The Airmen and the Headhunters Read online

  Being stuck inside together while the rain fell ceaselessly proved an unexpected hardship for the two men. They had so little in common. Franny was a short, garrulous, profane, citified, middle-aged Irish-Catholic postal worker from New Bedford, Massachusetts, who would get out his rosary four or five times a day and repeat the prayer in his flat New England accent but would casually sprinkle his ordinary conversation with the usual G.I. obscenities. John was a tall, very young, quiet, polite, outdoor-loving mountain man. Franny, a staff sergeant, had joined Coberly's at the last minute, replacing the crew's young tail gunner. He had been looking for a way to get on a combat mission, not because he was eager to fight but because he had figured out that he was going to remain overseas until he had enough combat missions under his belt. His war-weary attitude was at odds with John's more idealistic outlook. During the long days and evenings in the abandoned hut in the empty rice field—especially when the mosquitoes and the sand flies were biting—John and Franny would sometimes say things to each other that they then had to try to forget.

  Learning how to survive on their own took a lot of time at first, but it provided welcome occupation for their otherwise empty days. The Dayaks cut them a great pile of firewood and left sacks of hulled rice but warned them not to expect a return visit until the Japanese or their spies had left the area. It took John and Franny several attempts before they learned how to cook rice, beginning with learning how to keep a fire lighted with their dwindling supply of matches. There was a nearby stream for water and bathing, but many leeches lurked in the tall grass along the water's edge. Luckily, the men came across nothing more deadly, although they temporarily had to cease swimming when there were crocodiles around.

  During daylight, when there were not more important tasks, they often played cards, using a deck they had made from paper the Mongans had given them. Hearts was their main game, although it could get quite adversarial. Reading was more peaceable, but they sorely lacked reading material. John had managed to hold on to his G.I. New Testament, endorsed by President Roosevelt. He read it through, including the psalms and hymns at the back. At first, he dog-eared it daily in an attempt to keep track of the calendar. When he realized that he had missed a few days, he gave up the effort. What difference did it make what day it was, since they weren't going anywhere?

  The nights—twelve hours long at the equator—seemed even longer. They used as little light at night as possible, not only because their stock of resin torches was small but also to avoid calling attention to themselves. Sitting in the dark after their unsatisfactory dinner, they told each other their entire life histories; Franny's years gave him a distinct advantage.

  Illness soon gave them other things to think about. When their Atabrine wore off—they had had their last dose before boarding their B-24 on November 16—they both came down with malaria. As John recalled, "One minute we would be so hot that we could hardly stand it. Next, the chills would come on and we would be shaking so bad the whole hut would tremble." These bouts were typically preceded by days of strong feelings of self-pity and depression, and would come to an end in three or four days, leaving them slightly weaker but otherwise back to normal. In the extreme humidity, they were also prone to skin infections that would not heal. They had rare bouts of dysentery, but these were very frightening, bringing excruciating intestinal cramps and dehydration.

  Uncomfortable as their time in the empty hut was, their next place of shelter proved to be in some ways worse. When the Mongans learned that some of the Japanese had moved to Long Sempayang in the southern Krayan District, their Dayaks moved John and Franny into a small longhouse in a remote valley above Long Nuat. There was only one old man living in this house, and he seemed to be sort of a hermit. He tolerated the newcomers' presence, but the utter filth of his surroundings alarmed them. He tried to cook for the airmen but his rice was always burnt and his way of preparing chicken was to pull off the fowl's big feathers, singe the rest of the bird by holding it over the fire and then throw the singed carcass into a pot of boiling water to cook for a while.

  The old man lived with about a dozen hunting dogs, and one day he returned with the dogs and the carcass of a wild boar he had caught and killed. The airmen watched as he took his knife and butchered the wild pig right in front of the hearth a foot from the snarling, snapping jaws of the dogs. Occasionally he would throw a scrap of meat or gristle to one of the Cerberuslike creatures. When he wanted to wipe his knife clean, he would grab the nearest hound and wipe the blade on its rough coat before proceeding with the carving. The airmen were hesitant to touch this meat but found that boiled pig liver tasted pretty good.

  For Phil, Dan, Jim and Eddy at Polecat Gulch, December 7, the third anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, came and went, and the airmen's food was running out again. At this point, morale was so low that Jim later recalled "if I had had the strength to reach for my .45 I'd have blown my brains out." By December 10, when a few Dayaks came again with food, the airmen had been entirely without food for forty-eight hours. The young men, who were of an age when they might normally be expected to wolf down a quart of ice cream standing at the fridge, passed the time making up lists of their favorite foods. Phil's was a chocolate malted milk shake—so luscious, rich and satisfying. Thinking of it, he could almost feel the bubbles of the foaming liquid against his lips. As each man described his dream meal, the others listened appreciatively, drawing some satisfaction from imagining the smell, texture and taste of the dish described.

  Phil and the others searched for anything edible within the canyon, where they felt relatively safe. They tried gathering ferns and roots and boiling them, the way their survival book recommended, but they felt more ill after eating the plants than they had felt before from hunger. They did not find fish in the stream, and there was nothing nearby that resembled the plants the veteran Australian airmen in New Guinea had pointed out to them. The Aussies had gone on at length about the versatility of the coconut palm, but the men had not seen one since dropping into the hills of Borneo.

  On December 12, one of their usual Lun Dayeh visitors arrived at Polecat Gulch in the early evening with rice, tobacco and firewood. He was a young man whom the Yanks called Skeezix after an American comic-strip character whose hair stood out from his head. Pointing, Skeezix made it clear to the airmen that the Japanese were looking for them upriver and downriver. For days afterward, the Americans stiffened involuntarily at every unusual sound coming from outside their narrow canyon.

  Their supplies had run out again by the time the Dayaks came back a week later, but the new supplies were worth waiting for. "Pork, a big bag of rice, bananas, sugarcane and ten ears of fresh corn. Delicious!" Phil wrote in his diary. Sugarcane at first puzzled the airmen; they did not realize that they should not try to eat the fiber. The first time they were given sugarcane and tried to swallow it, the Dayaks found their efforts hilarious. The airmen took the laughter at their expense in good part, but they hated being so dependent on others for their every need.

  All soldiers in a war feel a certain separation from the real world, but here in the jungles of the Pacific there was nothing to remind them of anything they had ever known, only what one historian has called "a green and threatening mystery." Moreover, with no radio or other reliable source of news, the airmen were utterly cut off from what was happening in the world they knew.

  Again and again, Phil thumbed through the USAAF-issued jungle survival pamphlet he had taken from the plane. It was supposed to deal with precisely their present situation, but he and the other men found it an infuriating document, with its airy pronouncements that "good food and good water are fairly plentiful in the jungle if you know where to look for them" and "wood is plentiful, and even in rain forests comparatively dry wood can be found hanging in the network of vines and rattans." They eventually found a use for it: its pages, cut in two, made a good deck of cards. Phil and Dan taught the others to play bridge and sometimes they played pinochle, as the
y had done during slow periods on the air base at Morotai.

  Other times, they varied their entertainment with a game of gin rummy or hearts, although hearts is a game where ganging up on one person is encouraged, and sometimes this led to bad feelings within the group. Later on, picking out lice from the seams of their disintegrating garments—their boots had already rotted away—proved a productive way to spend a few hours each day.

  Eddy, who could see out of both eyes now, would have given up his favorite meal to have been able to find something new to read. He was the only Easterner of the four and although he liked them all, he had little in common with the others. He missed John Nelson who, though also a Westerner, was the same age as he and had been his companion for off-base adventures back in California.

  An account by each of the four men of their lives up to now provided some entertainment for the others, but not much. They were not the type of young men to feel comfortable unburdening themselves of their deepest desires, fears or family secrets. Phil and Dan were guarded in their choice of subjects and words. Coming from privileged backgrounds, they had grown up believing that it was good manners to assume the vocabulary of the common man as protective coloration, and to avoid standing out from the crowd. If one of the army's primary functions is to regiment men and make them as alike as possible, in World War II it succeeded. The American forces in World War II comprised, in the words of one acute participant, Paul Fussell, "the largest, most uniform army ever fielded by the United States."

  Phil Corrin had grown up the only child of an Englishman from the Isle of Man who had immigrated to California and married Ruby, a rancher's daughter with a zest for life that she passed on to her son. Phil's father had landed a job early in his California days in the print shop at Bullock's, a Los Angeles department-store chain, and had gradually worked his way up to vice president of the company. Twenty-one-year-old Phil, though not as ambitious as his father, was a natural if diffident leader. Tall, fair and slim, he had been looked up to by his friends since childhood. He had just been voted president of his college fraternity before he left to join the air force. Phil would never have mentioned any of this to his crewmates. He merely said he wanted to get back to college, though he still had not decided what subject to major in. After college, he thought he might go into advertising but he wasn't sure.

  Phil could be decisive when he needed to be but he did not often take a leading role; he preferred encouraging others to do well. Now he prompted the others to talk about their plans for the future when the war was over.

  Radioman Dan Illerich never liked to talk about himself. He enjoyed reading and loved to play chess with his father, a civil engineer with the state of California. Describing himself as "not much of an athlete," he had still been chosen to head his high school air force cadet program—where he had tried in vain to keep the authorities from removing Japanese Americans from the corps. When he was at Sacramento College, where he had joined the enlisted reserve corps while he waited for a West Point appointment, he had attempted to learn cribbage but not bridge. He was still at the stage of regarding girls more as friends than as sweethearts, and would not talk about them. The only thing even vaguely personal he would tell the others was that his grandfather had invented a burn ointment and that he was torn between wanting to become a pharmacist to exploit his grandfather's invention, and wanting to go into the restaurant business. Everything about food interested him hugely at the moment.

  Jim, who was keeping constantly alert for danger and thus was very quiet, may have been thinking of his girlfriend, Maggie. Five foot two and 112 pounds soaking wet, Maggie, the child of Yugoslav immigrants, had caught his eye when they were both fifteen-year-olds growing up in the same Sacramento neighborhood. The day he met her, he had gone home and told his mother he had found the girl he would marry. Maggie was taking a lot of convincing, but Jim was confident he would win her over if he ever got out of Borneo. He would have died rather than tell his mates about his feelings for her, but he would admit to dreams of owning a cattle ranch where he could be his own boss and have lots of land and not too many people about.

  Eddy, who was hiding from the others the amount of pain he still felt from his broken ribs, was even quieter than the others. Pressed by Phil to speak of his plans after the war, he said he wanted to get back East, to Maryland or Washington maybe, and find a good office job where he never had to be out of doors again, except possibly for a game of golf.

  Phil, the only officer of the four, wore his rank lightly, which was fortunate, given the attitude of the other airmen. Perhaps because they were so close in age, and also perhaps because most of the crewmen had started out planning to be officers, there had been from the beginning a feeling among the enlisted men that they were every bit as good as the officers. The officers, for the most part, had shared that view; certainly Phil did. He bore no grudge—quite the reverse—for Jim's having forced him to continue walking the day they fled Long Metuil after the Japanese letter came.

  This egalitarian view had already become clear during their training as a crew at March Field. The four officers were in the habit of jumping into Tom Coberly's Ford the moment they had any free time and heading for Los Angeles. Partway through their training there, Jim and Dan, the two enlisted Californians, asked: "How about letting us ride, too?" Although officers and enlisted men were not supposed to fraternize off-duty, Coberly and the other officers agreed to give lifts to town to any enlisted men of their crew with passes. Later, when the crew was transferred to Hamilton Field, near San Francisco, Dan had invited all of them, including the officers, for a day at his grandparents' house near Oakland.

  Jim, with his father's strongly worded views on bosses and bureaucrats still ringing in his ears, had an attitude toward rank that was openly confrontational, almost hostile. One memorable time when all the squadron's crews had been assembled in the Morotai briefing room, Jim had called out in a loud voice to an overly rank-conscious officer, "Hey, you need to go take a shit. You look a little full in the face." On that occasion, Jim's crewmates had not known where to look.

  The airmen sitting in Polecat Gulch liked to recall the time when they had taken part in what, in effect, had been a mutiny. It had been brought about by an announcement that the newly arrived trainees, unlike their predecessors, would not be given ten days' furlough after their March Field training was done. Instead, they would go directly to Hamilton Field and wait there for dispatch overseas. Coberly's was among the crews to be affected by this elimination of home leave. Most of the men had not been able to get home to their families in more than a year, and they were all incensed at the new measure.

  Cannily making use of the army regulation that stated that no one could be ordered to fly against his will, the entire class of new trainees had gone to the commanding general of the air base and said, in effect, "No leave, no fly." They did not wait for an answer before taking off for their homes. The general, recognizing the limits of his options, revoked the objectionable ruling and did not punish the men except to delay their promotions.

  Jim, of course, had pushed the powers of a mutineer to their limits, by turning up dressed in civvies at the Sacramento home of a horrified Dan Illerich. Being out of uniform while officially AWOL was grounds for court-martial, and Dan and his parents had urged Jim to go home and put on his uniform, which he grudgingly did.

  The airmen liked to think back on that mutiny. They had, by a combined force of will, made the AAF back down. That victory was a stark contrast to their situation now, where they were powerless, and there was nothing to do but wait through the onslaught of biting insects for whatever William and the Dayaks would do for or against them.

  Christmas Day was miserable at Polecat Gulch. It had been six days since they had had visitors. Christmas dinner consisted of the last bit of rice and their last four squares of chocolate. At the end of the meal, Phil passed out the last four American cigarettes—saved for this occasion and disappointingly foul tasting beca
use of mildew. The men smoked them nonetheless.

  But the next day was better. The flyers had three Dayak visitors who brought rice, cassava root, sugarcane, bananas, coffee, sugar, salt, fresh fish and tobacco. Five days later, the Dayaks were back with more rice. The following day was New Year's, and their Long Metuil visitors arrived in the afternoon with rice, bananas, roasted peanuts and tobacco. The Yanks had been in Borneo six weeks by then and were pretty weak from their poor diet and lack of physical activity, but Phil tried to keep their spirits up. He wrote in his diary: "Happy New Year and it certainly will be a happy one for us and our families." The Dayaks were clearly doing their best to help make it so, with six surreptitious nighttime visits to the Yanks between New Year's Day and January 18, despite their constant warnings that the region was swarming with Japanese soldiers.

  Since the Yanks at Polecat Gulch had no idea of their benefactors' names, they invented monikers for them. In addition to Skeezix, there was Alice the Goon, whose torso earned him the name of a hulking cartoon character. And then there were Fido, who was small and wiry, like a dog; Old Chris, who had come the day after Christmas and who the airmen later found out was one of the aristocrats of the Long Metuil longhouse; and Charles Atlas. There was also Indigestion Joe, an older man so named because he twice insisted on bringing them moldy pork rind and urging them to eat it. Later, the airmen learned that he was chief of a nearby longhouse. The other regular visitors were the Butcher, another longhouse chief, who once had chopped up some meat for them, and Herman, Sherman and Vernon, three Long Metuil teenage boys who often came to Polecat Gulch together, bringing whatever treats they could find for the airmen.

  The Dayaks would grin and try to cheer up the airmen by acting out the rumors they had heard of Allied attacks against Tarakan and campaigns against the Japanese on the Borneo mainland. The Americans wanted to believe their visitors' tales, and they did their best to pick up some Lun Dayeh vocabulary. They wrote down lists of words spelled the way they sounded, with guesses as to what the words meant. These word lists were constantly refined, and helped make their conversations with the Dayaks more than just pantomimes.