Jungle of Bones

by Ben Mikaelsen

  Uncle Todd motioned. “Good question. Keep reading — you’ll see.”

  Grunting his dismay, Dylan kept reading. Several hours later his mind was numb from stories of brutal weather and bad food. Dylan rubbed his tired eyes. They had been flying for almost six hours as he turned to the last two entries.

  NOVEMBER 27, 1942

  IT’S BEEN A HARD MONTH. I THINK WE’RE BEATING THE JAPANESE, BUT THEY’RE NOT GIVING UP EASILY. I’M HEADING OUT ON A BOMBING MISSION TOMORROW TO WEWAK ON THE NORTH COAST AND THE WEATHER FORECAST IS BAD. I SWEAR THE WEATHER AND TERRAIN KILL AS MANY OF US AS THE JAPANESE DO.

  THEY CALL THIS WORLD WAR II. THEY SHOULD CALL IT “THE JUNGLE WAR.” IF WE GO DOWN IN THE JUNGLE, OUR ENEMY BECOMES MALARIA, GANGRENE, DENGUE FEVER, BLACKWATER FEVER, DYSENTERY, AND DIARRHEA. DITCH IN THE WATER, AND OUR ENEMY BECOMES SHARKS. ON A NICE DAY, THE MOUNTAINS MAY LOOK BEAUTIFUL FROM THE DISTANCE, LIKE SPIKES ON THE BACK OF SOME PREHISTORIC DRAGON. BUT CLOUDY DAYS LIKE TODAY, YOU CRASH INTO THEM, AND THEY KILL YOU.

  I’M STARTING TO QUESTION WHY I’M HERE. EVERY MISSION, I TAKE OUT THE SMALL AMERICAN FLAG FROM MY MAP BOX TO REMIND ME OF WHY I AM RISKING MY LIFE.

  Dylan continued to the last entry — now Uncle Todd could quit bugging him. The handwriting of the last entry was weird and hard to read, scribbled as if written by a child.

  TWO DAYS AFTER WE CRASHED

  HARD TO THINK. MAY BE MY LAST ENTRY. WEATHER TO THE EAST MADE US FOLLOW COAST NORTH BEFORE HEADING INLAND. ZEROS JUMPED US CROSSING THE MOUNTAINS TO WEWAK. WEATHER HAD US TOO LOW TO PARACHUTE AND THINGS WENT BAD FAST. LAST I REMEMBER, WE CROSSED THE SEPIK RIVER ABEAM CHAMBRI LAKE TO OUR RIGHT, SAME DISTANCE AWAY FROM MT. HAUK AT OUR ELEVEN O’CLOCK.

  BELLIED INTO A SWAMP AREA WITH HEAVY TREES. PLANE DIDN’T BURN, BUT WE WRECKED BAD. FIVE OF US LIVED THROUGH THE CRASH, BUT THE FIRST NIGHT, THREE DIED. NOW ONLY GRAYSON, MY TAIL GUNNER, AND I ARE LEFT. WE WILL DIE IF WE STAY WITH THE PLANE. AM NOW BUSHWHACKING TOWARD THE SEPIK RIVER. I HAVE A BROKEN ARM AND AM WRITING THIS WITH MY LEFT HAND. GRAYSON HAS RIBS HURTING HIM BAD AND IS THROWING UP BLOOD. DON’T KNOW HOW LONG WE’LL LAST.

  I FORGOT MY FLAG IN THE MAP BOX. IF ANYBODY READS THIS JOURNAL, KNOW THAT I FOUGHT HARD AND I LOVED MY COUNTRY.

  Dylan closed the journal and handed it back to Uncle Todd. “How long did it take Grandpa to make it out of the jungle?”

  “Almost two weeks. Natives found your grandfather hiking alone in the swamps, hallucinating and stricken with malaria. He had infected cuts and scratches covering his body, and thorns in his skin, and his body was caked with mud. Looked pretty rough.”

  “What happened to Grayson?”

  “He never made it. Your grandfather tried to bury him, but that was hard in a swamp. Swamp rats probably ate him the first night. But your grandfather was lucky. The villagers who found him were friendly and able to take him through the jungles and turn him over to some Australian soldiers, who carried him to safety.”

  “If the military read this journal and couldn’t find the wreck, what makes you think we can?” Dylan asked.

  Uncle Todd nodded his approval. “I like your questions. Back then, this was hostile territory. Because of the Japanese, headhunters, and cannibals, all the military could do at the time was search from the sky, which they did. But that was like looking for a needle in a haystack. With the dense jungle canopy over the top, you couldn’t spot a whole army on the ground. When a plane went down, it was swallowed up by the trees and never seen again. The jungle was the perfect cover to hide from enemies, but the worst place for a search crew trying to find you.”

  “Why didn’t the military look again later after the war?” Dylan asked.

  Uncle Todd shrugged. “There were thousands of wrecks. The details in this journal were probably forgotten about when your grandfather came home. You can’t live in the past, so he probably stored this journal away in the attic along with his other memories of the war. He never talked about his war years. Many veterans won’t. But now that I found the journal, we can go in by land and ask local villagers if they know of any wreckages. That is how most of the wreck sites are being found.”

  “What happens if we find bodies?”

  “All that would be left are teeth, some bones, and dog tags, if that. Maybe some watches, glasses, or buttons. If we find any remains, the military will come in with a team to do DNA studies and try to identify them. Those that can’t be identified will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery in D.C.”

  “There’s really that many planes still in the jungle?”

  “Hundreds, maybe even thousands, are still hidden. Once in a while a new one is discovered. The wrecks are like swamp ghosts. Some villagers believe the planes are cursed by the spirits of the men who died. They believe that real ghosts protect the wrecks.” He shrugged. “Who knows — many searchers have gone in and never come back.”

  “You’re just trying to scare me,” Dylan challenged. “What’s the difference between cannibals and headhunters anyway?”

  “Cannibals eat their enemies to steal their spirits. The headhunters, they hang the heads of enemies in their doorways to keep away bad spirits. Some native boys had to prove they had become adults by claiming the head of an enemy. This wasn’t really that unusual. Some American soldiers kept the heads and other body parts of Japanese soldiers as trophies, even though the military had strict rules against that.”

  “That’s gross,” Dylan mumbled.

  Uncle Todd shrugged. “When I traveled in Africa, young Maasai boys proved they had come of age by killing a lion. What’s so different with taking the head of some enemy?”

  “There’s a bunch of heads I’d like to hang up.”

  Uncle Todd laughed. “I’m probably one of them. We don’t do much of anything in our culture to show a boy has come of age. All we do is recognize those that don’t grow up.”

  “How is that?” Dylan asked.

  “We put them in juvenile detention centers and call up their uncles.”

  “Real funny,” Dylan said. He stared out the window at the clouds passing lazily under the plane like pillows of white. His head hurt from thinking.

  The flight attendants served a hot meal with chicken that tasted like rubber and a salad with dressing that tasted like turpentine. “Why can’t they just serve a cheeseburger and fries?” Dylan complained.

  “Then you would have to find something else to complain about,” Uncle Todd said.

  After eating, an announcement came over the intercom asking everybody to pull their window shades down. Tonight there would be little darkness because they were chasing the sun west the whole flight at about 500 miles per hour.

  Uncle Todd picked up a book he had been reading and turned to a new page. He had a pair of reading glasses that he wore low on his nose. They had been in the air seven hours now since leaving LA, and Dylan was bored stiff. A movie showed on an overhead screen, but it was some love story. Dylan definitely wasn’t feeling love. He didn’t like how Uncle Todd always had to have the last word.

  “You don’t like me, do you?” Dylan blurted.

  Uncle Todd glanced up from his reading and shrugged. “I like everybody on the planet. What I don’t like is when people do dumb things for dumb reasons.”

  “So you think I do dumb things for dumb reasons?” Dylan asked.

  Uncle Todd took off his reading glasses and studied Dylan. “I’m not sure what motivates you. For example, explain to me why you like wearing your pants halfway down your butt.”

  “Because I want to,” Dylan said.

  “So, if you want to do something, that makes it okay?”

  “I guess. You wear anything you want,” Dylan retorted.

  “We already talked about this. I wear what I wear for a reason. To stay warm and because it’s comfortable. What’s your reason?” When Dylan didn’t answer, Uncle Todd added, “I think you do it to thumb your nose at the world. The same as when you say ‘whatever.’”

  Dylan didn’t like where this wa
s going.

  “You’re bigger than that,” Uncle Todd said. “I thought you were your own person.”

  “I am!” Dylan said, raising his voice.

  “Do you deserve respect?” Uncle Todd asked, his eyes intense.

  Dylan shrugged.

  “Simple question,” Uncle Todd repeated. “Do you deserve respect?”

  “Yeah,” Dylan answered.

  “Well, you’re never deserving of any more respect in life than you give. I don’t see you showing the world much respect. Until you show the world respect, the world won’t respect you, and neither will I.”

  Dylan folded his arms to hide his fists, which were clenched tightly. As usual, he regretted having started an argument with his uncle.

  Dylan hadn’t realized a plane could stay in the air so long. Finally he needed to go to the bathroom. The movie had ended, so when he walked to the back of the plane, half the people stared up at him. The other half kept sleeping. The tiny bathroom was a joke, like pooping in a phone booth. It smelled horrible.

  When Dylan returned to his seat, Uncle Todd had turned his overhead light off and was fast asleep. Dylan crawled over his legs and settled into his seat by the window. Bored, he pulled out the flight magazine from the seat pocket and paged through it. At the back he found maps showing where the airline flew, with lines to places all over the world. He saw the line from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia.

  Dylan tried to sleep but finally gave up and pulled up his shade to glance out the window. Below was nothing but the Pacific Ocean. They were just one of those lines in the flight magazine. One of the really long ones.

  When Uncle Todd woke a couple of hours later, he looked over and found Dylan still awake. “You’re going to be a tired puppy if you don’t get some sleep,” he commented.

  “I’m already tired,” Dylan answered. “But I can’t sleep.”

  Uncle Todd reached under the seat to his carry-on bag and pulled out a map. He spread it out carefully on his fold-down tray table. “I want to show you how we narrowed down the search area.”

  Uncle Todd pointed to an inland lake on the map of Papua New Guinea. “This is Chambri Lake, and this is the Sepik River.” He pulled out the journal and turned to the last entry. “Okay, so your grandfather first said the weather was bad so he had to follow the coast north from Port Moresby before heading inland.” Uncle Todd traced his finger along the shoreline, and then pointed. “He doesn’t say how far north, but let’s say he went up to somewhere in here. Now let’s draw a line between there and Wewak.”

  Already Uncle Todd had traced a line across the island to Wewak with a pencil.

  “So, next the journal says, ‘We crossed the Sepik River abeam Chambri Lake to our right.’ He says Mount Hauk was about the same distance at his eleven o’clock.” Uncle Todd pointed to a red circle he had drawn on the map. “This is the approximate location he would have been if he were flying a course across the island from the north coast, crossing the Sepik River, abeam Chambri Lake and at eleven o’clock from Mount Hauk.”

  Dylan wanted to say, “Whatever,” but bit his tongue. “So, then, what’s the big deal? It should be easy finding the bomber,” he said.

  Uncle Todd studied the map as if it were a puzzle. “It’s all jungle and swamp,” he said.

  As Uncle Todd stared down, Dylan studied his uncle. Why did he want to go halfway around the world looking for a plane wreck? It wasn’t like the wreck was filled with gold — then it might have been worth finding.

  As much as Dylan hated to admit it, Uncle Todd was right about a few things. Wearing his pants way low was because other boys were doing it, and because it bugged the adults, especially his mom. Using the word “whatever” was a way of verbally flipping someone the finger and getting away with it. It told other people that their opinion was garbage. After his dad died, that’s how Dylan felt about any adult’s opinion. And like Uncle Todd had said, his headphones did let him tune out the world.

  From the moment he’d found out about his dad’s death, it seemed like every adult on the planet had an opinion about how Dylan should be handling it. They told him his dad was a hero and that he should be proud of him. They told Dylan he was depressed and he should take medication. They told him he should feel lucky he still had a mom that loved him so much. Eventually Dylan got sick of hearing about everything he should be doing or feeling. Sometimes the world really needed tuning out.

  Especially Uncle Todd.

  Dylan reclined his seat, trying to sleep, but his mind kept churning with thoughts, his butt hurt from sitting so long, and now two babies started crying in the seat behind them. Dylan would have given anything for his headphones.

  He couldn’t quit thinking about Uncle Todd. His mom had given up on complaining about the low pants, headphones, or saying “whatever,” but Uncle Todd picked apart every little thing he did. Dylan wished that Uncle Todd would just back off. What was his weakness? What was the chink in his armor?

  Numb with fatigue, Dylan rubbed his dry eyes. They felt like they had gravel smeared in them. He glanced over and found Uncle Todd asleep again, as if he were on the couch back home. He even snored a little.

  When at last the flight crew announced the final approach into Sydney, Uncle Todd woke and nudged Dylan. “We have a three-hour layover before our flight to Port Moresby,” he said. “Maybe we can get us a little bite to eat. You won’t be getting many hamburgers and french fries in the jungle.”

  Dylan shrugged and stared out the window as they landed and taxied to the terminal. Half of this airport stuck out into a big bay like a peninsula, and the control tower looked like something out of a science fiction movie — everything was really modern. Papua New Guinea was only a hundred miles away. It was hard to imagine a place so close could be so different.

  Leaving the plane, Dylan followed Uncle Todd through the crowded Sydney airport, stopping to get a burger. There were about a zillion people — families, sportsmen, tourists, and business people — all traveling through an airport Dylan hadn’t even heard of a month ago. “I didn’t realize Australia was so big,” he commented. “I read in the flight magazine that it was just an island.”

  Uncle Todd chuckled. “A big island. Biggest in the world, almost as big as the lower forty-eight states of the United States, but just a fraction of the people. We’ll have to come back to Australia sometime and go into the Outback. That’s when you’ll see big!”

  “Not if I can help it,” Dylan mumbled.

  When they boarded the plane for Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, it was a much smaller jet and a much shorter flight, mostly over water. Dylan stared out the window at the nothingness underneath. What in the world was he doing this far from home, headed for some jungle?

  As they approached land, the mountains down the center of the distant island looked like the back of some green monster — sharp jagged splinters covered with trees. Clouds hung low on the peaks, with mist trailing down the slopes. As they landed, Dylan had an ominous feeling. He was stepping out of a world he recognized into a world he didn’t even understand. Instead of seeing a boarding bridge connecting the plane to the terminal, Dylan looked out the window and saw two men pushing metal steps across the tarmac. The minute the door opened, a wall of hot muggy air flooded the plane like a sauna.

  Uncle Todd turned and handed Dylan a small nylon pouch with a strong lanyard. “Put your passport, your tickets and anything else valuable from your pockets into this pouch. Wear it around your neck and tuck the pouch inside your pants. Then tighten your belt. When we leave the airport, this place will be a battle zone and thick with pickpockets. They would love to have you wear your pants halfway down. You’d be robbed blind in minutes. Stay close to me. We have a small van picking us up to take us to a hotel where we’ll meet the rest of the team and stay overnight. Tomorrow, we all fly on to Wewak.”

  Dylan ignored the low pants comment. He wished his uncle would take a bath in a shark tank. As they descended the steel steps to th
e tarmac, Dylan glanced around. The terminal was a big white building. It felt like they had walked into an oven. By the time they reached the door going inside, Dylan was mopping sweat from his forehead.

  “Corruption is what makes this place so dangerous,” Uncle Todd explained. “People rob you at gunpoint tonight, and tomorrow when you report it at the police station, you might recognize the police officer as one of the men who robbed you the night before. Don’t ever go walking by yourself, and keep an eye on everything you own.”

  The inside of the terminal was large and mostly empty, except for benches scattered around, one small vendor shop, an ATM where you could change currency, a plain check-in counter, and a big mural covering one wall. The bathrooms had old fixtures. Many floor tiles were ripped or missing, exposing the concrete. Worst was the smell. Urine had soaked into the floor and now made the warm air suffocating. Everything looked fifty years old. While they waited with their luggage to go through customs, Uncle Todd went over to the ATM and withdrew some kina, the PNG money. Dylan overheard one passenger explaining to another how the mural told the history of PNG and its people. Right now Dylan couldn’t have cared less about the people of PNG. To him they were aliens from outer space.

  It took almost an hour to clear customs, and Uncle Todd was right: When they exited the terminal building, a crowd of people hung outside the gate like a pack of wolves watching them with hungry eyes, pushing and shoving to peddle jewelry, sell drugs, even flag down a taxi for them. Anything to make money. Luckily, the hotel had sent a driver, who held a sign up with their name. Even as they followed him to a white van carrying their backpacks, a young boy ran up and tried to grab the lanyard around Dylan’s neck. Fortunately Dylan had followed Uncle Todd’s suggestion and tucked the pouch inside his pants. He tried to hit the kid, but the wiry boy was already running away.

  The driver wagged his finger at Dylan. “Be careful,” he said with a strong accent. “This place very dangerous. The rascals steal from you. Do not walk alone. Never walk out at night. Then rascals kill you.”