The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [64]
Laruni revived the men, but they had no time to linger; they needed to be back on the trail, moving as fast as they could in the direction of Jaure.
A day out of Laruni, Sam DiMaggio was disconcerted by the change of weather. In the lowland jungles he had been as hot as he was when he stoked the stoves at the Malleable Iron Company. Now, he was hiking in his sweater to cut the cold.
Two days out, somber gray clouds slid down from the mountains, and it began to rain—a cold, lashing rain that must have reminded Corporal Carl Stenberg of an early spring day on Lake Michigan.
Stenberg had worked on and off with his cousins on the big lake as a commercial fisherman. It was a tough, cold, dangerous way to make a living, especially in early spring and late fall, twenty miles out, with a set of thirty nets. But it was the Depression, too, and people did what they could to get by. If a storm blew in, especially out of the north where the fetch had over a hundred miles to build, they would have to make a run for dry land. Stenberg had seen his share of storms, more times than he cared to count. Still, he never got used to them.
Stenberg had joined the Guard to escape a hard, uncertain life on Lake Michigan and because he did not want to be drafted. He feared he would be one of the first guys chosen and the Selective Service Act contained a sentence about serving six months after the end of the conflict. Stenberg did not like that clause. “When it’s over it’s over,” he thought.
The day after he and his buddy O’Donnell O’Brien joined the Guard, they were inducted into federal service. The toughest part about the whole thing was telling his girlfriend Frances. They had been going steady since 1939, and he had not mentioned anything to her about joining up. A week later, Stenberg was forced to say good-bye to Frances, and he and O’Brien were on a train bound for Louisiana. Had he gone with his gut, he would have joined the navy. He had always loved the water. And in the navy he would have had a bunk to sleep in and decent food.
Now, here he was, carrying a Thompson submachine gun, 250 rounds of ammunition, and a field pack to boot. Stenberg had it better than some of his buddies, though. He still had not come down with malaria.
Even Herman Bottcher, a hardened veteran of the Spanish Civil War, suffered. “We were never dry,” Bottcher said. “Sometimes in twelve hours’ marching we would make three miles—some days only a mile.” Fortunately, according to Bottcher, the native carriers showed the soldiers how to find dry wood by “sounding trees.” Like lumberjacks, the carriers would use their machetes to strike the trunk of a tree, listening for the vibrations. A hollow sound meant the wood was damp and decaying and would be no good for building a fire.
The natives who accompanied Company G proved to be invaluable. Lieutenant James Hunt, who had helped Company E build the coastal road, writes of one terrible climb. Exhausted, he lay down and closed his eyes. “When I opened them,” he writes,
I was surrounded by a small group of native men, who were silently watching me. When I started to move, they helped me to my feet, took my pack and assisted me on the way. I had stopped within a few hundred yards of the top of a hill, and when we reached it one of the men climbed a coconut tree and got a fresh coconut, which their leader opened so I could drink the milk, which was cool and refreshing. They then went with me down to the bottom of the hill to our camp site…. I thanked them and gave each one a cigarette, which pleased them greatly. I then lay down on a canvas litter…. The afternoon rain started…but I was so exhausted I just lay there in the rain.
At midday, Gus Bailey called for a brief rest. Bailey had never seen anything like what confronted him on the trail. Here he was, a lieutenant in the role of a captain, and his company was falling apart. Bailey wrote his wife Katherine