The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [61]
The food and water did not help the situation. If there was not a nearby stream or river, men drank from muddy jungle puddles. And often when they reached camp, they were so tired they did not bother to cook their rice. “We just soaked it in water to soften it and then ground it up in our mouths like animals. It was hell on our bellies,” says Jastrzembski.
A stench followed Company G through the jungle. Jastrzembski’s body soured with the smell of encrusted sweat, excrement, and oozing sores. The worst dysentery cases dropped their pants and voided their bowels where they stood, or, like toddlers, fouled themselves as they walked, too tired to take down their pants. Some resorted to cutting the backs out of their pants and relieved themselves whenever nature “called.”
DISEASE HAS ALWAYS been the enemy of armies. MacArthur witnessed this firsthand in the Philippines and, before that, as a divisional commander in World War I, when trench foot and the flu ravaged battalions. In the Philippines, dysentery, ringworm, hookworm, dhobi itch, and especially malaria disabled countless men. By March 1942, the combat efficiency of MacArthur’s troops had fallen by more than 75 percent due to disease and malnutrition. But MacArthur had never encountered anyplace like New Guinea. It was the perfect incubator for a host of debilitating tropical diseases. The bodies of the men—of Stout, Ritter, Jastrzembski, and countless others—who made the march across the Papuan Peninsula coursed with pathogens. Although the dysentery outbreaks might have been avoided through better hygiene, the men were largely defenseless against insect-borne diseases like malaria.
The 32nd Division suffered several types of malaria, especially vivax and falciparum. Vivax debilitated its victims, making them susceptible to potentially lethal secondary infections. Falciparum, vivax’s wicked cousin, sometimes caused men to go mad, and occasionally, if left untreated, caused death. Despite the prevalence of malaria, however, army physicians knew very little about treatment of the disease.
Traditionally, soldiers fighting in malarial regions of the world relied on quinine as a malaria suppressant. An alkaloid extracted from the bark of the cinchona tree, quinine was discovered by Spanish missionaries in the seventeenth century in Peru and Bolivia. Though quinine masks the effects of malaria, it does nothing to cure it, as some of the men of the 2nd Battalion discovered. Quinine was unreliable in more than one way. It had become a sole-source commodity, grown only on the island of Java, which fell to the Japanese in January 1942. Quinine shortages proved disastrous in New Guinea. Eventually, soldiers fighting there would have an alternative—atabrine (quinacrine hydrochloride), which, ironically, had been developed as a synthetic substitute for quinine by the Germans in the early 1930s. In 1939, realizing atabrine’s potential, the United States began a crash program to become independent of foreign sources. But atabrine had its drawbacks. It was so new that medical officers, experimenting with dosage, feared its toxicity and worried about potential “atabrine psychosis.” More basically, soldiers loathed the taste of it. Company commanders trying to enforce a daily regimen were also up against a rumor that atabrine caused impotency and sterility. When their skin took on the yellow hue of an “atabrine tan,” soldiers did not need any more convincing. They were young men who hoped to return to wives and girlfriends. They would take their chances with malaria.
But in October 1942, all that was available to soldiers like Ritter and Jastrzembski was quinine. Without the aid of waterproof containers, though, the quinine was almost impossible to preserve. In the heat and humidity, the pills dissolved in their pockets before they could use them. Some men did not care. The