Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  He stumbled as he landed, painfully wrenching his left ankle. After discarding his parachute, Ramirez examined his ankle and was relieved to find that the bone wasn’t broken and he wasn’t bleeding. Doc Bulatao landed safely nearby. That was the good news.

  Immediately upon the medics’ landing, they were surrounded by natives. Ramirez reached for his rifle, a semiautomatic M-1 carbine with an eighteen-inch barrel and a fifteen-round clip. “The natives have spears, and bow and arrows,” Ramirez said. “And I had my carbine cocked, in case somebody acted to throw the spear, or bow and arrow.”

  Out stepped a native man Ramirez called “the chief of that village”—Wimayuk Wandik, whom the medics would soon know as Pete. They didn’t understand each other’s language, but using hand signs and body English, Ramirez explained himself. “I expressed my mission. That an airplane crashed. Catch on fire. I’m here to help.”

  Wimayuk nodded. He called over a group of boys and instructed them to lead the two medics to Mundima, the place by the river Mundi where the survivors were camped. “We followed them, just like rabbits, through the jungle,” Ramirez said. Hobbled by his twisted ankle, Ramirez couldn’t keep up with the nimble barefoot boys, who hopped from stump to stump, scampered across fallen logs wet with moss, and saw trails where anyone else would have seen none. Bulatao hung back with his friend. After several hours of losing and regaining sight of the boys, trekking through, over, and around the ferns and vines and trees, they arrived at the clearing.

  Margaret, McCollom, and Decker rose to shake hands with the medics. “When I got close to them,” Ramirez said, “Margaret was crying. She hugged me, and I kept smiling.” Margaret recorded the scene in her diary:

  When I spotted them down the native trail, I couldn’t keep the tears back any longer. They spilled out of their own volition and poured down my one blistered cheek and my one good cheek. Leading the way and limping slightly was Corporal Rammy Ramirez, medical technician. Rammy had a heart of gold, we came to know, and a smile of the same hue. Even as he came limping up the trail, his face was split in a wide, warm smile, and his two gold front teeth shone resplendently. Rammy was better for morale than a thousand-dollar bill. I felt better just looking at him through my tears. Sergeant Ben Bulatao, medical technician, brought up the rear. When the sergeant walked into camp, there arrived to take care of us one of the most kind and gentle men God ever put on earth. . . . I want to say right now that when better men are born, they will undoubtedly be Filipinos. If ever they or their islands need aid or a champion, they only have to send a wire to enlist me in the cause.

  Rammy rummaged through the jungle, gathering the supplies Walter had tossed from the plane. Favoring his bad ankle, he “hopped around on one foot like a cheerful sparrow,” Margaret wrote. He built a fire, pulled up a dozen or so sweet potatoes to roast, and boiled water. He shaved pieces of chocolate into a canteen cup and made hot chocolate—the survivors’ first warm drink in nearly a week.

  “It was heavenly,” Margaret wrote. “We gulped down the first cup like ravenous animals, and then held them out for more.” By the next morning, Rammy and Doc would be waking them with the rich aromas of hot coffee and fried bacon.

  They wolfed the hot potatoes, too, amusing Rammy with their excitement about a vegetable that had been under their feet the whole time: “I find out that they came from the city. And in the city, all you can see is lots of fruits, but no trees. So they don’t know how they grow.”

  Starting with Decker, the medics poured peroxide and an antibacterial powder called sulfanilamide into his wounds and onto the gangrenous burns on his buttocks. The gash on Decker’s head was spread too wide to stitch. Doc Bulatao—who took the lead on medical matters, with Rammy assisting—gently massaged the skin around the wound, pushing the two sides closer so they could eventually be knit together. Rammy worked on Decker’s broken elbow. He fashioned a splint from tree bark and held it against Decker’s arm as he wrapped it in bandages, immobilizing it. The medics decided not to set the break, fearing that without X rays they might do more harm than good.

  They turned their attention to Margaret and spent the next two hours working on her legs. The bandages McCollom had applied were stuck fast to her burns. Doc Bulatao knew that removing them would be torture.

  Sergeant Ken Decker in a makeshift latrine in the jungle. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

  “He would try to work the bandages off without hurting me too much,” Margaret wrote. “But he winced as much in the process as I did. ‘You ought to see the way I rip them off!’ McCollom encouraged him. ‘But I’m afraid I’ll hurt her,’ Doc would reply.”

  Margaret was more worried about losing her legs. “If I were back at Fee-Ask,” she told Bulatao, “the G.I. medic would yank the bandages off and then scrub my legs with a brush. Go ahead, yank.” So he did. “Not until long afterward did he tell me how shocked he was at the sight of me,” Margaret wrote. “I was skin and bones. I doubt if I weighed ninety pounds at that time.”

  Bulatao knew there was little he could do that first night to treat the gangrene on Margaret or Decker. It would be a slow, painful fight. He and Rammy would cut away the rotten skin, wash what remained with peroxide, daub it with ointment, dress the wound, then repeat the process day after day. If it wasn’t too late, eventually the gangrene would retreat and healing could begin. Otherwise, they’d have to consider more drastic steps, including amputation.

  “Doc must have read the fear in my heart,” Margaret wrote. “In the middle of bandaging up my sorry-looking gams, he smiled at me and said, ‘You’ll be jitter-bugging in three months.’ But I knew he wasn’t sure, and neither was I.”

  Chapter 17

  CUSTER AND COMPANY

  AS MARGARET HASTINGS was enduring the removal of her bandages in the mountainous jungle, Earl Walter finally got a chance to experience danger serving his country. It wasn’t a combat assignment or a spy patrol in the Philippines, but it was the next best thing: a rescue mission in Shangri-La.

  Colonel Elsmore and the planners at Fee-Ask still weren’t sure how they’d attempt to get everyone out of Shangri-La, but in the meantime they were certain they needed more soldiers in Shangri-La. They wanted Walter and five members of his paratrooper team to set up a base camp in the main valley, hike through the jungle to the survivors’ clearing, collect them and the two medics, and return with everyone to the base camp to await pickup or further instructions. While Walter and his group were en route to the survivors’ campsite, the other three paratroopers would stay in the main valley to maintain the base camp and to level and create a makeshift runway by clearing brush, trees, mud, quicksand, and other obstacles.

  The runway idea emerged as planners continued to narrow their options for rescue. A helicopter had already been ruled out because of the inability to fly a whirlybird over the mountains. Elsmore’s team also nixed a suggestion that they use an amphibious plane; unaware that Richard Archbold had landed on a lake near the valley with the Guba seven years earlier, they mistakenly believed such a plane was unsuitable for the mission. Marching the hundred and fifty miles to Hollandia was among the last resorts, along with the idea of piloting a U.S. Navy PT boat up a river from New Guinea’s south coast to within fifty or so miles of the valley. Among a half dozen remaining options, some more outlandish than others, were landing a C-47 in the valley—a dubious prospect because of the conditions—and the equally implausible idea of dropping motorless gliders into the valley, loading them with passengers, and using low-flying planes to snatch them back into the sky.

  In the meantime, at ten o’clock on the morning of Sunday, May 20, Walter and eight of his men, weighed down and clanking with parachute packs, guns, ammunition, bolo knives, and sundry supplies, climbed aboard a C-47 at the Sentani Airstrip destined for Shangri-La.

  Walter told the pilot, Colonel Edward T. Imparato, to take the plane in low—a few hundred feet above the valley floor. Walter, about to make his forty-ninth jump, didn’t wan
t the swirling winds to turn their parachutes into kites and spread him and his men miles apart. He also hoped that a low jump might escape the natives’ notice, as opposed to a long, slow descent that would be seen by every tribesman for miles.

  For a drop zone, Walter and Imparato chose an area with no huts or sweet potato gardens in the immediate vicinity, a relatively flat stretch of land in the shadow of a soaring rock wall, with only a few trees and shrubs and small knolls between hundreds of otherwise uninterrupted acres of kunai grass. Shortly before noon, with Imparato flying only 350 feet above the valley floor, the paratroopers tumbled from the plane like dominoes off a table. Their parachutes deployed as designed, and all nine men reached the ground without incident.

  They gathered in a defensive formation they’d planned beforehand—in close proximity to one another but not bunched together. Walter had heard radio reports from the survivors and the two medics that the natives near the crash site were welcoming, but his landing site was fifteen to twenty air miles away from that happy scene. The natives in the main valley of Shangri-La could be different altogether, and far less hospitable.

  “When we first landed,” Walter said, “everybody was spread around different places. Not far apart, but I wanted them to be spread out a little bit so we didn’t all get speared or whatever to start with.”

  His wish for a stealth landing proved a pipe dream. Even before the parachutes reached the ground, scores of men with spears and bows and arrows came running from all directions into the landing field. Walter estimated that more than two hundred Stone Age warriors surrounded him and his men. Master Sergeant Santiago “Sandy” Abrenica put the number at three hundred.

  Walter tensed. He grabbed his carbine. Abrenica was at his side, equally ready for combat.

  “Captain,” Abrenica said, “you know what this reminds me of?”

  “No, not really, Sandy. What?”

  “Custer’s last stand.”

  Stifling laughter, Walter held the carbine under one arm, his hand near the trigger. In his other hand he held a .45-caliber pistol—a gift from his father. He sensed that the natives were hostile but hesitant to attack. Walter shouted to his men to stay ready but to hold their fire until he gave the command.

  “For God’s sake,” Walter called, “don’t get itchy fingers and pull the trigger just to scare someone. I don’t want anything like that to happen. If we hurt any of them or kill any of them, then we’d really have a problem.”

  Abrenica didn’t like the natives’ trilling alarm cry, a “frightening, weird sound like the call of the Australian kookaburra.” Abrenica mistakenly thought the sound came from natives rubbing their spears together, but, in fact, it arose from their throats.

  Although they were outnumbered more than twenty to one, Walter believed the superiority of their firepower put them squarely in control. “Of course we had a lot of weapons,” he said. “No mortars or anything like that, but we had machine guns and submachine guns and our own carbines.”

  Said Abrenica: “We had jumped fully equipped for a combat mission, so we hastily erected a barricade and set up our machine guns behind it. We thought we’d have to shoot our way out.”

  In the middle of Shangri-La, the modern and prehistoric warriors stood their ground, locked in a standoff.

  WALTER AND HIS men had landed in the northwest part of the valley, in an area known to the natives as Wosi. Specifically, they were in the part of Wosi called Abumpuk, not far from a village called Koloima. No huts were nearby because the paratroopers’ drop zone was smack in the middle of a no-man’s-land—a designated battlefield—that separated the neighborhoods of two warring groups of Dani tribesmen, the Logo-Mabel clans on one side and the Kurelu on the other.

  The Dani people in this part of Shangri-La were separated by distance, heritage, and politics from the Yali people of Uwambo and the clans that lived near the survivors’ clearing in the jungle. They hadn’t seen or heard anything about the Gremlin Special crash. With enemies all around them, an event that took place twenty miles away might as well have happened in China. That is, if they knew China existed.

  Like the Yali people near the crash site, the Dani people around Wosi had grown accustomed to seeing planes, which they called anekuku. But they hadn’t made a connection between the noisemakers that flew over their valley and the nine strange-looking creatures in their battlefield. Instead, like the people of Uwambo, at least some of them thought the strangers were embodiments of an ancient legend.

  “When we saw them, we thought they were coming down on a vine from the sky,” said Lisaniak Mabel, who witnessed the paratroopers’ arrival as a boy.

  Although some natives thought the visitors were spirits, others believed that they were warriors like themselves who’d escaped a massacre of their people. The coverings on the strangers’ bodies reinforced that impression. When Dani people mourn, they cover their shoulders or their entire bodies in light-colored mud. Surely, they believed, the strangers’ khaki-colored coverings must be made of mud.

  The men and boys surrounding the paratroopers were from the Logo-Mabel clans, and their leader was a powerful warrior with many kills in battle and a large collection of “dead birds” captured from fallen enemies. He was a Dani, but his name was Yali, and he was from the Logo clan.

  As Yali Logo and his clansmen studied Walter and his men, they felt certain of one thing: the strangers weren’t their Kurelu enemies, so they had no immediate need to kill them.

  WALTER HAD NO idea what thoughts passed through the minds of the spear-carrying, penis-gourd-clad men surrounding him and his troops. But he sensed that the eyes upon him were filled more with curiosity than with hostility. None of the local people moved to throw a spear or notch an arrow. In turn, none of the soldiers used a firearm. This museum-like diorama of first contact continued for three hours.

  Before the jump, Walter and his men had been told by the rescue planners that a universal sign of friendship among New Guinea natives was to wave leaves over one’s head. As the face-off lingered on, Walter tried it.

  “I waved those damned leaves for hours,” Walter said, “and then when I got no response I began to realize how foolish I must look, and I quit.”

  Finally, after what Walter described as energetic “motioning and beckoning,” both sides relaxed and lowered their weapons. The paratroopers made a fire to gather around, and the natives followed suit nearby.

  “When we first started to get acquainted with them, I think they realized almost as soon as we did that they had nothing to fear from us,” Walter said. “And we realized we had nothing to fear from them because they were definitely not cannibalistic, at least not to us. As far as we could figure out, they only ate people from other tribes that they were fighting. That’s where the cannibalism came in.”

  Writing that night in the journal he updated daily throughout the mission, Walter recorded his first impression of the locals: “Natives wear nothing but hollow gourds over the penis and tie their testicles up with string, suspending the whole works from a string which goes around their midsection. Seem very healthy, teeth are in excellent shape, feet are badly misshapen from constant barefoot walking. Some have long, matted hair and look like French poodles, some short and are all kinky. So far no malformity of the body. Believe each family has different markings and hairdos. Some, doglike features; others, slightly anthropoid in appearance, and still others are as finely featured as the average white race. We are the first in this valley from the outside world.” Walter noted that the natives, redolent of pig grease and sweat, seemed to be people who “never bathed.”

  When both sides were at ease, the natives studied the soldiers’ appearance, too. In a journal entry, Walter described a particularly flamboyant inspection by the men and boys of the Logo-Mabel clans that bloomed into a classic cultural misunderstanding.

  As the two groups came close for a good look at one another, the natives gently stroked the soldiers’ arms and legs, backs and chests. They al
so engaged in what Walter described as “a lot of hugging. It drove my men wild, because they couldn’t figure out what the hell.” The natives murmured as they massaged Walter and his men up and down.

  Earl Walter speaking by walkie-talkie with a supply plane after parachuting into the valley. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

  Uncomfortable with the apparent shows of affection, Walter and his men concluded that the natives had somehow arrived at the mistaken conclusion that the paratroopers were women. What other explanation could there be for nearly naked men to rub their hands over the bodies of other men?

  This touching scene went on awhile, until Walter and his paratroopers had had enough. The six-foot-four captain, towering over the natives as well as his own men, tried to forcefully communicate that they were male. No luck. The rubbing resumed. It reached a point that Walter described as “making love.”

  When the tribesmen showed no sign of ending their laying on of hands, Walter devised a strategy of decidedly unconventional warfare, unknown to any military handbook. First, he unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants to show that he had the necessary equipment to wear a gourd of his own, if he so chose. After revealing himself several times, Walter realized it wasn’t working. He ordered his entire detachment of the 1st Recon to join him in World War II’s most unusual show of force.

  “God damn it, let’s take our pants down,” Walter told his men, “and show them that we’re men, not women. I’m tired of this.”

  Walter stripped off his shirt, pants, and underwear. His men followed suit. They walked around nude for the next several hours while the natives wandered among them, more modestly attired in penis gourds.