The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [49]
Harding then ordered the men to lighten their loads. They could cut down on their ammunition—twenty rounds per riflemen, eighty rounds for automatic weapons—and leave their “brain buckets” (steel helmets) behind.
As he watched the patrol move out, Harding, who had taught history as an assistant professor at West Point, must have wondered if New Guinea was to be Medendorp’s Gedrosian desert. In 326 B.C. Alexander the Great led his army through the Gedrosian desert in what is now Iran. According to Plutarch, during the sixty-day crossing, Alexander lost three-quarters of his men to exhaustion and starvation.
Strinumu.
It had been only three days and roughly twenty miles into the Wairopi Patrol’s crossing of New Guinea’s Papuan Peninsula, but Captain Medendorp could not shake the feeling that he was on a fool’s errand.
New Guinea was nature gone mad. The trail, what there was of it, was no wider than a garden row of beets, hemmed in by jungle “so dense,” according to Medendorp, “as to afford almost constant shade.” In backbreaking bursts, Medendorp’s men scrambled up and down over a series of forested, hogbacked hills. Their rifles kept slipping off their shoulders. They frothed at the mouth and grunted like pack animals in the choking humidity.
Captain Boice had called the trail “practicable,” but Medendorp knew Boice; Boice did not know the word quit. When Boice boarded the native lugger outside Port Moresby on September 17 for the twenty-four-hour trip to the trailhead, Medendorp was on hand to see him off. If Jim Boice had called the trail “taxing,” Medendorp might have guessed that it would be sheer hell.
Only three days out and already the terrain and climate made a mockery of military order. Seeing the condition of his men, Medendorp must have realized that drastic measures were needed. A devoted officer, it is easy to imagine him walking up and down the line, shouting words of encouragement, coaxing the patrol along. Fortunately, he had one man with him he would not have to coax, and that was Roger Keast.
Keast was head officer of the Antitank Company and Medendorp’s second-in-command. According to Medendorp, Keast was “loved and admired” by everyone who knew him. He was also the perfect complement to Medendorp. Medendorp was a cautious rule maker and follower. Keast was more impulsive. He had great physical strength and charisma and regarded all things military with a healthy dose of skepticism.
At Lansing Central High in Michigan, Keast had been movie-idol handsome and a star athlete—a football, basketball, and track man—famous for returning a fumble for the game’s only touchdown against rival Lansing Eastern. After graduating from Central, he went on to a stellar career in football, basketball, and track at Michigan State. As the fifth fastest quarter-miler in the country, Keast made All-American in 1932. After setting the mile and two-mile relay records, Keast’s team was invited to take part in the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Because of illness, though, the team had to withdraw.
After graduating, Keast worked as a teacher and coach. He was a natural-born motivator, and in 1940 his basketball team at Graveraet High School in Marquette, Michigan, won Michigan’s Upper Peninsula Class B championship. Keast was already a lieutenant in the Army Reserves when in the spring of 1941 he was called up and reported for duty at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana.
North of Strinumu, where the cold, mountain-born Mimani and Lala Rivers feed into the Kemp Welch, Medendorp and Keast stopped for a rest. At any other time of year the soldiers would have been able to fill their canteens, but now the rivers were swollen from recent rains. The water was undrinkable, so men resorted to licking the salt off the palms of their hands and sucking the sweat off their arms, or lapping at the raindrops that dripped from their faces.
Farther down the trail the lead platoon again caught sight of water—according to their simple