The Airmen and the Headhunters Read online

  When evening fell, the Lun Dayeh hosts and their neighbors formed a big circle. Three big iron drums kept the beat as they had throughout the day, their deep vibrations echoing for miles through the jungle. While the airmen looked on, Dayak men wearing capes ornamented with feathers or fur and lots of beading slowly took turns coming forward in the flickering torchlight to dance a warrior dance. In a strange, jerky rhythm, the dancer would hop first on one foot and then the other, stamping the wooden floor each time as hard as he could. At the same time, he would wave a ceremonial machete in the air but close to his body.

  The airmen noticed that a few of the men had put on colorful loincloths made of imported cloth, but most of them were wearing loincloths made from the usual dark, beaten bark. Some of the men wore in their upper earlobes earrings carved out of the scarlet-and-yellow crest of a hornbill bird or from the ivory-colored, curved fangs of a clouded leopard. A few men also had brass rings in their lower earlobes.

  Meanwhile, the women stood and formed a long line. Some were bare breasted above dark bark-cloth skirts that covered them from the waist to ankle. Others wore a Javanese kebayak (tight-fitting long-sleeved bodice) or a Western-style blouse, while still others wore a bib woven from pineapple fiber. Many of the women wore close-fitting skullcaps covered with hundreds of colored, glittering glass beads. Each cap (the Yanks were told) represented the life savings of its wearer. The resin torches reflected the glint of the heavy brass rings distending the long loops of the women's lower earlobes. The women, unlike the men, merely shuffled along the veranda singing a chant over and over. Their movements were paced, perhaps, to meet the need for their dance to continue without interruption for days.

  An enormous amount of food had been prepared for all the attendees, though not all the guests took part in the ceremonial banquet for the village aristocracy and their noble counterparts from other longhouses. On a slightly raised section in the middle of the longhouse floor, special foods in blue-and-white Chinese dishes were laid out on mats. The women had spread out beautifully woven seating mats and little resin lamps instead of torches. The Yanks, having watched the slicing of pork from the sacrificial pig, were taken to look at these banquet arrangements before being politely escorted to the far end of the longhouse, where they were asked to stay while the ceremonies continued. Curious though they were to see what was going on up by the leaders' seats, they found it perfectly proper that they had been consigned to the sidelines. After all, they were not aristocrats. Left to eat by themselves, they enjoyed the pork and gravy they had been given with their rice. They were also supplied with enough tobacco to last them a month, and coffee, a rare treat.

  Later, when the formal part of the banquet was finished, the Yanks were invited back to the party. At their hosts' urging, they started in on the borak—which tasted to Phil surprisingly like a California wine. Served the Lun Dayeh way, borak was sipped through reed straws from the tall Chinese jars in which it had been brewed.

  When offering a guest a drink of borak, as Phil describes it, "Your host will take you by the hand and lead you to the jug. The two of you stoop over the jug facing each other and then both drink through the straws at the same time. The host must drink as long as the guest. The basic law of Borneo society is that the last one on his feet is the best man." The airmen soon learned to pretend to be sucking in the drink rather than imbibing every time. In their weakened state, they could not hope to hold their liquor the way a Dayak could.

  While the dancing and chanting continued, two Dayaks went down to the river and brought back a pair of heads on poles that were then hung up over the fire. The Dayak men formed a long line and did another dance to the beat of the drums.

  Phil thought, "I'm a God-fearing person," but realized he was "happy to sit in on the end of two members of a race of people who brought so much suffering to so many people throughout the world." Neither he nor the other Yanks felt disgust at such treatment of the heitais corpses. The stories they had heard of Japanese behavior toward the natives and toward Allied prisoners precluded any sympathy for these dead men. And what they were seeing was clearly not an act of disrespect. On the contrary, the Dayaks were performing a sacred rite; the airmen felt privileged to be witnessing it.

  What the airmen probably did not realize was how completely their attitudes toward the Dayaks had changed in the months since they had dropped into Borneo. When they had left Polecat Gulch that day, their primary emotion had been, not surprisingly, exhilaration at being free of their enforced isolation. But now, well fed, feeling comparatively safe and sitting on chairs for the first time in months, they were filled with feelings for and about the Dayaks that they could not have predicted.

  They had started out in November thinking of the Dayaks as barely human. By now, they had come to feel not only respect for the Dayaks' competence in the challenging tropical mountain world, but also gratitude for their generosity and a genuine liking for their straightforward manners and their cheerful courage during trying times.

  In the crowd of celebrants, the Yanks recognized some of the men and boys who had come to Polecat Gulch to bring them food, firewood, tobacco and moral support. Indigestion Joe (who they now learned was the longhouse chief from Long Kafun) came during the first night of the feast with some of his people, bringing another pig and other foodstuffs to add to the feast. The Butcher was there, too, and he and Indigestion Joe, Phil noted, "make a grand pair." As the borak began to take effect on them all, great oaths of mutual affection were pronounced between the Dayaks and the Yanks and grand gestures were made. The Butcher and Indigestion Joe each urged the Yanks to come live in his longhouse. The Butcher offered them wives if the men would come to live with him. At some point well into that first night, Phil gave his lapel wings to Indigestion Joe as a gesture of friendship. Joe, equally moved, declared he wanted to go to America with the Yanks.

  Two and a half days of heavy rain followed, but this did not dampen the spirits of the partygoers. On the night of January 21, Pangeran Lagan reappeared. He had with him ten of his chosen warriors, his best marksmen. They were wearing their most elaborately ornamented sword belts and carrying their blowpipes and poison darts, and their spearheads were on their shafts, a sign they were going headhunting.

  They were leaving for Long Berang, they pantomimed, where more Japanese were to be killed. Lagan asked Phil and the Yanks to go down with his group to help kill the seven Japanese still there. He showed them a rifle and two muzzle loaders belonging to the Japanese soldiers whose heads he and his men had taken three days earlier. For Lagan, who had not witnessed the Yanks' weeks of deprivation in Polecat Gulch, it must have seemed normal that the airmen would want to take part in an attack on their enemy.

  Phil and the others tried to talk Lagan and his friends out of making the trip that night. They knew it was risky even for such skilled walkers as the Lun Dayeh to travel at night in the rainy season. The Yanks hated the idea of the Dayaks, who had already done so much for them, running such risks on their behalf.

  But when Lagan remained determined, Phil shook his head. With the weight of command on his shoulders, Phil was grown-up enough to recognize that this was not the time for amateur heroics by the Yanks. For one thing, they would be no good at moving down a sopping-wet mountainside through the jungle at night. They would just be in the way. For another, they were weak from their weeks of semistarvation, during which time none of them had fired a weapon.

  Reluctantly but firmly, he told Lagan that neither he nor his men would go with him. When it was clear the Lun Dayeh were going to go anyway, Phil took off his bombardier wings (the only medal-like object he had left). He pinned it on Pangeran Lagan's boar-skin hat before watching the "bravest man I ever knew" go off to fight the Yanks' battle for them.

  The head feast at Long Metuil was a historic event both for the region and Borneo, but Makahanap and his people at Long Berang did not yet know of it. Pangeran Lagan had managed to get word by runner to the headman of the villa
ge at Long Kafun and to the people of other nearby longhouses, who were all invited to the feast. But he had not been able to get a message to Long Berang, now that the landas (rainy season) had arrived in earnest. In inland Borneo, yearly rainfall exceeds two hundred inches, with heavy bursts of rain every day; but during the four months of the landas (November through February) it often rains hard all day, especially in January and February. Walking for any great distance during the heavy rains was virtually impossible, and the swollen rivers and streams were no longer navigable.

  There was a pause in the rainfall on January 22, and Indigestion Joe, the headman of Long Kafun, who had left the party hours ahead of Pangeran Lagan and collected more warriors from his own longhouse at dawn, hastened downriver to Long Berang. He arrived midmorning with additional warriors, who had joined him en route. They made an imposing crowd in the small street of Long Berang. Indeed, the only time Makahanap had seen a bigger crowd there had been Easter 1941, when more than a thousand Dayaks had assembled for three days of prayer and feasting led by Reverend Willfinger. To accommodate them for two nights, every bit of space in every longhouse had been occupied, as well as in the government rest houses and the Chinese stores. This time the Dayaks were here for a very different purpose.

  Joe had a quiet word alone with Makahanap, to tell him of the head-taking in Long Metuil and to ask the D.O.'s permission to do the same here. Makahanap was still reflecting on the matter when the taicho, who had spent four days waiting impatiently for the expected letter from Tarakan, appeared with his soldier aide and two of the Long Berang–based heitais to demand that the D.O. furnish him and his escort transport back to Long Metuil.

  The taicho also wanted to know why there were so many Dayaks gathered in Long Berang. Makahanap explained that they were there in such numbers to conduct their usual market day, postponed till now by the heavy rains. He provided the taicho with four canoes, one for each of his party. The Japanese official would appreciate the extravagance of the gesture, but the district officer saw this as the easiest way to eliminate these four on the river. The Long Kafun warriors would be granted their wish.

  Once the Japanese were on the river and out of sight of Long Berang, the paddlers launched their attacks. The taicho was stabbed first, with a machete. Badly injured, he fell out of his perahu. The current was running so fast that the Dayaks, anxious though they were to have his head, were unable to catch hold of the dying chief officer. They could only watch as the current sailed him downstream. The boatmen in the other three dugouts quickly beheaded the other Japanese. They took the heads and, after beaching their boats, they slogged cheerfully through the mud for hours, returning in triumph to Long Metuil. The head feast there was still going on and the new heads greatly enhanced the occasion. Phil wrote in his diary, without being aware of the cause: "The people and food are really pouring into this place. Another pig and a young water buffalo, another celebration in the making."

  Makahanap realized that, now the seven Japanese had been killed (assuming the Long Kafun people had been successful), he must somehow eliminate the remaining three heitais at Long Berang, who knew nothing yet of what had happened. The problem was that these remaining Japanese soldiers were more cautious than the others had been. They never went anywhere without their weapons—and one of them had a machine gun.

  It was time to employ other means—and quickly. Makahanap called Binum to him. As he looked at her with the eyes of a man—and not as her teacher and protector—Makahanap knew that her fair skin, long black hair, slim body and white teeth would make her tempting to the Japanese. Perhaps because she had never had children or perhaps because she had had an easier life working for a Dutch family than she would have had as a Lun Dayeh longhouse woman, she looked much younger than her twenty-five years.

  He told Binum that seven of the seventeen Japanese who had come upriver to catch the Americans had been killed by Lun Dayeh in the last several days. It was only a matter of time before Japanese headquarters in Tarakan learned of these killings. Tarakan was already calling for Ama and Mama and the children to be brought back there. Binum must know what that meant. He asked her: Could she find a few girls as beautiful as she was to go out to the big flat rock in the middle of the Pa' Paru and take off all their clothes and lure the heitais?

  Binum found herself torn between the traditional Lun Dayeh and more Western concepts of what was the right thing to do, the right way to behave. To show herself naked in public was totally against both social codes. To appear entirely naked, even before one's husband, was as shocking to the Lun Dayeh as having sex in public would be. But Binum knew her Bible stories, thanks to the missionaries, and she remembered the story of the beautiful Jewish widow Judith who had dressed in her finest clothes, gone to the Assyrians' camp to seduce their general Holofernes and had emerged from his tent with his severed head. This was just like that, wasn't it? Although it might involve trickery, even treachery, it was not actual lying. Surely these Japanese who had killed Reverend Willfinger and the others, and now wanted to kill Ama and Mama Makahanap and their children, were the enemies of the God-fearing. Also, she was confident that Ama would not ask her to do something wrong. Indeed, she would not have felt right questioning the orders of her acknowledged superior; the Lun Dayeh obeyed their leaders. She felt she had no choice—nor did she want one.

  She thought Ama's plan was a good one for distracting the heitais. She had lived among foreigners long enough to know the effect of a naked woman's body on the imagination of foreign men. She knew the flat rock Ama mentioned. It was a favorite place for the Long Berang women and girls to bathe and wash their clothes. She had washed the American soldiers' uniforms there. Eager to go ahead while she had the courage, she immediately went to ask a few of her closest friends in the Long Berang longhouses to do this with her: Ganit and Kafit, who were young and single, and Ilau Padan, who was already married. They were all beautiful by anyone's standards. The three young women admired Binum, who was older and very knowledgeable but also kind and generous. They readily agreed to this extraordinary request without sharing with Binum their worry that, if there were a firefight, they might also be "bathed in bullets."

  The river glittered in the midday sun, although the water was coffee brown from the mud. It was more than waist deep by the big flat rock, deep enough to slow down waders. At Makahanap's request, several Dayak men brought heavy iron and brass drums and stationed themselves on either side of the river. Some of these instruments had taken hundreds of years to reach the interior from coastal Brunei and had oral histories telling of their transfer from one person or tribe to another. Now, they would have a new story to tell.

  Binum and the other girls waded out to the flat rock and let their sarongs slide down to their feet; they began to dance naked to the sound of the drums. While they danced, Makahanap's son Christiaan and some of the Long Berang Dayaks silently slipped under the bridge and swam to the shore near the Presswood house, where the heitais were staying.

  A houseguest of the Makahanaps' named Santoni, a middle-aged Javanese woman, was in on the plot. She walked across the swaying bridge to the Presswood house and spoke in Malay to the heitais, who were staring out of the window, transfixed by the sight. She encouraged them to join the girls in the river. It must be terrible for the heitais to have been without a woman for months, Santoni said. She assured them that they would be allowed to have sex with the girls, after the dance was over.

  Binum, seeing that the Japanese had not yet approached, slid off the rock like a mermaid and waded toward the riverbank nearest the Presswood house. Her satin-pale body, dappled by the sunlight coming through the overarching trees, was covered below the waist by the opaque water. Calling out in Malay, she urged the heitais to join her: "Mari, mari, mandi dan menari"—Come, come, bathe and dance—she said, before turning back toward the flat rock.

  "She was so beautiful," Makahanap later recalled, "too much for the poor men." One of the soldiers gave a deep-throated shout, pu
lled off his outer garments and ran out of the door to join the girls in the river. He waded out awkwardly in his underpants and was about to reach the flat rock when a Dayak stabbed him dead from behind. By then, Christiaan and his Lun Dayeh accomplices had crept inside the Presswood house.

  Christiaan seized the machine gun from the room where the other two heitais were still staring out the window while Santoni discreetly left the scene. The two Japanese turned to see him and tried to grab him, but there were Dayaks everywhere. Quickly, the heitais were stabbed and their heads cut off.

  The heitais' blood pumped out and stained the hardwood floor and the whitewashed walls of the Presswood house. No one bothered to clean it up.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The D.O. Declares War

  Now in the fourth day of the head feast, the Dayaks at Long Metuil were sleeping off the night's borak during the quiet time of the day. Suddenly, the Yanks heard the barks and grunts from below that announced visitors. They looked up to see Makahanap and Pangeran Lagan and his warriors coming toward them. Lagan, with the bombardier wings still pinned to his hat, caught Phil's eye and grinned. Makahanap, also looking pleased, announced that all the Japanese in Long Berang—and, indeed, in the entire Mentarang District—had been killed, and that the next morning he would help the airmen move back to Long Berang.