The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [51]
Watching Segal in action, though, Medendorp forgave him. There was no denying it; Segal was good. He was strong and imperturbable, part medic, coach, and tough-as-nails drill sergeant.
Segal led his men through the maze of shelter halves and reported to Medendorp. Medendorp expressed concern about the condition of the men. They needed food and water, their sores bandaged, and antibacterial lotion to treat their jungle rot.
This, the patrol’s third night on the trail, was “miserable,” according to Medendorp. The men were unable to build fires and the rain forest canopy choked out what little light the stars might have offered. Frightened men searched in vain for a glimpse of a buddy. Only the carriers slept comfortably. Medendorp wrote that they “constructed frail huts to keep off the rain, built a fire by rubbing sticks and slept naked around the fire like a tangle of snakes.”
A day later, Medendorp and his men reached Arapara, thirty miles inland. The patrol had been making slightly more than seven miles a day, two-thirds of a mile an hour, but Arapara was the gateway to the high mountains, and Medendorp knew that the next fifty miles would be much harder on his men.
Private Boyd Swem felt the chill of the approaching night. After accepting Captain Medendorp’s invitation to join the patrol, Swem acted as Medendorp’s “faithful orderly and friend.” Medendorp recalled that Swem looked like the “most woebegone soldier in the column,” and that “everything seemed to hang loosely on his frame.” Still, each and every night, Swem found the energy to build a fire for Medendorp.
At Arapara, Swem crouched over a small pile of damp wood shavings and struck a match. The shavings caught, but only for a moment. Swem leaned toward a flickering spark and blew, trying to coax a fire. He was an irrepressible, happy-go-lucky character who kept the men entertained along the trail with his constant banter and off-key tenor. But as the fire fizzled, Swem was as irritable as the rest of the men. All around him, men were cursing: There was not a goddamned dry piece of wood in the entire jungle.
Ten minutes later, Swem and the entire patrol stared slack-jawed at what confronted them. All at once flashlights were aimed at a group of soldiers in shredded uniforms. At first, the men of the Wairopi Patrol thought they were seeing ghosts. But they were real enough: thirty-five Australians who had been fighting the Japanese on the Kokoda track thirty miles to the west. Segal opened his aid station. As he tended to the men, their story circulated among the Americans.
The Japanese had cut off the men from the main body of their battalion at Isurava on the Kokoda track. The group’s leader, Captain Ben Buckler, sent a platoon commander to seek help, while he and his men hid out in the hills above Eora Creek. For six days the group lay low, fearing that they would be captured and tortured. They lived off sugar cane and sweet potatoes, not daring to move during daylight. Eventually they set off to the northeast through the jungle in the direction of the coast. Almost three weeks later, Buckler’s group stumbled into the village of Sangai, where the village men carried twelve-foot pig spears. Buckler and his men expected to be killed, and possibly eaten, but instead they were given shelter and food. Buckler left behind his wounded and walked with the rest of his troops back inland.
At Wairopi, he and his men headed up the Kumusi River valley, past Kovio and the Owalama Divide, bound for Jaure. At Jaure, they turned south and headed over the wilderness of the Owen Stanleys, the same terrain that the Wairopi Patrol proposed to navigate. After more than a month of walking, they were already broken men when they entered the mountains, but the peaks north of Arapara nearly killed them.
The sight of Captain Buckler and his troops haunted the men of the Wairopi Patrol. What kind of place was this New Guinea? In a matter of a day, Medendorp’s men had gone from the heat of the