Narekesok Logo, his wiry body marked with long-healed arrow scars, remembered the paratroopers’ visit as a time of peace: “Pika and Weylon were standing there with their guns, so our enemies didn’t come.”
Equally memorable to the tribespeople was the soldiers’ practice of digging a single hole covered by a tent where all of them went to defecate. Native practice called for bodily waste to pass in private, in the jungle or the high grasses. However revolting the soldiers found the natives’ hygiene, it couldn’t exceed the natives’ disgust at the soldiers’ use of a house for inalugu—a pile of feces.
THE NEXT DAY, Tuesday, May 22, 1945, Walter fueled up with a breakfast of ham and eggs, biscuits, and marmalade, washed down with hot chocolate. He and five men—Corporal Custodio Alerta and sergeants Hermenegildo Caoili, Fernando Dongallo, Juan “Johnny” Javonillo, and Don Ruiz—were ready to begin the trek to the survivors’ campsite. That left his first sergeant, Sandy Abrenica, in charge of the base camp along with two sergeants, Alfred Baylon and Roque Velasco.
Walter enlisted a group of Dani men as carriers and “native guides.” After convincing himself that they understood his intended destination, they marched boldly out of base camp.
After three hours of steady uphill climbing, they broke for lunch. Walter pulled out his journal. “God only knows why mountains are this high,” he wrote. “Now we are going down again. Passed by a few native villages and had to stop near each one so that the people could gather around and satisfy their curiosity.” Along the way, the six soldiers gained and lost several groups of guides, “as they do not seem to go far beyond their own villages.”
With no maps, Walter and his men estimated that they traveled seven miles before stopping to pitch camp for the night. His gut told him that the natives were no threat—he made a casual reference in his journal to their spears and arrows, and wrote that their “only means of cutting are stone axes.” The paratroopers needed rest for the next day’s march, so Walter told his relieved men that they wouldn’t post guards that night.
WALTER’S DECISION TO skip guard duty proved uneventful, but not solely because his judgment proved correct that the natives “seem very friendly,” as he wrote in his journal. Unknown to Walter, tribal leaders along the route from the Wosi area base camp toward the Ogi ridge where the plane crashed had set aside their traditional enmities. They granted the strangers safe passage.
“A declaration, called a maga, was made that no one would attack them,” said Yunggukwe Wandik, daughter of the Uwambo leader Yaralok Wandik. “It was said, ‘Do not kill them. These are spirits. Don’t kill them. They are not human.’ ” If not for the maga, the six sleeping soldiers might have been ambushed and slaughtered by hundreds of spear-carrying warriors whom a regional big man could have summoned on short notice.
Not everyone agreed with the maga. Clearly defined territorial boundaries were deeply ingrained in the people of the valley, and the idea of strangers traipsing through their neighborhoods didn’t sit right with some. “There were people who thought killing them was a good idea,” Yunggukwe Wandik said. If not for the soldiers’ skin color—Walter’s whiteness more than the Filipino-Americans’ toffee coloring—the maga might not have held. “Do you think we had ever seen white skin before?” she said. “That made people afraid.”
Despite the maga, more than once en route to the survivors’ camp Walter and his men were met by antagonism when they came close to villages. “In a couple of cases they actually came out on a path and stopped us,” he said. “They didn’t want us going into their village.” Walter attributed the defensiveness to a shortage of available wives. “Sandy Abrenica and I figured out later that they were afraid that we would steal their women. This happened over there. There was some thievery of women between tribes.”
Walter’s description of natives blocking his path echoed the confrontation that led to the shooting death of a native during Richard Archbold’s expedition seven years earlier. It’s not clear whether Walter and his men passed the same villages, but the paratroopers never found it necessary to use—in Archbold’s euphemistic phrase for the shooting—“more than a show of force.” At the same time, the natives the paratroopers encountered either were unaware of the shooting or chose not to avenge it for reasons lost to time.
Walter didn’t know anything about the Archbold expedition or the Uluayek legend about the sky spirits and their rope to the valley, so he was unaware that the native men had good reason to suspect them of violence, pig theft, and wife stealing.
For his part, Walter said he wanted to avoid violence if at all possible. As for pigs, they had no time for a roast. And the last thing they wanted were native women. “Well, they didn’t ever mingle,” he said later. “And I told the men, absolutely not. I don’t think any of them were good-looking enough for the men, anyway.”
SPENT FROM HIS exertions, Walter fell into a deep sleep. The next morning, he and his men ate breakfast and waited for the supply plane, as much to get a fix on their location as to collect fresh provisions. Believing that they were on their last lap to the survivors’ camp, they began the day in high spirits. But the plane never came and the latest group of native bearers proved unhelpful. “So far the natives are more bother than good,” he wrote, “as they will not carry.”
They broke camp and started out, believing that they had communicated to their latest guides where they were headed. But after an arduous twelve-mile hike, Walter and his men found themselves right back where they’d started. The previously buoyant tone in Walter’s journal disappeared: “Did not understand that we want to go up to the wreck, not back to our camp. We are slightly discouraged to say the least. Hiked too long before setting up camp and were caught in the rain, thus getting everything soaking wet. Made camp and ate supper. What a rotten life.”
On the third morning of their trek, they awoke chilled, waterlogged, and tired. Having planned a one- to two-day hike, Walter and his men were out of food. Still unsure of their location, they moved on, guided by Walter’s innate sense of where they were going and “dead reckoning”—navigating in a fixed direction based on a previous known location, in this case their base camp. They headed toward a dip between two ridges that Walter called “the saddle.”
“Things look bad,” he wrote. “Our last rations are gone and we are still a long way from our objective. Broke camp and kept on going up and up toward the saddle, which is somewhere at the top of this canyon.” Late in the morning he finally made contact with the supply plane to request rations. In the meantime, they continued hiking without lunch. Much of the way they cut a fresh trail as they went, slogging through brush and high grass. A quick bath in a cold creek refreshed them, but the feeling didn’t last long. Soon they were exhausted, yet they “just kept going on and on and up and up.”
In late afternoon the rains came. Soaked, hungry, and cold, the would-be rescuers made camp around five o’clock in the afternoon. They laid out their bedrolls and went to sleep without dinner.
“God only knows where that last ridge is,” Walter wrote that night in his journal. “We can last for a few more days at this rate, but sure as hell would like to know about where we are. Don’t like this fooling around without maps.”
Chapter 19
“SHOO, SHOO BABY”
THEIR STOMACHS EMPTY and growling, Walter and his team awoke early to a breakfast of hot water and hope. His top priority was receiving a drop of ten-in-one rations. He tried hailing the C-47 supply plane by walkie-talkie as it flew somewhere in the vicinity overhead, even as he worried that his campsite at the edge of the jungle might not be visible from the air. Trekking farther toward the survivors’ campsite would only put them deeper under the canopy. So they stayed put, talked, and waited.
“Finally they are over us and have us spotted,” he wrote in his journal on Friday, May 25, his first upbeat entry in two days. “Rations dropped. Best things I have seen in a long time. Men recovered the rations and I learned that we are two miles by air due west o
f the wreck.”
Ravenous, Walter stuffed himself. He paid the price when they broke camp: “The first hour was terrible. Too much food.” But eager to reach their destination, they pressed on, slower than usual and taking more frequent breaks. After several hours, they reached the crest of a ridge and began to hike on a downward slope. Walter hoped they were close.
AT THE SURVIVORS’ camp, the radioman in the 311 supply plane passed on the news that the paratroopers were close by: “Earl will get down there pretty soon, and you’ll hear him.”
In late afternoon, Margaret heard what she called “that yapping noise peculiar to the natives.” As the noise grew closer, it was replaced by an unmistakably American sound:
“Shoo, shoo my baby, Shoooo.
Goodbye baby, don’t you cry no more.
Your big tall papa’s off to the seven seas.”
Walter marched buoyantly toward the campsite, swinging his bolo knife to clear the trail and singing the Andrew Sisters’ recent hit, “Shoo, Shoo Baby.”
Writing about the paratroopers’ arrival in her diary, Margaret’s first impression of Walter bordered on starry-eyed: “He looked like a giant as he came down the trail at the head of his Filipino boys and the ubiquitous escort of natives. The captain’s arrival was like a strong, fresh breeze. He was not only a capable and efficient officer, but a one-man floor show. Two minutes after he arrived the camp started jumpin’.”
Doc and Rammy rushed from their tents to greet their comrades. Walter was happy to see the survivors, but he was overjoyed to see the two medics. “I knew they were all right,” he said, “but I wanted to see them and congratulate them again, first of all on the jump, and secondly on the good job they had done. And just to get back together with them. The rest of the men felt the same way. We were all quite concerned about them.”
Margaret watched as Walter and the medics exchanged embraces, handshakes, and hearty pats on the back. She wrote in her diary: “His men worshipped Walter, and the affection was patently mutual.”
Walter, meanwhile, couldn’t help but notice that Margaret, despite her jungle haircut, her weight loss, and her injuries, “was a pretty good-looking gal.”
WITH THE SURVIVORS’ camp now expanded to ten men and one woman, Walter set his troops to work putting up more pup tents as sleeping quarters. They also erected a large pyramidal tent with a peaked roof and walls about sixteen feet long on each side, to serve as a combination headquarters, mess hall, and jungle social club for the two officers, Walter and McCollom; one WAC; and eight enlisted men.
Soon an American flag waved from a makeshift flagpole outside the big tent, making the camp a quasi-official U.S. Army base. In one journal entry, Walter called it “The Lost Outpost of Shangri-La.” He wrote: “The Stars and Stripes now fly over the Oranje Mountain Range. Being the first white people here, we can claim this territory for Uncle Sam, but doubt if the Aussies would appreciate it.”
After a bath in the creek and dinner served up by McCollom, Walter pulled out a deck of cards and organized the first of what became daily games of poker and gin rummy. Margaret was no poker player, preferring bridge, but she kept herself amused as they “won and lost thousands of dollars” in every session. Lacking chips, they bet with Raleigh and Chelsea brand cigarettes, along with wooden matches to light their winnings. She modeled her gambling style on the freewheeling ways of Sergeant Caoili, who’d bluff like mad on a pair of threes. Caoili was relentless in everything he did; when he wasn’t winning and losing matchsticks, he earned the nicknames “Superman” and “Iron Man” for his powerful build and tireless work habits.
The American flag waving over “The Lost Outpost of Shangri-La.” (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)
Sitting around their improvised card table in the big tent, Walter smoldered at Margaret’s card-playing style. He stewed over what he viewed as her stubborn refusal to learn the rules of the game.
“There ought to be a law against women playing poker!” he shouted.
Neither was he impressed when she invented a pokerlike game she called “Deuces wild, roll your own, and fiery cross.” Incomprehensible to everyone but Margaret, the game involved a muddle of wild cards and an opportunity for players to form the best possible hand using fifteen cards.
Walter declared: “Maggie, you don’t know how to play cards.”
“I do, too!” Margaret answered.
“Well, you probably know how to play bridge, but I don’t know how to play bridge. This is poker we’re playing, and there are a pair, three of a kind, a straight, a flush, and so on.”
In Walter’s view, Margaret could never remember the ranking of the best-to-worst poker hands. “We’d always get into an argument because I knew what I was drawing to, and she didn’t,” he said.
Margaret thought Walter’s anger could be traced to another source: his machismo. “The captain played just as earnestly as if it were for real money,” she told her diary, “and when I would bluff him out of a big pot he would be livid.”
After cards, the paratroopers, the survivors, and the some of the natives passed the evening hours by entertaining each other. Margaret, feeling better by the day, sang WAC tunes, and several paratroopers showed off their vocal stylings with Visayan love songs from the Philippines. The natives played the only musical instrument the survivors and paratroopers ever heard in Shangri-La: a simple mouth harp whose tune sounded to the outsiders like a monotonic funeral dirge. But there was only one star: Camp Shangri-La’s commanding officer.
“Walter was a personality kid,” Margaret wrote. “Often, after supper, he would put on a one-man floor show. He could give a wonderful imitation of a nightclub singer or a radio crooner. Then he would truck and shag, singing popular songs while not only we, but the natives, sat around entranced. ‘Shoo, Shoo Baby’ was always his favorite. Walter was wonderful for morale. No one could be downhearted for long in his presence.”
As Margaret’s health returned, so did her appetites. Soon Walter got the strong impression that Margaret found him sexually attractive. He picked up signals that she expected him to make a pass at her, and she looked for opportunities to spend time with him. Walter may have been tempted, but he insisted that he never made a move. Walter took seriously his marriage and his role as the mission’s commanding officer. He never explained his behavior to Margaret, but she apparently got the message.
When Walter didn’t rise to the bait, he said, Margaret turned her attentions to one of his men, Sergeant Don Ruiz.
Walter was no prude—only a few years earlier, he’d cut high school classes to visit L.A. strip clubs—and he didn’t care what enlisted personnel did in private, on their own time. But he felt responsible for everything that happened on his watch in Shangri-La. He knew there was no birth control in the valley, and he didn’t want unexpected consequences.
Not certain how best to proceed, Walter approached McCollom for help.
“I wanted him to tell Maggie to leave the men alone,” Walter said. “I had one noncom that was the best-looking guy in the unit, Don Ruiz. He was one of my best noncoms, and also one of the handsomest men around. Maggie sort of had her eyes on him and tried to seduce him a couple of times.”
Torn between interest in Margaret and respect for his captain, Ruiz found a private moment to speak with Walter.
“Captain,” he said, “what am I going to do?”
“Just leave her the hell alone,” Walter answered. “Walk away, just walk away.”
A flirtation between the two continued, but as far as Walter knew, it remained unconsummated.
After speaking with Ruiz, Walter gathered his troops and laid down the law to the entire squad: “If anybody lays a hand on her, so help me God, you’re busted to private the next minute.”
Walter explained: “I had to remind my men a couple of times that I sure as hell didn’t want a pregnant WAC flying out of there. . . . That would have given me a pretty bad reputation. So I had to be adamant about that.”
> THE DAY AFTER arriving at the survivors’ camp, Walter watched Doc and Rammy slice and peel the gangrenous skin from Margaret’s and Decker’s wounds. He took admiring note of the medics’ work in his journal, writing that “both men deserved all the credit in the world.” But one look at the injuries convinced Walter that his hope of a quick return to the base camp in the big valley had been overly optimistic. He wrote in his journal they’d be stuck at the jungle campsite for at least a week, maybe longer. Even then, he thought that he and his men would have to carry Margaret and Decker at least partway through the jungle and down the slippery mountain slope.
That day, just before lunchtime, the supply plane dropped its usual load of provisions, as well as books and magazines to help pass the time. When they gathered the cargo, the paratroopers found supplies for their difficult next task: burial duty. The 311 dropped twenty-one freshly pressed silver dog tags, along with twenty wooden crosses and one wooden Star of David. The military believed that the crash victims included sixteen Protestants, four Catholics, and one Jewish WAC, Sergeant Belle Naimer of the Bronx. Only much later would the military learn that a second Star of David should have been dropped, for Private Mary Landau of Brooklyn.
Aboard the plane that day, helping to toss the funerary supplies out the cargo door, was Sergeant Ruth Coster, whose workload had kept her from flying aboard the Gremlin Special, but whose best friend, Sergeant Helen Kent, had died in the crash. Other than keeping Helen’s memory alive, it was the last thing Ruth could do for her.
On Sunday, May 27, two weeks after the crash, Walter awoke at seven in the morning, ate a hearty breakfast, and set out for the wreck with five sergeants: Bulatao, Caoili, Dongallo, Javonillo, and Ruiz. Following detailed directions from McCollom, they tried to retrace the survivors’ trail in reverse, using the stream to guide them up the mountain. But they became confused about which of its tributaries to follow. The paratroopers left their equipment and the grave markers at an easy-to-find spot and split up—Walter and Ruiz went one way, and the other four men went another. Trekking through the jungle proved impossible, especially since they weren’t sure where they were headed. After several hours, both groups returned to the campsite, exhausted. To make matters worse, Walter had strained his groin on the hike.
Lost in Shangri-la Page 19
