Almost a Family

by John Darnton

  I learned from McKinney that two members of his force had been killed and fifteen wounded by the bombs dropped by the aircraft. One of the dead men was a U.S. war correspondent named Brian Darnton (I’m depending on memory for his name), and the other was Lieut. Bruce Fahnestock, who was C.O. of American Small Ships at Milne Bay. I gathered it was Fahnestock who gave the order for the ships to fire.

  So I ended up with a narrative that made sense and, to my mind at least, settled the matter. Conley had spotted the two ships and overflown them without noticing the American flags. He’d turned around and come back with the bomb-bay doors open. Seeing this, or maybe fearing it, Fahnestock had opened fire with the machine gun, which confirmed the pilot’s conviction that they were enemy ships. In short, my father’s death resulted from a tragic series of blunders both in the air and on water.

  One frustrating aspect of my interviews with the aging vets from the King John was that none of them remembered my father—that is, until June 2006, when I received a letter from Plainview, Texas, written in a shaky hand. Its contents made me want to fly right down there to talk to the writer, Robert L. Owens. But I then received a message from his daughter that he was hospitalized with a lung infection, and so I put off my visit for a month, until he was better. I flew to Amarillo and drove down the Panhandle, across pool table–flat country. The land was treeless and windswept, with not much to see, just wooden telephone poles leaning toward the dusty ground and an occasional silo. The radio played three things: preachers, country music, and heavy metal. I was in the middle of nowhere.

  I found Owens’s house easily, a low-slung white ranch on a street of modest homes called Zephyr Road. An old Buick with a Purple Heart license plate was in the driveway. A wheelchair ramp led up to the front door, which was open. The handrail was decorated with carved figures of small animals. Owens himself was waiting for me right inside, sitting in an easy chair in the living room. He rose to greet me—a large man, over six feet, with a broad, open face, wire-rim glasses, and a head of healthy white hair. He had a slight stoop and a friendly manner but seemed unsure on his feet and sat down again quickly. I saw that he was dressed in a good plaid shirt and slacks, as if in anticipation of my visit. His daughter, Sherita Hatch, was there, too.

  We talked for a while and then they showed me around. The living room was decorated with paintings of flowers. Lifelike replicas of birds hung from the pull chord of a fan and perched on a table lamp’s shade. Dolls were positioned on the couch. Above the purple carpet, supported by plaster angels, was a long coffee table, and on it were two Bibles and a crucifix. War memorabilia occupied his small study. There were plenty of photos. In them the young Owens looked capable, handy with a gun, the kind of man you’d want on patrol with you. I looked at his wedding picture. He was as skinny as a string bean and gawky, tilting his head up at the camera, the way people do who are not used to being photographed. His wife had died many years before.

  We sat back down to talk with the air-conditioning running and the TV on mute. He told of his early years in Comanche territory in Oklahoma. At the age of twenty-one, he was inducted into the army and went to Fort Ord in California, where he joined the 32nd. He went to Australia aboard the Monterey, the same ship that had carried my father three months before. On his way to Camp Cable outside Brisbane, the brass lectured them. “I remember them telling us, ‘Now you’re the foreigners. Don’t start popping off your mouth about them driving on the wrong side of the road.’ In Brisbane, they were glad to see us at first, but boy, going out with their girls and everything, they was ready to run us out before it was over with.” He got word his outfit was going to New Guinea. “The evening we shipped out, we were in such a hurry and we had to dye our fatigues green. I burned some holes in mine and they were still wet when we put them on.” They were airlifted in a Flying Fortress to Port Moresby and then later to the northern coast. There they boarded the trawlers for the journey up the coast.

  “There were two ships. The one I was on—the Saint John or something like that, your dad was on it and I got to talk to him for a while. I don’t remember the conversation now, probably just little things. We were going to make a beach landing—that was the purpose of it—and your dad being there with us as a reporter, I wondered what in the world he was doing on the ship. We had a pretty good little trip there on the water. I’m sure we probably talked about the excitement of going to a beach landing for the first time. Then that B-25 came over and started bombing us.”

  Owens stretched his long legs out before him, and when he got nervous, he rubbed the sides of his shoes together and they made a squeaking sound. He did that now. I asked him a question about something he had put in his letter, but he seemed not to hear me and repeated again that he wished he could remember what they had talked about. “It was so long ago, I really don’t remember.” He resumed the story and said his ship was carrying ammo and the other ship was carrying canned goods. I asked him again about what he had written, and again he seemed not to hear. Instead, he described how the ships tried to maneuver out of the way, one going closer to shore, the other out to deeper water. He looked away from me and continued. “After they dropped the bombs, the natives that came to meet us out at the ship—some of them were educated in Australia and they were trained … so they had those canoes with the … I never know what to call them; they had a little bamboo platform and a floating thing on the side, to carry supplies on.…” His voice trailed off and he paused for what seemed like a long time. Then he went on. “Well, that’s when I helped your father off the ship onto, onto that. It would have taken him to the beach.” He had finished the story, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to talk about the thing he had written to me.

  We talked some more and I reminded him of what he had put in the letter and he said he was sorry he’d written it. “I thought afterward, Well, I shouldn’t put that down.” He didn’t want to talk about it again. I told him that it was all right, that he shouldn’t worry about my feelings, that I was only eleven months old when my father died and had no memory of him and so whatever he had to say wouldn’t hurt me. He looked over quickly and then away again. “Well,” he began slowly, “as I wrote you, I was the one who picked up your father’s body. I wrapped him in a blanket—you know, we had these blankets with us; we called them ‘G.I. blankets.’ So I wrapped him in one and put him on one of those native canoes and he was taken to shore.”

  Owens stopped talking for a bit, then resumed and again went off on a tangent. “And there was a second lieutenant there—he had a small shrapnel wound and he raised so much Cain, our company commander, Captain Florey, said, ‘When you get back on that ship, I don’t want no part of you. If you raise so much Cain over such a small wound.’ ” He paused, looked over at me, then resumed his narrative. “So then we got off the ship. When we did, when we got your father down there on the beach, there was a native hut there. It started to rain. We thought, well, we’d have a little shelter. But there were sand fleas there; they’d just eat you up. You couldn’t sit in it. Then later, a native came running up that had been a captive of the Japanese and he had escaped. Of course, we couldn’t understand what he was saying, but the other natives there understood and they told us. He said the Japanese were just a short distance from us and we didn’t have time to dig in or do anything ourselves, you know, so we signaled the ships that were still in the bay and they came closer and the natives in those canoes got us back out on the ship and we were out of there.”

  We talked about other things for a while, including what life was like in New Guinea. “The women run around in grass skirts. Their breasts—one would be normal; the other be hanging way down, ’cause they used it to feed the pigs. These little pigs be following after them. When we first got there, the Japanese had raped the women, so the women hid.” He had vivid memories of the Battle of Buna. “One night out on patrol, three of us got trapped. We had to spend the night in the water, under barbed wire, so close to the Japanese tha
t we could hear them talking. Finally we found a communication wire in the morning and followed it back to our company. When I come off the front lines, the seat of my pants was out, the knees was out, my underwear was long rotted off, my shoes were off. Nature itself was as bad as the enemy, the mosquitoes and the swamps. You could be sitting there on guard duty at night, you know, out in those swamps, and you hear something come into the water and it gets closer and closer and you click the safety off your M-1, ready, you know, and about that time it be a squeal, it’d be a swamp rat. And just stuff like that. The Japanese had a twenty-five-caliber with an exploding shell and they fire it at a distance and it hit a tree and it would explode like it was fired right at you. And there’s a bird that would holler, ‘Hey, hey,’ and you think somebody was calling you until you found out that was a bird. You had to get used to it. And occasionally some of the boys would just absolutely lose it. We had one boy in our squad who lost it and he was behind me and he yells, ‘There’s one, there’s one,’ and he starts firing. And the leader yells, ‘Owen, you all right?’ and he knocked that kid’s rifle down. There’s very few in our company that wasn’t killed or wounded or had malaria. I remember one, just slightly wounded, but he didn’t make it. I guess his heart just gave out.”

  At one point, he told a joke to show how big the mosquitoes were: “They used to say you could pump gasoline into them, thinking they was an Airacobra.” I realized with a start that this was the very same joke my father had recounted in a dispatch.

  Owens was wounded at Buna. He was standing in a river, up to his neck in water, when a mortar round landed nearby. A log in front of him stopped most of the shrapnel, but one piece flew up his nose, and he spent several weeks in a field hospital. One memory that still bothers him is of an insect. “I remember one night a bug got in my ear, all night long. I couldn’t get it out. I poured water in it. It went on fluttering. It was like to run me crazy. Funny, a thing like that, it sounds small—I think back on it and it gives me the shudders.”

  Each time I eased the talk back to the raid on the King John and each time he told me a little more about the attack, how the bombs sent plumes of water high into the air, and more about my father. He said he didn’t remember my father’s wound but that he knew it was in the back of his head or his neck and he was sure he died quickly. He said he and one other soldier laid my father’s body on the platform of an outrigger. “Then we went to the beach and laid him on the shore back aways. And handling him … there was blood. The blood seeped through my trousers.… And … that’s what I shouldn’t have told you—that later, when it came time to eat, I looked down at the blood on my pants and I couldn’t do it. I was too upset. It was my first time. His blood was all over me.” He rubbed his legs so that his shoes were squeaking and he stopped talking.

  He looked relieved that he had said it. He said that of all the war memories—standing in water up to his neck, being alone in the swamps, being hit by shrapnel—that moment was the worst: sitting on the beach, his rations open before him, the sand fleas biting him, the blood on his pants. When I left, he shook my hand strongly and wished me well. I thanked him for everything.

  CHAPTER 23

  The nine-seater Cessna Caravan took off from the Port Moresby airport at dawn and by first light we were over the Owen Stanley Mountains. I stared down at the terrain, an uninterrupted blanket of knotty green, and recalled the forbidding descriptions I had read of what lay below. Nina and I were on our way to Pongani. I had come on a mission. It had become important, essential, to see the place where my father was killed. I wondered if any villagers who had witnessed the bombing might still be alive, though I realized this was a long shot, since sixty-five years had passed and life expectancy on the island back then was well under forty.

  I pulled out a map of New Guinea. Various writers have tried to conjure up a beast whose shape best conforms to the island. William Manchester in his book on MacArthur, American Caesar, described it as a dragon. Karl Shapiro, the poet who served as a medical corps clerk there in 1942, thought it looked more like a sprawling bird. In his recollection of the war years, The Younger Son, Shapiro tells of rain so voluminous that “it was more like a shipment of solid water with no space between the drops,” of clouds of mosquitoes that fell on the soldiers, bats that were more like flying foxes, and the stench of “God knows what vegetation [that] made it impossible to breathe.” He remembered a remark by Aldous Huxley that if Wordsworth had visited the tropics, he would have deserted nature forever or at least “thought twice about the countryside kindliness of things.” He summed up: “Nobody had ever called New Guinea the isles of the blest, and nobody ever would. It was the island of the damned, and they were in it.”

  Turning from the map to the landmass below, I thought the beast it most resembled was a hideous-looking giant iguana I had seen in the Galápagos. A hump of land poking northwest into Indonesia looked like the beak-shaped head. The hills rose like folds around the unsightly neck, while the mountains formed the spiny crests along the upper back. The eastern peninsula dangled toward Australia like a leg. Even the dark green colors and the open patches of dark brown seemed right. I remembered how repellent the actual giant lizard had appeared, sitting still for hours on black volcanic rock, absorbing the sun’s heat into its cold-blooded veins.

  Before flying into Port Moresby on a plane sparsely filled with glum businessmen, aid workers, and other Third World adventurers, Nina and I had spent three weeks in Australia and New Zealand. I was struck by the people’s continuing involvement in World War II, as if the war had ended, say, twenty years earlier, instead of more than sixty years ago. On ANZAC Day, the equivalent of our Memorial Day, hundreds of thousands turn up at dawn for commemorative services.

  In Papua New Guinea—or PNG, as everyone calls it—the war has left a different legacy. There’s no national celebration—national anything seems out of the question, since the population of six million–plus is splintered into remote, virtually inaccessible villages. The people eek out subsistence livelihoods, living in thatched huts, growing yams and vegetables, and hunting wild pigs. They speak some 850 languages and owe allegiance to local clans, not some distant abstraction of government. The insular system of local allegiances and obligations is called wantok, after the pidgin expression “one talk,” which refers to those who share a language. In short, their lives seem untouched by the twenty-first century.

  But they were touched by the great conflagration of the last century. During the war Papuans were pressed into service by both sides, by these strange outsiders who were either small and yellow or large and white and were fighting each other to the death. The locals were used mostly to haul supplies and evacuate the wounded. The landscape is still littered with the ancient relics of war—old landing strips, bombed-out planes, and sunken submarines. Jeeps and tanks rust in the forests, having been left behind when the troops moved on, like a stage set deserted by the actors. So many soldiers died—including thousands of Japanese never accounted for—that even today, after heavy rains, villagers report an occasional skeleton rising up in the mangrove swamps like a mummy in a horror movie.

  In Australia, Nina and I noticed that when we told people that we were going next to New Guinea, their faces would cloud over. More often than not, they gave a warning; they had known someone, a friend, a neighbor, a young backpacker, who had gone there and not returned. The stories were often the same: The person had been robbed and killed in town or had ventured into some distant village and been drawn into a dispute that turned deadly. Many of these arguments seemed to revolve around land; the Papuans held their ancestral territory sacred and many visitors didn’t understand that to trespass upon it without permission, and without payment, was a serious affront. Port Moresby and some regional capitals, like Popondetta, in Oro Province, where we were bound, were among the most crime-ridden places anywhere. Gangs of young toughs from the provinces roamed the streets. They were called by the pidgin name “rascals,” which, when
we first heard it, endowed them with an innocence they didn’t deserve.

  In Moresby we were taken in hand by Erik Andersen, a young lawyer originally from New Zealand, and his gorgeous wife, Mary-Anne. I had met this couple through a complicated chain of e-mails and we had hosted them in New York. They met us at Jacksons International Airport. It was mercilessly hot—the heat slapped us in the face the moment we stepped off the plane. We hopped into their Land Rover for a tour of the capital. The roads were crowded, less with cars than people walking on the shoulders and dashing across the roundabouts. Women sold stacks of coconuts by the roadside, children swarmed everywhere, and fires in dusty market stalls sent up plumes of smoke. Young men lounged about, sitting on curbs and leaning against buildings. These were the legions of unemployed. They gave the place an ominous feel, as if the calm could be broken at any moment by an explosion.

  The Andersens’ hilltop villa, where we were given a room, did not ignore sensible precautions. There was a ten-foot-high fence with a gate at the bottom of a steep driveway, a fierce-looking guard from a clan notorious for using poisoned darts, two large dogs, and a “rape gate” to seal off the bedrooms at night. As the hot night fell with tropical speed, we sipped gin and tonics on their veranda, which overlooked the harbor far below, where dots of light gleamed from an industrial wharf. Sounds of frogs and insects came from all directions. Then it was back into the Land Rover, out the guarded gate, a quick trip through town to another ten-foot-high fence topped by concertina wire, through another gate, to a large clubhouse filled with hard-drinking expatriates. After dinner, the process was repeated in reverse.

  In the morning we were up at 4:30 a.m. There was a muggy haze and we drove through empty streets to the airport. Our bags were weighed in and more people showed up to join our contingent. In addition to Erik, who wanted to come along to see how this trip would play out, there was a translator I had enlisted from a local newspaper, the Post-Courier. His name was Barnabas Orere, and he said to call him “Barney”—which I took as a good omen. Barney was dressed in a flaming red Adidas T-shirt. He was an engaging type with a quick smile. His mother came from a village near Pongani, so he was fluent in the local language. He seemed to have a quick explanation for everything that we encountered. Erik, meanwhile, who had long dreamed of starting an indigenous film company, had arranged for a camera crew to accompany us. He was hoping to produce a three-part series on PNG and the war. The crew consisted of a cameraman, Carl, a cheerful young Papuan who had studied at the university, and a soundman, Samu, a quiet chain-smoker with Rastafarian curls, who came from a nearby island, where his grandfather had been a headhunter. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of a camera dogging my steps, but that seemed to be the price in order to split the cost of the chartered plane. Besides, the two looked to be good company. The pilot, Ian Smith, loaded the bags, carefully checking the balance, and we were off.