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By Root 803 0

over tier after tier of sharp mountain peaks, and dangerous descents on slippery trails. Sometimes men lost their balance and tumbled into the jungle. When they struggled to their feet, they were covered in half-inch-long leeches. Getting them off after they had attached themselves was not only a chore, but the leeches left small, stinging red wounds that, if not treated, invited infection. The men also discovered that the forest teemed with something like stinging nettles. The natives called it “salat,” and rubbed the leaf on tired muscles to relieve soreness. They had to choose carefully, though—just a touch from the wrong salat leaf left behind a painful red rash.

Massive trees with trunks the size of army jeeps, adorned with lianas and wrapped in a swarm of vines resembling large pythons, flanked the trail. At first the men marveled at them, but less than an hour into the hike, they were incapable of admiration. The faint hunting trail rose nearly straight up, and soon they were on all fours, slopping through the mud, grabbing at roots, trees, ferns, bushes, sharp-edged leaves, anything they could grasp to keep from falling backward down the slippery mountain. Everything they reached for came equipped with spurs or thorns or tiny but sharp bristles, and often swarms of angry red ants.

Medendorp had to keep his troops moving. “We were marching,” he wrote, “again with only the rations we could carry…. If we couldn’t get to the next dropping ground…we would be stuck in the jungle without supplies.”

Two days out of Laruni, after a series of false summits, surrounded by frigid, swirling mists, the Wairopi Patrol confronted the highest point on the trail, the 9,500-foot Mount Suwemalla, which sat in the midst of the cloud forest, a strange, icy, god-forsaken place where the sun never shone. Glowing moss and phosphorescent fungus covered every tree, and subterranean rivers roared beneath the men’s feet. They were convinced that the peak was haunted and promptly dubbed it Ghost Mountain.

Ghost Mountain—the men could not wait to leave it behind. Soaked in sweat and trembling from the cold and rain, which “fell without ceasing,” Medendorp’s patrol began its descent. “At one place,” Medendorp wrote later, “we right-stepped over the face of a stone cliff with our bellies pressed against the stone and our arms outstretched like a Moses in prayer…. It is still a miracle to me that all of our men got over that point safely.” As darkness fell, the patrol made it to level ground. Medendorp continued, “Finally, we reached the bottom and made camp beside a clear running stream, and in a constant rain.” Too exhausted to prepare camp or to build fires, they ate their rations cold and shivered in the chilly night air. As much as they had hated the heat of Nepeana, the men longed to be warm again.

By noon of the next day, the patrol reached Suwari. Medendorp wrote that the village’s “wild” natives fled in terror. Despite the probability of fleas, the native huts looked too warm and dry to pass up, so Medendorp halted the patrol. They would spend the rest of the day and the night in the village. Then Medendorp issued a warning: “No souvenirs.” Nothing was to be touched. The soldiers were to leave tobacco behind as a thank-you. Medendorp wanted the people to know they could trust the American soldiers.

Medendorp’s precaution was a smart one. The patrol had reached the north side of the mountains, and that meant the possibility of Japanese. The last thing the patrol needed was angry natives who could report its presence to the Japanese and spoil the entire plan—or worse yet, get a lot of people killed.

In the middle of October 1942, many New Guinea natives had still not allied themselves with either the Japanese or the Americans and the Australians. They were waiting for the outcome of the early battles and watching to see who treated them best. It was an unsentimental calculus on their part. They wanted, simply, to side with the winning army in order to minimize the war’s impact on their people.

That night, the eight remaining natives