Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Either way, McCollom turned the leader’s attention to the smiling candy-bearers: “Here! Meet Corporal Hastings and Sergeant Decker.”

  Regardless of who had extended his hand first, the tension was broken, and now both groups were smiling at each other. The native leader shook hands with Margaret and Decker, and in no time the rest of the natives followed suit. Margaret described the moment in her diary: “There on the knoll we held as fine a reception as any ever given by Mrs. Vanderbilt,” she wrote. “The black man who never had seen a white man and the white man who never before had met a savage on his own ground understood each other. The smiles had done it.”

  As her fear ebbed, Margaret sensed that the natives weren’t fierce. They seemed shy, perhaps even afraid of the three bedraggled intruders. When she asked Decker if he thought the same thing, he shot back: “Shh, don’t tell ’em so!”

  McCollom nicknamed his handshake partner “Pete,” after a college classmate. The survivors didn’t know that “Pete” and his fellow villagers thought they were spirits from the sky. And they never learned “Pete’s” real name.

  “PETE” WAS WIMAYUK WANDIK, a leader though not a “chief” in Uwambo.

  Wimayuk had listened closely to his clansman Yaralok Wandik describe what he saw at the crash site. Although his name meant “Fearful of War,” Wimayuk was more cautious than afraid. He’d been in many battles, and he knew the cost of war—his younger brother Sinangke Wandik had been mortally wounded in battle. He and Yaralok Wandik shared the responsibility of calling the men of Uwambo to fight. It was a role he didn’t take lightly.

  He told his son Helenma Wandik, the second of his five children, that he acted warmly to the creatures he thought were sky spirits because of the way he’d learned the Uluayek legend. Although the spirits’ return meant the end of an era, Wimayuk Wandik believed that something good could come of it. He hoped the new era might be better for his people.

  John McCollom with Wimayuk Wandik several weeks after the crash. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  Also, Wimayuk Wandik was a man willing to be flexible when an opportunity presented itself. He and his fellow villagers were traders, regularly walking twenty or so miles from their homes to the Baliem Valley lands of the Dani tribe, the heart of what the outsiders called Shangri-La. They exchanged feathers from birds of paradise, string, and bows and arrows for cowrie shells, pigs, and tobacco. If a battle happened to break out while they were trading, they’d join the fight on the side of their trading partners, even if they had no beef with the enemy. It was good for business, and good fun, too. When he found the survivors smiling and offering gifts in the clearing he called Mundima—the place of the Mundi River—Wimayuk saw an opportunity to befriend the spirits.

  ALTHOUGH MARGARET CONTINUED to refer to the natives as “savages” in her diary, she realized how much fiction had circulated around Hollandia about the natives:

  Far from being seven feet tall, they averaged from five feet four inches to five feet seven inches in height. And certainly, only on close observation, they didn’t look very fierce. They were black as the ace of spades and naked as birds in feathering time. Their clothing consisted of a thong around their waists, from which a gourd was suspended in front and a huge triple leaf hung tail-like in back. Some wore bracelets above their elbows. There were two kinds of bracelets. Those woven of fine twigs and those made of fur. . . . All but Pete, the chief, wore snoods suspended from their heads and hanging far down their backs. At least they looked like snoods. They seemed to be made of heavy string, like a shopping bag, and they were certainly the New Guinea counterpart of a shopping catch-all. In these snoods, the natives tucked anything they had to carry. After all, they didn’t have any pockets.

  Margaret wrinkled her nose at the powerful, musky scent of sweat mixed with the ash-blackened pig grease the natives smeared on their bodies: “Pete and his boys certainly needed baths and a lot of rosewater,” she wrote. “The breeze was coming from the wrong direction, and I prayed they would get tired of staring soon and go home.”

  The feeling was mutual, at least about the odor. Wimayuk and Yaralok told their children that the spirits carried a terrible smell. Considering the gangrenous sores on Margaret and Decker, combined with their unwashed days in the jungle, all three survivors almost certainly reeked.

  Margaret recoiled at the swarms of flies that hovered around the natives’ cuts and scratches. She marveled at the “biggest, flattest feet any of us had ever seen.” The survivors thought all the natives at the edge of the jungle were adults, but during the handshakes and greetings Margaret noticed that a group of boys had followed the men—they’d hung back until friendly relations were established.

  As the greetings continued, a native started a fire—splitting open a stick and quickly rubbing a rattan vine to make a spark—to cook sweet potatoes, which the natives called hiperi. McCollom bent down and pulled up a plant he thought looked like the rhubarb he’d grown in a garden back home in Missouri. He wiped off the dirt, bit into the stalk, and felt smoke shoot from his ears.

  “That’s the hottest damn stuff I ever tasted!” McCollom said later. He spit it out—sending the natives into peals of laughter. All except one.

  The unamused native began protesting to “Pete” in a way that the survivors interpreted to mean that they’d trampled through his personal garden. Margaret felt afraid of the man, whom she called “Trouble Maker.” But “Pete” stepped in.

  “The native who had the garden,” McCollom recalled, “he apparently started griping to the chief, and the chief, in effect turned around and said, ‘Shut up.’ And from then on we were friends.”

  THE UNHAPPY MAN was almost certainly Pugulik Sambom. His objections, according to Yaralok’s daughter Yunggukwe, weren’t about the ruined crops but about the survivors themselves.

  Margaret Hastings with a native child. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  “Pugulik was yelling at everyone that something bad would happen because of the spirits,” she said through an interpreter. “He said, ‘They’re spirits! They’re spirits! They’re ghosts! Don’t go in there with them.’ ”

  Yunggukwe watched as Pugulik paced back and forth on a fallen log, more scared than angry, repeating his warning that the strangers were mogat, spirits or ghosts, and certain to bring bad tidings. The woman whose legs Yunggukwe had grabbed in the field when the Gremlin Special flew overhead was Pugulik’s wife, Maruk, whose name meant “Bad.” Maruk echoed her husband’s warnings. Fortunately for the survivors, the Wandiks outnumbered the Samboms and welcomed them, spirits or not.

  THE SURVIVORS TRIED to get the natives to take McCollom’s knife as a gift. They encouraged them to try the Charms.

  “They handled the jackknife curiously,” Margaret wrote. “We tried to show them that the candy was to eat. We would open our mouths, pop in a piece of hard candy, smack our lips and look rapturous—though we had come to hate it like poison. Apparently they didn’t understand us. So we thought we would give the candy to some boys of ten or twelve who had accompanied Pete and his men. But when we started to feed the kids, ‘Trouble Maker’ danced up and down and shrieked until we backed off in a hurry.”

  Alarmed, Margaret dug into her pocket for her compact. She popped it open and showed “Pete” his image. Delighted, Wimayuk Wandik passed the mirror from man to man. “If ever anything was calculated to make friends and influence savages, it was that cheap red enamel compact from an Army PX,” she wrote. “These naked strangers beamed and gurgled and chattered like magpies over a sight of their own faces.”

  “Maggie,” Decker told her, “you ought to write home to the missionaries to stock up on compacts.”

  PHYSICALLY AND EMOTIONALLY exhausted, her burned legs and feet throbbing, Margaret dropped back down to the ground. A group of natives circled around her, squatting on their haunches and staring. Using her compact, Margaret took stock of herself and understood their curiosity.

  She wrote in her diary th
at not only was she the first white woman the natives had seen, she was “the first black-and-white person they had ever seen.” Burns from the crash had darkened the left side of her face, while the right side was unmarked. Her eyebrows and eyelashes had been singed, and her nose seemed swollen. McCollom’s jungle salon treatment didn’t help—short tufts of Margaret’s once-lustrous hair stood at attention all over her head. She didn’t know it, but even more interesting to the natives were her bright blue eyes.

  As she stared at the natives and the natives stared back, Margaret felt relief. Soon it spread into affection. “At the moment, I could not have loved Pete and his followers more dearly if they had been blood brothers,” she wrote. “They had turned out to be a race of Caspar Milquetoasts”—the name of a mild-mannered comic book character—“in black face instead of head hunters or cannibals. I was duly grateful.”

  McCollom brought “Pete” to Margaret and Decker to show him their injuries. The native leader nodded solemnly. Margaret detected sympathy in his reaction.

  “He looked again and muttered, ‘Unh, unh, unh,’ over and over again. We knew he was trying to tell us he was sorry and wanted to help. The only native word we ever picked up was ‘Unh, unh, unh’ repeated over and over,” Margaret wrote. In fact, unh wasn’t a word in the Yali or Dani language. It was a murmur, a local equivalent of a polite listener in English saying “Hmmm” to express interest.

  “Pete” examined the gash in Decker’s scalp. He stepped in close and blew into the cut. Margaret made light of it: “For the first and only time, I thought Decker was going to faint. Old Pete then came over to me and blew on my legs and hand. And I thought I would faint. Pete undoubtedly had the world’s worst case of halitosis.”

  “Decker and McCollom and I came to the conclusion,” Margaret continued, “that the blowing of the chieftain’s breath on a wound was probably some native cure-all custom, like laying on of hands in other parts of the world. But Decker and I didn’t appreciate the honor.”

  The survivors’ conclusion about the practice was close, but it failed to capture the full significance of the moment. Margaret and Decker had just received a remarkable gift, one that signified that the people who’d found them hurt and hungry in a sweet potato patch wanted nothing but for them to survive.

  WHEN A YALI or Dani man is wounded in battle, the physical damage is almost a secondary concern. More worrisome is the possibility that the injury might dislodge the essence of his being, his etai-eken, or “seeds of singing.” A better translation: his soul.

  Among people of the valley who enjoy good physical and spiritual health, the etai-eken are believed to reside in the upper part of the solar plexus, just below the front arch of the ribs. The native leader’s shell necklace, hanging as it did at just that spot, might well have been placed there to protect his etai-eken. Under pain or duress, the etai-eken are believed to retreat from the front part of the chest to a person’s back. Such a move is a spiritual calamity, a threat to an individual’s well-being that demands urgent action.

  First, a specialist removes any remnants of the arrow or spear that caused the wound. Then he makes several incisions in the victim’s stomach to drain what the natives call mep mili, or “dark blood,” which is believed to cause pain and sickness. Next comes the more essential treatment. A person who is either close to the wounded warrior or especially skilled in the healing arts speaks directly to the man’s etai-eken. He coaxes the soul matter back to its proper place, blowing and whispering special pleadings in the victim’s ear. He also blows directly on the wounds.

  A short time earlier, the survivors had feared that they’d be killed and eaten by Wimayuk Wandik, the native they called “Pete.” Now he was tending to their souls.

  BY MID-AFTERNOON THE survivors were bushed, but the natives were so fascinated by the sky spirits that they showed no sign of leaving. Then, around four o’clock, the cold nightly rains arrived. The natives gathered up the cooked sweet potatoes—“They took the chow with them!” Decker complained—but left the knife, the compact, and the hard candy behind. It would be another starving night for the survivors.

  The trio found a smooth spot of cleared ground, laid out one tarp, used the other as a cover, and went to sleep, “too weak to do much and too happy to care,” Margaret wrote. They’d scratched their way through the mountain jungle to a clearing, been spotted by a search plane, and made friends with the natives. Margaret summed it up with understatement: “It had been a big day.”

  When she awoke in the middle of the night, she sensed that someone was hovering over her. Before she could scream, she recognized a man’s face: “Pete.”

  “It was as plain as day that he was worried about us and had come back to see how we were. He hovered over us like a mother hen. I woke up McCollom. He took a good look at Pete and said, ‘Holy smoke! We’ve got a guardian.’ ”

  Later, when she compared notes with McCollom and Decker, Margaret learned that whenever one or the other woke that night, he saw Chief Pete/Wimayuk Wandik watching over them.

  Chapter 13

  COME WHAT MAY

  BY NOVEMBER 1944, Earl Walter and sixty-six jump-qualified members of the 5217th Reconnaissance Battalion were sweating out the war in “strategic reserve,” stuck in steamy but peaceful Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea. The closest thing to excitement came when their battalion was renamed the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion (Special), known as the 1st Recon. The new name did nothing to change their idle fate. Neither did Walter’s promotion from lieutenant to captain.

  As months passed, Allied forces under General MacArthur kept busy retaking the islands of the Philippines—one after another, from Leyte to Luzon, Palawan to Mindanao. As the fight progressed, paratroopers from the 503rd and 511th regiments carried out their dangerous and heroic missions on Corregidor and Luzon.

  All the while, Walter and his men yearned to get out of the heat of Hollandia and into the fire of war. Their battalion’s devil-may-care motto was Bahala na! a phrase from the Tagalog dialect of the Philippines that can be translated as “Come what may!” The more time passed without a mission, the more it seemed like a taunt. The problem, as Walter and his men saw it, was that nothing came their way.

  While awaiting orders in Hollandia—some eighteen hundred miles southeast of Manila—Walter’s men pressed him for news. With families and roots in the Philippines, they wanted the honor and the satisfaction of driving the enemy from their homeland. They craved payback for more than two years of Japanese occupation. They wanted revenge for the Bataan Death March of 1942, during which Japanese troops killed or brutalized thousands of captured Filipino and American soldiers along a forced hundred-mile march to a prison camp. Newspapers had detailed the atrocities, fueling a combustible mix of fear and hatred of the Japanese, perhaps nowhere more so than among the men in Walter’s unit. One of them, Corporal Camilo “Rammy” Ramirez, had experienced the horrors at Bataan firsthand before making a daring escape.

  Walter tried to boost morale and conditioning, leading grueling runs around Hollandia to keep his men’s legs strong for parachute landings. Yet privately, Walter feared it was a waste of time. He worried that he’d spend his life saying, “Nothing much,” when asked what he’d done in the war.

  “My men would come to me and say—I was a lieutenant then—‘Lieutenant, when in hell are we going to get to the Philippines?’ ” Walter recalled. “And I’d say, ‘As soon as I can get us there.’ ” One hindrance, at least from Walter’s perspective, was that the Japanese were retreating faster than expected, potentially making unnecessary his unit’s unique language, intelligence, and parachute skills.

  Walter proposed one combat task after another to his superiors, to no avail. Showing some moxie, he tried to cut through the U.S. Army bureaucracy by drawing up plans for a behind-enemy-lines parachute drop. He shared the plans with an acquaintance—a lieutenant who happened to be the son of General Courtney Whitney, who oversaw guerrilla resistance in the Philippines and was Ma
cArthur’s closest confidant.

  When that gambit didn’t spark a response, on March 13, 1945, Walter took the next step and wrote a blunt letter directly to General Whitney. In it, Walter complained about being idle and fairly pleaded for combat duty in the Philippines. If that wasn’t possible, he wrote, he wanted to be reassigned to a fighting unit in Europe or anywhere at all before it was too late and the war was already won.

  “As you know, Sir,” Walter wrote the general, “I came to this theater at my own request, in fact I worked hard for the assignment, but now I find that my efforts were in vain.” After making his case, he acknowledged that he’d violated protocol and jumped multiple levels in the chain of command by sending the letter. “In closing may I add that I admit I have stepped over the line but I am afraid this is a trait I inherited from my father.”

  Whitney seemed to admire Walter’s pluck. He responded two weeks later with a letter filled with praise and encouragement. The brigadier general gently explained to the young officer that matters more pressing than personal ambition—however courageous or well-intentioned—took priority in the effort to reclaim the Philippines. Whitney urged Walter to keep his men ready to invade Japan, and offered flattery and morale-building suggestions. “The work of the Battalion and the preparation of your parachutists for active service has been brilliant,” the general wrote. “Your leadership in this latter field has been cause for much satisfaction on the part of every staff officer of this Headquarters. . . . My advice to you is to do all possible to keep your men in trim and keep patient a little longer. I am sure that your desire for an opportunity to employ these men in the manner for which they have been trained will be fully satisfied in the campaigns which yet lie ahead.”

  Whitney’s letter cheered Walter. He wrote the general in response: “I took the liberty of reading it to my parachutists, and to the man they were overjoyed, and their morale has climbed to a new high. They are all very anxious to do their part, and the work given us, no matter how difficult, I can guarantee will be a complete success. The men will be kept in trim and when our turn comes we will be ready. Thank you for giving the hopes of my officers and men a new foundation and I can easily say for all, you can count on us for anything.”