Almost a dozen men stood in and around the two Temple vehicles. It seemed unlikely that Jones would send such a large group simply to say good-bye. There was a possibility, I thought, that they might attempt to harass the traitors, try to retrieve their people from our midst or even take a few swipes at them and us.
Edith Bogue said, hands on her hips, “They’ve got a trap there.”
Wilson and two other Temple loyalists wandered over from their group to the plane boarding area. When they asked Steve Sung which people were assigned to each plane, the NBC soundman pleaded ignorance. The two looked around and asked the same of Jim Cobb and some defectors.
Meanwhile Layton asked emphatically to be assigned to the first airplane, the Cessna—and he lined up with several other defectors at the right plane door. Ryan positioned himself there to frisk each for weapons. Like the rest of us, he was aware of rumors that someone among the defectors conceivably might bring down or hijack one of the planes.
At the end of the line, his curly hair snarled by the rain, stood Layton. Quickly, I positioned myself behind him in a shallow puddle out of his line of vision. As the line into the Cessna shortened, he slipped around to the opposite side, entered the aircraft and climbed into a back seat behind the pilot’s seat. Was he simply anxious to get aboard and reach safety, or were his intentions more sinister? I informed Ryan that Layton had skirted the inspection, and Ryan confronted him. “I was frisked already,” Layton said. When I contradicted him, he reluctantly climbed back out and submitted to a search by Ryan. Not even a knife was found on him, but I escorted him back to his seat anyway. As we passed the tail section, he scooted ahead and climbed inside.
A black man from the tractor had appeared near the plane as Layton was frisked, then had gone to join Wilson and the two others questioning the defectors. One of the loyalists looked up, apparently saw the tractor highwheeling across the airstrip, and said to the others, “Come on. Come on.” They hurried toward the Temple vehicles.
As belongings—trunks, suitcases and packs which represented the defectors’ earthly possessions—were lugged to the larger plane for loading, the red farm tractor-trailer moved slowly toward us. About a half dozen men stood in its high-sided trailer. Their faces, young to middle-age, black and white, stared in cold hostility. The driver waved away the knot of a dozen or two Guyanese. Obediently the onlookers dispersed toward the apron in and around the metal shack, as though that thin steel would protect them from whatever was going to happen.
Catching up with Greg Robinson directly in front of the tractor, I said, “Be careful. I think we’ve got trouble.” He looked me squarely in the eyes for an instant, as though gauging my seriousness. Then he glanced past me at the tractor-trailer. He nodded, but there was nothing more to say.
The proximity of the tractor, the stillness of the damp air, the uneasiness of the defectors who knew that some men there were security personnel—all these accelerated the loading of the larger Otter, which until then had been almost leisurely. Jackie Speier, still in her sundress and wedge-heeled shoes, urged everyone, “Come on. Get on the plane. Get on the plane.” With clipboard in hand, she strutted to the foot of the Otter’s stairway; a bunch of people followed, looking over their shoulders toward the tractor.
In that hurried moment, she asked me to help her frisk the defectors. As a reporter, I did not relish the idea of searching anyone for hidden weapons, but Ryan was not available at the moment, and haste seemed important. Speier searched the women in a sloppy and tentative manner, and I checked the men with about the same thoroughness. Gerald Parks and Harold Cordell volunteered pocket knives, which surprised me: I had assumed Temple members—unless on security—were prohibited from carrying weapons of any sort.
A second truck—not from Peoples Temple—pulled up dramatically. Dick Dwyer of the Embassy was in the front seat. Several blacks piled out, the young Guyanese constable among them, with his trusty shotgun. He was a welcome sight. It appeared that Dwyer had rounded up the constable and some friendly locals, perhaps also constables, to safeguard our final moments in Kaituma. Ryan embraced Dwyer and patted his shoulder, then Dwyer shook hands with the pilot near the cockpit while Greg Robinson looked on.
As the frisking went on, the young constable stood at port arms. The next moment, a burly dark man with a round head was cradling the constable’s shotgun. I assumed that the man was an assistant. While I was occupied with searches, another hefty dark man, dressed like the constable’s assistant in light shirt and dark trousers, came around the tail of the plane with a rifle or shotgun. Shortly thereafter, the constable and his assistant disappeared. Jim Cobb had recognized the second gunman as a Temple member and had told the constable trouble was going to start: we needed help.
It was almost 5:00 P.M. The sun was plunging toward the jungle horizons and softening the light. The forest was turning a dusty verdigris: the tall grass at the edge of the airstrip was gilded; the air was cooling off a few degrees at a time, as splotches of overcast passed. Patricia Parks, wearing striped blouse and slacks, had just boarded with her family. Most of the defectors were inside, and so were Guyana information officer Neville Annibourne and Concerned Relatives Beverly Oliver and Carol Houston Boyd. My back was to the tractor and I was about to frisk someone when the unmistakable sound of gunshots pierced the quiet. “Hit the dirt,” yelled someone. “Hit the dirt.” The opening few shots were distinct, then booms and pops and cracks overlapped, peppering the plane and the ground around us.
At the first shots, I spun around, crouched and scrambled for the far side of the plane, bending at the waist to clear the low-hanging belly. Bullets kicked up dirt and gravel; bodies were airborne and crawling and running in a frenzy of evasive, panicked motions that were more instinctual than rational. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a one-frame image of what I mistakenly thought was the constable’s assistant—aim—ing his shotgun at us and firing! “My God,” I thought. “The police are shooting at us!”
Not knowing how I got there, I found myself midair, diving headlong to the other side of the plane, trying desperately to tuck my head behind the right airplane wheel—the only real protection on the ground. With my body extended above the ground and my arms ready to break my fall, I could hear screams of pain and fear and shouts and guttural losses of air. People were being hit all around me.
Just as I made a four-point landing, with my head low, I saw red explode from my left forearm just below the elbow. The slug ripped through my arm and apparently passed under my still partially airborne body. Before the pain could burn the message to my brain, a second round punched my wrist with such force that my left arm nearly crumpled beneath me and my watch was blown off. Simultaneously, what seemed like particles of gravel sprayed my upper body. At the sight of my own blood and in pain, I seethed, spitting out a curse of terror and disgust. In the next microseconds, I grasped that the shooters—government police, Temple members, whoever they were—were not simply trying to cripple the plane or kidnap the defectors or frighten us. They were killing us.
While bodies rolled and tumbled about me, some tripping, some scattering, I immediately pushed to my feet and in one motion took flight. Head down and legs pumping, I lengthened my stride, pursued by the cacophony of bullets and shotgun slugs. I saw no one else; I looked for no one else. I sprinted those forty yards with my eyes fixed straight ahead on one thing only—that tall, golden grass. From several yards away I dived headlong, as low and yet as far as my momentum would carry me.
Crashing into the brush, my arms and legs kept churning. Crawling as fast as I normally run, I mowed down the tall, brittle weeds, hardly glancing at my bloody arm. There was no looking back. I could not outrun, let alone outcrawl, a bullet. I fully expected someone to be following close behind me with a gun. Without so much as lifting my head, I bellied on all fours through thirty to forty yards of grass, then clawed a tunnel into a clump of dense bushes just at the edge of the jungle.
My head drummed as I c
urled up in a nest of foliage and knelt, completely still but for thumping heart and aching lungs. My pants quickly became drenched with blood to the knees, my wounds gushed. Perking my ears to every sound, every shot, I heard the rough beating of the Otter’s engine. I tore off my wide leather belt. My first impulse was to make a tourniquet to keep from bleeding to unconsciousness or worse. Passing the belt end through the brass harness buckle, I instead cinched down the leather over the two long gouges in my forearm, hoping to stop the bleeding with directly applied pressure. But the loop of leather was not stemming the flow. On my second try I wrapped the leather over the wounds several more times, but the stiff leather kept slipping in my blood, refusing to be tightened. Finally, I positioned the belt correctly and pulled the loops tight with my teeth. My own blood tasted sickeningly salty.
The throbbing in my wrist caused me more pain but less concern and less bleeding. A glancing bullet or shrapnel had hit my wrist bone, splattered and embedded fragments in me.
The shooting sounded like shotguns and rifles rather than bursts from automatic weapons. The pops seemed relentless at first, then they faded and died. Silence. Then a few more shots—isolated, deliberate shots, booming, echoing. Final shots, accompanied by not a single, audible cry. Those last blasts made me sink deeper into my lair, hoping that my red shirt and white skin would not be spotted in the glossy green undergrowth. Did those solitary shots mean that gunmen were stalking survivors in the bush?
Thoughts buzzed in my head like hungry mosquitoes. The fear was raw yet dreamlike. My mind rebounded from one extreme to another—one instant I was the lone survivor, the next I was the only one wounded. Bleeding to death or being gunned down was merely the final manifestation of the terror. Being left behind in that jungle alone with nothing but my wounds and my hunters was the greatest dread, and so the steady beat of that airplane comforted me.
When the engine noise of the Temple tractor and truck had faded away, I realized that a Temple death squad had done the shooting. It was time to move. I hoped there would be an opening to dash for the plane, get aboard and fly out of hell.
In a low crouch, I pulled my way through the brush and grass, as stealthily as possible, until I could stand on my toes and see through the brittle foliage. I was about thirty yards from the apron, ready to drop again to the ground and retreat if any remaining gunmen should turn upon me. Walking alongside the plane was a heavyset black man in a green and yellow sweat shirt. My heart fell and my muscles tensed. Was he one of them?
When Bob Flick came into view, it dawned on me: the black man was Neville Annibourne in an unfamiliar outfit. Surveying the field, I took cautious steps forward. Bob, looking flushed and strangely subdued, turned to meet me. His eyes were dulled by emotion, his face a mask of shock. I asked him about Ryan, who was the closest figure, and most easily identified with his light bluish clothing and bushy gray hair. “He’s dead,” Bob said. It was then I noticed that the congressman’s head was bloodied and a piece of flesh lay on the ground next to his face.
“Don?” I asked, seeing that the NBC reporter was on his back, boot toes straight up, his face a mess. I did not look closely. The answer was apparent before Bob said it.
At that moment I felt the reality of death—unmistakable, irreversible, senseless. I looked around and asked, “Where’s Greg?”
Near the bullet-flattened left plane tire was a crumpled form in khaki and brown. Greg, my roommate, companion, photographer and new friend, lay face down, one cheek pressed to the gravel, his glasses askew. His left shoulder was tucked under his body as though he had fallen violently on it. A large but seemingly bloodless crater behind his shoulder looked like an exit wound. His cameras still hung around his neck, or were pinned under his body. “Greg, Greg,” I called softly, shaking him lightly. I touched the side of his neck to feel for a pulse. Nothing.
Behind and beyond the tail of the plane, Bob Brown’s body was sprawled, his brains blown out over his camera and the ground. But for his clothes and camera, he would have been unrecognizable. He too had been cut down working. Just prior to the gunfire, Don Harris had warned the NBC crew to spread out, and Bob Brown and Steve Sung had taken up a position out of the main line of fire. Brown had filmed the opening volleys, then one of the guns turned on him with a puff of smoke. He went down with a leg wound, while Steve Sung, attached to him by an electronic umbilical cord, was hit in one arm. Sung lay motionless, fighting pain as the seconds passed. A gunman had finished Brown, then someone fired from close range at Sung. The blast, partially deflected by his inch-thick leather shoulder harness, blew away part of his shoulder, throwing so much blood and flesh against his head that he appeared dead. His life rode on the knife edge of his capacity for pain. He endured it silently, without stirring. Once the death squad had left, he managed to stagger to the bush and collapse.
At the gangway, near Greg’s body, I came upon Anthony Katsaris, flat on his back. Blood seeping from one nostril, his chest bloodied, a lung collapsed, he looked up at me with dazed and entreating eyes and gasped my name. He was fighting for breath. “Anthony,” I said. “Stay still. You’ll be all right. Just stay still. Be calm.” Others, mainly defectors, carried him to the edge of the bush, where he would be less visible.
As a first priority, the injured were cleared from the airstrip so that they would not be exposed targets, even though this was an imperfect precaution. If the Temple death squad had raced back down the field, they could have killed all the nonambulatory and probably some of the rest, particularly those of us bleeding. In my head I calculated roughly how long it would take the Temple truck to cover several hundred yards of airstrip, then compared that to the time it would take us to thrash through thirty to forty yards of tall grass to the cover of jungle vines and trees. Those of us who could run and walk could probably make it, but there was another problem: after emerging from the airplane and from sections of nearby jungle we had congregated in such a way that the killers, returning for a final assault, could sweep down and corral us that much easier. My initial sense of relief, my elation at finding living comrades, turned into a probing uneasiness.
Some defectors were tending Steve and Jackie at an open spot in the tall grass about fifteen yards from Anthony. In excruciating pain, Steve was lapsing into delirium. He cried about losing his arm and rolled from side to side, digging his heels ever deeper into the moist earth. Jackie appeared more calm, almost sedate; she was probably in severe shock. Tears welled in her eyes but never seemed to fall. Several of us stood around the two, not really knowing the extent of their wounds, nor how to treat them. The defectors were the most helpful; all but a few had escaped injury and some knew first aid or had worked in the Temple clinic.
They had been the first to board the planes. Though I was not aware of it at the time, some on the Cessna had been wounded—and the small plane did not get off the ground. It sat far down the airstrip.
When the shooting had started, those on the large Otter had taken cover inside. Some of the children had had the presence of mind to pull up the gangway and lock the door. The one fatality on the plane was Dale’s mother, Patricia Parks, who was sitting near a window. She lay near the gangway now, on her back, her skull blown open, her face a death mask. Her youngest daughter Tracy had witnessed her sudden death. It seemed cruelly ironic that perhaps the most ambivalent of the defectors had been eliminated so ruthlessly.
The magnitude of Jackie Speier’s wounds left me feeling helpless and nauseated. A slab the size of a frying pan had been gouged out of her thigh, and the flesh above and below the vicious gunshot wound was bridged only by an inch-wide strand of skin. The torn muscles quivered loosely. There were other wounds—to her arm and her pelvic area—though the blood on her dress and underwear obscured the damage. Her life seemed to be hanging by little more than that band of skin.
The extreme wounds around me made me all but forget my own. I stood by holding my belt bandage and watching the able-bodied make Jackie more comfortable with a h
eadrest of rolled-up clothing.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said to Bob Flick at one point.
“How are we going to do that?” he said, pointing at the flattened left wheel of the Otter.
“I’d be willing to take the risk,” I said.
“With only one engine? One’s shot out.”
Carol Boyd found me and hugged me tearfully. We were happy to see each other alive. Then someone came up and pointed out that she was an excellent target with her white blouse and pants, and pale face. “Cover that up,” she was told. But she had no other clothes, she said, rather frantically. Everything was back at the plane. It was only a short distance across the no-man’s-land between the grassland and the Otter where the dead lay scattered like pieces of luggage. But walking out there seemed an invitation to any attackers who might be in hiding.
Moments later, the concern did not seem unwarranted. Carol and I were standing around Anthony Katsaris in the tall grass where he lay with helpless dark, wide eyes. Anthony, who like me had tried to hide under the Otter’s right wheel, had been hit by one bullet, then had been shot in the back while trying to play dead. Despite his serious wounds and the drying blood chilling his body, he had enough character to ask about Greg.
“They’re coming back,” someone shouted. At the far end of the strip, Guyanese men, women and children scattered to both sides of the clearing, a flurry of white clothing and black limbs. Certainly they must have seen something alarming, maybe the Temple vehicles, we thought. Defectors and others in our party lit out for the undergrowth, expecting a truck or tractor bristling with guns to bear down on us. Panic-stricken, I looked at Carol, snatched her hand and said, “Let’s go.”
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