The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [60]
What they might have craved more than anything else was salt. Lutjens later wrote, “The sweat in that drippy, oozy place took all the salt out of our bodies.” He dreamed of “good salty bacon or a dill pickle.”
Up until Laruni, food consisted of Australian bully beef and half a canteen cup of rice, which the soldiers stored in a sock that they knotted at the top. Even the hungriest of men considered the bully beef too vile to eat. Some, like Lutjens, could stomach it only when mixed with rice in what Lutjens called a “hobo’s stew.” If Lutjens ate it plain, he got “sick as a dog.” But at Laruni, Company E got lucky. One morning, a pilot making a drop dove dangerously low, skimming over the tops of the trees. Men rushed to recover the boxes, dreaming of the possibility of finding a chocolate bar. According to Lutjens, a guy “would sell” his “soul for a chocolate bar.” They thought they were fantasizing, when instead of chocolate, they found another treat—hard candy! Lutjens wrote that the candy dropped “from the jungle vines overhead like a hail storm,” and was scattered across the rain forest from “hell to breakfast.”
The soldiers’ joy at discovering the candy was short-lived. Beyond Laruni, wrote Lutjens, the march became “one green hell.” Still, Company E kept moving, motivated by a curious sense of pride. “No one,” according to Lutjens, “wanted to get passed by another unit.”
As bad as Company E had it, the men of Companies F, G, and H had it worse. The boots of nearly two hundred soldiers—those of Company E—had turned every square foot of trail into something resembling a pig wallow.
It was man against jungle, and it was obvious to Don Stout, a platoon sergeant from Muskegon, Michigan, that the jungle was winning. Stout had joined the Michigan National Guard in 1939 at the age of fifteen. He had never liked school anyway and if the recruiter sensed that Stout was too young, he chose to ignore the Guard’s eighteen-year-old requirement. Stout was proud of his new uniform, though he had to contend with people who called him a freeloader living off the federal government.
When Stout joined the Guard, he never envisioned himself slogging through the jungles of New Guinea.
“You should have seen ’em,” Stout says. “Guys were straggled out so far along the trail. When they were too sick or tired to move, they would set up a pup tent—if they hadn’t tossed it already—and pray that they would get better before the last company came past.”
At twenty-five, Don Ritter, a staff sergeant also from Muskegon, was something of an old-timer, especially compared to Stout. But he certainly did not lack for strength. “One hundred and seventy-five pounds and not an ounce of fat,” he says. “That’s how much I weighed when I started.” When the malarial fevers hit, though, they laid waste to his body. The first full-blown attack struck one day out of Nepeana. Ritter could not understand it. The jungle was a humid 100 degrees, but his body shook as if he were back in Muskegon walking shirtless on a chilly October morning. By the time the medic was able to check him out two days later, Ritter’s chill had turned into a 103-degree fever. On the trail he walked like a zombie. His buddy Russell Buys helped him out, but Buys was himself exhausted. Ritter’s legs were buckling on him, and his teeth rattled like a train going over the tracks. He drifted in and out of delirium. Thousands of parasites were reproducing at will inside his liver and exploding into his bloodstream.
“I don’t know if I can make it,” Ritter told Buys. “I’m sicker than a dog. Just leave me here.”
Buys, though, insisted that his friend keep moving. “And somehow,” Ritter says, “I did. I didn’t have a choice. It was walk or die. They couldn’t get you out. Evacuation just wasn’t a possibility.”
Stanley Jastrzembski says, “Everybody had malaria, and everybody was throwing stuff out of their packs. The guys with quinine pills were popping them like gumballs. Things got really bad when guys started getting