Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  WHEN THE PLANE flew off, the survivors saw that the natives had returned.

  “There on the knoll across from us were Pete and his chums,” Margaret wrote. “They were squatted on their haunches, grinning and watching us like an audience at a Broadway play.” She counted her blessings, with a touch of condescension: “The natives, who might easily have been head-hunters, stood about and watched us with childish pleasure.”

  The natives made a small fire to warm themselves in the morning chill, and they sat around it, contentedly smoking stubby green cigars. Margaret, McCollom, and Decker looked on with envy. They had cigarettes in their pockets, but McCollom’s lighter was spent and their matches were wet. His spirits lifted by the conversation with the men on board the C-47, McCollom told the others, “I think I’m going over and borrow a cup of sugar from the neighbors.” He cadged a light, then shared the flame with Margaret and Decker.

  “The natives smoked on their knoll and we smoked on ours,” Margaret wrote. “No peace pipe ever tasted better.”

  Margaret began to fantasize about “the luscious Spam and K-rations probably awaiting us within a stone’s throw.” Despite her hunger, she told her friends, there were certain foods she wouldn’t savor: “One is canned tomatoes and the other is raisins,” she said. “When I was little I ate myself sick on both, and now I can’t stand the sight of either.”

  McCollom answered: “I could eat the tomatoes, can and all, if I could get ’em.”

  He rose and marched off in search of the supplies. Margaret appreciated McCollom’s endurance and leadership. She was even more impressed by the man shadowing him through the jungle.

  “Decker was emaciated, his eyes like burnt holes in a blanket,” she wrote. “We knew he was hurt, but just how gravely we were not to discover for a few more hours. How Decker got to his feet I shall never know. But he did, and staggered uncomplainingly after McCollom, determined to do his share of the work.”

  Although McCollom explained during the radio conversation that there were only three survivors, the C-47 had been packed optimistically, with supplies for two dozen. Their orders were to drop the supplies, and Captain Mengel and his crew had no intention of disobeying. The sky over Shangri-La filled with cargo parachutes.

  While Decker and McCollom went off in search of supplies, Margaret worried that the natives might collect boxes of rations she saw falling on the other side of a nearby hill. “I decided to scout that situation,” she wrote. “It was excruciating to stand on my burned, infected legs. So part of the way I crawled on my hands and knees. When my infected hand hurt too much, I would sit down and bounce along on the ground.”

  When she reached the other side of the hill, Margaret was stunned to see a split-rail fence that she thought looked straight out of the Old West. Just beyond it was a native compound. She wrote:

  It was an odd and fascinating New Guinea housing project, with one large section and several smaller ones mushroomed around it. The huts were round, with bamboo sides and thatched roofs, and seemed to be at least semi-attached to each other. As for the roofs, they were alive with natives, all craning their jet-black necks for a better look at me. I could see a large-sized hole in one thatched roof. A hunch and a sinking feeling hit me simultaneously. I knew that one of our packages of supplies had gone through one roof. I was right, too, McCollom discovered later. I wondered if the natives were angry about this, or if they might go on the warpath because one of their houses was damaged. But they just stood and stared, entranced by the free show I made. So I decided to leave well-enough alone and go back to my own knoll.

  THE CRATE THAT crashed through the roof did no harm beyond requiring new thatchwork. But another crate, dropped without a parachute, permanently embittered one resident of Uwambo toward the sky spirits in her midst.

  Yaralok’s daughter Yunggukwe, a girl on the cusp of womanhood, had recently become the owner of her first pig. This milestone, and the possession itself, was of immense importance to a Yali girl. So great was the pig’s value to Yunggukwe—emotionally as well as, eventually, gustatorily—that its worth could only be exceeded by two pigs.

  That morning, she tied her pig to a stake outside her hut, thinking it would be safe there. But when the supply plane roared over Uwambo, the pig had nowhere to run. To save parachute cloth, some of the boxes containing unbreakable items such as tents were pushed freefall out the C-47’s cargo door, and such was the case with a crate dropped this day.

  There was no evidence of intent, but no pinpoint bombing raid during the war found a mark more squarely. It landed on Yunggukwe’s pig, killing it instantly and striking with such force that the animal shattered into pieces. Yunggukwe never received an apology or compensation, and she neither forgot nor forgave.

  “That was my own pig that died,” she said angrily sixty-five years later.

  MARGARET CRAWLED BACK to the clearing just as McCollom and Decker returned from the jungle, “grinning like apes.” In their arms were half a dozen cans of the only food they could find: tomatoes and tomato juice.

  “Come on, Maggie,” Decker said. “Be a big girl now and eat some tomatoes.”

  She forced down four mouthfuls before quitting. Watching Decker and McCollom gorge themselves on the fleshy fruit, she grew so angry she demanded that they return to the jungle to find her something else to eat. They headed in the direction where they thought the parachutes landed, but turned up only a half dozen “jungle kits” filled with Atabrine pills for malaria, ointments for wounds, water purification tablets, and bags to collect water from streams or lakes. Also inside were jungle knives, mosquito nets, bandages, and gauze. The only food in the kits was chocolate bars. Margaret felt only slightly better about the chocolate than the tomatoes. “By this time I was almost as sick of candy as I was of tomatoes,” she wrote.

  Again Margaret marveled at Decker’s fortitude. Determined to do his part, he gathered the water bags and went to fill them in the icy stream. “He was gone so long I began to worry about him,” Margaret wrote. “It took every ounce of his strength to get back to our knoll, and when he reached us he just sagged gently onto the hard earth.”

  McCollom, meanwhile, was worried about his companions. He decided the time was overdue to tend more thoroughly to their wounds. On McCollom’s orders, Margaret rolled up her pants to expose the wide rings of burns around her calves. Left untended for four days, they oozed pus and reeked of dying flesh. The burns and cuts on both her feet had turned gangrenous, as had part of her hand.

  “Decker and McCollom looked at me, and I knew they were alarmed. Suddenly I was in terror, lest I lose my legs,” she told her diary. She fought to remain in control, fearing that letting down her guard might trigger a spiral into panic. She helped McCollom to apply an ointment they’d found in the jungle kits, after which he wrapped her wounds in gauze.

  Crew members aboard a C–47 prepare to drop supplies to the survivors of the Gremlin Special crash. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

  Even without looking in her little mirror, Margaret knew that she was filthy and unkempt, almost unrecognizable from the eager, take-charge WAC who cared about her appearance and spent nights tailoring her khakis so they’d fit her petite figure. Decker, in what was becoming his usual blunt way, didn’t hold back.

  “Maggie, you are certainly a sad sack,” he said.

  McCollom wisely kept his mouth shut, but even that wasn’t enough to spare him her wrath. Margaret looked at the two of them—equally dirty, with four days’ growth of beard on their hollowed cheeks. She shot back: “Neither one of you are exactly Van Johnsons,” she said, referring to the actor whose all-American good looks landed him heroic roles in MGM war movies.

  After Margaret it was Decker’s turn for triage. The gash on his forehead was deep and oozing. Wimayuk Wandik’s breath might have salved his soul, but it did nothing to heal the wound. Margaret and McCollom worried that any attempt to treat it without sterile tools and proper medicine might only make matters wors
e, so they left it alone. They took the same approach with what appeared to be a broken right elbow, focusing instead on Decker’s one seemingly less urgent complaint. Several times during the previous days, Decker had mentioned discomfort caused by his pants sticking to his backside. They thought the cause might be burns from the crash, but the fabric was neither torn nor scorched, so they didn’t believe the burns to be serious. Now McCollom ordered Decker to drop his trousers and lie facedown on the ground.

  “What we saw horrified us both,” Margaret wrote, “and made us realize for the first time what pain Decker had been suffering in silence.”

  His buttocks and the back of his legs were laced with angry burns that had turned horribly gangrenous. Margaret found the sight sickening. Frightening, too. From the look on his face, so did McCollom. They didn’t want to upset Decker, so they said nothing and went to work trying to gently wipe away ruined skin. They cleaned the area as much as they could and applied a generous coating of ointment.

  Decker had no idea how he’d been burned. One possibility was that he fell against a piece of scalding metal during the crash. The result would’ve been the same as ironing pants while still wearing them: the trousers would be fine, and the skin underneath would be destroyed.

  Decker accepted the treatment with stoicism until McCollom covered the burns on his bottom with a large, triangular bandage that resembled a diaper. “That momentarily broke Decker’s spirit,” Margaret wrote. As much as possible, they’d all maintained a gallows humor since the crash, ribbing each other and themselves to boost morale and seal their camaraderie. Decker’s bandage could have been an easy source of jokes, but the others knew better. “We were all silently worried and trying not to let the other fellow know it,” Margaret wrote. Fearing that her legs would have to be amputated, and that Decker’s infections would fatally poison his blood, she wrote: “We were all wondering if the medics would reach us in time.”

  AFTER THE INFIRMARY session, McCollom ordered both patients to lie down and remain still. All three stayed close together, listening for the planes they hoped would drop the promised medics before nightfall. But clouds rolled in and the weather turned foul by two o’clock that afternoon. A heavy mist settled on the valley and on the survivors’ hopes. They knew that no paratrooper medics would dare jump into such soup, especially because hidden beneath the mist was a thick jungle in which to get tangled or impaled. They could do nothing but spread out the tarps and try to keep warm.

  By nightfall, only McCollom could get around on his feet. Decker could barely move, worn out from his injuries, his exertions, and his embarrassment. Margaret felt equally bad. She told her diary that, despite his obvious exhaustion, McCollom patiently ministered to her “as if I were a baby.”

  She felt helpless, too sick and too weak to walk. All she could do was pray. She told her diary that she’d never prayed so hard in her life.

  Chapter 15

  NO THANKSGIVING

  AFTER EVERY PARATROOPER in the 1st Recon volunteered to jump into Shangri-La despite the dire warnings, Captain Earl Walter chose ten of his troops. He immediately picked his right-hand man, Master Sergeant Santiago “Sandy” Abrenica, whom Walter considered a good friend and the best soldier he’d ever met. Abrenica was thirty-six, whippet-thin, with dark, deep-set eyes and a wary expression. Born on Luzon in the Philippines, Abrenica immigrated alone to the United States in 1926, when he was seventeen, declaring that his intended address was a YMCA in Seattle. As a civilian he’d worked as a gardener, and as a hobby he raced model airplanes.

  Next Walter needed two medics who he thought might have the toughest job of all. They’d be parachuting into a dense jungle to treat the survivors, while the rest of the unit jumped into a flat, mostly treeless area of the Shangri-La Valley some thirty miles away to establish a base camp. After talking to his men and leafing through their service records, he picked Sergeant Benjamin “Doc” Bulatao and Corporal Camilo “Rammy” Ramirez. Both Doc and Rammy were good-natured, with easy smiles—Rammy’s was more distinctive, as it revealed two front teeth made of gold. Otherwise they were entirely different. Doc Bulatao was quiet, shy almost, while Rammy Ramirez had the gift of gab and an outsize personality for a man who stood just five-foot-one.

  Like Abrenica and most other enlisted men in the 1st Recon, the thirty-one-year-old Bulatao was single and had immigrated to the United States as a young man. A farm worker before the war, Bulatao joined the 1st Filipino Regiment in California before being assigned to Walter’s unit.

  Rammy Ramirez’s route to Hollandia was more circuitous and more perilous. Born in the city of Ormoc on the island of Leyte, Ramirez enlisted ten months before the war. He was assigned to the Philippine Scouts, a unit of the U.S. Army consisting of native Filipinos who served in the islands under American command. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines after Pearl Harbor, Ramirez was part of the overmatched, undersupplied force that held out against the enemy, hunger, and dysentery for more than four months on the Bataan Peninsula. After Filipino and American troops surrendered in April 1942, Ramirez endured the Bataan Death March, suffering not only from his captors’ brutality and the lack of food and water but also from malaria and dengue fever. Only a daring gambit spared him from a prisoner-of-war camp.

  At a temporary holding area, Ramirez noticed a hole at a corner of a fence that had been patched with barbed wire. “I said to myself, ‘I will get through there,’ ” he recalled. The next night, he waited until a Japanese guard set down his rifle and appeared to doze off at his post. “So I roll, little by little, towards the gap in the barbed wire.” He tried to pry apart the patch to enlarge the opening but couldn’t find the strength—“It’s kind of hard, because I am small, you know.” As he crawled through, his shirt snagged; razor wire ripped a gash in his side.

  “About ten feet from the barbed wire were bushes, lots of bushes and trees. So I went toward the bushes when I got out. I didn’t even notice that I cut myself.” He was about a hundred and fifty yards from the fence, running through the woods, when he heard gunfire behind him—“boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!” Later Ramirez learned that Japanese guards had opened fire when other prisoners tried to follow him through the hole. “I kept running, and my head was really pounding—the fever, malaria fever and dengue fever mixed.”

  Ramirez dragged himself to a nearby house, where sympathetic residents gave him clothes to replace his uniform. He hid his dog tags in his shoe, avoided main roads, and headed toward Manila, an “open city,” supposedly safe from bombing by either side. He saw an ambulance and hitched a ride to a hospital, but everyone there was evacuating to a medical ship bound for Australia. Manila was blacked out, but he found his way to the pier and saw the ship silhouetted in the moonlight. He talked his way on board and curled up in a warm spot on the deck amid scores of sick and wounded.

  After a month recovering in a Sydney hospital, Ramirez regained his strength just as the 1st Filipino Regiment was arriving in Australia. He was still officially attached to the U.S. military, so it seemed a natural fit. “They discharged me from the hospital and put me with them.”

  In time, he was assigned to medical, commando, and paratrooper training in Brisbane as part of the 5217th Reconnaissance Battalion, the predecessor to the 1st Recon, under the command of Captain Walter. Now twenty-six, with a scar for life from his escape, Rammy Ramirez wanted to help Margaret, McCollom, and Decker to make their own getaway.

  Walter was especially glad to have Ramirez on the team. “I just liked his gung-ho attitude. He was happy.” Other medics, including Bulatao, were more experienced treating patients, “but they weren’t as free and easygoing as Rammy was. I felt the two survivors that were badly injured . . . needed someone that was kind of happy and a good talker, and was not the least bit hesitant about talking back and forth.”

  “That’s how I picked those two for the jump,” Walter said. “I picked ’em mainly because Ben was the most qualified and Rammy had the most guts.”

/>   After Abrenica, Bulatao, and Ramirez, Walter filled out his parachute infantry team with seven of his most senior and capable enlisted men: six sergeants—Alfred Baylon, Hermenegildo Caoili, Fernando Dongallo, Juan “Johnny” Javonillo, Don Ruiz, and Roque Velasco—and a corporal, Custodio Alerta.

  Captain C. Earl Walter Jr. with Corporal Camilo “Rammy” Ramirez (left) and Sergeant Benjamin “Doc” Bulatao. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

  In civilian life, they’d been gardeners and kitchen workers, farmhands and laborers, familiar with the slights and discrimination routinely experienced by Filipinos in America. Now they were U.S. soldiers, volunteering to parachute into uncharted territory to protect and rescue three comrades. When Walter was choosing his squad, neither he nor his men knew that the first natives who made contact with the survivors were friendly. All they knew were Walter’s warnings: no maps, no safe drop zone, no predicting the natives’ response, and no exit plan. Yet all they wanted to know was how soon they could jump into Shangri-La.

  Walter spoke again with Colonel Elsmore and Colonel T. R. Lynch, deputy commander of Fee-Ask, who was deeply involved in the search and rescue effort. In an earlier meeting, Lynch made clear to Walter that he’d be given wide latitude in terms of choosing which men to use and how best to carry out the mission. Walter quoted Lynch as saying, “It’s gonna be your operation. You’re entirely responsible.” Walter understood Lynch to mean that if it went horribly wrong, if a live WAC, a live lieutenant, or a live sergeant came back dead, or if his ten paratroopers failed in any way, Walter would shoulder the blame. His answer: Bahala na.