Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  “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 Com
mand 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.”

  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.”