The Airmen and the Headhunters Read online

  Being at the Mongans' felt to John and Franny like staying with relatives, and the airmen naturally became involved in the activities of the church. There was some kind of service every day, and Sunday morning service was an all-village event. Mongan would ask the airmen to tell about their lives, while he translated for the congregation. The Yanks were happy to participate, and they would join in the singing of "Onward Christian Soldiers," "Down by the Riverside" and—a hymn new to them—"Fishers of Men."

  While staying with the Mongans, John and Franny finally learned where they had landed and where they were now— the northwest part of Dutch Borneo, near the borders of Sarawak and (British) North Borneo. Looking at a map, John saw they were near the center of the island, with the Pacific Ocean to the east and the South China Sea to the west. But the real question was: Where was the war?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Becoming Lun Dayeh

  A week after jumping into the jungle, twenty-one-year-old Sgt. Tom Capin was alone and near death. At six foot five and a good 240 pounds, he had always cut an imposing figure, but now he was gaunt from dehydration and lack of food. Even his red hair, which stuck to his forehead in the overwhelming heat and damp, was beginning to fall out.

  Tom had been the last to jump from the back of the plane, taking with him only his small handgun and a shoulder bag of ammunition. He had landed in the upper branches of a tall mahogany tree and climbed down using the vines that clung to it. Despite his height he was agile, and getting down from the tree presented no problem. Aside from some surface shrapnel wounds on his leg, his body seemed sound—nothing was broken.

  Tom had no idea where in Borneo he was. He thought he heard the sound of airplane engines, and "I had this crazy notion that if there was a Jap base I would steal a plane." He had not walked far before he realized that the noise he heard was not an engine but rather water falling from a stream higher up on a nearby mountain.

  With his handgun at the ready, he set out through the jungle, searching in vain for food, drinking river water that gave him diarrhea and trying to locate the other crew members. A city boy, he would not have known how to catch fish or reptiles or other animals even if he had been able to see them. At night he slept under the trees on the damp earth. He could hear birds and other creatures calling in the mornings, but visibility was very limited by the tall underbrush that spread in all directions, even along the water's edge. Like his crewmates, he had bitter thoughts about the training he had received on how to survive in the jungle. It had all been designed for New Guinea, a very different world from the one where he now found himself.

  "By the eighth day, I was too exhausted and starved to care what became of me; I knew I could not stand another mile of jungle. I found a well-fortified spot where I could hold off onrushing Japs for a while, set my clips nearby and loaded my gun." After sitting there a while, with insects crawling on him and biting him—the sand flies and the leeches were the worst—he felt he had to find somebody, either friend or foe, to bring an end to his untenable situation. So he let off one round from his gun. "If the Japs came, I intended fighting as long as possible, and make sure they would never take me alive. All Air Force men in the Pacific knew what had happened to American airmen forced down in enemy territory."

  The only married man of that B-24 crew except for Franny Harrington, Capin thought of his wife, Betty, and how she would react when she got the inevitable telegram about his being missing in action. He could see her with that telegram, and the image so upset him that he tried his best to dismiss it. He listened hard in an effort to distinguish the different noises of the jungle, in case someone was approaching. As quietly as possible, he picked off a dozen leeches that had climbed up inside his trouser legs. He used his fingers like tweezers so as not to have the loathsome blood-bloated creatures break off under his skin and cause an infection. He noticed that his legs were covered with blood.

  He stood up and tried to remain perfectly still. He was waiting for the enemy to find him when he heard someone call out: "Ho American!"

  With no more warning than that shout, two natives in loincloths carrying blowguns and machetelike swords appeared out of the bush. Tom gave a weak "Hello." The Dayaks dropped their weapons immediately, smiled and ran forward to shake hands. Greatly relieved, Tom dropped his gun and gladly grasped their dark outstretched hands.

  Appearing to recognize the cause of his weakness, the Dayaks took down the woven-reed pouches they wore on their shoulders, brought out leaf-wrapped packets of sticky rice and offered him some. They also had tobacco, which they rolled in a banana leaf to form a crude cigar for him. Tom relaxed as he savored his first food in a week, but he froze when one of the Dayaks reached into a little box for a match to light the cigar. The box was decorated with the emblem of the rising sun. With no Bornean vocabulary, Tom tried to learn from his rescuers where the matches had come from, but he could make nothing out of "their native gibberish."

  After a short rest, when he was strong enough to walk, he let his rescuers lead him to a small hut in a clearing. No one seemed to be living in the hut, but he was given a piece from a length of sugarcane that had been stored there. Trying to eat the cane was like chewing on the business end of a broom until his laughing guides pantomimed that he should just suck the sweetness from it and then spit out the fiber. The sweetness was wonderful and gave him a fresh spurt of energy. Next, the Dayaks walked him farther along in the jungle through scratchy, dense brush, as tall as he was, that pulled at his hair and clothes. Mercifully, they soon emerged near a much bigger native house, high up on stilts above the river.

  Climbing up the notched log to the veranda, Tom found this thatched-roof house full of people. They talked loudly among themselves, and every once in a while a woman or man would come up and touch him on the arm. At first he flinched at the contact, but soon he realized what an oddity he must be to the local people.

  "I learned later that I was the first white man many of them had ever seen. One woman threw cobs of corn on a fire, and was feeding me the most delicious roasted ears, when Kibung, one of the natives who had first found me, refused to let me have more."

  Kibung, a long-limbed young man with complicated black rosettes tattooed on the top of his muscled shoulders, took charge of Tom's welfare from then on. He supervised what Tom ate, letting him have only rice gruel seasoned with deer meat until Tom's system could stand more solid food.

  Tom quickly saw that Kibung knew precisely how to care for a fugitive. It would take some days to learn why: Kibung was a fugitive, too. He was from the famous Iban tribe, the island's most notorious headhunters in the old days, the original "wild men of Borneo" and the biggest tribal group in Sarawak, the British-run territory over the mountains to the west.

  The Iban were mostly found in parts of Borneo nearer the coast, not as far inland or as high up as the Lun Dayeh. The Iban were (to Western eyes, at least) a stunningly handsome people, for the most part taller and longer-limbed than the hill people, but, like them, they had nearly hairless bodies and honey-colored skin that was often tattooed. Unlike the socially hierarchical Lun Dayeh and other upriver people, however, the Iban are uncompromisingly egalitarian. They are also famously competitive and self-confident.

  Kibung, who radiated Iban self-confidence and ease with this foreign red-haired giant, had fled over the border after killing some Japanese occupiers in his home village, which was in the Limbang District of northwest Sarawak, not far inland from Brunei Bay. Tom never learned exactly why Kibung had killed the Japanese, but the Iban were among the most anti-Japanese of Borneo's ethnic groups, being impatient with people who required subservient behavior of them. The frequent Japanese order that the natives bow before them would have been cause enough to engender murderous Iban thoughts. But this past year, as food had grown scarcer, the Japanese demands for the Iban's rice, and their commandeering of the young men for labor and the young women for sex, had made them utterly intolerable.

  Once over the border in
to Dutch Borneo, Kibung had kept going inland until he found himself on the Pa' Ogong, a stream that joined the mountainous, uppermost reaches of the Mentarang River. He eventually came to the Pa' Ogong longhouse. There he met and married a Lun Dayeh woman. Their baby boy was now six months old.

  While the headmen and the village elders were at the longhouse, Kibung and his wife and baby and many of the other longhouse residents were in individual family huts in the midst of their rice fields at this time in the farming year. They were weeding (chiefly women's work) and trying to protect the rice crop from the birds that feed on the rice grains and the fruit bats that steal the flowers and fruit from the fruit trees. Both men and women fought to protect their rice crop as it grew, trying to keep all sorts of vermin from feeding on the plant roots.

  Tom was brought by Kibung to a hut near the one Kibung shared with his wife and baby. A woman—who he later learned was the sister of the longhouse chief—was designated to cook for him at the longhouse and bring food to his hut. She was able to speak Malay because she had attended a mission school for two years. That gave Tom the opportunity to use the Dutch/Malay/English word list that had survived his parachute drop.

  Kibung would invite the American every evening after dinner to come to his hut so he could teach him how to speak and understand Lun Dayeh. Kibung's first instructions to Tom had been to stop wearing army boots and go barefoot. As Tom understood it, Kibung's pantomime said: "Boots mean white man; barefoot, just another Lun Dayeh." This was not strictly true. Tom's feet were too big and his toes not splayed enough for a Lun Dayeh, but at least his footprints would not leap out to a Japanese or coastal collaborator the way boot or shoe prints would have done.

  The Iban, having learned the Lun Dayeh language himself so recently, was an ideal teacher. While his wife and baby slept, he would sit with Tom next to the fire and teach him one word or phrase at a time, using gestures and acting everything out. Tom found that vocabulary alone could take him further in this tongue than in Indo-European languages, there being no genders, cases, tenses or plurals to complicate matters. With Kibung to help him, Tom made rapid progress.

  Tom was, in a sense, benefiting from the fact that his parents had been dirt-poor throughout much of his childhood. During the Great Depression, his father, a hardworking electrician, would find himself without a job each time the plant where he was working closed down, obliging the family to move. Tom had learned quickly how to adapt to new surroundings.

  One of their homes, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, had been destroyed when the St. Mary's River overflowed its banks. Tom recalled being rescued by his uncle Wilbur, who came by their house in a beautiful car with the water up to the running boards. His parents took in another uncle to help pay the rent, and he stayed with them for years, accompanying them from house to house. Another time, he and his parents moved in with his grandmother until a family quarrel forced them out on their own again. Once, they lived in a mostly black neighborhood where Tom found that most of his black neighbors "were much the same as I was."

  All through his childhood, Tom had few friends because he tended to try to disguise his unease as an outsider by being bossy. But he had been a good student. He had managed to complete high school despite all the moves, which had put him a year behind. Thanks to his excellent physical coordination, he had excelled at running and swimming, solo sports that rewarded endurance. His mother was a conscientious housekeeper and his father was a handy amateur carpenter. Tom had absorbed from them some useful survival skills, though those skills had not included how to find food in the jungle.

  With Kibung to guide him, Tom was determined to be "the best Lun Dayeh I could be." He noticed that at mealtimes while he sat on a mat on the floor with his legs stretched out before him, the others squatted on their haunches, with their posteriors an inch or two off the floor. This crouching position, which looked so comfortable when the Dayaks did it for hours at a time, was less so for Tom. It took long practice before he could stay that way for more than a few minutes without his legs and thighs aching.

  It was easier to learn how to eat the way the others did, using only two or three fingers of the right hand, with a stiff leaf as a plate and a gourd as a serving spoon. Eating what was served him was harder, but he soon found he could manage swallowing one of the Lun Dayeh delicacies, roasted grasshoppers. Tom found they weren't that bad if he didn't think about what he was eating. The hunters would bring back meat from a dozen different kinds of jungle animals. The meals might also include a bewildering variety of strange fruits and vegetables. Few of them appealed to Tom, but he did his best, quickly realizing that good manners required his appearing to eat a lot and enjoy it, though one was expected to end the meal with a little bit of rice left uneaten.

  Rice was the mainstay and sometimes the only food in a meal, and he could never work up a hunger to match the enormous mounds the chief's sister brought him. Still, he found even rice could be appetizing when stuffed with raw sugar into a section of bamboo and cooked to a perfumed tenderness in glowing charcoal.

  The next problem for his hosts was how to clothe a giant. Tom's uniform had not survived the week of continual dampness in the jungle; it was torn everywhere, the fabric was full of mold and rot, the seams full of lice. An extra-long loincloth was made for him out of bark cloth. Kibung taught him how to put on this loincloth and how to undo it in the river when he bathed, twice a day. He watched Kibung and learned to keep his genitals modestly from view while he cleaned himself with suds from a particular tree bark. He then wound the long cloth again around his waist and between his legs before leaving the water. In the heat, the loincloth dried quickly.

  The sun was not very strong in the early morning and near dusk, and there was generally so much rain and cloud cover that Tom soon learned he need not worry about sunburn, redhead though he was.

  Often, when Tom went to the stream to bathe or swim, Kibung's baby—now called Tom in the airman's honor—would cry to come with him. The baby had been covered with sores when Tom first had seen him, but now, thanks to some Palmolive soap from Tom's flight kit, the baby's skin was smooth.

  It warmed Tom's heart to see the baby reaching out to him. Tom had taught swimming at a YMCA, though never to anyone so young as little Tom, and he would bring the baby along in his arms and play with him in the water if there seemed to be no danger of the Japanese or their henchmen coming by.

  There were no signs yet of anyone nosing around looking for Tom, though Kibung said he had heard that the Japanese were looking for four other airmen who had landed on another branch of the Mentarang, near Long Kasurun. Tom was anxious about the safety of his crewmates, but he did not want to leave Pa' Ogong where he felt so well looked after.

  Kibung, who worried that he himself still might be a target of the Japanese, was anxious to show Tom how to hide in a thicket without being seen or heard. First, though, he had to show Tom how to get around in the tropical mountains. It seemed almost impossibly complicated to Tom. The Lun Dayeh never seemed to take a straight path, except up and down hills.

  Kibung could sympathize with Tom's problem. The Iban were not great walkers like these Lun Dayeh hill people. The Iban preferred to travel by dugout canoe and had good, wide rivers that made such transport relatively easy. The rivers here were full of rocks and waterfalls and the land had many unexpected ridges and gullies that twisted back on themselves.

  With few exceptions the hilltops all looked alike to Tom, as did the rest of the landscape. Kibung, who had recently been taught by his father-in-law how to find his way in this unfamiliar landscape, eagerly passed on what he had learned to Tom. He warned Tom that in this terrain it was easy even for Lun Dayeh to get lost or at least to engage in long, heated arguments about which was the right way to go. He pointed out the different kinds of soil under their feet. It was soft and slimy and covered with moss if they were higher up the mountains and sandy if they were lower down. He made Tom notice where the stones were big and few or small and many. H
e said that often the name of a river or stream or mountain accurately described what the place was like, so that the more Lun Dayeh words Tom learned, the easier jungle travel would be.

  In the midst of what seemed to be total wilderness, Kibung would occasionally point out a fruit tree only to warn Tom that the fruit of that tree could not be taken without permission of the owner. How did he know that someone had claimed that tree? Kibung would point to the mark of ownership, a main stem with a branch twisted perpendicular to it at the base of the tree. Or the owner might have formed a cross with two sticks and stuck it into the ground at the foot of the tree. If Tom and Kibung came across a tree with four sticks intertwined to form a square, Kibung would smile and offer Tom a fruit if it were ripe, saying that the sign meant the tree belonged to the nearest village and anybody from that village could help himself to the fruit.

  Kibung showed Tom different kinds of plants and explained their uses, some to make sleeping mats, some to make string or rope, some to make baskets, some to make fish traps. He showed Tom a sago palm. Its leaves could be used for thatching, while the pith of the young palm shoots made a delicious vegetable and the mature pith could be boiled to make a starchy pudding. He said that the sago palms were so prized that an indignant owner of a tree had once speared a young man for taking some of the shoots without permission.

  Once, when they saw a beehive up in a tall tree, Kibung said it was a pity that they could not risk attracting the attention of possible enemies by using a torch to drive out the bees. He said that anybody was free to take a single honey hive. But if there were many beehives together, high up on a very tall, straight tree, collecting them would become the object of a joint expedition by the men of the village.

  Kibung put his greatest effort into making clear that if Tom could learn to be still and quiet in the jungle without being distracted by leeches or ants or flies or mosquitoes, he would be invisible to the Japanese or people in league with them, such as the Malay police sent upriver occasionally to spy for Mustapa al-Bakri, the Malay administrative official based in Malinau. He said Tom would also be able to hunt animals this way.