Before he left for the Pacific, Tom Capin had told his wife, Betty, "No matter what they tell you, don't believe them. I'll be back." She had held on to that thought until the telegram that announced that Tom was alive and would be coming home soon. A month later, Betty and her mother-in-law went out to the chicken coop behind their Fort Wayne, Indiana, house to collect some eggs. When she walked back with the eggs, Betty could not understand why her father-in-law insisted on taking the eggs from her—until she saw Tom sitting on the sofa, a good sixty pounds thinner than when he had left, but still Tom. She was glad not to be holding those eggs.
After returning from the war, Tom Capin's great desire, Betty explained, "was to get back to Borneo as a missionary to repay the Dayaks the debt he owed them, but he had so many tropical diseases that his doctor said it would be suicide to go back." He began instead to study to be a minister of the Methodist church but had to give that up when Betty became ill with asthma and couldn't work. In July 1947, he, like Dan Illerich, was informed by the War Department that he would be permitted to accept the British Empire Medal, an honor for which the mad major had nominated him in recognition of Capin's work as a medic all those months with the Harrisson-hating Doc McCallum.
His hopes of returning to Borneo quashed, Capin went to work on big construction projects, becoming an estimator. He was forty-five years old when one of his sons died of illness, an experience that brought him back to wanting to serve God. He eventually became an ordained minister of the United Methodist Church in Nebraska, and he also became a licensed psychotherapist. He enjoyed his work as a counselor and continued at it until succumbing to a fatal illness a few years ago. His love for the Dayaks and for what they had taught him shone through every conversation I had with him.
Bob Graham's wife, Janet, though long his girlfriend, had been his bride for a mere two weeks before he had shipped out to the Pacific in 1944. Her hopes for his safe return were strengthened by a photograph the navy had sent of her husband's plane sitting in a rice paddy in northwest Borneo. Around July 4, 1945, she heard from the Red Cross that "Johnny" (as she had always known him) was coming home. Although she rarely touched alcohol, her father insisted that she swallow some rum to fortify her for what she might see before he drove her to the small airfield near Philadelphia where Graham's plane would land. The rum worked almost too well. When Janet saw her husband—bloated and yellow with Atabrine but otherwise the man she knew—coming down the plane's steps, she ignored the KEEP OUT sign, found a gap in the perimeter fence and ran to embrace him.
Though he suffered from malaria for years thereafter, Graham made a smooth recovery and was pleased and surprised when he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for having saved the lives of his crewmates. He finally got to go to college, and he was within months of completing a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering when he was offered a job as a sales representative for a big machine manufacturing company. He and Janet had three children, a boy and two girls. Physically fit until a massive heart attack in 2002, he played a lot of tennis and golf.
Graham had been especially struck by the high incidence of disease among the Dayaks—malaria, tuberculosis and dysentery—for which they had no remedy. He was equally struck by how well the Dayaks treated their children. He kept all of his notebooks, including his charts of the heavens and his diaries from his time in Borneo, and he let me borrow them. He never wrote up his experiences, though he told Janet and the children all about his life in Borneo. By the time I tracked him down, he had had a bad experience with a journalist turning his account into an overwritten adventure story for a men's magazine, and he cooperated with me because he wanted the real story told.
More than fifty years after the events described in here, I caught up with the Makahanap family and some of the people in Borneo who took part in this story (though, unfortunately, not the Mongans). By then, William and Theresia Makahanap were long dead and Christiaan had just died, although his widow, Kafit, was still able to remember events from those days. Makahanap and Mama's third daughter, Thea, gave me a copy of her father's unpublished memoir.
Like so much about him, Makahanap's memoir was a fascinating moral mixture of honest recollection and self-serving partial truths. He omitted, for example, all mention of the Mongans and claimed that he and Mama had cared from the beginning for all eleven Yank airmen.
His memoir does, however, tell what happened to him after the war. In November 1945, after the Fujino Tai surrendered to Harrisson, the major arranged for the Makahanaps to move to Malinau permanently and for William to be appointed administrator, replacing the dead, letter-writing ken kanrikan, R. Iwasaki. He stayed in that job until April 1946, when the Dutch came back and sent him to Tarakan to be assistant resident under a Dutch officer. He showed his blood chit with the picture of Queen Wilhelmina and her promise that her government would reward those who helped the Allied forces, but no one in Tarakan seemed to take this promise seriously.
In his new job, he had to share an office with a Dutchman who said, "It is not right that a colored man be on the same level with a white man." He left that job soon afterward and spent the next years trying to earn a decent living, generally not succeeding very well. He would get a job as a teacher and then would leave it when it appeared that his credentials were not good enough to get him a raise.
He was given 29,000 rupiahs by the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta in 1950, as a reward for his helping the airmen, but he was told that this was the first and last payment he would receive from the U.S. government. It was enough to buy a small house in a provincial town in Java, but he found no decent-paying work there.
Finding his status as an outer islander and a Christian in the Republic of Indonesia uncertain, Makahanap began to pursue obsessively the idea of getting to the United States. With the help of American missionaries and the U.S. Consul in Surabaya, who knew the Illerich family, he got permission for visas for himself and his family, but the visas had to be issued at the embassy in Jakarta, three hundred miles away. In Jakarta, the American Embassy consular officer told him he must show he had enough money so the immigration authorities could be sure that he and his family members would not work or become public charges. The sum needed was 150,000 rupiahs, an amount that was totally out of the question.
By July 1959, he was back in Tarakan, trying to track down Tom Harrisson (who by then was the curator of the Sarawak Museum and a brilliant, irreverent contributor to fields as various as anthropology, animal conservation and art history). Makahanap planned to go along byperahu to Long Berang and north overland to Lumbis, in hopes of finding a way to Kuching, where Harrisson was based. But there was a civil war going on in Indonesian Borneo by then, and Makahanap was captured by the police and brought back to Tarakan under arrest. By the time his credentials were established, he had run out of time and money and had given up hope of meeting Harrisson.
Makahanap eventually returned to Java, defeated and ill. In 1981, he dictated his memoir, "A Hero in the Jungle of Kalimantan (Borneo)" to a family member who was also a notary public. By then, his beloved Mama was in bad health. She died the next year, and his death followed in early 1984 at the age of seventy-five.
In contrast to Makahanap's own full, but not always truthful recollections, the Dayaks whom Thea Makahanap and I interviewed were scrupulous in telling only the facts as they knew them, regardless of how fragmentary those facts were. The Lun Dayeh did not yield to the Western temptation of filling in gaps in their knowledge or memory with what logically should have happened.
They had become Kemah Injil pastors, low-level government servants and office clerks, for the most part making ends meet with some subsistence farming. There were no foreign missionaries living among them, but the Lun Dayeh of that part of Indonesian Borneo were all devout Kemah Injil churchgoers by the time I met them, including Pangeran Lagan's sons, two of whom showed me the wings Phil had pinned onto the pangeran's hat before Lagan went off to kill the Japanese. Most of the family trea
sures and mementos had disappeared over the years—chiefly as a result of the floods that regularly ravage their homeland now that so much commercial timbering is being done. But Phil's bombardier wings had survived because they had been buried with the pangeran and then dug up by his sons when his services to the Allies were about to be honored in a ceremony in Jakarta.
Nobody lives in Long Berang anymore, and the Lun Dayeh of East Borneo no longer live in longhouses. Indonesian government policy is for them all to live in single-family dwellings; fear of fire is the usual reason given. The people I met all now live in or near the small town of Malinau or in Tarakan Town. Instead of loincloths and sarongs, the Dayaks wear simple Western-style cotton clothes and usually wear rubber flip-flops when out of doors.
The whole area of north central Borneo is almost as cut off from the world today as it was during World War II. In 2003, to get from Washington, D.C., to Malinau, it took two and a half days and seven airplanes, each one smaller than the previous one. Slathered with deet against mosquitoes, I avoided contact with leeches but came close, twice, to meeting up with cobras. There was no town telephone switchboard in Malinau, no way of exchanging currency, postal service was very unreliable and none of the maps for the area between it and the Malaysian border agreed. For example, the courses of the rivers were different on every published map I saw.
Church services I attended one Sunday in May 2003 seemed to have brought out most of the Lun Dayeh of the Malinau area—a hundred or more adults, plus children. The service was led by a Lun Dayeh pastor and lasted for hours, with much singing and sharing of news. At the end, everybody shook hands repeatedly with everybody else, causing an intricate crisscrossing of lines of people that would have done Busby Berkeley proud.
During the ten days I was in Malinau and Tarakan, I found more than a dozen Lun Dayeh who had personal recollections of the events described in this book. Yakal was long dead but I learned that he had fulfilled his ambition to be the first Lun Dayeh to become a Kemah Injil pastor. His widow, the once tall Binum, now shrunk by age and illness but with her enormous eyes still bright and beautiful, sat surrounded in her little wooden shack by young people who, though not her children or grandchildren, clearly regarded themselves as such. She told me the story of her naked dance on the flat rock in the river in front of the Presswood house.
"Now I have told you," she said, "I can go in peace to join my beloved Yakal."
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Anybody who thinks writing is a lonely task has never tried to research a historical event. Dozens of people took part in all stages of putting this book together, providing vital information, advice and moral support. Aside from those people not mentioned below because they appear in A Note on Sources, the following people and organizations helped me in various ways to find out what happened in Borneo in 1944 to 1945.
The help of the family of William Makahanap was crucial, especially that of the late Thea Makahanap Lasut, who did research in Borneo on my behalf and helped translate her and my interviews of Borneans. Thanks are also due to Thea's son Stefan Lasut, who took me to meet the Borneans involved in the story, and Thea's daughter Tasya Lasut, who obtained the releases for me to use Makahanap material.
Thanks also belong to: the United States–Indonesia Society (USINDO) and its then president, Paul Cleveland, for giving me a travel grant to Indonesian Borneo in 2003 to interview the Lun Dayeh; Ambassador Robert Pringle (who suggested I ask USINDO for a grant and gave me other good advice); the Mission Aviation Fellowship and especially Tim Chase and the MAF staff in East Kalimantan, who got me into and out of Malinau—not an easy task.
Pastor Wesley Arun, chief pastor of the Gereja Kemah Injil (Christian and Missionary Alliance—CMA) in Malinau and his wife deserve special mention for their advice, help and generous hospitality. It was typical of Wesley's efficiency and kindness that, with almost no notice, he borrowed for me, a total stranger, the substantial sum needed to pay my and Stefan's hotel bills in rupiahs when the hotel in Malinau would not accept a credit card, traveler's checks or U.S. dollars.
I was led in the right direction on people, things and events Bornean by: Frank and Marie Peters of the CMA office in Samarinda, Kalimantan; Lelia Lewis (widow of Rodger Lewis of the CMA); Dr. Martin Baier; Dr. Barbara Harrisson; James Ritchie; Lucy and David Labang; Jayl Langub; Prof. Jay B. Crain; Poline and Esther Bala; Sidi and Heidi Munan; Jacob and Garnette Ridu; the Borneo Research Council; Prof. Michael Leigh; the Australian War Memorial Library and the Australian National Library.
Thanks also are due to Andang Poeraatmadja, who helped get my Indonesian back up to speed for the interviews; to Bob Long (who was wonderfully generous with his maps, photos and recollections); and to Harry Marshall (who helped me get back to Borneo in 2005 and found me a great mapmaker, Helen Phillips).
Other resources include: Special Operations Executive; Public Records Office, Kew; the American Bible Society; the USAF Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and its brilliant researcher Brett Stolle; the Library of Congress; VB 101 Vagabond News (which helped me track down Bob Graham) and Mary Jane Garner (who helped in contacting American WWII veterans' associations).
To get the book written and published, I had essential help from the following: my most indefatigable reader-editor and friend, Don Ediger; my friends and readers-editors Linda Robinson, Edward Shufro, Sir David and Lady Goodall, Harry Inman, Brian Wickland, Betsy Schell and my "sister sister," Soeur Miriam du Christ-Jesus; my book developer Paul De Angelis; colleagues at the Political-Military Action Team (PMAT) in the State Department who gave me moral and material support; my always encouraging and astute agent at Janklow and Nesbit, Eric Simonoff; Jane Turner Rylands (who generously introduced me to my agent) and Doug McElhaney and Giovanni Cavicchi (who introduced me to the Rylandses one rainy afternoon in Venice); and—probably most valuable of all—my Harcourt acquiring editor Andrea Schulz, managing editor David Hough and Marian Ryan, copy editor, who, in the great Maxwell Perkins tradition, all really edit.
No doubt I have mislaid the names of others who aided me during the course of the book's long gestation, and to them I apologize.
The three maps were created to my specifications with infinite patience and skill by Helen Phillips of Bristol, England.
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GLOSSARY
AFC—Australian Flying Corps.
arak—(Malay) Homemade brandy, often distilled from rice beer or palm wine.
atap—(Malay) Palm leaf used in thatching for a longhouse roof.
Batavia —Capital of Netherlands East Indies, former name for Jakarta, the present capital of the Republic of Indonesia.
borak—(Lun Dayeh/Kelabit) Homemade rice beer brewed by the Lun Dayeh, Kelabit and other Southern Muruts of north-central Borneo.
British Empire Medal (BEM)—A medal awarded for meritorious service to noncommissioned officers and men and to persons who are not members of the British Commonwealth.
British North Borneo—Post–WWII name for the British protected state of North Borneo, which, in 1963, became the East Malaysian state of Sabah.
Brunei Town—Former name of Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of the Sultanate of Brunei.
CBE—Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the third-highest rank in that prestigious order of chivalry, usually awarded to recognize merit in persons not residing in the United Kingdom but who are connected with the Commonwealth.
the Celebes—Big island and associated smaller islands, now called Sulawesi, due east of Borneo. As compared with other big Indonesian islands, it has a high proportion of native islanders who have long been Christian.
Dayak (also Dyak)—Derived from a Malay word meaning "upland," Dayak is the ethnic label given in Dutch Borneo to all indigenous Borneo tribespeople of Malay or proto-Malay stock, although the term was usually reserved for those who were animist or Christian, not Muslim. (In Sarawak, the term Dayak was and remains more restrictive. It denotes only those indig
enous non-Muslim tribespeople who traditionally lived midriver, between the coastal plains and the upriver areas: e.g., Iban, including Sea Dayak and Bedayuh [formerly called Land Dayak]. The people living farther upriver, above the rapids, such as the Lun Dayeh, Lun Bawang, Kelabit, Murut, Kayan, Kenyah, Penan and Punan, were and are referred to in Sarawak as orang ulu [Malay for "upriver people"].)
Dutch New Guinea—Also Netherlands New Guinea, former name for the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya.
godown—(Southeast Asian pidgin) Storeroom or warehouse.
heitai—Japanese soldier. (Transliteration from Japanese.)
Indochina—Former name for the region that includes the countries of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Jesselton—Capital of British North Borneo; now, as Kota Kinabalu, the capital of the East Malaysian state of Sabah.
kain—(Malay) Cloth; also cotton sarong that women wear wrapped tight from waist to ankle, usually worn beneath a kebayak.
kawang—Kelabit equivalent of Lun Dayeh tafa.
KBE—Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (see CBE). As a knight, he is addressed as Sir plus his given name: Sir Frederick.
kebayak—(Malay) Long-sleeved blouse with a tight, front-opening bodice, worn above a kain. The kain-kebayak had long been standard dress for Javanese women, but beginning mid twentieth century it became common urban female attire throughout the Indonesian archipelago.
ken kanrikan—(Japanese) Japanese civil administrator for a prefecture.
Long (also lung)—(Lun Dayeh/Kelabit) The meeting place of two or more rivers or streams, or where a river meets a stream. As with bus stops at various streets along an avenue, the word Long is followed by the name of the smaller stream that meets the bigger one. Often, a longhouse village grows up at such a riverine crossroad and so the word Long, followed by the name of the smaller stream, has become a shorthand way of denoting the village or longhouse: e.g., Long Nuat, Long Berang and so on.
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