Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  One girl he dated introduced him to her friend Sally Holden. Her mother wasn’t keen on Earl, but Sally was. “She was a beautiful gal,” he said, “and we mutually fell in love. Once we started going steady, I had no interest in anybody else.”

  EARL SPENT TWO semesters at the University of Oregon before being drafted in August 1942, when he was twenty-one. He went to officer candidate school and underwent parachute training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Just before he was about to ship out for the European front, as a junior officer in the infantry, Army Lieutenant C. Earl Walter Jr. received unexpected news about his father. The last he’d heard from Earl Senior was a letter in 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, in which his father wrote that he’d “most likely stay on in the islands in the event that war came.”

  As a U.S. territory, the Philippines sent a resident commissioner to Washington to represent its interests, without a vote, in Congress. At the time, the resident commissioner was Joaquin Miguel “Mike” Elizalde, a member of one of the Philippines’ richest families. The Elizaldes held an interest in the lumber company where the elder Earl Walter was an executive. Mike Elizalde learned that Earl Senior had followed through on his plan to remain in the Philippines when war came. Rather than surrender and face internment or death, or try to flee to Australia or the United States, Earl Senior took to the jungles of Mindanao. There he led a resistance force of Filipino guerrilla fighters. Earl Senior’s bravery earned him praise, medals, and the rank of major in the U.S. Army, on his way to being commissioned a lieutenant colonel.

  A book about a fellow guerrilla leader in the Philippines described the elder Walter as a “tough, no-nonsense warrior” and “a leathery man in his fifties . . . ready with his fists.” It said he’d been honored for bravery under fire in World War I and picked up where he left off during World War II. Walter and his guerrilla troops “mounted as vicious a close-in infantry action as men have fought”—ambushing Japanese soldiers along a coastal road and patrolling the streets of Japanese garrison towns at night.

  Mike Elizalde, the Philippines’ resident commissioner in Washington, sent word to the younger Walter to let him know that his father was alive, well, and fighting the Japanese. Walter told one of his commanding officers at the time that Elizalde “gave me enough information of my father to at least stop my fears for his safety and make me proud of his work.”

  C. Earl Walter, Senior and Junior. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

  The news about his father had another effect: C. Earl Walter Jr. lost interest in battling Germans and Italians in Europe. In a report filed at the time, a lieutenant colonel quoted Walter as saying that he didn’t know many specifics of his father’s guerrilla fighting, but it was “enough to make me envy the type of work he was doing.”

  With help from Elizalde, Lieutenant Walter volunteered for a special commando and intelligence unit, the 5217th Reconnaissance Battalion, made up almost entirely of Filipino-American volunteers. The idea was to insert Filipino-American soldiers onto one of the Japanese-held islands by submarine or parachute, under the theory that they could immediately blend in among the native civilians. Once there, members of the unit would organize guerrilla operations and direct supply drops for resistance fighters. That sounded ideal to C. Earl Walter Jr.

  Having grown up in the Philippines, Walter knew the culture and the Visayan dialect, which made him an ideal officer for the 5217th. As a qualified paratrooper, he was a natural to establish a jump school for the battalion outside Brisbane, Australia, known as Camp X. Best of all, when he got to the Philippines, he could fight alongside his father. That was the plan, at least.

  After marrying Sally, Walter shipped out in early 1944 and got to work turning members of the 5217th Recon into qualified paratroopers—occasionally with amusing results. The U.S. Army used large parachutes, and many of the Filipino-American soldiers weighed less than a hundred and twenty pounds. After jumping, they’d float around in the air currents. “This one little guy kept yelling, ‘Lieutenant, I’m not coming down!’ ” Eventually he did, and afterward one of Walter’s sergeants fitted smaller men with weighted ammunition belts to speed their descent.

  In July 1944, upon his arrival in the South Pacific, Walter filled out a duty questionnaire for officers. He immediately sought a “special mission” in the Philippines prior to the anticipated Allied invasion. He explained his reasoning more fully in a long, bold memo to his new commanding officer. In it, he detailed his upbringing in the Philippines and his knowledge of the islands and its languages, and described his father’s work and his own ambitions. “In short,” he wrote, “I have an intense hatred for the Jap and came to this theater hoping to join a combat parachute unit and do my bit in their extermination.”

  Later in the memo, Walter wrote that he would perform to the best of his ability in a noncombat intelligence or propaganda mission, but only if he were denied a posting in the heart of the action. Though he had yet to fire a shot in anger, Walter believed he knew how he would react if and when the opportunity arose. Despite his discipline and training, Walter wrote, he might not be able to restrain his trigger finger in a noncombat assignment. “My only desire is that I be given a job which would involve possible contact with the enemy, as I am afraid my liking for combat with the Jap might run away with itself when it should be curbed.”

  His thirst for battle notwithstanding, Walter’s unit was left out of the invasion of the Philippines and MacArthur’s return to the islands in October 1944, which came some three months after Walter had appealed for a role in the fight. Even as the battle for control of the Philippines continued, Walter and his men remained at ease. Ill at ease would be more accurate.

  While suppressing his frustration and biding his time for a meaningful assignment, Walter worked with members of the battalion who were secretly brought to the islands by submarine for intelligence missions. One submarine trip was to the island of Mindanao, and Walter went along. When he arrived at the landing place, he climbed out of the sub to find a surprise: his father was waiting there to greet him. Walter was thrilled—he hadn’t seen Earl Senior for seven years, since he’d been sent to the United States to finish high school far from the Filipinas.

  But his happiness was short-lived. The elder Walter told his son that he didn’t want him taking part in more secret missions, by submarine or any other conveyance. Earl Senior also said that he intended to let higher-ups in the U.S. Army know his wishes. As far as C. Earl Walter Sr. was concerned, the Allies would have to win the war without the help of C. Earl Walter Jr.

  Chapter 11

  UWAMBO

  WHEN CAPTAIN BAKER and his B-17 crew reported seeing three survivors in a jungle clearing, they didn’t mention any natives nearby. Even if they’d spotted the tribesmen approaching Margaret, McCollom, and Decker from the surrounding jungle, they couldn’t have done anything about it. They weren’t about to start shooting, they couldn’t land, and they had neither paratroopers nor weapons to drop to the trio.

  The Gremlin Special survivors were on their own, and they were about to experience a first encounter with the people of Shangri-La.

  MARGARET, MCCOLLOM, AND DECKER had crash-landed in a world that time didn’t forget. Time never knew it existed.

  In their isolation, the people of this so-called Shangri-La followed an idiosyncratic path. They had tamed fire but hadn’t discovered the wheel. They caked their bodies with clay when mourning but had never developed pottery. They spoke complex languages—the verb that meant “hit” or “kill” could be inflected more than two thousand ways—but had a single word to describe both time and place: O. Their only numbers were one, two, and three; everything beyond three was “many.” In a world awash in color, they had terms for only two: mili, for black, maroon, dark browns, greens, and blues; and mola, for white, reds, oranges, yellows, light browns, and reddish purples.

  They ornamented themselves with necklaces and feathers but created no lasting works of art. They believed the moon was
a man and the sun was his wife, but they ignored the stars that hung low in the night sky. Four hundred years after Copernicus declared that the earth revolved around the sun, people in and around the Baliem Valley thought the sun revolved around them. They believed it crossed the sky by day, spent the night in a sacred house, then traveled underground to its starting place at dawn. The moon had a house of its own.

  They feared the ghosts of their ancestors but worshipped no gods. They were gentle with children but hacked off girls’ fingers to honor dead relatives. They treated pigs as family—women nursed piglets when needed—but slaughtered them without remorse. They built thirty-foot-tall watchtowers, but their only furniture was a funeral chair for the dead. They grew strong tobacco but never distilled their crops into liquor. They practiced polygamy, but men and women usually slept apart. They valued cleverness but not curiosity. Loyalty had special significance. To greet close friends and relations, they said Hal-loak-nak, “Let me eat your feces.” Its true meaning: “I will do the unthinkable for you.”

  The sixty thousand or so natives in the main valley, and tens of thousands more in the surrounding areas, organized themselves into communities consisting of small fenced villages or hamlets. Most had thirty to fifty people living communally in huts arranged around a central courtyard, though larger villages might have several times that number. Men of the hamlet usually slept together in a round hut that was generally off-limits to women. Women lived with children in other round huts and worked together in a long, oval cooking house. Pigs lived in the huts, too, so they would not wander at night or be stolen by enemies.

  When they referred to themselves, the natives of the valley might say they were ahkuni, or people. Their enemies were dili. Sometimes they’d identify themselves by the name of their neighborhood or clan, or by the name of the big man, or kain, who held sway over the military confederation to which their neighborhood belonged. They might describe themselves in relation to the river that wound through the valley: Nit ahkuni Balim-mege, or “We people of the Baliem.” Although they were members of the Yali or the Dani tribe, tribal affiliation was less important than neighborhood, clan, and alliance loyalties. Different clans and neighborhoods within the same tribe were often enemies, and Yali and Dani people routinely crossed tribal lines to fight shared enemies.

  Dani tribesmen, photographed by Earl Walter in 1945. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  A walk of a few minutes to an hour might take a resident of any one hamlet to ten or fifteen similar hamlets that comprised a neighborhood. Several neighborhoods that joined together for war made a confederation, and several confederations constituted an alliance of four to five thousand people. Native wars, called wim, were fought between alliances. Despite shared language, ethnicity, and culture, alliances nurtured deep, long-standing hostilities toward one another, the original source of which was often unknown. They had always been enemies, and so they remained enemies.

  Indeed, hostility between alliances defined the natives’ lives. If covered by a glass roof, the valley would’ve been a terrarium of human conflict, an ecosystem fueled by sunshine, river water, pigs, sweet potatoes, and war among neighbors.

  Their ancestors told them that waging war was a moral obligation and a necessity of life. Men said, “If there is no war, we will die.” War’s permanence was even part of the language. If a man said “our war,” he structured the phrase the same way he’d describe an irrevocable fact. If he spoke of a possession such as “our wood,” he used different parts of speech. The meaning was clear: ownership of wood might change, but wars were forever.

  When compared with the causes of World War II, the motives underlying native wars were difficult for outsiders to grasp. They didn’t fight for land, wealth, or power. Neither side sought to repel or conquer a foreign people, to protect a way of life, or to change their enemies’ beliefs, which both sides already shared. Neither side considered war a necessary evil, a failure of diplomacy, or an interruption of a desired peace. Peace wasn’t waiting on the far side of war. There was no far side. War moved through different phases in the valley. It ebbed and flowed. But it never ended. A lifetime of war was an inheritance every child could count on.

  In the Baliem Valley, the inexhaustible fuel for war was a need to satisfy spirits or ghosts, called mogat. The living built huts for them, so the spirits would have a place to rest and a hearth to light their tobacco. The living also designed rituals to please them, believing that the mogat could choose to either help or hurt them, so they had best be kept happy. When a person died in war, his or her friends and family sought to mollify his or her spirit. That required killing a member of the hated enemy—a male warrior, a woman, an elder, even a child. It could happen on the battlefield or in a raid on a sweet potato patch. Until the spirit was satisfied, the survivors believed that their souls were out of balance, and the mogat of the fallen would torment them with misfortune. Once they settled the score, they’d celebrate with dancing and feasting. Sometimes those rituals included cooking and eating the flesh of their enemies. While the successful warriors and their families celebrated, their enemies cremated their dead, held elaborate mourning rituals, and began plotting a turn of events. Because combatants on both sides shared the same spiritual beliefs, one side or the other always had a death to avenge, a retaliatory killing to plan, a ghost to placate. An eye for every eye, ad infinitum.

  Pacifying ghosts was the main rationale for war, but it wasn’t the only one. In an isolated valley where people enjoyed generally good health and abundant food and water, a place with temperate climate and no seasons, where nothing seemed to change, war animated communities and bound people to one another. It satisfied a basic human need for festival. War deaths and their resulting funerals created obligations and debts, shared enmities and common memories. Occasionally war led to changes among allies, which freshened everyone’s outlook, for good or ill. War also had a practical benefit for some: warrior deaths meant fewer men, which allowed male survivors to take multiple wives without creating villages filled with unhappy bachelors.

  Dani tribesmen, photographed by Earl Walter in 1945. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  The practice of war in the valley was as unusual as its principles. Battles were arranged by calling out an invitation to the enemy across a no-man’s-land. If the enemy declined, everyone went home. They fought only by day, to prevent mischievous night spirits from getting involved. They canceled battles in bad weather, lest the rain smear their war paint. Their war whoop wasn’t a predator’s cry but the hoot of a cuckoo dove. They put feathers in their hair but not on their arrows; when fired, the arrows traced jagged patterns, like birds in flight. During breaks in battle, warriors lounged, sang, and gossiped. They knew details about their enemies’ lives, and hurled insults across the front lines. A nasty remark about an enemy’s wife might reduce both sides to belly laughs. Then they’d pick up their spears and try again to kill one another.

  Because success in war was seen as necessary for the well-being of the community, men who succeeded in battle gained social standing. Skilled warriors had access to more potential wives. This was especially valuable in a culture in which married couples routinely abstained from sex for up to five years after the birth of a child. But it would be wrong to overstate the link between war, polygamy, and abstinence. For many men, war was its own reward, a source of pleasure and recreation, a platform on which to find excitement and camaraderie. A sporting good time, with a reasonable chance of injury or death. Paradoxically, when villagers were not waging war, life tended to be serene, punctuated by occasional conflicts over pig theft and marital discord. Among friends and family, the most common way of coping with conflict wasn’t violence but avoidance—one party would simply move away.

  War had few apparent benefits for women. It hung over every journey a woman’s male kin made from their village and each trip she and her daughters made to the gardens or to the brine pools to collect salt, where an enemy raiding party
might set upon them.

  War shaped children from their earliest memories. Boys’ education and play involved mimicking male elders waging war and staging raids. Toys were small bows with arrows made from bamboo or long stalks of grass. Grass arrows routinely found their way into boys’ eyes, leaving them half blind but no less eager to grow into warriors. For girls, war meant having the upper halves of one or more fingers chopped off each time a close relative was killed, to satisfy the dead person’s ghost. By the time a girl reached marrying age, her hands might be all thumbs. An anthropologist who followed the Gremlin Special survivors into the valley years later described the process: “Several girls are brought to the funeral compound early on the second day. One man, the specialist in this practice, is waiting for them. First he ties off a girl’s arm with a tight string above the elbow. Then he smashes her elbow down on a rock or board, hitting the olecranon process, the ‘funny bone,’ in order to numb the nerves in the fingers. Someone holds the girl’s hand on a board, and the man takes a stone adze and with one blow he cuts off one or two fingers at the first joint.”

  Making war and appeasing spirits wasn’t all the native people did. They built huts and watchtowers, grew sweet potatoes and other vegetables, tended pigs, raised families, and cooked meals. Most of the hard work fell to the women. Men built homes and watchtowers and tilled gardens, which left plenty of time to spare. They devoted that time and energy to war—planning it, fighting it, celebrating its victories, mourning its losses, and planning it anew. In between, they talked about it, sharpened their weapons, pierced their noses so pig tusks would fit into the holes and make them look fierce, and wrapped greasy orchid fibers around their arrows to cause infections if the wounds weren’t immediately fatal. They also spent endless hours scanning for enemy movements from the watchtowers on the edge of the vast no-man’s-land that separated their homes and gardens from their enemies’ identical homes and gardens.