The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [50]
Each and every American soldier had heard the stories: The Japanese were jungle supermen who liked to attack in the night. They would slither through the forest and disembowel a man or slit his throat and then crawl back to their units without being noticed.
After drinking at the stream, the men slowed to a snail’s pace, their bellies full of water. Medendorp, Keast, and Schmidt did their best to keep them moving. It must have been unnerving, though—already the Wairopi Patrol was being undone by the jungle.
The first steep ascent nearly killed them. Boice had reported that soldiers would need hobnail boots. Rubber heels, he said, “were of no value.” It did not take long for the Wairopi Patrol to discover just how right Boice was. Men slipped, stumbled, and fell, and got up, only to slip and stumble and fall again. Some leaned on wooden sticks slashed from trees. Others used creepers and vines and ferns, which cut and tore their hands, to pull themselves up the steep inclines. Parrots screeched as if heckling them.
According to Medendorp, the trail “told a tale of exhaustion and misery.” Strong young men in their late teens and early twenties, men hardened by the Depression and manual labor, high school and college athletes, lay at the side of the trail in a stream of ochre-colored mud, cursing their fate. Their legs had given out, their chests heaved and they gasped for air. Some retched, coughing up volumes of water.
Later Medendorp would write: “We had to go slowly. We struggled through thick tangles of brush, over steep hills, over slippery stream bottoms. The column was like a long snake. Our sick were in the rear, staggering along with the help of the faithful aid men.”
Many of the men opened their packs and discarded what they could: Some things, leather toilet seats, for instance, were ridiculous, a testament to just how little the U.S. Army knew about outfitting its soldiers for jungle warfare. But they threw out essentials, too—soap, towels, extra socks, shelter halves, mosquito netting, blankets, underwear, and raincoats. Later, many of the men would come to regret it. How could they have known that in the mountains a World War I-era raincoat would be worth the two or three extra pounds?
Near dusk a native runner reported that Captain Keast had located a bivouac site two miles up the trail. In different terrain, two miles would have been a cinch. But two miles in New Guinea was like walking fifteen or twenty through the hills of Australia. However, that evening, Medendorp and the main body of the patrol finally limped in. Dusk had fallen and the jungle came alive with shrieking birds, the incessant yodeling of millions of frogs and whistling crickets, cracking branches, and the rustling of leaves. The men’s imaginations were in overdrive. The rain on the forest canopy sounded like footsteps.
Long after the men had curled up like wet dogs under their shelter halves, which were nothing more than two sheets of canvas fastened together at the ridge line, Lieutenant Lester Segal, one of the medical officers assigned to the patrol, walked in with what Medendorp called a “flock of cripples.” The stragglers were soaked, dazed, and weary.
In the few days on the trail, Lieutenant Segal had already proved himself equal to just about any task. He not only carried his pack like the others, but had to lug a heavy load of medical supplies, too. It was a pleasant surprise for Medendorp, who had been nursing a grudge against Segal, and was none too pleased that the lieutenant had been assigned to the patrol. Months before at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, Segal had raked Medendorp’s Service Company sergeant over the coals for keeping a dirty kitchen, and had written a request that the sergeant be busted to private. Medendorp was incensed. The company had been at Fort