Lost In Shangri-La Part 4

DURING THE YEAR before the before the Gremlin Special Gremlin Special crash, Colonel Ray Elsmore had basked in public acclaim as the valley's self-styled discoverer. Unbeknownst to him or anyone else in the U.S. Army, Elsmore was the New Guinea equivalent of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott. After believing that he'd snowshoed through virgin territory to the South Pole, Scott learned that his rival Roald Amundsen had beaten him there. In other words, Elsmore was the second outsider to discover Shangri-La, third if he counted Major Myron Grimes. crash, Colonel Ray Elsmore had basked in public acclaim as the valley's self-styled discoverer. Unbeknownst to him or anyone else in the U.S. Army, Elsmore was the New Guinea equivalent of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott. After believing that he'd snowshoed through virgin territory to the South Pole, Scott learned that his rival Roald Amundsen had beaten him there. In other words, Elsmore was the second outsider to discover Shangri-La, third if he counted Major Myron Grimes.

The valley's true Western discoverer was Richard Archbold, a young man who enjoyed the good fortune of having been born exceedingly rich. And unlike Elsmore and Grimes, Archbold had visited the valley on the ground.

Archbold's inherited wealth flowed from his grandfather, John D. Archbold, a president of Standard Oil and a partner of John D. Rockefeller. The family's millions guaranteed that Richard Archbold would never be required to work a traditional job. This was convenient, as he was never much of a traditional student. As a boy, skinny, shy, and socially awkward, with piercing eyes and a brusque manner, Archbold bounced among several private schools, including one in Arizona where his favorite subject was camping. He took cla.s.ses at Hamilton College in upstate New York and at Columbia University in Manhattan without staying long enough at either school to collect a degree.

One subject to which Archbold applied himself was the great outdoors. In 1929 Archbold's father, hoping to set Richard on a productive path, agreed to help finance a joint British, French, and American research expedition to Madagascar. The elder Archbold had one condition: along with his money came his underachieving twenty-two-year-old son. The expedition's organizers were delighted by the cash but not quite sure what to do with young Archbold, who'd reached adulthood as a tall, thin, moderately handsome man with a shock of wavy black hair, a thick mustache, and a partiality for bow ties.

After initially planning to use Archbold as a photographer, one of the expedition's senior scientists suggested, "Why don't you collect mammals?" So he did.

Archbold practiced collecting at the family's Georgia estate-something akin to a big game hunter preparing for a safari at a zoo-and learned from his many mistakes. But once in Madagascar, he stoically suffered the bites of land leeches and mosquitoes, the many discomforts of camp life in the wild, and the stigma among serious scientists of being the rich kid along for the ride. Along the way, he found his calling as a biological researcher.

Upon his return from Madagascar, Archbold learned that his father had died. He collected his inheritance and with it a Manhattan apartment on Central Park West. He took a low-level job down the street, as a research a.s.sociate in the mammal department at the American Museum of Natural History, where his grandfather had been a major benefactor.

Working in an office across the hall on the museum's fifth floor was a young ornithologist from Germany named Ernst Mayr, who later became a legend in evolutionary biology. Archbold's new acquaintance encouraged him to focus on the wilds of New Guinea, where Mayr had spent months studying bird life. Archbold put his inheritance to work by organizing, funding, and leading several major expeditions there under the auspices of the museum. From the outset, his plan was nothing less than "a comprehensive biological survey of the island." Unlike Mayr, who'd done his work among small groups of scientist-explorers, Archbold a.s.sembled a veritable research army to attempt the ambitious task.

Archbold enjoyed notable success on his first two New Guinea journeys, one begun in 1933 and another in 1936, as he and his well-funded teams reached previously unexplored territory and supplied the New York museum with numerous new plant and animal species. But Archbold grew frustrated by the logistical challenges posed by the enormous island, not least of which were the inhospitable terrain and the lack of native pack animals. Napoleon said armies march on their stomachs; the same could be said for large, exotic scientific expeditions. Archbold's journeys in New Guinea depended on efficient supply lines, which meant that someone or something needed to carry tons of provisions to explorers cut off from civilization for months on end.

In the absence of horses, mules, oxen, or camels, and in light of the impossibility of using trucks in the roadless interior, human bearers were the only land-based option. But Archbold learned that New Guinea natives couldn't be relied upon. One reason was fear, not of the explorers but of each other. The island's innumerable tribes and clans were usually at war with one another, so the instant a native bearer left his home territory, he had reason to fear death at the hands of a neighbor.

Archbold concluded that the best way to conquer New Guinea, scientifically at least, would be with air support. He became a pilot and began buying airplanes. In early 1938, he purchased the largest privately owned airplane in the world-the first commercial version of a U.S. Navy patrol bomber known as a PBY. With a wingspan of more than one hundred feet, a yawning cargo bay, and a range exceeding four thousand miles, Archbold's PBY fit his needs perfectly. Its greatest appeal was the PBY's design as a "flying boat." Fitted with pontoons, it could take off and land on bodies of water, including the high-alt.i.tude lakes and rivers of New Guinea. Archbold added special navigation and communications equipment, then named his plane after a native word for a powerful storm: Guba Guba. With Guba Guba at his disposal, Archbold could ferry supplies, personnel, and specimens wherever needed, making possible his third and most ambitious expedition to New Guinea. at his disposal, Archbold could ferry supplies, personnel, and specimens wherever needed, making possible his third and most ambitious expedition to New Guinea.

Archbold obtained approval and support from the Dutch government, which controlled the area he wanted to explore. The government's motivation was that the expedition would provide authorities in the Netherlands with deeper knowledge about their colony, including not just the flora and fauna in Archbold's sights but also the people and the resources hidden within.

In April 1938 Archbold's team established a base camp in Hollandia with nearly two hundred people, including scientists from the American Museum of Natural History; seventy-two Dyak tribesmen brought from the neighboring island of Borneo as bearers; two cooks; a backup pilot; a navigator; a radioman; and two mechanics. The Dutch government contributed nearly sixty soldiers, including a captain and three lieutenants. Also on hand, courtesy of the Dutch, were thirty political prisoners-anticolonial activists, mostly-pressed into duty as "convict carriers."

Explorer Richard Archbold in 1938, standing on the Guba Guba after landing in what was then known as Challenger Bay in Hollandia. (Photo courtesy of Archbold Biological Station.) after landing in what was then known as Challenger Bay in Hollandia. (Photo courtesy of Archbold Biological Station.) The expedition focused on collecting mammals, birds, plants, and insects at a range of alt.i.tudes-from sea level to the barren twelve-thousand-foot peaks in the least-studied area of New Guinea, the north slope of the Snow Mountains, one of several ranges in the island's interior. With Guba Guba, the Dyak bearers, and the convicts carrying supplies to keep them fed, Archbold and his team of scientists gathered a trove of remarkable specimens, including tree-climbing kangaroos, three-foot-long rats, and a previously unknown songbird with a flycatcher beak. But nothing was as startling as what they encountered on the morning of June 23, 1938.

ARCHBOLD WAS PILOTING Guba Guba toward Hollandia after a reconnaissance flight when the plane broke through thick clouds surrounding the three-mile-high mountain named for Dutch Queen Wilhelmina. Ahead, Archbold saw a wide, flat, heavily populated valley that appeared nowhere on his maps and was unknown except to its inhabitants. He estimated that the valley was roughly forty miles long by ten miles wide. Later, adopting patrician nonchalance and the detached language of science, he downplayed his shock and called it "a pleasant surprise." toward Hollandia after a reconnaissance flight when the plane broke through thick clouds surrounding the three-mile-high mountain named for Dutch Queen Wilhelmina. Ahead, Archbold saw a wide, flat, heavily populated valley that appeared nowhere on his maps and was unknown except to its inhabitants. He estimated that the valley was roughly forty miles long by ten miles wide. Later, adopting patrician nonchalance and the detached language of science, he downplayed his shock and called it "a pleasant surprise."

A Dutch soldier on board Guba Guba called the area a called the area a Groote Vallei Groote Vallei, or Grand Valley, and Archbold declared that that would be its name.

He initially placed the population at sixty thousand people, though in fact it was perhaps double that, including natives who lived in the surrounding mountains. Even at Archbold's estimate, that was enough people to immediately establish the valley as the most densely populated area in all of Dutch New Guinea. Archbold's discovery was comparable to a botanist in 1938 searching for b.u.mblebees in the American Midwest and stumbling upon Kansas City, Kansas.

It almost defied belief. New Guinea was remote, but hardly unknown. Explorers had penetrated large parts of the island's interior on foot, and mountaineers had climbed its highest peaks. Separate expeditions in 1907, the early 1920s, and 1926 came close to Archbold's Grand Valley and made contact with some traveling natives, but they never found the valley itself. One group of explorers, the Kremer expedition of 1921, reached a nearby area called the Swart Valley. The anthropologist Denise O'Brien, who studied the Swart Valley some forty years later, wrote that when they first encountered Kremer and his team, the natives "were puzzled as to why the light-skinned men, who must really be ghosts or spirits, had no women with them. Finally they decided that the spirits' women were carried in containers, containers that the spirits also used for carrying and cooking food. Sometimes the spirit women came out of the containers, and to the (natives) they looked like snakes as they slithered along the ground, but to the spirit men they looked like women." The natives' overall reaction, O'Brien wrote, was fear, compounded by a severe epidemic of dysentery after the explorers left.

Even if land-based surveyors missed the valley, surely a military or commercial pilot should have spotted an area of three hundred or so square miles filled with hundreds of villages, inhabited by tens of thousands of men, women, and children-not to mention pigs. Yet some of the world's most celebrated aviators missed it. In July 1937, a year before Archbold's discovery, Amelia Earhart flew over part of New Guinea as she attempted to circ.u.mnavigate the globe. Her last known stop was at an airstrip in the town of Lae, at New Guinea's eastern edge, after which her plane disappeared somewhere in the Pacific. But she, too, never saw the Grand Valley.

By the late 1930s, most anthropologists believed that every significant population center on the planet had been discovered, mapped, and in most cases modernized to some degree by missionaries, capitalists, colonizers, or a combination of the three. No one doubted that pockets of undisturbed aborigines still roamed the rain forests of the Amazon and elsewhere. But the people of Archbold's Grand Valley were stationary farmer-warriors, living in clearly defined villages, in a wide-open area, covered only by the clouds above. A hundred thousand people, hiding in plain sight. Sixty years later, mammalogist Tim Flannery, an authority on the natural wonders of New Guinea, declared that Archbold's find represented "the last time in the history of our planet that such a vast, previously unknown civilization was to come into contact with the West."

One explanation is that an unusual combination of forces kept the valley off the map. When Archbold described his find for National Geographic National Geographic magazine, an editor there tried to make sense of it, writing, "Forestation is so heavy and terrain so rugged that earlier explorers pa.s.sed on foot within a few miles of the most thickly populated area without suspecting the existence of a civilization there." The surrounding mountains played an important role as well, discouraging flights overhead and commercial incursions by land. The lifestyle of the valley natives helped, too. They were self-sufficient farmers, as opposed to hunter-gatherers who might travel far and wide to feed themselves and obtain needed goods. Their stay-at-home tendency was cemented by their wars, which ensured that most spent their lives within short, relatively safe distances of their huts. magazine, an editor there tried to make sense of it, writing, "Forestation is so heavy and terrain so rugged that earlier explorers pa.s.sed on foot within a few miles of the most thickly populated area without suspecting the existence of a civilization there." The surrounding mountains played an important role as well, discouraging flights overhead and commercial incursions by land. The lifestyle of the valley natives helped, too. They were self-sufficient farmers, as opposed to hunter-gatherers who might travel far and wide to feed themselves and obtain needed goods. Their stay-at-home tendency was cemented by their wars, which ensured that most spent their lives within short, relatively safe distances of their huts.

WHEN ARCHBOLD FIRST saw the valley, rough weather prevented him from changing course or dipping saw the valley, rough weather prevented him from changing course or dipping Guba Guba low for a better look. But in the weeks that followed, he flew several reconnaissance missions, photographing the valley and sending pigs and their owners running for cover-just as Colonel Elsmore's flights would do six years later. low for a better look. But in the weeks that followed, he flew several reconnaissance missions, photographing the valley and sending pigs and their owners running for cover-just as Colonel Elsmore's flights would do six years later.

Archbold's chief botanist, L. J. Bra.s.s, described what they saw from the air: "The people were living in compact, very orderly and clean, fenced, walled or stockaded villages of about three or four to about fifty houses. Dwellings were of two types, built with double walls of upright split timbers, gra.s.s-thatched, and without floors. The men's houses were round, ten to fifteen feet in diameter, with dome-shaped roofs; the women's houses were long and narrow. The everyday dress of the men consisted of a p.e.n.i.s gourd, and perhaps a hair net of looped string. The women affected either short skirts of pendent strings, worn below the b.u.t.tocks, or an arrangement of cords around the thighs, and always one or more capacious carrying nets hung over the back from the forehead. As arms and implements they had bows, arrows of several kinds, spears, stone adzes, and stone axes."

Archbold seemed only mildly interested in the people, but he was fascinated by their farming methods. Unlike all other known tribes on New Guinea, natives of the valley grew sweet potatoes-their staple food-in clearly defined plots of land, with labyrinthine drainage ditches and surrounding walls. Archbold said it reminded him fondly of the farm country he'd seen on holiday in central Europe.

Archbold's a.s.sistants established a camp some fifteen miles west of the valley on a body of water called Lake Habbema, where Guba Guba could set down and take off. One day, two natives presented themselves to the outsiders. "One was evidently a man of some importance," Archbold wrote. "The other, who was younger, perhaps a bodyguard, remained very much on the alert. They squatted on their haunches, their backs toward home, their bows and arrows handy, while we sat down on the camp side of them." could set down and take off. One day, two natives presented themselves to the outsiders. "One was evidently a man of some importance," Archbold wrote. "The other, who was younger, perhaps a bodyguard, remained very much on the alert. They squatted on their haunches, their backs toward home, their bows and arrows handy, while we sat down on the camp side of them."

Archbold gave the two men beadlike cowrie sh.e.l.ls-small, pearly white, naturally smooth sh.e.l.ls that were widely used as currency and jewelry in Africa and elsewhere. He plied them with sugar, cigarettes, and dried fish. The two men accepted the gifts, but after a polite period of time handed them back, a gesture that Archbold interpreted "as a sign of independence." He noted, however, that the more senior man did accept a few draws from the cigar of the senior Dutch officer on the expedition, a captain named C. G. J. Teerink. After a fifteen-minute visit, the two natives left the explorers' camp.

Subsequently, Archbold dispatched two exploration teams, each consisting of Dutch soldiers, convict carriers, and Dyak tribesmen trained to collect flora and fauna. The teams, one led by Captain Teerink and the other by a lieutenant named J. E. M. Van Arcken, started their treks at opposite ends of the valley, so they'd meet roughly in the middle.

In August 1938 the two teams marched through the valley's high gra.s.ses, past one village after another. If the outsiders had been tribesmen from other parts of the valley, such an incursion likely would have been greeted with spears and arrows. But the white explorers and their bearers were so strange and exotic, so far removed from the day-to-day warfare among the tribes, they were met by little more than curiosity from the native men and shyness from the women and children. The explorers saw signs that the natives practiced cannibalism, but the heavily armed Dutch army troops felt they had nothing to fear.

Occasionally some tribesmen would discourage the explorers from traveling to the next village-placing sticks in their path, pantomiming the firing of arrows, and standing arm in arm as a human blockade. Language barriers prevented Captain Teerink or Lieutenant Van Arcken from getting a full explanation, but the acts seemed to Teerink more protective than hostile. The natives apparently didn't want their new acquaintances to be harmed by enemies who lived in the next village.

That pattern remained in place until an incident that involved a band of natives and the exploration team led by Lieutenant Van Arcken.

On August 9, 1938, as Van Arcken's patrol neared the Baliem River in the valley's center, they were met by tribesmen "in large numbers" carrying spears and bows and arrows. "We apparently were not to be trusted because we had come from the direction of enemy territory," Van Arcken wrote in his daily log. He defused the confrontation with a few cowrie sh.e.l.ls. Later that night four natives came into his camp, asking to sleep among the soldiers. "These gentlemen were sent packing," Van Arcken wrote, "after a shot in the air to scare them off."

The next day, Van Arcken found that the patrol's trail had been "closed off with tree branches, behind which some youths with spears took cover." His troops brandished their weapons, and the young natives fled. As the column of soldiers moved forward, bringing up the rear were two soldiers, one of them a corporal named Pattisina. Van Arcken wrote that two natives grabbed Pattisina from behind. When the other lagging soldier came to Pattisina's aid, one of the natives "wanted to spear the corporal with his lance, whereupon said native was shot by the corporal." In short, Van Arcken's report revealed that Pattisina had killed a native, and the official version was that he'd done so in self-defense.

Captain Teerink, the highest-ranking Dutch officer on the expedition, didn't buy the explanation. Teerink, who was leading the other patrol, wrote a critical addendum to Van Arcken's report that suggested he held a more humane view of the natives: "In my view, this fatal shot is to be regretted. Corporal Pattisina should have fired a warning shot first. It has been my experience that with tribes like this, a warning shot is usually sufficient. It is requested that you issue instructions to this effect to your men."

EVEN BEFORE HE returned to the United States, Archbold published articles about the expedition in returned to the United States, Archbold published articles about the expedition in The New York Times The New York Times and elsewhere. In March 1941 he wrote a long piece for and elsewhere. In March 1941 he wrote a long piece for National Geographic Magazine National Geographic Magazine. In it, he described a number of encounters with natives, most of them friendly though a few laced with tension. He seemed most surprised when his expedition pa.s.sed villages and the natives paid them little mind: "Here the natives seemed to take our party for granted. Some stood by and watched the long line of carriers file by, while others, digging in the gardens of rich black earth, did not even look up."

But in none of his accounts did Archbold describe what the natives must have considered the most awful moment of the outsiders' visit.

Four years after the shooting, in June 1942, Archbold finally acknowledged that an incident had occurred between the natives and Van Arcken's patrol that day near the river. But the way he described it and the publication he chose guaranteed that the significance would be overlooked. Writing in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Archbold described how on August 10, Van Arcken's patrol encountered a trail barricaded with branches and guarded by men with spears: "Here occurred the one incident of the whole expedition where more than a show of force was necessary." Without stopping to explain what he meant, much less acknowledge and discuss the gunshot death of a native, Archbold forged ahead to report the time of day that the patrol reached the river and the precise width of the river's floodplain.

Van Arcken took an even more misleading approach when he created the first known map of the valley. On it, he drew an arrow to the spot of the August 10, 1938, confrontation and wrote: "Location where one native died due to a lance attack." Unless a map reader knew better, Van Arcken's note seemed to suggest that the explorers had witnessed a fatal duel between two natives.

Elsewhere in Archbold's report to the museum, he outlined his overall philosophy where natives were concerned. There he whitewashed the shooting entirely: "In venturing into an unknown area, the kind of reception the natives will extend is unpredictable. Certain it is that natives in general tend to be more friendly toward a large, well-armed party than toward a small, weak one. Our parties inland were usually of the former category and no unpleasant incidents of importance arose in our contacts with the people."

Archbold apparently had no interest in determining whether the natives considered the Grand Valley's first fatal gunshot to be "unpleasant" or an "incident of importance."

ARCHBOLD'S EXPEDITION AND his writings about the valley went unnoticed by Colonel Elsmore. When initially told about Archbold after the crash of the his writings about the valley went unnoticed by Colonel Elsmore. When initially told about Archbold after the crash of the Gremlin Special Gremlin Special, Elsmore brushed it off, certain that his Hidden Valley, his Shangri-La, was distinct from Archbold's Grand Valley. After all, New Guinea was so huge and unexplored, who could say how many isolated, undiscovered valleys might still exist?

But Grand Valley and Shangri-La were one and the same. And the first known contact between its natives and the outside world had been marked by blood.

Chapter 9

GUILT AND GANGRENE

AFTER SEEING THE native footprint, the three survivors spent what Margaret called "this aching, miserable night" on the sloped, muddy banks of the mountain creek. Soggy and exhausted from their repeated rolls into the cold water, they woke in the dim predawn light on Wednesday, May 16, to resume their trek toward the clearing that McCollom had spotted farther down the slope. native footprint, the three survivors spent what Margaret called "this aching, miserable night" on the sloped, muddy banks of the mountain creek. Soggy and exhausted from their repeated rolls into the cold water, they woke in the dim predawn light on Wednesday, May 16, to resume their trek toward the clearing that McCollom had spotted farther down the slope.

As Margaret tried to stand, pain racked her body, and with it came fear. Overnight, her joints had stiffened, and the burned skin on her legs had tightened around her muscles. The burns choked off blood flow, starving healthy flesh. It hurt to even think about walking and sliding farther downstream. She couldn't straighten up. She wrote in her diary, "My legs were so stiff they were a sickening sight."

A quick inspection showed that infection had set in. She downplayed the gory details in her diary-the oozing pus, the blue-black hue of dead tissue. But she had a sickening idea of the causes and the dangers of what she described as "big, evil-smelling, running sores."

New Guinea teemed with bacteria, and the microscopic organisms were feasting on the stagnant blood in her poorly dressed wounds. The combination of burned flesh, unsanitary conditions, and swarming bacteria was a recipe for gangrene. Unless treated, the dread condition meant the death of a damaged body part and ultimately an entire body. Gangrene comes in two varieties, wet and dry. Both are awful, but wet gangrene is worse. Dry gangrene usually appears gradually as a result of blocked blood flow through the arteries. Decades of smoking might lead to dry gangrene and the slow death of a smoker's feet. That wasn't Margaret's worry. Her infected injuries were ripe for fast-moving, fast-killing wet gangrene. The longer her wounds went untreated, the greater the chance that her legs would have to be amputated. Even that radical step might not be enough. Wet gangrene can lead to the blood infection called sepsis. In the jungle, sepsis is fatal. The only question is whether it takes its victim in hours or days.

Margaret steeled herself and struggled upright onto her tender feet. She walked in agony, back and forth on the inclined bank, trying to loosen her joints and get limber enough to continue the journey. She glanced at Decker, knowing that he must have been in at least as much pain. She admired how stoic he remained.

McCollom looked at his two companions. He felt responsibility for them, but more than that. Respect and growing admiration. Affection, too. During all the walking, all the sliding downstream, all the discomforts, Decker hadn't complained once about his gaping head wound or his other injuries. And this pet.i.te WAC corporal-by now McCollom thought of her affectionately as Maggie-had turned out to be much tougher than he'd expected. Not only was she soldiering on with gangrenous wounds on her legs and hand, but the burns on the left side of her face had darkened. It occurred to him that other WACs he'd known, as well as some male soldiers, wouldn't have survived half of what she'd already been through.

Yet as their injuries worsened and infections took hold, McCollom could see his companions' strength ebbing. He felt certain that both already suffered from full-blown wet gangrene, and he feared that if the search planes didn't find them soon, he'd be the only one left alive.

McCollom wouldn't reveal it to Margaret or Decker, but he was fighting back fear. Later he explained, "We were in what was thought to be headhunter territory, we had no medical supplies, no shelter. We were in the middle of nowhere. I knew my twin brother was dead in the wreckage. I had to take care of the others. I didn't want to think about being out there all by myself, so I did what I could as much for myself as for them."

Though determined to save Margaret and Decker, McCollom made a private resolution: if the searchers gave up before spotting them, he would somehow find a navigable river and build a raft, or if need be, keep walking. He'd float or walk all the way to the ocean a hundred and fifty miles away, if that's what it took to get out of there. He'd return to Hollandia, and after that to his family. He couldn't save his brother, but he was determined to save himself and keep watch over his brother's infant daughter.

He'd do everything in his power to help Decker and Margaret. But if gangrene got the best of them, McCollom would go it alone.

BREAKFAST WAS WATER and more Charms, still their only food on the third day after the crash. They separated the candies by color, eating the red ones until they tired of them, moving on to yellow, and so on. Decker jokingly called the color-by-color approach a good way to vary their diet. They had cigarettes, but McCollom's lighter was dry and their matches were wet. As they prepared to resume their trek, rolling their supplies into the yellow tarpaulins, their thoughts turned to coffee. and more Charms, still their only food on the third day after the crash. They separated the candies by color, eating the red ones until they tired of them, moving on to yellow, and so on. Decker jokingly called the color-by-color approach a good way to vary their diet. They had cigarettes, but McCollom's lighter was dry and their matches were wet. As they prepared to resume their trek, rolling their supplies into the yellow tarpaulins, their thoughts turned to coffee.

"I'd love to be back in the mess hall having some of that delicious battery acid," Decker said.

"Me, too!" Margaret said. She didn't understand why, but despite not eating since her lunch of chicken and ice cream three days earlier, she didn't feel especially hungry.

The stream bank was too steep for them to walk on, and the jungle foliage gave no quarter. They gingerly stepped down the eight-foot bank, back into the mountain stream, to resume their soaking march. Again they clambered over fallen logs and slid on their bottoms down waterfalls.

"By this time my feet, my leg and my cut hand were infected," Margaret wrote in her diary. "We were all in the last stages of exhaustion, and now the nightmare of yesterday commenced all over again."

Tears filled her eyes as Margaret fought to keep up. Her feet throbbed with each step. Decker hung back with her. McCollom marched on, eager to reach the clearing. He got so far ahead they lost sight of him.

Margaret teetered on the edge of panic.

"McCollom has gone off and left us, and he's got all the food," she cried to Decker. "And we're going to starve to death." She plopped down in the stream. It was the closest she'd come to giving up since the thought of surrender flickered through her mind in the burning plane.

Decker, usually the quiet man among the three, had heard enough. He wheeled around like a red-faced drill sergeant. Margaret wouldn't quote his full tirade to her diary, but she sheepishly admitted that he called her "a piker" and "a quitter." Whether he did it as a motivating technique or in real anger, Decker had found the exact right words.

"I got so mad I wanted to kill him," she wrote. "But I got on my feet and stumbled downstream once more. Pretty soon we caught up with McCollom."

Margaret wasn't someone who easily admitted that she was wrong, but almost immediately she felt regret. McCollom had been steadfast and strong, guiding and helping them even as he suppressed his emotions about his brother's death, which Margaret suspected hurt more deeply than her burns. She told her diary: "It shames me to the core to think that even in hysteria, I doubted him for a moment."

BACK IN HOLLANDIA, the the Gremlin Special Gremlin Special's failure to return to the Sentani Airstrip had sent shock waves through Fee-Ask headquarters. The plane's absence and the lack of radio communication almost certainly meant a crash, and a crash meant a search. From the outset, the mindset at Fee-Ask was a rescue mission, aimed at finding survivors, as opposed to a recovery effort, aimed at returning remains to families.

As a unit on a large air base, Fee-Ask had almost unlimited access to pilots and planes. The fact that the missing crew and pa.s.sengers were colleagues, friends, and subordinates of the Fee-Ask bra.s.s made it doubly certain the search organizers would have whatever they needed. Raising the ante further were nine special circ.u.mstances: the WACs on board.

There's no evidence to suggest that Colonel Ray Elsmore and the other officers at headquarters would have been any less aggressive if everyone aboard was male. But transport planes crashed regularly during the war with no notice from the press. Elsmore, savvy about the ways of reporters, must have known that the WACs aboard the Gremlin Special Gremlin Special would attract special interest. would attract special interest.

SEVERAL HUNDRED U.S. women had already died in World War II, but the numbers are fuzzy in part because some were civilians working with the Red Cross and other relief organizations, and some died in transit to war zones and in accidents on U.S. soil. Of the women who died serving noncombat military roles, many were nurses, including decorated heroes such as Lieutenant Aleda Lutz, a U.S. Army flight nurse who took part in nearly two hundred missions. In November 1944 she was aboard a C-47 hospital plane evacuating wounded soldiers from a battlefield in Italy when it ran into rough weather and crashed, killing everyone aboard. Thirty-eight U.S. military women who died were members of the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, the WAFS, and the Women Airforce Service Pilots, the WASPs, who flew military aircraft on noncombat missions to keep male pilots fresh and available for battle. women had already died in World War II, but the numbers are fuzzy in part because some were civilians working with the Red Cross and other relief organizations, and some died in transit to war zones and in accidents on U.S. soil. Of the women who died serving noncombat military roles, many were nurses, including decorated heroes such as Lieutenant Aleda Lutz, a U.S. Army flight nurse who took part in nearly two hundred missions. In November 1944 she was aboard a C-47 hospital plane evacuating wounded soldiers from a battlefield in Italy when it ran into rough weather and crashed, killing everyone aboard. Thirty-eight U.S. military women who died were members of the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, the WAFS, and the Women Airforce Service Pilots, the WASPs, who flew military aircraft on noncombat missions to keep male pilots fresh and available for battle.

Each death of a woman in World War II drew attention, but in most cases the deaths came singly or in pairs. Exceptions included six nurses killed by German bombing and strafing of a hospital area during the battle on Anzio. And just two weeks before the Gremlin Special Gremlin Special crash, six nurses were among twenty-eight crew members killed when a j.a.panese kamikaze pilot slammed into the U.S. Navy hospital s.h.i.+p crash, six nurses were among twenty-eight crew members killed when a j.a.panese kamikaze pilot slammed into the U.S. Navy hospital s.h.i.+p Comfort Comfort off Leyte Island, between Guam and Okinawa. off Leyte Island, between Guam and Okinawa.

The base at Hollandia had suffered only one previous WAC death, in February 1945, when a private from West Virginia drowned while swimming in the Pacific. On the day before her burial, her distraught friends wanted to honor her by flying the WAC flag-a banner of gold and green satin, with a fringe at the edge, its center adorned by the profile of the Greek war G.o.ddess Pallas Athena. No such flag existed anywhere in New Guinea. As one Hollandia WAC put it, the materials needed to make one were "as out of their reach as a handful of icicles." Regardless, a group of WACs stayed awake past four in the morning, fas.h.i.+oning a flag from Australian bedsheets, colored with dyes made from yellow Atabrine antimalaria tablets and red Merthiolate antiseptic ointment pilfered from the infirmary. For the image of Pallas Athena, they used green India ink from the drafting department. For a fringe, they used old parachute cords. Bleary-eyed, they finished in time for the funeral. They ignored their flag's blotchy colors and irregular size, its makes.h.i.+ft fringe and rough edges, saluting proudly as it waved in the warm breeze for their lost friend.

That was the reaction to the death of one drowned Hollandia WAC. Now nine Hollandia WACs were missing and feared dead in the island's wild interior.

AFTER THE GREMLIN SPECIAL missed its estimated return time, calls were made to Allied landing strips throughout the region to see if Colonel Prossen and Major Nicholson had unexpectedly landed the C-47 elsewhere. That proved fruitless, so Fee-Ask planners hauled out their admittedly inadequate maps and divided the island into sectors where the pilots might have made what they euphemistically called "a forced landing." missed its estimated return time, calls were made to Allied landing strips throughout the region to see if Colonel Prossen and Major Nicholson had unexpectedly landed the C-47 elsewhere. That proved fruitless, so Fee-Ask planners hauled out their admittedly inadequate maps and divided the island into sectors where the pilots might have made what they euphemistically called "a forced landing."

Though hampered by incessant rain, airborne searchers spent three days scouring those sectors. In all, twenty-four planes took part-a squadron of C-47s, a C-60 transport plane, and a flock of heavy bombers, including B-24 Liberators, B-25 Mitch.e.l.ls, and a B-17 Flying Fortress. A volunteer crew member on one of the search planes was Corporal James Lutgring, hoping against hope that he might rescue his best friend, Melvin Mollberg, who'd taken his place on the Gremlin Special Gremlin Special.

Overseeing the rescue effort was Colonel Elsmore, who knew the area around the Shangri-La Valley better than anyone else in the U.S. military.

AT AROUND ELEVEN Wednesday morning, May 16, after five hours of trudging through the stream, McCollom climbed up the eight-foot bank. Wednesday morning, May 16, after five hours of trudging through the stream, McCollom climbed up the eight-foot bank.

"Come on," he called, "this is it."

Decker scrambled up, dragging Margaret behind him. On flat ground at the top, she fell face-forward onto the earth, unable to take another step. Decker and McCollom went ahead while she crawled after them on her hands and knees. A half hour later, she reached the spot fifty yards from the stream where Decker and McCollom lay panting on the ground. Margaret sprawled next to them, catching her breath. Feeling the warmth of the sun's rays, she noticed that for the first time in days she could see a wide expanse of sky. They'd reached their goal, a clearing in the rain forest atop a small knoll.

Within minutes, the survivors heard the roar of four powerful engines. They looked up to see a B-17 bomber, its unmistakable shape silhouetted high overhead against the blue sky. The trio waved to draw its attention, but the pilot of the Flying Fortress flew away without spotting them. They rested and ate what pa.s.sed for lunch, disappointed by the near miss but heartened by the sight of the plane.

An hour later, either the same B-17 or another just like it made another pa.s.s over the clearing. This time McCollom wasn't taking any chances. He jumped to his feet.

"Get out the tarps!" he shouted.

McCollom and Decker raced to untie their supplies and spread out the yellow tarpaulin covers they'd salvaged from the Gremlin Special Gremlin Special's life rafts. The B-17, with Captain William D. Baker at the controls, was flying over the jungle at high alt.i.tude. Along with his usual crew, Baker had brought along an unusual pa.s.senger for a heavy bomber: Major Cornelius Waldo, the Catholic chaplain at the Hollandia base.

Margaret worried that the pilot would miss them again and declare that sector of the mountain fully searched, with no sign of wreckage or survivors. She begged her companions to hurry.

Just when it seemed to the survivors that the B-17 was about to fly away, Captain Baker turned the big bomber and circled back over the clearing. Still, Baker gave none of the traditional signs that he'd seen them. McCollom called to the sky: "Come on down, come on down and cut your motors," he cried. "Cut your motors and dip your wings."

Margaret chimed in: "I know they see us, I know they do."

Decker added a note of optimism: "They see us by now."

Even though Baker was flying high above the clearing, he couldn't mistake the survivors for any natives that might be around. One obvious distinction was that all three wore clothing. But the real giveaway was the tarp. Less than five minutes after the survivors spotted the B-17, the B-17 returned the favor. Baker raced his engines. He dipped his wings.

They'd been found.

McCollom had made the right call when he'd ordered them to leave the crash site and march down the mountain and through the icy stream. As one pilot experienced in jungle searches described it, "An airplane going into the trees makes a very small gash in a limitless sea of green." By leading them to a clearing and laying out the bright yellow tarpaulin, McCollom had given them a shot at being rescued.

Later, a funny thought struck him: a life raft designed for ocean survival had saved them in the middle of a jungle.

UNBEKNOWNST TO THE survivors, they weren't alone. Hiding in the nearby jungle was a group of native men and boys from a nearby village, among them a boy named Helenma Wandik. "I watched them," he recalled. "I saw them in the clearing, waving." survivors, they weren't alone. Hiding in the nearby jungle was a group of native men and boys from a nearby village, among them a boy named Helenma Wandik. "I watched them," he recalled. "I saw them in the clearing, waving."

BARELY ABLE TO stand just a short time earlier, now Margaret, McCollom, and Decker jumped up and down. They danced and screamed and waved their weary arms. For the first time since they'd sat in the stand just a short time earlier, now Margaret, McCollom, and Decker jumped up and down. They danced and screamed and waved their weary arms. For the first time since they'd sat in the Gremlin Special Gremlin Special, they laughed.

Baker wagged the B-17's wings again to be sure they'd seen him. He logged their position by longitude and lat.i.tude, then had his crew drop two life rafts as markers as close as possible to the clearing. With a violent thunderstorm moving toward the valley, no more flights could be made at least until morning. As Baker flew out of sight, heading toward the island's northern coast, he radioed a message to the Sentani Airstrip: three people in khaki, waving, spotted in a small clearing on the uphill side of a forested ridge, about ten air miles from the valley floor.

"We'll probably be back in Hollandia by Sunday," said Decker, who by then had dropped back to the ground.