Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  After meeting with the brass, Walter joined a flight crew for several reconnaissance passes over the valley, the crash site, and the survivors’ clearing. Then he spoke again with his superiors. “We figured out just how they were going to get us in there,” Walter recalled. “I was very concerned because I knew we had to parachute in there. It was the only way. The territory north of the valley was inhabited by headhunters, we figured, and south of the valley were Japanese troops. So there’s no way to get in there by foot unless you wanted to get into a firefight, and I wasn’t the least bit interested in exposing us to that.”

  Walter instructed his men to pack supplies and parachutes. None of them had jumped since leaving their training base in Brisbane months earlier, so he arranged for each to make one or two practice jumps in Hollandia. “That was a mess because the only place they found that we could use was kind of a swampy area,” Walter said. “The men and I laughed about it afterward, but we sure as hell didn’t at the time. We were in what they called kunai grass”—with sharp edges, each blade several feet high. “It was very thick and almost one hundred percent coverage. We’d take two or three steps and then purposely fall forward to make an indent in the grass, and then we’d take two or three steps and fall again. A mess.”

  Walter went back to his medics and asked, “Do you really want to do this?”

  “I remember both of them saying, ‘Yes, sir. We want to do this because they need us.’ ”

  “I know they do,” Walter told his men. “I can’t do it. You can, because you know what to do medically.”

  Later, Walter said of the moment: “This, to me, is one of the things I want people to think about. They didn’t have to do this. They wanted to.”

  Walter noted in a journal that it was his twenty-fourth birthday, Friday, May 18, 1945. Having finally found himself engaged in a real mission, he was too busy and too distracted to celebrate. After his last practice jump, he returned to camp, packed parachutes, and went to bed.

  ON THEIR SIXTH day in Shangri-La, the survivors spent the morning waiting for the comforting sound of the approaching supply plane. When the 311 appeared, the sky filled with parachutes slowing the descent of wooden crates. When the survivors made contact with the plane’s crew by walkie-talkie, they warned that however bad the terrain looked from the sky, it was even worse on the ground.

  In her diary, Margaret wrote that she told the crew: “Don’t let anyone jump in here if it means he’ll be killed. I’d rather die right here than have anyone killed trying to get me out.” McCollom and Decker felt the same. “We had seen enough of death and tragedy,” she wrote. “God knows we wanted to live, but not at the expense of someone else.”

  Their fears for the paratroopers would remain with them for at least another day. The mist rolled in early, shrouding the jungle and the surrounding ridges. That made it impossible to fly safely over them, much less jump into the cloudy mess.

  When the plane was out of sight, McCollom traipsed into the jungle in search of cargo. “I could no longer move at all,” Margaret wrote, “and Decker was so white and feverish that McCollom sternly ordered him to stay in camp. Flesh had melted away from all of us, even McCollom.”

  On successive trips, McCollom brought back a package filled with pants and shirts, but only in a size small enough to fit Margaret. She was grateful, though she wished he’d also found panties and bras to replace the underwear she’d removed five days earlier to make bandages. On another outing, he found enough thick blankets to fashion two makeshift beds in their jungle infirmary. He made one for Margaret and the other for him and Decker to share. That night, fleas in the blankets tormented Decker but ignored McCollom, which annoyed Decker even more.

  Returning to their knoll after another trip, McCollom shouted, “Eureka! We eat!” In his arms were boxes of ten-in-one rations.

  “Food, real food, at last, after almost six days,” Margaret wrote. She confessed that her stomach ached from hunger, and the men admitted the same despite having gorged on the tomatoes without her. As McCollom pried open the packages, Margaret’s spirits soared: “It was such a beautiful sight: sliced bacon in cans, canned ham and eggs, canned bacon and eggs, canned meat, canned hash and stews, the makings of coffee, tea, cocoa, lemonade and orangeade, butter, sugar, salt, canned milk, cigarettes, matches, and even candy bars for dessert.”

  All three chose cans of bacon and ham, and each hastily worked little key openers to reveal the tasty-under-the-circumstances innards. As they dug into their cold breakfasts, the survivors gave no thought to making a fire. For one thing, all the nearby wood was saturated from the relentless rains. “Even more important,” Margaret wrote, “even McCollom was too far gone physically to do anything that took an extra, added effort.”

  Despite how hungry she’d been, Margaret felt stuffed after only a few bites. She stopped eating before she’d finished one small can, realizing that a steady diet of Charms, water, and a few mouthfuls of tomatoes had shrunk her already small stomach.

  As they waited for the medics, the survivors’ anxiety grew about Margaret’s and Decker’s injuries. The ointments and gauze they’d found in the supply crates had done nothing to slow the spread or the flesh-killing power of gangrene. After they ate, McCollom did what he could to tend to their wounds. He removed the dressings on Margaret’s legs, releasing the nauseating stench of infection. McCollom tried to ease off the bandages, but they were stuck to the burned skin. He closed his eyes, knowing the pain he’d have to cause Margaret by ripping them off.

  “Honest, Maggie, this hurts me worse than it does you,” he told her.

  Within an hour the fresh bandages he’d applied were drenched with foul-smelling pus. They repeated the excruciating process. Margaret wrote: “I tried not to show my growing terror that I would lose both legs, but it was mounting in me like a tide, and sometimes I thought I would pass out with fear.”

  Margaret’s fears deepened when she tried to help McCollom treat Decker. The gangrene on his legs and backside had grown worse during the previous twelve hours. “He was in great pain and we knew it, although he had never said a word,” she wrote. “He lay on his stomach all day with a kind of exhausted patience and pain.”

  In the afternoon, the native leader they called Pete returned with his greatest show of trust yet: a woman whom Margaret took to be his wife. The couple stood on the knoll across from the survivors’ camp and beckoned them over. Neither Margaret nor Decker could walk, so McCollom went alone. The two leaders shook hands and tried to communicate, with little success. At breaks where a response seemed appropriate, McCollom murmured, “Uhn, uhn, uhn,” just as he’d heard the natives do when the two groups met. The conversation didn’t progress much beyond that.

  Elsewhere in her diary, Margaret wrote of the natives: “They would chatter like magpies to us. We would always listen carefully, from time to time muttering, ‘Uhn, uhn, uhn.’ They would be delighted, like the bore to whom you keep saying, ‘Yes, yes, yes’ during long-winded conversation. ‘Uhn, uhn, uhn,’ we would say as the natives chattered. They would beam at us and then talk twice as fast.”

  As McCollom spoke with his counterpart, Margaret sized up the native woman. Margaret was pleased to find that the first woman she’d seen up close in Shangri-La was “shorter than my five-feet, one-and-one-half inches.” A woven bag hung down her back, suspended from a string handle draped over her head. She stood “mother naked,” other than what Margaret described as “a queer New Guinea g-string woven of supple twigs” that somehow remained in place on her hips.

  Unknown to Margaret, the woman’s name was Gilelek. Despite the practice of polygamy that would have allowed Pete/Wimayuk Wandik to take more than one wife, she was his one and only.

  “She and all her jungle sisters under the skin were the most graceful, fleet creatures any of us have ever seen,” Margaret wrote. “And they were shy as does.”

  THE COUPLE LEFT, and in the late afternoon the survivors settled into their blanket beds
. Less than an hour later, Wimayuk and a large group of his followers returned. It appeared as though his wife had approved of the strangers, and had reminded him that his obligation to guests went beyond kindness.

  “They held out a pig, sweet potatoes and some little green bananas, the only fruit we ever saw,” Margaret wrote.

  “They want to give us a banquet,” McCollom said. “Maggie, if our lives depend upon it, I cannot get up and make merry with the natives.”

  “Amen,” said Decker.

  If the feast had been offered a day earlier, the survivors would have been thrilled. “But tonight,” Margaret wrote, “for the first time in days, our stomachs were full of Army rations, and we were bushed.” They used sign language to explain as politely as possible that they were too tired, too sick, and too full to appreciate another meal.

  By declining the dinner, Margaret, McCollom, and Decker had effectively canceled what would have been the first Thanksgiving in Shangri-La. The man they called Pete would have filled the role of Chief Massassoit, and the survivors would have played the Pilgrims.

  A native couple in a Dani village, photographed in 1945. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

  More significant, they unknowingly missed a chance to become bonded to the natives through one of the tribe’s most important community rituals: a pig feast. As an anthropologist later explained: “It is the remembrance of pigs which holds . . . [this] society together. At every major ceremony pigs are given from one person to another, and then killed and eaten. But they leave behind memory traces of obligations which will be paid back later; when this happens, the people will create new obligations. And so the network of the society is constantly refurbished by the passage of pigs. A single man in his lifetime is bound to his fellows by the ties of hundreds and perhaps thousands of pigs which he and his people have exchanged with others and their people.”

  Despite the deep symbolism of their offer, the natives took no apparent offense at the survivors’ refusal to share a pig.

  “Pete, who must have had a wonderfully understanding heart in that wiry black body, comprehended at once,” Margaret wrote. “He tucked the pig more firmly under his arm. He ordered his men, who had started a fire by some magic known only to them, to put it out. Then he clucked over us reassuringly and herded his followers home.”

  The survivors burrowed into their beds and went to sleep, feeling sated and relatively warm and comfortable for the first time since leaving Hollandia. In what Margaret called “the irony of an evil fate,” they were awakened several hours later by a sudden cloudburst. Margaret’s nest of blankets, arranged on low ground, became a woolly swamp. The bed on higher ground shared by McCollom and Decker was wet, but not soaked. Margaret ordered them to make room, and she crawled in alongside them.

  “Lord,” said McCollom in mock protest, “are we never to get rid of this woman?”

  They huddled together against the cold and wet through the night, talking now and again under the blankets about helicopters, medics, and being rescued.

  Chapter 16

  RAMMY AND DOC

  FLYING IN A C-47 over the survivors’ clearing, Earl Walter was sweating.

  The plane carrying him and the medics Rammy Ramirez and Doc Bulatao took off from the Sentani Airstrip around 8:00 a.m., Saturday, May 19. During several passes over the intended drop zone, it looked more treacherous than Walter remembered from his first view, two days earlier. Adding to his concern was the unpredictability of the mountain winds. Already he’d dropped five wind dummies—weighted bundles used to assess turbulence—without any benefit. “The reason I dropped five,” he explained, “is because every one of them changed direction, so I had no idea” which way the winds would blow the medics.

  Walter pushed the medics’ equipment out of the cargo door over the jungle near the survivors’ campsite, so they wouldn’t have to carry the supplies the entire way from the landing area. The cargo drops provided no more useful information about the wind conditions. As he watched the dummies and the equipment crates spin and twist in the shifting currents, Walter kept his fears to himself.

  “I never told Ben or Rammy because, well, it wouldn’t have done any good,” Walter said. “I mean, it didn’t make any difference. We knew we had to put two people in there, no matter what.”

  The young captain knew that Bulatao and Ramirez were about to become what paratroopers call “human wind dummies.” If they’d been officers like Walter rather than enlisted men, they would have earned the more formal moniker “turbulence testers.” Either way, the swirling winds added another danger to an already frightening jump.

  Walter’s biggest worry was the drop zone itself, an area of four-foot-high brush, jagged rocks, and sharp-topped tree stumps that looked as though it had been the scene of a recent lightning fire. “I can remember flying over there at roughly a couple of hundred feet because I wanted to get down and see what it looked like,” he said. “And it looked like hell. Pardon the expression, but it did. I mean, there’d been fires, there were rock formations, stumps, trees that had been broken or whatever. I don’t remember ever hearing about a drop zone like that.” An ideal landing area was flat and soft, wide open, with little or no breeze; this was the opposite.

  Reluctantly, Walter chose the area because it was within two miles of the survivors’ campsite, and it was better, though not much, than parachuting into a full-fledged jungle. Jumping into the campsite itself wasn’t an option because it was too small a target.

  Walter’s plan called for the medics to exit the plane only a few hundred feet above the ground, to reduce the chance that they’d drift miles from where the survivors desperately needed their help. But improving the odds for the survivors meant increasing the risks for Bulatao and Ramirez.

  Cords called static lines ran from their parachute packs to an anchor cable inside the plane. If everything went as intended, the lines would ensure that their chutes would deploy automatically after the men stepped out the door and were clear of the plane. But jumping so close to the ground meant that they’d have no time to deploy a reserve parachute if their main chutes failed. The mountain altitude added to the peril. They were more than eight thousand feet above sea level, which meant the air would be thin and they’d fall faster. They’d have little opportunity to steer themselves away from trees or other hazards by pulling on the nylon straps that linked their harnesses to the cords leading to the parachutes’ umbrella-like canopies.

  A light man in thin air with a twenty-eight-foot-diameter parachute might descend at a rate of fifteen feet per second. If that rate held true, from the time they left the plane, Ramirez and Bulatao would be on the ground—or stuck in a tree, or impaled on a jagged stump, or lost in a rocky gorge—in less than thirty seconds. That is, if the winds didn’t spin them around, tangle their lines, and turn their parachutes into narrow “streamers.” Without a reserve chute, a streamer meant almost certain death.

  Walter and the pilot conferred about wind speed and direction, then agreed on what they thought would be the best approach. Both knew their calculations were only slightly more useful than expert guesses.

  Ramirez and Bulatao rose from their seats and did the paratrooper shuffle to the jump door to keep from losing their balance with their heavy loads. Walter “stood them in the door”—paratrooper lingo for preparing to jump—and again checked their resolve.

  He shouted over the engines and the wind: “Are you ready?”

  In unison, Ramirez and Bulatao answered: “Yes, sir!”

  Describing the scene more than sixty years later, Walter’s eyes misted with pride.

  The medics leaped into the void, one after the other, their parachutes opening as intended and filling with air. At first, they seemed to be headed toward an area below the clearing where Walter thought they could make a relatively safe landing. Then the winds shifted again, blowing them off course.

  MARGARET, MCCOLLOM, AND Decker awoke that morning anticipating the medics’ arrival. “I
t was patent to all of us now—though we never once mentioned it—that Decker might die and I would surely lose my legs unless the medical paratroopers reached us immediately,” she wrote.

  All three were “wet, miserable and aching” from the rainstorm the night before as McCollom served her and Decker cold breakfast rations. Their ears pricked up at the sound of the plane, and McCollom manned the radio. “They told us the two medical paratroopers were aboard,” she wrote, “and would jump two miles down the valley as soon as the plane had discharged its ’chute cargo of pup tents, ponchos, blankets, more medical supplies and food.”

  A radio operator on the plane assured them the medics would be taking care of them within forty-five minutes. When McCollom relayed the message, Margaret rattled her lips in a Bronx cheer. McCollom and Decker joined in. “We had some intimate knowledge of the jungle by this time,” Margaret wrote, “and we knew that even over a native trail it would take hours for the medics to make the two-mile hike.”

  The survivors watched as two small figures left the plane and their parachutes mushroomed in the sky. A single thought crossed Decker’s mind: “God bless you.” He considered the medics to be “the difference between life and death for us.”

  When they lost sight of the paratroopers, Margaret wrote, they knew there was nothing they could do but wait and pray. “I said more ‘Our Fathers’ and ‘Hail Marys’ in the next two hours than ever before in my life.”

  Watching from the plane’s open jump door, Walter did the same.

  ON THE WAY down, struggling against the wind in a futile effort to get back on course, Camilo “Rammy” Ramirez gained a more complete understanding of what he’d volunteered himself into. “We were about a hundred feet above the jump zone,” he recalled. “I could see the stumps and the rocks. I said to myself, ‘There’s all this—it’s dangerous.’ So I tried to face away from the wind. I tried to pilot the parachute toward the woods, where I could see no rocks in there. I missed the stumps, but I did not miss the rock.”