Lost in Shangri-la

Chapter 18

BATHTIME FOR YUGWE

MARGARET AWOKE THE next morning, eager to rid herself of a hard week of sweat, blood, gangrenous shavings, and jungle grime.

She gratefully accepted a toothbrush Doc Bulatao had tucked in his pocket before the jump. Then she asked Rammy Ramirez to help her with a bath. He was happy to oblige, but the question was where. McCollom and the medics bathed in the cold creek, about a hundred yards from the knoll where Rammy and Doc had set up a little village: a cook tent and a shelter for supplies made from draped parachutes, and pup tents for them to sleep in. They dug a latrine and tented that, too. But the idea of Margaret bathing alone at the creek worried them, and they didn’t want to intrude on her privacy by hovering close by.

Rammy solved the problem with the universal soldier’s bathtub: his helmet. Hobbling on crutches he had made from branches to ease his sore ankle, he found a semiprivate area on the far side of the knoll and filled the helmet with fire-warmed water. He gathered soap, towels, a washcloth, and a small khaki uniform earmarked for Margaret in one of the cargo drops.

With McCollom’s help, the medics carried Margaret to her makeshift bath area and left her to wash in what they expected would be complete privacy. She stripped off her soiled shirt and tattered pants. Naked, she lathered the washcloth and began to scrub. Almost immediately, she felt eyes upon her.

From left, Corporal Camilo “Rammy” Ramirez, Corporal Margaret Hastings, and Sergeant Benjamin “Doc” Bulatao. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

“I looked around and there on a neighboring knoll were the natives,” she told her diary. “I never could figure out whether they were goggle-eyed at the queer rite I was performing, or at a skin so different from their own.”

McCollom spotted them, too: “Big smiles on their faces.”

When she couldn’t shoo them away, Margaret gamely finished her bath. She dried off, pulled on her new clothes, and called for her bearers to return her to her tent. The bath routine became a daily event for Margaret, and a highlight for the men and boys of Uwambo.

WHEN THEY FIRST met the visitors, the natives had been fascinated by McCollom’s straight blond hair. Margaret’s bath had that beat. One of the smiling regulars at the show was young Helenma Wandik.

“We saw she had breasts, so we knew she was a woman,” he said. “She would wave us away, but we thought it was interesting so we stayed until she finished.”

Once they were certain that Margaret was a woman, the tribespeople jumped to a conclusion. Although they still believed them to be spirits, they assumed that the three survivors were “a man, a woman, and the woman’s husband,” Helenma Wandik said. The “husband” was the man the natives called “Meakale,” their attempted pronunciation of McCollom.

Although the survivors and medics didn’t learn the names of the natives, the people of Uwambo tried to make sense of what to call their visitors. They’d heard McCollom calling Margaret “Maggie,” but to their ears it sounded like “Yugwe,” so that’s what they called her. In her diary, Margaret wrote that she “always heartily detested” the nickname Maggie, “but I loved it the way the natives pronounced it.” She said they softly slurred the syllables. She heard the result not as Yugwe, but as “Mah-gy.”

The natives never witnessed sexual relations or intimate affection between “Meakale” and “Yugwe/Mah-gy.” The basis for assuming the two were married, Helenma Wandik said, was their own culture. In male-dominated Yali and Dani society, a healthy woman who reached sexual maturity wasn’t single long. The people of Uwambo didn’t know that Margaret was thirty, but one look at her naked body told them she was past thirteen. They identified Meakale/McCollom as the group’s leader, so they thought she must be his wife.

ON THEIR FIRST full day in the valley, Earl Walter and the eight enlisted paratroopers of the 1st Recon enjoyed ten-in-one rations for breakfast. Afterward, Walter took Master Sergeant Sandy Abrenica and two sergeants, Hermenegildo Caoili and Juan “Johnny” Javonillo, on what he described in his journal as “a short recon” of eight miles round-trip through the valley. Along with native tracks and a deserted village, they came upon “one skeleton near [the] trail, with rotten flesh” and a broken spear nearby. Walter wrote in his journal that the “cause of death [was] undetermined.” But he suspected the body was evidence of the native battles and enemy raids.

During the hike, Walter got his first look at a native woman. Writing in his journal, he judged her looks with a harsh Western eye: “Very unattractive hairdo, not fancy hair, and . . . much less hair than the men. She wore a loose cloth draped around the crotch and private parts (very skimpy). No other clothing. Looked like she was pregnant.”

Upon their return to camp, Walter found that the men who’d stayed behind had rigged a parachute as a tent to cover their equipment from the rains. As he put it, “The circus has come to Hidden Valley.” In mid-afternoon, a C-47 dropped water, supplies, and, best of all, a stack of letters from home. Walter remained excited by the adventure, writing in his journal: “Everyone is in fine spirits. . . . This promises to be one of the most interesting parts of our lives.”

As the paratroopers arranged their camp, people from the Wosi area crowded around to watch. Walter’s men grew edgy from the proximity, the incessant touching, and the body odor. Walter pointed a carbine in the air.

“Fired a few shots to see effect on natives and most of them didn’t stop running till they were out of sight,” he wrote. His men followed suit, including one who fired a burst from a Thompson submachine gun, the famous “Tommy Gun.” As the natives fled, “ass over tea kettle,” as Walter put it, the men trampled the smaller boys. Some of his paratroopers got a kick out of it, but Walter ordered a cease-fire. “The men were doing it just for the hell of it, to make the natives run and yell and whatnot,” he said.

The guns’ noise frightened the natives, but Walter wrote in his journal that “they do not understand the killing power of the modern firearm.” They seemed more afraid when the soldiers held up sticks or branches to resemble spears.

Later that day, Alfred Baylon, a stocky, cigar-smoking sergeant who was qualified as a medic, hiked to the Baliem River, followed by a group of natives. When a flock of ducks flew overhead, he used his carbine to shoot one. The natives retrieved it, and Baylon brought it back to camp. In his journal that night, Walter praised the “excellent dinner with barbecued duck.” Of the natives, he wrote: “Imagine they now know our weapons can kill.”

MORE THAN SIX decades later, the warning shots fired by the paratroopers and the duck hunt by Baylon—whom the natives called “Weylon”—still reverberated in the minds of old men who were boys when they witnessed the displays.

“One man, named Mageam, came in to the white men’s camp,” said Lisaniak Mabel. “He was getting too close, and the white people got irritated and fired shots to keep him away. We didn’t know the sound, and we ran. . . . Then Weylon shot the duck. We understood he did it with the gun.”

Several also remembered the hikes Walter took through the Wosi area. On one of his treks, Walter stopped at an area called Pika, near the edge of the no-man’s-land, almost in enemy territory. Tribespeople believed that he was purposely standing guard at Pika. They viewed this as an act of bravery and a warning to their enemies. They called Walter “Pika,” as a tribute to his apparent courage.

“Pika was shooting the gun a lot, to show the enemies not to come,” said Ai Baga. “We liked when Pika went there. We told Pika to stay there, so our enemies wouldn’t attack.”

Narekesok Logo, his wiry body marked with long-healed arrow scars, remembered the paratroopers’ visit as a time of peace: “Pika and Weylon were standing there with their guns, so our enemies didn’t come.”

Equally memorable to the tribespeople was the soldiers’ practice of digging a single hole covered by a tent where all of them went to defecate. Native practice called for bodily waste to pass in private, in the jungle or the high grasses. However revolting the soldiers found the natives’ hygiene, it couldn’t exceed the natives’ disgust at the soldiers’ use of a house for inalugu—a pile of feces.

THE NEXT DAY, Tuesday, May 22, 1945, Walter fueled up with a breakfast of ham and eggs, biscuits, and marmalade, washed down with hot chocolate. He and five men—Corporal Custodio Alerta and sergeants Hermenegildo Caoili, Fernando Dongallo, Juan “Johnny” Javonillo, and Don Ruiz—were ready to begin the trek to the survivors’ campsite. That left his first sergeant, Sandy Abrenica, in charge of the base camp along with two sergeants, Alfred Baylon and Roque Velasco.

Walter enlisted a group of Dani men as carriers and “native guides.” After convincing himself that they understood his intended destination, they marched boldly out of base camp.

After three hours of steady uphill climbing, they broke for lunch. Walter pulled out his journal. “God only knows why mountains are this high,” he wrote. “Now we are going down again. Passed by a few native villages and had to stop near each one so that the people could gather around and satisfy their curiosity.” Along the way, the six soldiers gained and lost several groups of guides, “as they do not seem to go far beyond their own villages.”

With no maps, Walter and his men estimated that they traveled seven miles before stopping to pitch camp for the night. His gut told him that the natives were no threat—he made a casual reference in his journal to their spears and arrows, and wrote that their “only means of cutting are stone axes.” The paratroopers needed rest for the next day’s march, so Walter told his relieved men that they wouldn’t post guards that night.

WALTER’S DECISION TO skip guard duty proved uneventful, but not solely because his judgment proved correct that the natives “seem very friendly,” as he wrote in his journal. Unknown to Walter, tribal leaders along the route from the Wosi area base camp toward the Ogi ridge where the plane crashed had set aside their traditional enmities. They granted the strangers safe passage.

“A declaration, called a maga, was made that no one would attack them,” said Yunggukwe Wandik, daughter of the Uwambo leader Yaralok Wandik. “It was said, ‘Do not kill them. These are spirits. Don’t kill them. They are not human.’ ” If not for the maga, the six sleeping soldiers might have been ambushed and slaughtered by hundreds of spear-carrying warriors whom a regional big man could have summoned on short notice.

Not everyone agreed with the maga. Clearly defined territorial boundaries were deeply ingrained in the people of the valley, and the idea of strangers traipsing through their neighborhoods didn’t sit right with some. “There were people who thought killing them was a good idea,” Yunggukwe Wandik said. If not for the soldiers’ skin color—Walter’s whiteness more than the Filipino-Americans’ toffee coloring—the maga might not have held. “Do you think we had ever seen white skin before?” she said. “That made people afraid.”

Despite the maga, more than once en route to the survivors’ camp Walter and his men were met by antagonism when they came close to villages. “In a couple of cases they actually came out on a path and stopped us,” he said. “They didn’t want us going into their village.” Walter attributed the defensiveness to a shortage of available wives. “Sandy Abrenica and I figured out later that they were afraid that we would steal their women. This happened over there. There was some thievery of women between tribes.”

Walter’s description of natives blocking his path echoed the confrontation that led to the shooting death of a native during Richard Archbold’s expedition seven years earlier. It’s not clear whether Walter and his men passed the same villages, but the paratroopers never found it necessary to use—in Archbold’s euphemistic phrase for the shooting—“more than a show of force.” At the same time, the natives the paratroopers encountered either were unaware of the shooting or chose not to avenge it for reasons lost to time.

Walter didn’t know anything about the Archbold expedition or the Uluayek legend about the sky spirits and their rope to the valley, so he was unaware that the native men had good reason to suspect them of violence, pig theft, and wife stealing.

For his part, Walter said he wanted to avoid violence if at all possible. As for pigs, they had no time for a roast. And the last thing they wanted were native women. “Well, they didn’t ever mingle,” he said later. “And I told the men, absolutely not. I don’t think any of them were good-looking enough for the men, anyway.”

SPENT FROM HIS exertions, Walter fell into a deep sleep. The next morning, he and his men ate breakfast and waited for the supply plane, as much to get a fix on their location as to collect fresh provisions. Believing that they were on their last lap to the survivors’ camp, they began the day in high spirits. But the plane never came and the latest group of native bearers proved unhelpful. “So far the natives are more bother than good,” he wrote, “as they will not carry.”

They broke camp and started out, believing that they had communicated to their latest guides where they were headed. But after an arduous twelve-mile hike, Walter and his men found themselves right back where they’d started. The previously buoyant tone in Walter’s journal disappeared: “Did not understand that we want to go up to the wreck, not back to our camp. We are slightly discouraged to say the least. Hiked too long before setting up camp and were caught in the rain, thus getting everything soaking wet. Made camp and ate supper. What a rotten life.”

On the third morning of their trek, they awoke chilled, waterlogged, and tired. Having planned a one- to two-day hike, Walter and his men were out of food. Still unsure of their location, they moved on, guided by Walter’s innate sense of where they were going and “dead reckoning”—navigating in a fixed direction based on a previous known location, in this case their base camp. They headed toward a dip between two ridges that Walter called “the saddle.”

“Things look bad,” he wrote. “Our last rations are gone and we are still a long way from our objective. Broke camp and kept on going up and up toward the saddle, which is somewhere at the top of this canyon.” Late in the morning he finally made contact with the supply plane to request rations. In the meantime, they continued hiking without lunch. Much of the way they cut a fresh trail as they went, slogging through brush and high grass. A quick bath in a cold creek refreshed them, but the feeling didn’t last long. Soon they were exhausted, yet they “just kept going on and on and up and up.”

In late afternoon the rains came. Soaked, hungry, and cold, the would-be rescuers made camp around five o’clock in the afternoon. They laid out their bedrolls and went to sleep without dinner.

“God only knows where that last ridge is,” Walter wrote that night in his journal. “We can last for a few more days at this rate, but sure as hell would like to know about where we are. Don’t like this fooling around without maps.”