Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Native tribesmen help push the Fanless Faggot into position for a snatch attempt. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

  With the clock ticking and the snatch plane’s fuel tanks emptying, Palmer hustled the five passengers onto the glider. Margaret realized she hadn’t said good-bye to the natives. “But they understood that we were going,” she wrote. Margaret was especially sorry to leave without a final visit with “the queen.”

  The native leader Yali Logo wasn’t sorry to see them leave, but Margaret felt certain that some of the tribesmen were distraught: “Tears streamed down their black faces. They felt they were losing friends, and I knew I was losing some of the best and kindest friends I would ever have. I blew my nose rather noisily, and discovered that McCollom and Decker were doing the same thing.”

  IT’S POSSIBLE THAT the weeping natives were sad to see Margaret climb aboard the glider. It’s also possible that their tears reflected complex emotions among the people of Koloima.

  The glider fascinated them, but according to several witnesses, they wouldn’t understand until later that their new acquaintances intended to fly away forever. They thought the glider’s arrival was the last sign of the Uluayek legend. Frightened, they appealed to their ancestors.

  “We had a crying ceremony,” said Binalok, a son of Yali Logo. “It was to say, ‘Oh, we feel this deeply.’ As we cried, we named our dead ancestors. We thought we would be going back to the ways of our ancestors.”

  Almost nothing had changed for generations in the valley, where the people lived and farmed and fought as their forefathers had. One exception involved styles of penis gourds and women’s wrapped skirts. After the crying ceremony, the men of Koloima stopped storing tobacco in the tips of their penis gourds, reverting to the practice of their elders. Native women changed how they wrapped their grass skirts, adopting a more traditional style. The changes might have seemed inconsequential to an outsider, but not to a Dani. Unable to envision what a new age would look like or how dramatically it would affect their lives, the people of Koloima made the most drastic change they could imagine—a return to older styles of gourds and skirts.

  In the end, the natives were right about Uluayek but wrong about its effects. In a relatively short time, the world would come to Shangri-La, and the valley would change in ways they could never imagine.

  INSIDE THE GLIDER, Palmer snapped Margaret out of her thoughts about the natives with a sharp warning: “Don’t be surprised if the tow rope breaks on the first try.”

  “What happens if it does?” McCollom asked.

  Palmer laid on a Louisiana accent: “Well, suh, the Army’s got me insured for ten thousand dollars.”

  Margaret wasn’t laughing. She gripped her rosary and looked around the glider cabin, so flimsy when compared to the plane that had brought her to the valley nearly seven weeks earlier. She told her diary: “I wondered if we had survived a hideous plane crash and so much hardship, illness and pain, only to be killed when rescue was so near.”

  Palmer helped to fasten their seat belts and showed them where to hold on, to avoid whiplash when the snatch came. They held tight as the Leaking Louise grew closer.

  Major Samuels circled the C-47 at fifteen hundred feet above the valley floor. His crew made sure the pickup arm was in place, hanging below the plane’s belly, to grab the nylon loop. Peering through the windshield, he looked to the horizon and saw clouds closing in on the valley.

  “I don’t think I can pick up today,” he radioed to Elsmore in the Ray Jr. and also to the crew in the supply plane.

  Relying on his rank and his expertise, gained from a year of flying into and out of Shangri-La, Elsmore commanded otherwise: “This is the best weather I’ve seen in the valley in many a day. You can do it. Go right down there and pick up the glider. You’ll never get much better weather here.” Samuels knew better than to argue.

  The Leaking Louise, piloted by Major William J. Samuels, approaches the Fanless Faggot for a snatch attempt. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

  At one point during the conversation, Samuels turned away from the radio and asked his copilot, Captain William McKenzie: “Are you nervous, Mac?”

  “Hell, yes,” McKenzie said. “Are you?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  Samuels wrenched his neck to look into the cabin. “You guys all ready back there?” he asked the crew. They responded with thumbs up.

  “OK, here we go. Lower the boom.”

  Samuels pulled back on the throttles, slowing the C-47 to just over 135 miles per hour. He pushed forward on the control wheel, guiding the plane down to twenty feet above the valley floor and headed toward the spindly posts with the nylon loop draped across them.

  At 9:47 a.m., the steel hook caught hold of the loop. Samuels slammed the throttles forward to gain power as he pulled back on the control wheel to gain altitude.

  Inside the glider, the passengers and crew felt a neck-snapping jolt.

  Watching from his B-25 at six thousand feet, Colonel Elsmore spat a machine-gun litany into his radio: “Oh boy. Oh boy. Ohboy, Ohboy, OHBOY!”

  The drag from the glider slowed the Leaking Louise to a dangerous 105 miles per hour. The snatch plane was flying barely above the speed at which a C-47 was doomed to stall, a failure almost certain to be fatal.

  Making matters worse, just before becoming airborne, the left wheel of the Fanless Faggot had snagged one of the parachutes laid down the center of the field. The white cloth billowed and thrashed against the glider’s underbelly as it struggled to gain altitude at the end of the tow rope. Lieutenant Palmer’s black humor about government life insurance now seemed more relevant and even less funny. If it were even possible, an emergency landing in the Fanless Faggot would likely be a twisting, uncontrolled affair.

  As the Fanless Faggot moved forward at the end of the nylon cable after the snatch, a parachute used as a field marker caught on the glider’s wheel. (Photos courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr. and the U.S. Army.)

  Margaret prayed harder as the glider swept treacherously low toward the jungle-covered mountains. Seven hundred feet of steel cable had spun out from the winch inside the Leaking Louise. Added to the three hundred feet of nylon rope from the loop and the towline, the Fanless Faggot trailed the C-47 by about one thousand feet, or several hundred feet farther than ideal. With Samuels struggling to gain altitude, the longer distance between the two aircraft meant that the glider was being tugged too low toward the mountains. Samuels pulled back harder on the control wheel and applied full power. It wasn’t enough. Still the tow rope dragged through the trees—pulling the glider and the seven people on board through the upper branches.

  When the glider grazed a treetop, Margaret clenched in fear. Her mind raced back to the sickening sound of branches scraping against the metal skin of the Gremlin Special just before it crashed.

  The Leaking Louise clawed for altitude, climbed, and hauled the damaged Fanless Faggot into the clear. “When the glider swayed into our line of vision,” Samuels reported, “we could see pieces of fabric fluttering off in the wind.”

  The trees were only the first obstacles. His hands sweating, Samuels fought to bring the C-47 up to ten thousand feet, the altitude he knew would be needed to clear the surrounding ridges. As Samuels overheated, the twin engines of the Leaking Louise did so, too. The plane began losing altitude.

  “I’ve pushed her as far as she can go,” he radioed. Samuels announced that he wanted to cut the glider loose to avoid killing the C-47’s engines—along with everyone aboard both aircraft.

  Elsmore demanded that the major do no such thing. Watching from a higher altitude in his B-25, he believed the Leaking Louise had climbed high enough to clear the pass. He radioed back: “Let ’em heat up. Keep goin’!”

  Clouds shrouded the highest ridges, blocking Samuels’s vision.

  INSIDE THE FANLESS FAGGOT, the five passengers were exhaling with relief over the tow rope’s refusal to break in the trees. But while
congratulating each other on their apparent survival, they heard a persistent slap-slap noise from underneath the glider. The sound came from the parachute that had snagged on the wheel during takeoff. As it whipped against the glider’s belly, the chute tore through the canvas-covered floor, adding to the damage caused by the sweep through the branches. Strapped in their seats, the passengers looked through ragged gashes to the jungle several thousand feet below. The chute kept thwacking, the canvas kept shedding, and the holes kept growing.

  Nearing panic, Margaret tried not to look, but she couldn’t stop herself. It reminded her of a ride on a glass-bottomed boat, only with no bottom.

  John McCollom, who’d twice reentered the burning Gremlin Special, who’d swallowed the grief over his dead twin to lead Margaret and Decker down the mountain, who’d walked across a log to confront the ax-wielding natives, had one more task thrust upon him.

  McCollom unbuckled his seat belt and dropped to his knees. He crawled toward the tail of the glider, wind pounding against his face. Hanging on to keep from plummeting to his death, McCollom reached through the hole and grabbed a handful of parachute cloth. He pulled it inside, then grabbed another handful, then another, until the chute was safely stowed away.

  IN THE COCKPIT of the snatch plane, Samuels’s struggles continued. He obeyed Elsmore’s order not to cut loose the glider, even as he watched a temperature gauge on the dashboard show that the cylinder heads of both engines were overheating.

  With help from copilot William McKenzie, Samuels flew the equivalent of a high-altitude tightrope, with a dozen lives in two aircraft hanging in the balance. He throttled back just enough to keep the engines from seizing while maintaining enough altitude for both his C-47 and the trailing Waco glider to narrowly clear the valley walls.

  “We dropped her down to eight thousand feet,” Samuels said, “and . . . we were practically brushing the mountain tops.” But the plane didn’t quit. The C-47 remained aloft, and so did the glider.

  As they flew through the final mountain pass out of the valley, the overheating Leaking Louise and the damaged Fanless Faggot passed over the charred wreckage of the Gremlin Special.

  Even with a two-foot-wide hole in the glider floor, Margaret, McCollom, and Decker couldn’t spot the crash site. But they knew that under the jungle canopy, pressed into the moist soil, there stood twenty white wooden crosses and one Star of David, silently marking the loss of friends, comrades, and family, left behind in Shangri-La.

  The view from the Fanless Faggot as the Leaking Louise pulled the glider out of Shangri-La, en route to Hollandia. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  EPILOGUE: AFTER SHANGRI-LA

  AS COLONEL ELSMORE predicted, the remainder of the ninety-minute trip was uneventful, with one small glitch. A pack of generals, VIPs, and reporters gathered at Hollandia’s Cyclops Airstrip for the survivors’ arrival, but the Fanless Faggot landed a quarter mile away on the Sentani Airstrip, completing a round-trip begun seven weeks earlier with the Gremlin Special. The greeting party raced to Sentani, where the survivors posed for photos with the crews of the glider and tow planes. Later they gave a press conference that made the front pages of newspapers around the world. Asked what they wanted to do next, the trio played it cute:

  “Get a haircut and shave, and then go up to Manila,” McCollom said.

  “A haircut and a shower will do me,” Decker said.

  “I’d like a shower and a permanent,” Margaret said.

  The Fanless Faggot was too damaged to fly again, so a new glider was used the following day in a snatch that brought out Alex Cann and five paratroopers: Corporal Custodio Alerta and Sergeants Alfred Baylon, Juan Javonillo, Camilo Ramirez, and Don Ruiz. Two days later, on July 1, 1945, out came the third and final group—Walter called them “The Four Musketeers”—sergeants Santiago Abrenica, Hermenegildo Caoili, and Roque Velasco, and Walter himself. Along with souvenirs of bows, arrows, and axes, they decorated their caps with pig tusks and feathers to make a grand entrance. They left behind the tents and most of their supplies, but took their weapons.

  The paratroopers tried to convince several native boys to board the glider, without success. “We were excited to go,” said Lisaniak Mabel. “We said, ‘Let’s go!’ but our parents said, ‘We don’t want to lose you.’ ”

  The three survivors of the Gremlin Special crash upon their return to Hollandia. (Photos courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  The paratroopers had better luck with the little pig named Peggy. Squealing and wriggling, it left Shangri-La on the last glider flight to Hollandia. Peggy’s subsequent fate is unknown.

  FOUR MONTHS AFTER the rescue, Shangri-La and the “Grand Valley” discovered in 1938 by Richard Archbold were formally acknowledged to be one and the same. As the journal Science reported: “The identity of the valley came about through a comparison of photographs taken by the Army just before the survivors were rescued with airplane photographs taken by the Archbold expedition. The identity is acknowledged by the Army, and particularly by Colonel Ray T. Elsmore, who directed the recent rescue operations.”

  Archbold never returned to New Guinea, never married, and never engaged in further exotic expeditions. He devoted the remainder of his life, and his considerable fortune, to the Archbold Biological Station, a five-thousand-acre preserve near Lake Placid, Florida, dedicated to ecological research and conservation. He died in 1976 at sixty-nine.

  JUST AS THE Uluayek legend foretold, a new age dawned after the return of the sky spirits. Changes in the valley during the ensuing decades have been dramatic, but whether for better or worse is a matter of debate.

  Spurred in part by news stories about the natives during coverage of the Gremlin Special rescue, Christian missionaries established camps in the valley in the decade after the war. They flew in aboard new amphibious planes that could land and take off from a straight stretch of the Baliem River. After initially reacting with hostility, in time a majority of native families accepted Christianity. Today, more than a dozen large churches dot the valley’s one town of any size, Wamena, a dusty former Dutch government post with trash-strewn streets and a population of ten thousand and rising. Wamena is also now the site of a small airport; aircraft remain the only way in and out, but the valley’s former isolation has surrendered to regularly scheduled flights.

  After the missionaries came Indonesian troops, who arrived in force in the 1960s and ’70s, after the Netherlands ended colonial control over the western half of New Guinea. Dutch New Guinea is now an Indonesian province called Papua. (The eastern half of the island of New Guinea is a separate country, called, confusingly, Papua New Guinea.) Hollandia has been renamed Jayapura. Shangri-La is now the Baliem Valley.

  Tribal affiliations remain intact among valley people, but natives throughout the province are collectively called Papuans. A low-intensity independence movement has sputtered along seeking a “Free Papua.” But hundreds of miles from the Baliem Valley, mining companies are extracting major gold and copper deposits. The Indonesian government has no intention of ceding control over Papua or its resources.

  Years of persuasion by missionaries and force by Indonesian authorities put an end to the perpetual wars that formerly defined native life in the Baliem Valley. But an absence of war has also meant an absence of strong leaders, and peace hasn’t meant prosperity. The province has the highest rates of poverty and AIDS in Indonesia. Health care is woeful, and aid workers say school is a sometimes thing for valley children. The Indonesian government provides financial support, but much of the money ends up in the hands of nonnative migrants who run virtually all the businesses of Wamena.

  Elderly native men in penis gourds walk through Wamena begging for change and cigarettes. Some charge a small fee to pose for photos, inserting boar tusks through passages in their nasal septums to look fierce. More often, they look lost.

  One village near Wamena earns money by displaying a mummified ancestor to the few tourists who obtain special government permits to
visit the valley. Younger men and women have largely abandoned penis gourds and twine skirts. Instead they wear Western castoff shorts and T-shirts with unfamiliar logos and images. In February 2010, a young man walked toward his remote village wearing a T-shirt that displayed a portrait of Barack Obama. Asked if he knew the identity of the man on his shirt, he smiled shyly and said no.

  A Dani tribesman photographed in the Baliem Valley city of Wamena in 2010. (Photo courtesy of Mitchell Zuckoff.)

  Robert Gardner, a documentary filmmaker who first visited the valley in 1961 to film the Dani people in their original state, despairs at the changes during the past half century. “They were warriors and independent people,” he said. “Now they’re serfs in their own country.” Others, however, say the transition to modern ways, though difficult, will eventually lead to improved opportunities and standards of living.

  Outside Wamena, large parts of the landscape remain unchanged from scenes depicted in photographs taken by Earl Walter and the movie made by Alex Cann. Families still live in thatch-roofed huts and grow sweet potatoes and other root crops, and they still count their wealth in pigs.

  Logging companies have stripped some nearby mountainsides of trees, but the Ogi ridge where the Gremlin Special crashed remains pristine. Large pieces of wreckage can still be found there by anyone willing to make an arduous hike up the mountain, using moss-covered logs as bridges over small ravines, cutting through thick vines, and avoiding missteps that could send them over cliffs. Buttons, belt buckles, and pieces of human bones can be found in the muddy tomb where the wreck sits. Not long ago, a boy digging with friends turned up a silver dog tag. It was stamped with the name, address, and serial number of WAC Sergeant Marion McMonagle, a widow from Philadelphia who had no children and whose parents died before her.