The Airmen and the Headhunters

by Judith M. Heimann

  Although Phil found the official's gaze shifty, especially compared to the unblinking, forthright stares of the Dayaks, he wanted to trust this man who had made such a wonderful meal for them. In any case, he felt he and his men had no other option. He wrote out the names and ranks of the four airmen and gave it to the official. He also gave the man a typed description of their squadron's general mission, with the most important words in both English and Malay. Then he showed him the blood chit in Dutch that promised a reward to anyone who helped the Allied forces.

  All this exchange of names and documents, not to mention the soothing effects of good food, produced a somewhat more cordial mood. Phil pulled out his silk map. With it and a map that Makahanap produced of the Dutch East Indies, Phil was able to tell the district officer about the successful battle of Leyte Gulf and that the airmen's home base was in Allied hands. Makahanap managed to convey that he came from Long Berang and had known American missionaries there.

  The airmen tried to ask if there were still Americans living at Long Berang but could not understand the answer. Americans in Long Berang—that would be almost too good to be true.

  Then Makahanap led the airmen back to the river, where they boarded his boat. Within an hour or two they moored at Long Gavit. There, with Busar's help, Makahanap arranged for a celebratory dinner to welcome the Americans. This time, Makahanap's adopted son, Christiaan, did the cooking: pork fritters, fruit, fried rice.

  "If only G.I. chefs had recipes like this," Phil remarked. His and the other airmen's spirits rose as their stomachs filled.

  After the flyers were sent off to sleep in a nearby hut, Makahanap again took out his map of the Dutch East Indies. By the light of damar resin torches, he showed the headmen where Morotai was and told them the Allies were based there. The Lun Dayeh elders could see that the Allied forces were not so far from them. They discussed the whole matter again for hours. Makahanap knew he must not rush, that he must allow the Dayaks plenty of time to turn over the subject in their minds. In such a discussion, everyone who had something to say had to say it. If the argument grew heated, there was always someone in the group—often one of the highest noblemen—who would play the clown, make faces and dance about or do animal imitations to make the others laugh and restore the group's equilibrium.

  Finally, everyone seemed in agreement that the Americans should be hidden and protected. Makahanap then suggested that they all swear an oath so that nobody would betray the plot. The Lun Dayeh agreed. To seal the oath, the Long Gavit elders took a dog from the longhouse down to an amphitheater-like area nearby that had delicately carved and ornamented log seats. This was where the longhouse noblemen slaughtered their pigs and water buffalo for a big feast.

  The men tethered the dog to a post and quickly slit its throat, catching the blood in a wooden basin. Everyone had to lick a small amount and smear a bit of the blood on his chest. This was the Lun Dayeh's most solemn oath. Makahanap knew that a man would think long and hard before daring to break this oath because it would mean his death. That fulfilling this oath might also lead to their deaths was a thought Makahanap kept to himself.

  The elders eventually went off to sleep, but Makahanap stayed awake on the veranda. At midnight, when everyone else was asleep, he woke the four flyers and Christiaan. This was a time of day when no one would normally venture out of doors. Even hunters in the forest would stay inside their huts until just before dawn, to avoid the nocturnal wildlife that prowled unseen.

  Makahanap and his son dropped the notched log down through the hole and led the airmen through the tall grass to the edge of the Kinaye River in front of the Long Gavit longhouse. There, the former mission aide held an evangelical prayer meeting such as he remembered Brothers Willfinger and Presswood doing, with "kneeling, sobbing and praying to the Almighty God, asking His mercy, and pleading with Him to spare us all." He wanted to ask God's blessing on this hazardous enterprise, but he probably was looking also to bind the airmen to him the way drinking the dog's blood had bound the Lun Dayeh to him. He later remembered it as "an unforgettable moment in my life."

  He must have felt he had done the right thing when the Christians from the longhouse, hearing the noise, came out and joined them. The Lun Dayeh, with Christmas approaching, sang hymns into the dark to the tune of "O Come All Ye Faithful" and "Silent Night." They sang a song to the tune of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" that the Americans found comforting. The flyers sang their version while the Dayaks sang theirs, to everyone's apparent satisfaction. But there was one song unfamiliar to the Yanks that the Lun Dayeh appeared to like even better. The chorus went:

  Alla ngimet moejoe,

  Anid atjo; ngimet do' do'

  Ie ngimet moejoe,

  Alla ngimet moejoe.

  William (as Phil and the others were beginning to call Makahanap) had learned the English for it from the missionaries. It meant:

  God will take care of you.

  Through every day, o'er all the way;

  He will take care of you.

  God will take care of you.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Another Part of the Forest

  After the dying copilot shouted, "Hit the silk," John Nelson had been the first to jump out of the plane. "The first part, when you leave the plane, is like stepping off of a porch. Next you hit the slipstream and then you realize what it is like being in a 150-mile-an-hour windstorm," he later said. After slowing down a bit, he pulled the rip cord but the chute stayed in its pack. Desperately throwing the rip cord away, he clawed at the flap until he got the chute out. The shock of its opening caused his antimalaria Atabrine tablets, his first-aid pack and a variety of small tools to fly out of his unbuttoned pockets. Fortunately, his .45 was in its shoulder holster and two clips of ammunition were in his flying suit.

  Once he recovered from the shock of his chute opening, he experienced "a moment of silence and loneliness such as I have never had before or since." He could not see any of his crewmates, not even Franny Harrington or Elmer Philipps, who had been chuted up and standing just behind him. Above him, the plane still seemed to be flying. Had he jumped too soon? Below, some distance away among the seemingly solid cover of dull green mounds of treetops, he could make out a few plumes of smoke. Smoke had to mean human life of some sort. As the trees came up to meet him, trees that seemed to be on top of a mountain range, he tried to keep in mind where he had seen the smoke coming from. Then he crashed into a very tall tree. Unable to work his chute free, he managed to wriggle out of his harness and did a combined slide and fall a hundred feet down to the ground. His experience working one summer in the Idaho forests had been good for something after all.

  It was midday, and the sun was at its highest. John crawled around in the undergrowth in the steaming heat, hoping not to surprise snakes or other dangerous creatures while he retrieved what he could of his fallen gear. He did not find much. Then he started down the mountain alongside a small stream, heading in the direction of the no-longer-visible plumes of smoke. Though John found it slow going through the thick jungle, the stream beside his path gradually widened and led to what was clearly a river. By now, he had been tramping through the leech-ridden brush for a good five hours. A bit farther on, he could see a large native structure. But what to do now? He had heard from the Aussies about headhunters, and he did not want his own head to become one of their trophies.

  It was nearly dark, so John decided to wait and watch before taking action. Meanwhile, he tended to the leeches that were covering his ankles and the lower parts of his legs. He remembered being told during the three days of jungle survival training in New Guinea that tobacco juice would make the leeches fall off. He chewed up a couple of cigarettes from one of the two packs that had survived the drop and tried spitting the juice on the leeches. This did not work.

  He looked up from his ministrations to see a fierce-looking dark man carrying a spear outside the house a short distance away. The Dayak dropped his long weapon and bowed down. John called
out to him in his best high school Spanish that he was an "Americano." After the initial shock of seeing each other had subsided, John pointed to his bloodied legs and feet. The Dayak (a Lun Dayeh, as John would learn) approached with his machete in hand and flicked off the leeches with the tip of the blade. He then grabbed a hunk of moss from a nearby tree and wiped the places on John's legs where the leeches had been. This cleaned the blood off and stopped the bleeding.

  The Dayak led John up a notched log into the longhouse, some twelve feet above the swampy ground. (Though John did not know it, the longhouse was at Pa' Inau, in the northern part of the Krayan District.) It was smoky and dark inside the two-hundred-foot-long by fifty-foot-wide structure. The only light came from resin torches and cooking fires burning in the stone or clay hearths scattered about the floor of the one big room. There seemed to be about thirty men, women and children, and they were visibly excited by John's arrival. John kept telling them that he was "Americano." He took off his .45 in its shoulder holster and hung it from a peg on the wall before sitting down.

  He had arrived at dinnertime. He was offered a place by one of the cooking fires and was given a lot of rice and a little bit of boiled greens and meat to eat. After eating what he could, he pulled out one of his wartime brown packs of cigarettes and passed it around. John could see that the gesture was greatly appreciated, although he mistook one old man for a woman and did not offer him a cigarette—a huge social error, he later learned, but one he was forgiven because of his foreignness.

  As the evening wore on, John learned that these people knew a lot about foreigners from his part of the world because the Krayan District had been proselytized by North American Protestant missionaries, whom the Japanese had murdered two years before. After terrifying the Dayaks and killing all the white people in the interior, the Japanese had gone away.

  John learned this because, after dinner, the Dayaks brought out paper and pencil and a Malay/Lun Dayeh/English glossary the missionaries had left with them. To supplement this word list, the Dayaks kept pointing out things to John and giving him their word for it so he could write it down.

  Using gestures as well as his growing command of the Lun Dayeh vocabulary, John tried to tell his hosts where he had come from. "I finally got them to realize that I had been in a plane that had flown over their village. They knew what planes were, but they could not believe that such a big person as myself could have possibly been in that small an object."

  It was getting late, and his hosts stretched out a woven fiber mat by the fire, indicating he should sleep there. Exhausted by trying to sort out the jumble of hopes, fears and memories of this extraordinary day, John quickly fell into a deep sleep, not waking till the roosters underneath the longhouse started crowing at dawn. The Dayaks were sitting around him, waiting for him to wake up.

  John conveyed to his hosts that he wanted to find his crewmates and that he had left his parachute up in the top of a tree. By midmorning he was part of a hunting party looking for his crewmates, his parachute or, ideally, both. Some of the dozen or so dogs that seemed to have the run of the longhouse came, too.

  Although John had worked one summer in the high forests of his native northern Idaho, he had no experience of the oppressive damp heat or dense vegetation he now faced. "After we had spent about six hours going up and down impossibly steep and slippery mountains, we returned home empty-handed and I had a greater respect for the jungle."

  Late in the afternoon of his third day at the longhouse, John heard a big commotion outside. Going out onto the veranda, he saw a hunting party returning with a short, stocky middle-aged man he immediately recognized as Franny Harrington. Franny was bruised and bloody from having slipped and fallen on the steep, wet paths in the jungle. His blond hair was covered with leaves, and his legs and feet were eaten alive by leeches. His flight suit was in tatters, and he was limping because one of his boot heels had been ripped off by the force of his parachute opening. That blast of air had also taken his sidearm, but he had managed to hold on to three or four clips of ammunition. Usually a tough-acting bantam cock of a guy, Franny was now weak and dehydrated after three days without food or water.

  The Dayaks recalled that their dogs had made a lot of noise the night John had arrived, but they had not gone out to investigate. Nobody who can avoid it goes into the jungle in the dark, they explained to John. That is why the log ladders are pulled up at night. They surmised that the noise that had alerted their dogs must have been made by the new airman walking somewhere nearby, along the stream past the longhouse. They had found the man they called "Efrani" some five hours' walk downstream, and they had had to almost carry him home.

  The next three or four days were spent nursing Franny back to health while both flyers tried to learn more about how to manage life among the Dayaks. The food was not too bad, if you didn't mind plain rice. Sometimes there was even a bit of fresh fish from the river or meat from a successful hunt. The women caught fish in shallow parts of the river or in puddles in the rice fields, often with just their hands, and the men caught bigger fish in the deeper water, using big fish traps made of wood, leaves and vines.

  The biggest problem for the airmen was the total lack of privacy. With no walls between households, there was no way for anyone in the longhouse to be alone or out of sight, and certainly no way for these very interesting foreigners to screen themselves from view. John had already learned that urination and defecation were done along the edge of the veranda. He and Franny tried not to think about the fact that the pigs, which were being fattened for an eventual feast, were quick to swallow whatever fell down to them. The two Americans learned how to take a bath in the stream without exposing their bodies to the frank stares of the Dayaks. They noticed that their bath time tended to bring out many of the longhouse women, who chose just that moment to draw water from the stream for cooking.

  The Dayaks often sang in the evening after dinner. John and Franny could sometimes recognize the tunes of Protestant hymns, though the words were in another language. When it was the guests' turn to entertain the others, the two airmen had fun singing old camp songs and army ditties. There was a Sousa marching tune that was especially dear to John, who had tried and failed to get through Air Force officer cadet training, because of slightly below-standard eyesight. It began: "Be kind to your washed-out cadet, for he may be your aerial gunner." But the song the Dayaks liked best was John and Franny's rendition of "When der Fuhrer Says We Are the Master Race" from the repertoire of comic songwriter Spike Jones. John and Franny's exuberant sound effects invariably brought the longhouse down with laughter.

  The two men kept asking for news of their crewmates; Tom Capin and Elmer Philipps ought to have landed nearby. But nobody seemed to know what had happened to them, much less to the guys in the front of the plane.

  A week or more after Franny's arrival, the season for visits among the longhouse people began; the harvest was done and the heavy rains had not yet started. The Dayaks told the Yanks that one of their teachers, a native of Menado in the northern Celebes who had been recruited by the missionaries to be their aide, would be coming to see them.

  His name was William Mongan, and John and Franny found him to be a small, gentle man in his late thirties or early forties, with a little knowledge of English and a lot of sympathy for their plight. He explained that he had been left behind by the departing Kemah Injil missionaries to try to keep the Christian spirit alive in the Krayan valley. The Japanese had allowed him to stay, with his Menadonese wife, Maria, and their ten-year-old son and two little girls, so long as they did nothing disloyal to the Japanese or the Co-Prosperity Sphere. They had not seen any Japanese since. The Mongans had lived and worked first at the Kemah Injil school in Long Sempayang in the southern Krayan, but they were based now at the village of Long Nuat, to the north, on the Kemalu River. Mongan explained that Long Nuat was one or two days' walk (less than one day's walk for a Lun Dayeh) east from Pa' Inau, the longhouse John and Franny now regarded
as home. Mongan insisted that the airmen should come with him to Long Nuat. They would be better off with him, he said. He and his wife knew how to care for them.

  As John and Franny prepared to leave the longhouse the next day, their hosts were clearly not eager to see them go, and loaded them up with reed mats and other gifts. The airmen bade a reluctant farewell. Something like love had developed between them and these generous-hearted longhouse people of the Krayan.

  By the time they actually got under way, it was midmorning, the beginning of the hottest part of the day. As with virtually all the Lun Dayeh mountain trails, the one they took was steep. The air was damp and the path was muddy, except when it went through the middle of a stream, several of which had currents so strong that there was a real risk of being swept quickly downriver if one slipped on the rocky bed. Franny's age and infirmities were beginning to tell.

  When they stopped for the evening, the Dayaks threw together a temporary sulap for the night. It seemed almost magical the way the Dayaks could collect vegetation from very nearby and quickly turn it into a lean-to. A fire was started to cook their rice and to temper the mountain chill—and to keep clouded leopards and honey bears from approaching.

  Long Nuat, reached the next afternoon, was a surprise to the airmen. It was almost as if they were no longer in Borneo. There were several Western-style buildings there, chief of which were the Kemah Injil church and the Mongan house next door. There had been no Japanese or other outsiders there in two years, so Mongan invited them to stay with him and his family. Maria cooked for them the recipes she had learned from the American missionaries back home in Menado: fried chicken, pork roast (from animals that had not been raised under a longhouse) and, best of all, fried bananas for dessert, washed down with limeade sweetened with sugarcane juice.