Above the Thunder (22 page)

There were perhaps fifteen or twenty huts of bamboo, grass, and poles, standing seven or eight feet above the ground on posts. Each hut's only opening was in its floor. The central area around which the huts stood in a ragged oval was damp, black earth, patted flat by hundreds of bare feet, and the whole place had a dank, sour smell that made me lose all interest in hanging around.

But out in the middle of that central plaza we stood, and Colonel Truxtun yelled, “Hello!” several times without getting any response. At last, a pole with projections on it to make a crude ladder poked down from the floor door of the largest building, and down it climbed a most interesting individual who proved to be the headman of the village. He was about five feet four, I guessed, barrel-chested and bandy-legged, and black as human beings ever get to be. He looked to be an extremely hale and hardy sixty years; the whites of his eyes were yellow, his teeth black, and his tongue and gums bright red from chewing betel nut. His only garment was a rawhide thong tied tightly around his hips and supporting a wicked-looking knife as well as a little doohickey to cover his otherwise utter nakedness. His chest, upper arms, shoulders, and face were marked with patterns of welts formed by inserting clay under the skin, and his earlobes were long loops of skin that hung down to his shoulders. His hair was short and kinky and black with liberal signs of gray.

He clambered agilely down the pole ladder and walked toward us like a man with a purpose. He greeted Colonel Truxtun in a manner cautious but not unfriendly, and they began to converse in the pidgin English Truxtun had learned from a book and was using for the first time. He wasted no time in giving the chief a little gift of a tropical chocolate bar and offering to trade more of such stuff for some fresh papaya and some seashells of a certain kind that he wanted.

Very soon other men appeared, one or two at a time, until a large group stood around us. Most of them were younger, and all were armed, most of them having spears or bows and arrows. I saw no guns. They dressed the same as the headman, but few were so ugly as he and very
few had the welts and the stretched earlobes, which Truxtun later told me identified a man who had distinguished himself by killing an enemy in battle, then cooking and eating his flesh. Only the old men had such markings.

These men stood by and watched and listened, having very little to say, and saying that in undertones so as not to disturb the two big men who were negotiating a trade. But there appeared an old woman, the first female we'd seen. We guessed that she must be the headman's head woman, for she would dart in through the crowd to his side and talk loudly and harshly to him, gesturing vehemently. He'd stand and listen patiently until she finished and left again, then he'd resume talking.

As the trading session proceeded, other women and children began to appear, all coming from a brushy area at the mouth of a ravine just outside the village, where I suppose they had concealed themselves until their menfolk had discovered the intentions of the visiting white men. The children were stark naked, the women nearly so, with spindly limbs and distended stomachs. Like the men, most of them had plentiful scabs of sores on their legs. They assembled soundlessly on the outskirts of the group of men.

As the crowd thickened, so did the atmosphere, and I was eager to depart long before Truxtun was. As we finally headed back across the path toward the airstrip, I led the way. The colonel followed me, and the chief was right behind him, followed by all the other men and then the women and children, everyone strung out in single file.

At the strip, the colonel continued to engage the chief in conversation, and they got onto the subject of big snakes. Truxtun asked whether the people ever hunted python, and the chief eagerly assured him that they did. When asked how they went about it, he turned to one of the young men and spoke a few words to him. The fellow was one of the best looking of the men, relatively tall, his slender dark-brown body strong and supple, looking cleaner and healthier than most, and intelligence was evident in his dark face. He walked away from the group a few paces to the expanse of tall kunai grass at the edge of the airstrip, and then, suddenly, he went into character, like an actor on a stage.

The young hunter tensed, crouched slightly, and with his bow in one
hand and an arrow in the other, carefully parting the chest-high grass ahead of him, he began stalking his prey, moving very deliberately, step by step, alert and intent upon the ground ahead of him.

Suddenly he stopped, crouched lower, his gaze fixed on an imaginary big snake hidden from us in the grass. Quick as a flash, he fixed the arrow to the bow and let fly. Instantly he whipped another arrow from the rawhide quiver hanging from his waist cord, and with quick aim, fired it at the supposedly wounded python. He hastily fitted a third arrow to the bow; this one he did not fire but held ready as he very cautiously circled and examined the phantom serpent until certain that it was, indeed, slain. Then he slung his bow, drew his knife, and went through the motions of skinning the python. That done, he returned to our group, smiling broadly and obviously proud of his achievement.

Colonel Truxtun made a deal with the chief by which, on the following Sunday, one week hence, the natives would take the colonel and me on a python hunt. And then we boarded our L-4 and flew back to Fortification Point. All the way, Truxtun sat in the rear seat holding in his lap a steel helmet half full of his precious seashells, with the putrid remains of their former residents still inside. I flew with my head out the window.
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In spite of abhorring all snakes, I was truly looking forward to that python hunt. But it was not to be. There were plans for a change of scenery for the 33d Division, and Colonel Truxtun's G-2 duties prevented his going, so that let me out, too. But I did go up to the fighter strip the following Sunday for reasons of my own. I had devised a way of fastening my Australian submachine gun on the wing struts of my L-4 and firing it by wire from the cabin. Of course, I couldn't do that at Fortification Point, so I flew up to the old Japanese strip, mounted my weapon, and proceeded to fire up some ammo on rocks out in the surf. For a short-range gun hastily rigged up like that, it did pretty well. At least I didn't shoot myself down.

As I landed again to dismount my armament, I saw our friend, the chief, followed by his entire band, coming across the long path toward
the strip. By the time I had my gun put away, they were standing around the plane. The chief looked about with a puzzled expression and then spoke to me.

“Whah numbah one white mahstah?”

I knew he was wondering why Colonel Truxtun wasn't there for the python hunt, but I didn't know how to explain to him. The best I could do, trying to imitate the colonel's pidgin talk, was to say, “Numbah one white mahstah,'e no come.”

I don't know whether he understood me or not, but he looked most displeased, and he spoke harshly this time.

“Whah numbah one white mahstah?”

The friendliness that had characterized our earlier contacts with these people was obviously deteriorating rapidly, and I was acutely conscious of the fact that I was forty miles from any white man and nobody knew where I'd gone. I had my submachine gun but it was stowed in the plane. I had a .45 on my hip, but common sense told me that if they were so minded the men could have me drawn and quartered before I could even get it out of its holster. While I knew that missionaries had influenced these people in years past, I could not help remembering Colonel Truxtun's explanation of the patterns of welts on the faces and bodies of the older men, and thinking of the long abandoned missionary residence up in the hills. But I could think of no words with which to explain and apologize to the chief, who quite evidently was highly offended by Truxtun's failure to show up as agreed. And here was I, a lonely, bedraggled, and insignificant little lieutenant who couldn't even communicate.

“Numbah one white master,'e no come.”

No doubt about it now, the chief was highly teed off. Glowering in a very unpleasant way, he growled a few words to the men crowding around us, and they responded in kind, shuffling restlessly. Every man was armed with a bow or a spear, and each also had a knife of some variety, and I had a feeling that they would not hesitate to use them on me under present conditions. In short, I was scared, but I don't think I showed it. I tried not to show undue concern, but the situation called for some decisive action on my part.

I was standing beside the open door of my plane, the native men crowding close around me, the women and children pressing in all around even the tail of the L-4. Ignoring whatever more the chief might have had to say, I pulled the propeller through a couple of times and got it ready to start. I reached inside, cracked the throttle, and turned on the magneto switch. Then I waved my hand in a gesture that told them to stand back, and bracing my foot against the right wheel, pulled the prop through from the rear. The engine caught immediately, and I crawled inside.

All this activity on my part had momentarily taken their minds off the colonel, I guess, for they had just stood and watched. Now I revved the engine and they began to move back. I swung the tail around and they scattered out of the way. As soon as there was a path open, I was off—and I never returned.

The Massewang was a fine stream for bathing. It was swift and clear and cool as it hurried down out of the hills, and just below our airstrip was a rocky rapids in which we air section people had lots of fun while most of the other personnel of Div Arty seemed to prefer the salt water down where the supply boats came in. But one sad event is related in my mind to the Massewang. One day as several of us were swimming there, someone noticed that Hal Davis was floating off down the swift current, evidently unconscious. He was pulled out and taken to the medics, and his flying days were over. As I recall, they diagnosed his trouble as epilepsy. He returned stateside and became a maintenance officer at Post Field, Fort Sill. Dorie and I visited him and his wife when we got back to the States.

Coming back from the river one day, one of the boys found a human skull, stuck up on a stake in a corner of our tent, and we had many jokes at the expense of “George,” as we called him. While we played cards and talked and laughed, George gazed solemnly and sadly at the ground from his place in the shadowy corner and never spoke a word. Eventually, one of the less sensitive souls in the outfit got the idea that
an appropriate fate for George, as one of our enemies, would be placing him in our urinal as a target of sorts, and so there he went. That became George's salvation, for a visiting doctor recognized that George was not Japanese but Caucasian and, therefore, undoubtedly one of the Australian soldiers who had died in a fight with the Japanese there beside the Massewang.

Well, some of us had felt ashamed at treating the remains of any human being the way we had George, and now, knowing that he was one of our allies, we were horrified in retrospect at our own callousness. How could we make amends? We should have turned him over to the Australian officers across the river and let them handle it, but I guess we didn't think of that. Bill Brisley, as he often did, came up with what we all thought was an excellent idea, in this case a very romantic end for poor George.

On nights when the moon was bright, we sometimes went out over the ocean off Fortification Point and practiced our limited aerobatic routines. Brisley's idea was to clean George up and take him out there and bury him at sea. And so he did it, sending the pitiful remains of some Australian mother's lost son plunging from an American L-4, far down into the shimmering silver of a moonlit tropical sea.

The incident of George made me recall a lecture we'd had while attend ing the jungle warfare instructors' school on Oahu. The lecturer was an infantry battalion commander of another division that had recently participated in the conquest of one of the Japanese-occupied atolls in the Pacific. In the battle, he had won particular notice, and he related several bloody tales of the fight, but his principal theme was “hate the enemy!” The idea was that men would be motivated to fight better if they fiercely hated the enemy, and this officer's aim was to instill some of that hatred. To help do that, he brought along a skeleton, which he suspended from a wooden rack beside his lectern. He informed us that this was the remains of a Japanese soldier killed in the recent battle, and from time to time during his lecture he cursed and reviled the bones and viciously spat on them.