wrote. “My pride was involved! I was determined to be as good a soldier as Decker. For four endless hours, Doc peeled my legs, my feet, and worked on my hand. I didn’t cry or make a sound. But I was yelling bloody murder inside all the time.”

A page from Margaret Hastings’s diary, written in shorthand. It reads in part: “Doc is the most gentle person I have ever seen, especially for a doctor. The day he arrived he didn’t get around to dressing my legs until late in the evening, after he had done Decker. He then started to remove the bandages from my legs, and what a mess they were. They had bled considerably and the bandages had stuck so that you couldn’t tell what was burned skin and what was bandage. He was pulling very gently and kept saying, ‘I am so afraid I will hurt you.’ ”

Rammy remembered her reaction differently. “We had to slice, little by little, slice, slice, until it bleeds. . . . She always cried. Cry, cry, cry. It was painful when I cut, but I think she tried to hide it. It was painful. To me it was very painful.”

The treatments left the medics exhausted and Decker and Margaret bedridden. Margaret was in such pain she had to lie on her back with her knees bent, to keep her clothes from chafing against her leg wounds. Despite her agony, she began to believe that Doc would save her legs.

As she settled in for the night, she called out to the four men nearby: “It’s wonderful to go to bed and know you’re on the road to recovery instead of ruin.”