The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [48]
Now, Medendorp and his men were preparing for the day’s march. In the blue-green haze, they yawned and stretched, and shaded their eyes from the glare of the tropical morning. A few were shaving. Who knew when they would get the chance again? Native carriers with vines tied around their ankles for traction shinnied up long, bare trunks to the tops of coconut trees, where they cut off coconuts and threw them down to waiting GIs.
Some of the other carriers, using fiber ropes, were tying bags of food to poles fashioned out of saplings, which they would carry on their shoulders, two men to a pole, one in front and one in back. An Australian sergeant barked at the carriers and told anyone willing to listen, “You gotta treat them with a firm hand, or they’ll run all over you.”
Medendorp had not had much experience with natives, but he had watched other Australians manage natives, and he knew that he did not like this sergeant’s style. Besides, he understood that the patrol, as he would later write, “depended on them utterly,” and they were to be treated as kindly as possible.
An old native man collected stray cigarette butts, taking a few remaining puffs. Other natives sat on their haunches passing a bamboo pipe in which they smoked a pungent trade tobacco. They were all fabulously decorated and tattooed, and the soldiers looked on as if they were watching an exotic movie; their eyes, according to Medendorp, “popped out at the sight.” The native men wore lap-laps—colorful skirts with a waistband and a small codpiece—shell earrings and strings of shells around their necks and woven bracelets of dyed fiber high on their muscular arms. Their teeth were stained a deep red from chewing betel nut. Their bare feet were broad and calloused. Pigs, the natives’ prized possessions, snorted and trotted around casually, as if they were used to having the run of the place. When the bony hunting dogs ventured too close, the men kicked at them and shooed them away. The native women and children remained out of sight.
The men of the Wairopi Patrol oiled their weapons and sorted through their fieldpacks. They moved in slow motion, already listless from the heat. Sergeant Ralph Schmidt watched them. Schmidt was a bear of a man who had grown up on a farm in Coopersville, Michigan. Baling hay, he could outwork any man in the county. If Medendorp needed to rely on someone to keep the men on their toes, it was him.
When General Harding arrived in Nepeana by jeep over Michigan Avenue, he, like everyone who tried to negotiate the road, was splattered with mud and dripping sweat. No matter; he was eager to hear of the patrol’s ten-mile march from Kalikodobu to Nepeana. Medendorp did not intend to paint a pretty picture; he knew that Harding would want the unvarnished truth.
Medendorp told General Harding that for many of his men the trail had been a nightmare. The men of the Wairopi Patrol carried eighty pounds from “the skin out”: the clothes on their backs, their backpacks, ten-pound M-1 rifles, two bandoliers of ammunition, and pineapple grenades. It was too much weight. Under a battering tropical sun, through jungle and rolling savanna country with mosquitoes teeming in the long grass, they walked sluggishly. Nothing in their training—no twenty-five-mile hike through the tablelands of Australia, no Louisiana Maneuvers—could have prepared them for the strain of it.
Medendorp’s assessment of that first day must have left Harding uneasy. Harding could see General MacArthur’s grand plan for an overland assault collapsing before his eyes. He instructed Medendorp to assemble his men, and did his best to rally them, reminding them of their crucial task. Only thirty miles to the west, on the Kokoda track, the Australian army was battling against the Japanese.