by Jeff Long
The sound of yelling and a ferocious brawl woke me up. Bears, I thought. Dave was under attack. I raced over with the heaviest chunk of wood in our fire pit. He was under attack all right, just not by bears. Ripped to shambles, filled with terrible shouts, the tent writhed among the pine needles. I pulled Dave through the torn door. His wild eyes returned to normal. “Zombies or the demon child,” I joked. I had memorized The Night of the Living Dead to tell girlfriends and campfire faces. The Exorcist novel had just come out, sparking an intense desire to enter the priesthood that lasted about 24 hours.
I got Dave settled in my tent. Morning arrived: more gold walls and big trees. The beginning of his story emerged. He was a combat vet freshly back from Vietnam. I thought it was a myth, but he described a young woman spitting on his uniform in the airport. What cut deepest was her beauty.
Dave’s nightmare shook me with a strange power. Until the draft board 4-F’ed me for my knees, I had kept Vietnam at bay with the mountains. Now Vietnam was coming to the mountains. I don’t remember anything more of that trip. My partner showed up, we climbed something or other. I made a point of saying goodbye to Dave. It was important to me. He stayed, I’m told, and became a major force in big wall climbing.
Geof Childs, the climber, master storyteller (Stone Palaces, “Cannon Mountain Breakdown”, “Leviathan”,) and a lifelong friend, was another survivor of that war. I tried to learn from his economy and organization. He had chosen the extra training to become a Ranger, comparing the difference with regular soldiers to attempting El Cap with big wall climbers vs. Boy Scouts. In coming years, more vets appeared among the rocks and mountains. The real ones like Dave and Geof didn’t give details. They were there, like us, for the ascent.
- JEFF LONG
Cannibals
NOVEMBER 24, 1974.
KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP)—One month after an international expedition of climbers was reported lost on 27,800-foot Makalu in the Nepalese Himalaya, a sole survivor has been found. Daniel Bogle of Eldorado Springs, Colorado, was recently led to civilization by a Tibetan yak herder.
Bogle claims avalanches trapped him and climbing companion Cameron Corder of Butte, Arkansas, high on the mountain for nearly ten days. The partially eaten remains of an unidentified man were found at the base of the mountain. Bogle denies accusations of cannibalism.
Yes, I survived but not because I ate Corder. For one thing, raw meat doesn’t digest at those altitudes. I’d have killed myself with constipation. Besides, there was food up there, though the amount varies each time I tell the story. Sometimes I detail the scene with a cornucopia of food. At other times the tent is bare of morsels, only bones. Over these past ten years, sometimes I’ve told the truth, other times I’ve taken liberties. This time, the truth. It’s not really my story, anyway. Corder was largely responsible.
I remember him in bits and pieces, not chronologically but in order of biological impact. He had massive hands, suitably enormous for his six and a half feet of muscle and thick bone. His face was furrowed by premature wrinkles. When his eyes chanced upon you, you reacted. Their deep blackness set the tone for the rest of his face, the dark simian brow, the beard and blacker mane of hair. Instinctively you felt that Corder was a creature of melancholy, a naked conscience.
I knew all about Cameron J. Corder, of course, there being no other climbers near his size and power who spoke with an Arkansas drawl. But I’d never actually met him before our introduction in Kathmandu, where the international expedition of British, Italians, French, and Americans was mustering rank. Corder and I were the American pair. When Corder first appeared on the brown cobblestones of an alley that reeked of curry and goat blood, my impression was one of a gigantic human animal built for labor and physical, not intellectual, ascent. He was dressed in gym shorts, sandals, and a white T-shirt, clothing that did not hide his numerous scars. Both his legs were scarred with slight pale lines and with deeper, wider purple stripes. His right arm was marked with a shiny dent where a bullet had passed through the triceps.
We shook hands and immediately found a tea shop that served cold Indian beer. Pulling out our photos of Makalu, we smeared our fingerprints up and down the routes, possible and impossible, on the west face of the mountain.
During the remainder of that week, Corder and I explored Kathmandu’s charming decadence. Dodging bicycles in alleyways where old women were laden with twisted firewood or rice, we ferreted out beer stalls and found black marketeers from whom, for the sheer gall of it, we bought Nepalese rupees and Afghan hash.
I was still young then. Twenty-two years old with not a worry. I owned eighty-dollar climbing boots, a bellyband of three-inch sling, and sixty dollars’ worth of metal—enough chocks, pins, and ‘biners to ring like a Swiss cow when I walked with my rack on. No stereo, no car, not even a bed. My prized possession was 165 feet of prime European rope, a blue Perlon line freckled with clean white diamonds. I lived to climb. With a bachelor’s in philosophy, what else, I took spot jobs as a stonemason, a waiter, even a paperboy. If I went to the movies with a woman, she paid for herself. You see, ascent was everything. And I was so innocent, with so little past.
I can’t say when Vietnam took hold again of Corder’s mind. Not once in the city had he mentioned that he was a vet. I had heard back in the States that he’d been on a helicopter during the war and that he’d endured some mysterious ordeals. But he didn’t talk about them, not until long after we’d passed through the jungle and had reached the mountain. By that time he was possessed.
The longer I think about it, the more it seems Corder could have managed more sanctuary from his memories than he did at Makalu. The acid whiteness of the bleached mountain, its angles and lifelessness, couldn’t possibly have been more alien to his memories of Vietnam; and yet he was stricken. I think he may have been reminded initially by that jungle we had to pass through in getting to the mountain. Down there among the rotted Hindi shrines, among the ghostly herds of monkeys, Corder must have begun remembering. The jungle, like other jungles, was lukewarm. Every 15 minutes it had us genuflecting with knives to scrape away the monsoon leeches. Down there, I’m quite sure, Corder’s Vietnam loomed up, though he kept it to himself like an embarrassing souvenir until those final ten days of avalanches.
Through September and early October, the climb progressed with talented vigor. All of us in the expedition were proud of ourselves for being so gentlemanly and industrious. Rope stitched the route together, an 8,000-foot thread of polypropylene that snaked toward the summit.
On October 23 Corder and I occupied the highest camp, Camp VI at 26,500 feet, and were prepared to force the line another 500 feet higher so the British pair could leapfrog and go on to the top. Early the next morning, on October 24, a blizzard set in.
That afternoon the first avalanche struck, taking the two Italians at Camp II with it. The avalanching effectively marooned two French climbers, an Englishman, a Scot, Corder and me on the upper regions of Makalu’s west face, all of us at camps above 23,000 feet. The crackle of walkie-talkies was fierce and prolonged that evening as each pair of us debated our alternatives. There were only two really, though it seemed the universe depended on our choice: we could go down or we could stay put. The high altitude had us stunned and delirious, so our decision that night was a poor one. We chose to stay put—the two French on Camp III, the two British in Camp V, and we two Americans in Camp VI.
Tipped at a forbidding 70-degree angle, the face was composed of very hard, blue ice. Our tents were pitched precariously on platforms carved from the snow or stolen from brief ledges of rock. Just above Corder and me, dangling with erotic menace, hung a wide bosom poised to avalanche. We talked about it, willed it to either freeze solid or fall to the north, and hoped that by waiting a few more days we could outwit it. But on October 25 a second slide hurtled past Camp III, knocking the French and their tents into the abyss. We knew we were doomed, too. In medieval times travelers swore that avalanches were giant snowballs, trigg
ered by the flapping of a solitary swallow’s wings. Our avalanches were inspired by something even quieter than that—Corder. Or, to be more precise, Corder’s sin. So Corder thought.
“Yes... yes,” he murmured as we lay in our sleeping bags, hesitating as much to breathe the thin air as to sort his thoughts. With our crampons and axes, our jumars, helmets, and ropes, all our tools for both ascent and descent useless in the tent with us, Corder began to talk about Vietnam.
I’d never heard of soldiers hunting animals in Vietnam, though more than a few American soldiers were killed by wild animals in the surreal jungles of Indochina. As Corder said at the start of his rhapsody, “Grunts ate monkeys, tigers ate grunts.”
“King Bees,” Corder drawled softly. “They done it most. Fire up a tiger, go down, gut it, and sell the hide and teeth back in the cities.” Gradually, almost somnolently, I learned Corder’s slang. King Bees were CH-34 helicopters that had been manufactured in Korea and were flown by Vietnamese pilots. The term ‘King Bee’ applied collectively to the craft and it’s crew. “They were 90 pounds of person and 500 pounds of balls. They weren’t always lucky, but they were always right there, you know. I remember one King Bee, a gunner, he took off into the jungle to fetch the carcass and never came out again. The cat must have got him.”
When the blizzard paused and when Corder slowed down with his storytelling, I could hear the ropes outside fluttering in the rarefied wind. Individual snowflakes clattered dryly against the nylon tent wall. I half expected the sullen hiss of an avalanche to sweep our tent and us away at any moment. But Corder had started; he kept right on going. At first I was sure he was talking to suppress the avalanche; then, slowly, I realized he was trying to come up with a reason for our predicament.
“American crews couldn’t go hunting any old time like King Bees.” He startled me. Hours had passed since his last words. “We had a whole lot of laws on us. There was trouble for firing things up. But we done it anyway.” Spindrift, driven by the wind, formed a silent dune by a rip in the far corner. The fiberglass tent poles bowed overhead like the ribs of a whale.
“But sometimes it was legitimate, like once....” He drew at the thin air. “Viet Cong used to use elephants for transport, and this one time we spotted a big gray all rigged out with .51 caliber machine guns, one on each side for anti-aircraft. We only had five rockets left, but we went down on it anyway and missed with everything except a white phosphorous. You can believe we burned that beast. It took off like hell, knocking trees down every which way, and it’s sure they never got their guns back.”
I was paralyzed by the avalanches that were still to come, stock still and afraid, but somehow Corder’s little sketches of Vietnam seemed vitally relevant. He was building to something, and that progression was more dynamic than my own concerns. Already Corder had begun to take possession of our tent. There were two of us listening to the walkie-talkie morning and night at seven o’clock, two of us drinking tea, two of us gasping for air 24 hours a day, but more and more there was only one real presence in that tent, and it was Corder’s.
“I was gunner on a Huey,” he took up again. “There was Huey slicks and there was Huey guns. Slicks carried troops, and guns rode shotgun for the slicks. There was all kinds of guns. Cobras and Bravo models. And then there was November models—the best.” I felt he was comparing himself to me. “They had every killing thing. Twin miniguns, 20-millimetre Vulcan cannons, chunkers. And fast, man, 160 knots. When we came along with those November guns, we had the power.” His story was not meant for me, though once or twice he remembered me with a glance. He was addressing an image, and in speaking aloud he drew it nearer.
“‘Roger, Roger,’ you know. Like, keep your heads down; we’re coming in with Spooky,” he explained. “Then they’d go ‘Roger, Roger’ and duck their asses down for the fireworks. Those guns was so goddamn fast they didn’t go bang-bang or rat-a-tat. Just this low grunt for ten or 20 seconds, and that’s all she wrote. Even the grass was mowed.” Corder touched the tip of his tongue to each wide split in his weathered lips. Suddenly he looked at me. “Don’t worry,” he winked. “I’m not crazy, brother.”
A day passed, nearly as cold and dark as night. The wind and snow continued to rattle against the bellowing tent wall. At seven the British called, their voices pinched by the radio’s static, their fear, and, no doubt, bronchitis. Our position was the same: wait out the storm. It would let up in a day or two. So we hoped, but it didn’t.
I’ve been asked if I felt despair in that violent region so far above the earth. It wasn’t that I trusted Corder’s sanity or our decision to wait, nor that I believed the weather would suddenly spare us. There was just so little sense of urgency, how could there be despair?
On the morning of October 28, for no particular reason, Corder and I shared a nearly empty yellow bottle of oxygen. Five minutes for him, five for me. In those five-minute gulps of pure air, the world turned richer, fuller, and focused into smells, sights, and sounds. We had a painful sense of what we had missed. I watched Corder’s face suddenly fatten with some vast, oxygenated memory and, with it, distress. Then it was my turn again, and while I stared at him and inhaled the thick air, Corder’s exhaustion lines and sunburn and dandruff overwhelmed me.
“You’re dying, Corder.” I whispered through the mask, and he nodded back in terror. “We’re....”
The oxygen ran out. The mask’s rubber bladder collapsed, and we were again stupefied.
Corder’s face returned to its side of the tent; his eyes clouded over. The urgency evaporated. I lay back with the cold snow outside and the tired desire to sleep and escape the tedious dream of wind and nylon that surrounded me.
We weren’t without certain tasks. Snow had to be knocked from the sagging walls. The walkie-talkie, though it was becoming silent, had to be kept warm with body heat. Water had to be melted for drinking. I made a habit of reaching through the north door to fill cook pots with snow, a special ritual that Corder fouled when he emptied his piss-bottle all over the drinking-water snow.
“Damn it, Corder,” I snapped. He’d violated one of my only taboos, making my presence in the tent even more transparent and unreal. “Drop Vietnam. Take a look where you are.”
The giant pushed one big bare hand out of the top of his sleeping bag and wiped his eyes. “I can’t,” he insisted in a soft voice. “It’s eating at me.” I didn’t retort, though I wanted to. Restraint was all-important; I couldn’t afford to have Corder annoyed at me. Believe me, he pleaded, second-guessing my silence. “It’s on me. I got to.”
Afterward Corder was quiet for half a day before resuming his tales. At last, five days into his imagery of Vietnam, Corder began to actually weave a bona fide story, not just piecemeal anecdotes.
Not often, but now and then, Corder’s November gun would stray on its return from missions in order to hunt tigers and elephants. They always hunted from the air. From up there, Corder told me, the tigers were fluid orange and red lights that glowed through the overgrowth. Elephants were black shadows. Once driven from the trees by rocket fire, the orange lights and black shadows turned into miniature animals. As Corder snaked his miniguns down, the pilot tipped the craft to broaden the field. Excitement mounted. Everyone wanted to reach out to touch the animals and, like magicians, to drop them in their tracks. While I listened for the hiss of incipient avalanches, Corder told me how slow roses of blood would blossom when the rockets hit an elephant’s rib cage. He gestured with his hand to show how the tigers would hatefully dodge the November’s quick shadow.
To pass the time while Corder unwound his story, I kept a veiled eye on our food. It wasn’t promising. There was a small, freeze-dried slab of beef, four fresh tea bags, two packets of Quaker Oats, a cube of cheese, and three marbled Hershey bars. I rationed the food, apportioning equal shares until the fifth night, when I decided Corder had gone crazy. His gentle, twangy voice had begun to accelerate the tale, and he’d even let his tea freeze in its cup while he
rambled.
The food was scarce, but I wasn’t worried. I believed that, like me, Corder had brought provisions. We’d make it.
“Let me have the food,” I thought I said it aloud. Perhaps I didn’t really say anything. When Corder didn’t move, I watched myself reach across and pull the man’s pack onto my legs. Although it felt light, there was some weight to it, some food anyway. I watched myself upend the pack.
A book landed on my sleeping bag. Nothing more. Corder had brought a Bible.
The afternoon was a vacuum, not a sound except for snowflakes on nylon and Corder breathing.
“We’re out of food,” I told him when he awoke. “Here... tea,” and I handed him a cup, then half a candy bar. “That’s it.”
“Where’s my gear?” Corder demanded.
I didn’t answer. I watched myself not answer. Corder knew I knew.
“Where’s my Bible?”
I handed it to him. “You screwed up,” I said, but without an ominous tone. Corder might have suspected.
He grabbed at the book. It should have been two pounds of food—bread and fish, so to speak—not paper. I lay down, thinking there was a chance Corder had killed both of us. But it was a sure thing that Corder had killed himself. He wouldn’t last long at that altitude. Over the next two days sleep and imagination were the antagonists. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see the future: murder, then food.
So, I had made my choice. I started hiding bits of food for myself. If the storm continued, I knew we’d both be dead inside of three days anyway; on the other hand, if there was only one of us, the survivor might last as long as nine or ten days. I wanted to live, and all Corder could seem to think about was death and hunting wild animals.