Lost in Shangri-la

Chapter 24

TWO QUEENS

AS JUNE 1945 wound down, so did the war.

After the bloodiest battle of the Pacific, the Allies took Okinawa. Its capture on June 21—after the deaths of twelve thousand Americans and more than one hundred thousand Japanese—provided a staging area for an air and land attack on the main islands of Japan. That is, unless Emperor Hirohito could be persuaded to surrender. Secretly, America’s leaders thought a new weapon, a bomb of unimaginable power, might accomplish that goal without sending troops to Tokyo. The bomb would be tested within weeks; if it worked, President Truman would decide whether to use it. Already, though, much of the world seemed eager to look beyond war. While the outsiders in Shangri-La awaited rescue, envoys from forty-four countries landed in San Francisco to sign a charter creating the United Nations.

WHILE THE GLIDER crews worked, Camp Shangri-La played. Before an audience of natives, Decker shaved off six weeks’ growth of beard. McCollom got a haircut from Ben Bulatao, but he and Walter kept their nonregulation whiskers. Walter told the crew of the 311, “We want to look like we’ve been someplace after we get out of here.” They ate communal meals; explored the valley; posed for Alex Cann’s camera; talked about their families; and read books, magazines, and letters dropped by the supply plane. One supply drop included a book on jungle survival techniques; it arrived so late the survivors were certain it was someone’s idea of a joke.

A native man whom the paratroopers called “Joe” oversaw daily swap meets between the natives and the outsiders. When the market was up and running, five cowrie shells could be exchanged for a stone adze, the most sought-after souvenir. Walter established a going rate for other native weaponry, exchanging eighteen shells for sixty-two arrows and three bows. At first, a pig could be had for as little as two to four shells, but inflation crept in, and the price rose to fifteen shells. This proved costly when the pigpen built by the paratroopers collapsed and eight plump, fifteen-shell swine headed for the hills. So many shells changed hands that McCollom worried that the survivors and paratroopers were ruining the local economy.

IN FACT, THE outsiders’ use of cowrie shells as a kind of coin represented the natives’ first tentative step toward a money-based economy. Although they had long traded shells with people from outside their villages to obtain twine, feathers, or other goods that weren’t readily available, the natives didn’t treat shells as a universal currency among themselves. In their communal villages, there was nothing to buy from each other. They used shells and shell necklaces primarily to cement social bonds. At a funeral, for instance, mourners would briefly drape the dead body with gifts of shell necklaces. As a highlight of the ceremony, a village leader would redistribute those necklaces, creating obligations to him and shared remembrances of their previous owner.

A Dani tribesman tries on a uniform. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

McCollom’s worry about the local economy was only the half of it. By tossing around shells as though their only value was as a means of trade, the outsiders risked undermining the glue that kept the community together.

Although most natives were willing to provide pigs, adzes, bows, and arrows in exchange for shells, some felt trepidation about the deals. “We’d never seen so many shells. Our parents were telling us to be careful, don’t take the shells,” said Lisaniak Mabel. He and his friends heeded the warning. “The white guys got frustrated that we were rejecting the shells they were offering.”

ONE DAY, THE native trader the paratroopers called Joe brought three women to the camp. Confused at first, Alex Cann and the paratroopers concluded that they were being offered the women in exchange for shells.

“Walt, you’ve got to be careful,” Cann told Walter, “because he wants to sell you the women.”

“Hell, I’ve got enough trouble,” Walter replied. “I don’t want a bunch of women running around!” Walter’s men cracked up when they heard that.

Walter wrote in his journal: “He [Joe] is quite a money monger, and by the looks on the women’s faces, they were little impressed by us.” The feeling was mutual. Walter wrote that it would take him “a few years, plus the realization that we would never get out of here, plus a ton of soap, before they would be even presentable as far as I am concerned.” Walter waved off the deal.

THE MAN THE outsiders called “Joe” was Gerlagam Logo, a son of the chief named Yali Logo and a warrior with a fierce reputation. Many years later, tribe members remembered Gerlagam as having been friendly with the outsiders. But they doubted that he ever tried to sell them women. Gerlagam had a wife and two daughters. Perhaps, they said, he wanted his new acquaintances to meet his family.

EACH DAY WHEN the supply plane flew overhead, Walter and McCollom placed orders for food and provisions. Sergeant Ozzie St. George, a reporter for the U.S. Army magazine Yank who covered the mission alongside civilian journalists, made a sport of tracking the cargo drops. Among the items he recorded were: twenty pairs of shoes; three hundred pounds of medical supplies; fourteen .45-caliber pistols with three thousand rounds of ammunition; six Thompson submachine guns; knives; machetes; tents; cots; clothes for the survivors; seventy-five blankets; camp stoves; gasoline; canteens; water; seventy-five cases of ten-in-one rations; rice; salt; coffee; bacon; tomato and pineapple juice; and “eggs that landed unscrambled.” St. George claimed that Margaret received “scanties,” but she insisted that the underwear never arrived.

Walter continued his amateur anthropology. He searched for signs of religion, with no luck. “They’re believers in mankind and that’s about all the religion they seem to have,” Walter told Major Gardner by walkie-talkie.

While hiking with his men and some natives near the Baliem River, Walter arranged a footrace on the riverbank to test their speed. Earlier he’d recorded his disappointment with their potential as porters, complaining in his journal that they tired more quickly than the Filipino bearers he recalled from his boyhood. The race did nothing to improve his view. “Natives not very fast,” he wrote, “as we outran them with equipment on.” He didn’t record whether the Dani men might have been amused, confused, or both by the notion of running full speed when they weren’t chasing a lost pig or escaping a deadly enemy.

During one hike, Walter and the survivors found corpses from recent warfare. “One warrior had been shot through the heart with an arrow,” Margaret wrote. “Another had died from a spear driven through his head.” Separately, Walter and McCollom found the skeleton of a man they thought must have stood more than six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds. It was the closest they ever came to seeing one of the “giants” they’d heard so much about.

Captain C. Earl Walter Jr. and Lieutenant John McCollom examine a native jawbone they found on a hike. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

After a walk with Alex Cann, Walter estimated the valley’s population at five thousand and concluded that the natives belonged to “a dying race.” He based that assumption on his observations of few children and some overgrown sweet potato fields. In fact, Walter’s population estimate was about one-tenth to one-twentieth the actual number, and he didn’t know that the Dani people left old fields fallow to regain their nutrients. However, Walter was onto something about children. Because Dani women abstained from sex for up to five years after childbirth, the birthrate wasn’t as high as in some other native populations.

The natives reached mistaken conclusions about their guests, as well, beyond their belief that the visitors were spirits. Decades later, several old men who were boys and teenagers in June 1945 swore that they’d witnessed a strange miracle. As they described it, after the paratroopers ate pig meat, the animals emerged whole and alive when the men defecated. Narekesok Logo said: “You could see where the cuts were on the pig” after its rebirth.

DURING HIS WEEKS at the base camp, Alfred Baylon—“Weylon” to the natives—made regular medical calls in the nearby hamlets. The sergeant earned the natives’ trust by treating minor wounds, pig bites, and a variety of skin ailments, including a form of athlete’s foot. He treated their dandruff, too. “In the Army, they say to make the most of what you have,” Baylon told a reporter. “So I smeared their heads with mosquito repellant. It seemed to work surprisingly well.” When a woman with an infection on her breast began to heal within days of treatment, Baylon became the tribespeople’s favorite outsider. The feeling was mutual. “They are a wonderfully carefree people,” he said. “Living in a land of perpetual summer, they never worry about their next meal.”

Walter encouraged the sergeant, to a degree. When a local woman went into labor, the natives came running for Baylon. “But the captain forbade it,” Margaret wrote in her diary, “fearing that if anything happened to the woman or the baby, the natives might turn on all of us.”

Before the others reached the valley, Baylon usually visited the village alone or with Sergeant Velasco, who became relatively adept at the native language. Now, Alex Cann, Walter, and the three survivors joined the sergeants on their rounds. But as they headed toward the nearest village, an old man blocked their way.

“He was a man of dignity and authority,” Margaret wrote. “He knew and liked Sergeants Velasco and Baylon, and there was no ill will and nothing threatening in the chief’s attitude. But he made it abundantly clear that he didn’t want his village invaded all the time.”

When a pantomime negotiation went nowhere, Margaret tried a charm offensive: “I pouted as prettily as I knew how and I batted what few stubby little eyelashes had begun to grow back after the originals were singed off in the plane crash.”

“Aw, Chief, don’t be mean,” she told the native leader.

Margaret laughed about it in her diary: “Walter, McCollom, Decker and the sergeants stared at me as if I had lost my mind. But it worked. Right before our eyes, the old chief melted.”

Still, the native leader had limits. He allowed the two sergeants, Margaret, and Alex Cann into the village, but he turned away Walter, McCollom, and Decker. Rather than risk an incident, Walter and the two male survivors returned to camp.

That day, Margaret met a woman in the village whom she described as “regal in manner.” Based on her belief that the woman was a village leader’s wife, or at least one of his wives, Margaret called her “the queen.”

THE MEETING AND its aftermath revealed a profound change in Margaret since the crash. She’d flown aboard the Gremlin Special hoping to see strange creatures she believed were “primitive.” During her time in the jungle clearing, she came to see them as people. Since reaching the base camp, her views had evolved further. No longer did she describe natives in her diary as savages or childlike, for instance. Upon getting to know “the queen,” Margaret’s outlook took an evolutionary leap. Any remaining hint of superiority vanished. In its place came respect.

“The queen and I liked each other immediately,” she wrote. They spent long stretches together: “All we lacked, from the American point of view, was a front porch and a couple of rocking chairs.” Margaret described their ability to communicate as “a case of understanding the heart, for neither of us was ever able to understand a word of the other’s language.”

The native woman invited Margaret into the long hut the village women used as a communal cookhouse. She fed Margaret hot sweet potatoes, declining the butter that Margaret brought with her from the base camp. Margaret, too, hesitated to abandon her traditional ways. The native woman tried to persuade her to strip down to what Margaret called a “G-string of woven twigs worn by herself and her ladies in waiting.” Margaret demurred: “I just clutched my khaki tighter around me.” The queen didn’t seem to mind.

The native woman Margaret called “The Queen” greets her outside a hut. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

After a few days, the native woman was so eager for Margaret’s visit that she met her halfway between the camp and the village. “Occasionally the trail was rough or we would have to cross small streams with precarious log bridges,” Margaret wrote. When Margaret feared she’d fall, she’d appeal to the nimble-footed woman for help: “She always knew what I meant. The queen would take my hand in hers and give me an assist along the way.”

When the sergeants teased Margaret for slowing their pace en route to the village, the queen sensed that the men were making sport of her friend. “She turned on them, and there was no mistaking the fact that they were getting a royal dressing down, for such unseemly behavior toward a royal guest.” The same tongue-lashing befell a group of native girls and young women working in the sweet potato gardens who giggled when the two women walked past.

Walter noticed Margaret’s growing connection. With a combination of envy and admiration, he told the men in the supply plane: “The natives will take stuff from her, but they won’t take anything from the rest of us.”

The more Margaret came to appreciate the locals, the more she admired them for refusing the paratroopers’ goods. “The natives of Shangri-La are a wise people,” she wrote. “They are happy. They know when they’re well off. They are too smart to permit a few chance visitors from Mars to change the rhythm of centuries.”

Walter, meanwhile, tried repeatedly to trade machetes, knives, and other modern conveniences for an ornate necklace of small shells arranged in vertical rows on a strip of rawhide that hung from the wearer’s throat to his breastbone. Each time he failed.

The necklace belonged to a man named Keaugi Walela. In later years, Keaugi became a chief with ten wives. When Keaugi died, his son Dagadigik inherited the necklace. One day in battle it fell from his neck. An enemy warrior retrieved it, and the necklace became a spoil of war, in Dani terms a “dead bird.”

Keaugi Walela wearing the necklace that Earl Walter tried unsuccessfully to obtain. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

SOON WALTER HAD bigger worries than souvenirs. Reports on the glider snatch tests, delivered via walkie-talkie, sounded grim.

After the pickup equipment was installed in the Leaking Louise, snatch pilot Major William Samuels, copilot Captain William McKenzie, glider pilot Lieutenant Henry Palmer, and a second glider pilot, Captain G. Reynolds Allen, agreed on what sounded like a straightforward plan. First, they’d make a few practice runs on Wakde Island to test the gear, get in sync with each other, and hone the glider and pickup crews. Then the Leaking Louise would tow the Fanless Faggot halfway across New Guinea to Mount Hagen, a large, accessible valley at the same mile-high altitude as Shangri-La. If they tested it there, they thought, the first high-altitude Waco glider pickup snatch wouldn’t involve crash survivors as guinea pigs and reporters as witnesses.

The plan unraveled almost immediately. On the first trial run on Wakde Island, Samuels came in too low with the Leaking Louise. No one was hurt, but the snatch failed. Worse, the C-47’s propellers severed the nylon tow rope, and the radio compass mast was knocked off the underside of the plane. After repairs, Samuels tried again. On the second effort, the steel tow cable broke, destroying the winch. No one was hurt, but replacing it caused more delays. Then calamity struck.

The Tribune’s Walter Simmons had flown to Wakde Island to witness the tests. Despite the danger, Simmons volunteered to be one of eight passengers aboard the Fanless Faggot for the third trial run. Just after the snatch, the steel cable inside the Leaking Louise again snapped as the crew tried to reel in the glider. “The winch just blew up,” said McKenzie, the copilot.

The broken cable whipped around the C-47’s cabin like an angry snake, tearing through the wall of the navigator’s compartment. The slashing cable struck the winch operator, Master Sergeant Winston Howell, in the head. Only days earlier, Howell had told the AP’s Ralph Morton he was certain they’d have no trouble. The cable slashed the radio operator, Sergeant Harry Baron, across the back.

“A shower of aluminum, wood, glass and smoke inundated the cockpit,” Samuels wrote in a self-published memoir. “I looked back to ask if the boom was retracted so we could land. All I could see was everyone lying down and much blood.” The injuries to Howell and Baron weren’t life-threatening, but both were hospitalized.

Before the other half of the broken steel cable could slice through the Fanless Faggot, glider pilots Palmer and Allen detached the Waco and made an emergency landing. Walter Simmons and the other glider passengers and crew emerged shaken but unhurt. Later, Allen blamed the accident on the hastily scavenged snatch equipment, saying it “was unused for several years and was badly rusted.”

Alarmed, Colonel Elsmore put out a call for another replacement winch and flew to Wakde Island to supervise. He told Walter Simmons that if they encountered more problems, he might cancel the glider snatch altogether. In the meantime, Elsmore quietly revived the idea of inviting the Seabees to build a runway in Shangri-La; it would take longer than a glider snatch and pose its own problems, but he wouldn’t have to worry about exploding winches, snapping cables, and the other perils inherent with “flying coffins.”

Even before the snapped cable, Walter and his men had been unsettled by the idea of a glider ride. They were blasé about jumping out of airplanes. But gliders were something else entirely, and the Waco’s reputation preceded it. In his daily radio conversations with the supply plane, he told the planners not to rush: “We wouldn’t want any haphazard attempt made to get us out of here. . . . We are perfectly willing to wait until everything is set. . . . We don’t want to take any chances by pushing the thing to get out of here before the pickup and glider pilots are ready.” After learning of the accident and injuries, Walter repeated those messages with more urgency.

Adding to his anxiety was the need for multiple pickups to get all fifteen people out of the valley. “Each trip increased the possibility of a bad accident, trouble, whatever,” Walter said. He spoke privately with his top sergeant, Sandy Abrenica, about trying to hike out, or “whether we had to come up with other ways to get out of there, if the glider pickup didn’t work.” Without telling Elsmore, Walter and Abrenica made rough calculations of how many more men they’d need to mount a trek during which they might face headhunters, hiding Japanese troops, or both.

Margaret turned to prayer. The night she learned about the broken glider cable, she huddled in her private corner of the big tent: “I said my Rosary over and over, asking God that no one be hurt in trying to save us.” Major Samuels, the snatch pilot, had the same idea. He later told Margaret that he’d gone to Sunday services and asked a chaplain to pray for their mission.

THE FIRST THREAT to Margaret’s friendship with the native woman came one day in the village when she pulled out a comb and absentmindedly ran it through her hair. The queen was mesmerized: “She had never seen a comb before or anyone doing such queer things to their hair. The other natives were equally delighted with this toy. Half the village gathered ’round and I combed my hair until my arm was tired.”

Margaret handed the comb to her friend. Rather than use it on herself, the woman “carefully combed my hair down over my face.” Margaret smiled as the woman completed the styling. Then Margaret combed her hair back off her forehead to its usual swept-back arrangement. The queen took the comb and again plastered Margaret’s hair over her face. Alex Cann captured the comic back-and-forth scene on film. But the woman’s husband became involved, and it stopped being funny.

“Sergeant Velasco was about to put a stop to this beauty business when the chief decided to join the game,” Margaret wrote. “He started to run his hands through my hair. This was a goodwill gesture from which I shrank inwardly. But I didn’t want to offend him and his followers. So I sat still a moment and said, ‘Unh, unh, unh’ at what I deemed were appropriate intervals in the conversation.”

Velasco kept an eye on Margaret’s friend. The native woman began speaking in what sounded like an agitated tone, and he sensed that she was growing jealous.

“Scram,” Velasco told Margaret, and they ran together from the village.

Margaret brushes back her hair after a native salon treatment. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

On their way back to base camp, he said: “I guess you might have been queen. But I also suspect you might have been dead.”

Margaret worried the friendship was ruined. But on her next visit to the village, the woman was her usual gracious self. From the woman’s improvised sign language, it appeared that she wanted Margaret to move from the base camp into the women’s hut. “Velasco and Baylon told me they were certain she wanted to adopt me. But I didn’t think my father back in Owego would like that very much,” Margaret wrote. She politely declined.

On another visit, with Decker and McCollom in tow, several women approached Margaret and motioned for her to hold out her right hand. “As I did so, one of the women raised a stone ax,” Margaret wrote. “I was so amazed by this first sign of violence in the natives that I could scarcely move.”

Realizing what was happening, McCollom shoved Margaret out of the way.

Afterward, McCollom tried to explain what he believed was afoot: “When a girl is of marriageable age, they chop off the tips of all the fingers on her right hand. I guess this is a hint to you to nab off one of us handsome guys.”

McCollom had added one and one but got three. Having noticed that nearly all the women in the village who’d reached sexual maturity had lost several fingers, he assumed there was a relationship between the two.

IN FACT, THE Dani people of Koloima were trying to help Margaret mourn.

Unlike the natives near the jungle campsite, the villagers in the valley didn’t know about the plane crash; news of an event so many miles away would have had to pass through the territory of enemies with whom communication usually occurred at spear-point. Instead, the natives in the valley assumed that Margaret and the other visitors had escaped from some terrible event in their world. The people of Koloima were so sure of this, their name for Margaret was Nuarauke, which meant “fleeing.”

By their logic and experience, whatever tragedy had caused Margaret to seek refuge in the valley must have involved death. To honor and appease the dead, they assumed that Margaret would want to sacrifice her fingers. When she declined, the natives weren’t insulted; any reprisal against Margaret would come not from them, but from the spirit world.

Margaret also apparently misunderstood when she thought that the native leader wanted to take her as his bride. To the contrary, the natives thought that the male survivors and paratroopers wanted to give Margaret in marriage to a native leader named Sikman Piri. “The white men said to him, ‘Sleep with this woman,’ ” said Hugiampot, who was a teenager at the time. “She said, ‘Sleep with me.’ But Sikman Piri said, ‘No, I am afraid.’ So he didn’t take her as a wife.”

Margaret/Nuarauke wasn’t the only outsider given a native name. Sergeant Caoili was called Kelabi—a rough pronunciation of his surname that had no meaning in the Dani language. Other names included Bpik, Pisek, Araum, Mamage, and Suarem, though the passage of time blurred which name belonged to whom. Some natives knew Alex Cann as Onggaliok, but others remembered him as Elabut Muluk, a Dani phrase that means “big belly.”

WHEN WALTER FIRST arrived at the base camp with the survivors, he was happy to see the people of Koloima. The captain wrote in his journal: “All of the natives appreciate our help, as we do theirs.” But three days later, Walter sensed tension bordering on hostility. The change was subtle; fewer smiles, fewer visitors hanging around the base camp.

That night, he heard angry shouts coming from the village. He put the base camp on alert and for the first time in weeks posted guards throughout the night. “It is good to be prepared,” he wrote in his journal. “The natives have been less friendly the last few days. However, with our weapons we can stand here easily. And so we prepare for our first uneasy night since we got here.”

Morning arrived without incident, but Walter ordered his men to remain vigilant. He kept closer tabs on the survivors’ movements, ordering them to stay close to base camp.

Walter tended to be cautious, but in this case he wasn’t imagining things. As much as the natives appreciated the medical care and liked Margaret, the outsiders’ presence had disturbed their routines, their wars in particular.

The base camp was in the middle of the no-man’s-land the natives regularly used as a battlefield. As long as the outsiders were there, the Dani people of Koloima couldn’t satisfy their desire to confront their enemies in open combat. In addition, some local leaders didn’t like how Walter and his men handed out fistfuls of shells, fired their frightening guns, and wandered wherever they pleased. For many years, the native leader named Yali Logo had been the regional big man. Now the outsiders behaved as big men, and Yali didn’t like it.

Regional “big man” Yali Logo (center). (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

Unaware that the outsiders were preparing to leave the valley, Yali began plotting their departure on his own terms. He visited the base camp by day, where Walter photographed him standing calmly, though unsmiling, with his tribesmen. But according to his tribesmen, at night Yali sent a messenger to his sworn enemy and frequent battlefield opponent, a legendary big man named Kurelu from the neighboring territory.

“At night the enemies talked,” said Ai Baga, a teenager at the time. “Yali wanted to drive them out, and he wanted Kurelu to help. But Kurelu said no.”

It’s possible, said several Dani men who witnessed the events, that Kurelu was pleased to see Yali’s authority undermined by the outsiders; as a result, Kurelu had no incentive to join a conspiracy.

As days passed with no sign of gliders, Yali kept plotting and Walter kept posting guards.