Shadows In the Jungle (18 page)

Planning for a five-day mission, the men packed six days' worth of K rations, clean clothes, several changes of socks to prevent the growth of debilitating fungus on their feet, and as much ammo as they felt they could carry. The men also took rolled-up hammocks to sleep in, rather than lie on the ground. They were warned that the mud was knee-deep in places, and that there was little drinkable water available, so each man took two canteens and plenty of halazone tablets for purification.

Trucked to the beginning of the trail, the team climbed into their packs and set off, hoping to reach the halfway point—the village of Isobo—by dark. They hiked for fifty minutes, then took ten-minute breaks, stopping at noon for lunch near the Tami River. En route they overtook a squad of engineers.

“We're on our way to the Tami River,” their leader told Lutz. “We're supposed to set up a defensive position. Can we follow you guys?”

“You may,” Lutz said. “But we plan to move quickly.”

With that, the Scouts were off, the engineers following, although they were soon lagging behind.

“A defensive position?” Ross wondered aloud. “Who are they kidding? There aren't any damned Japs there.”

As if taunting Ross for his flippancy, as they approached the Tami, Lutz waved the men to get down. Two weary-looking men in Japanese military uniforms were approaching. As they drew up, the team rose and quickly took them prisoner. One of the men, in broken English, told the GIs that they were Taiwanese, not Japanese, and that they were part of a labor unit and were on their way to surrender.

“I've heard that story before,” Geiger snarled. “They could have Tojo tattooed on their ass cheeks and they'd still say they weren't Japs.”

The two men were in pitiful condition, with jungle sores covering their legs, and they stank.

The Scouts waited until the engineers caught up and turned their two prisoners over to them to be sent back, then continued their hike. As they trekked inland, the trail, as promised, became muddier and muddier, and the lifting of each foot became an arduous chore. The muck was so thick and heavy that it pulled off part of the bottom of Ross's hobnailed Australian army boots.

Exhausted from their exertions, the team reached Isobo just after sunset and settled in for the night. The village was empty of inhabitants, although someone had stuck a Japanese skull on a stake. Finding fresh water, the Scouts washed their clothes and themselves while one man stood guard. Nightfall came around seven p.m. and the team strung their hammocks and tried to get some sleep. In the distance they heard the sound of rifle fire—an American Garand. Noises out in the jungle jolted them awake from time to time. The men rotated guard duty, although in the pitch-black, where it was literally impossible to see one's hand a few inches in front of one's face, guard duty seemed pointless.

Somewhat refreshed, the team was back on the trail by eight a.m. and following the bank of a river. After about forty-five minutes, Lutz indicated “freeze.” By a bend in the trail about 150 yards ahead was a man in a Japanese uniform, bent over, dipping water from the river.

Gathering his team around him, Lutz said, “Gonyea, Geig, Ross, try to circle around him and take him prisoner.”

Just then the man, suddenly aware of a foreign presence, rose and looked as if he was going to run. The team opened fire, spewing lead at the hapless soldier, who dropped and rolled into a depression. After they ceased firing, the team hurried forward and their jaws dropped as they found the man sitting against a tree trunk, trembling violently. The entire area around him had been chewed up by gunfire and several bullets had passed through his clothes. But he was unharmed.

“If this young man did not believe in God before, I'm sure he does now,” Lutz said.

Then a look of irritation spread over Lutz's face when he realized seven men had fired all their weapons at the lone soldier at a range of one hundred yards, and the man was unscathed. Lutz turned to his men.

“When we get back, we are putting in time on the rifle range,” he said.

The frightened man began jabbering in Malay, which Ross could speak and understand. The man turned out to be a seventeen-year-old Javanese who had been in New Guinea for ten months as a Japanese laborer. Under questioning by Ross, the boy said there were ten Japanese in Arso and eight rifles.

Thin and sick from malaria, the boy, now nicknamed “Junior,” was given K rations and Atabrine tablets, which he downed hungrily. It was also decided Junior would accompany them to Arso.

The heat and humidity of the land was intense and by nightfall the team's water supply had run out, forcing them to drink what water they could scoop from muddy footprints after first dosing it with purifying halazone tablets.

The next day, August 16, the men continued toward Arso, passing the remains of Japanese soldiers, mostly bones and rotting uniforms, lying along the trail, their identities long ago obliterated. Around noon the team stopped for lunch by a stream. Lutz took Ross and Junior ahead to reconnoiter, although the boy grew more frightened the nearer they drew to the village. Creeping through the tall grass for about an hour, the three saw the first house in the village. As they drew closer, Japanese voices could be heard inside the house. Junior told Ross there were two men inside, as well as two at the other end of the village and six at a large hut in the center.

Returning to where the rest of the team waited, Ross and Junior came across more dead Japanese. Ross discovered a stash of papers, which he tucked away, and then, to his amazement, picked up a pair of black oxford shoes.

“These fellas sure carry the strangest things,” he said.

He gave the oxfords to Junior, who kept them awhile, then tossed them away.

* * *

The team rose at four thirty the next morning and, leaving their packs behind, headed toward Arso. Arriving before dawn in a misty rain, they quietly approached the first house. The team split, with Lutz, Shullaw, Ross, and Junior slinking off one way while Gonyea, Roesler, and Geiger went another.

“When we get there,” Lutz had whispered, “Shullaw, you and Ross strangle the Japs and I will finish them with my knife.”

That was the plan, but as the team drew closer, the plan changed. The Japanese were awake and, seated inside the oblong, open house, were making breakfast. Worse, they were facing the direction from which the Scouts would have to approach. The only solution would be to rush them. Lying behind a foot-high wall surrounding a well just twenty feet from the house, Lutz, Ross, and Shullaw watched the enemy. A Japanese soldier walked the length of the house, parallel to the trio of Scouts, who were plainly visible behind the low wall, had the man looked in their direction. But he didn't. With his hands, Lutz indicated that Ross was to take the man on the left and he would handle the other. Shullaw was to provide cover. Readying their knives, the men sprang forward, across the clearing, and burst into the house. The man Lutz was to take was working by the fireplace, two knives in his hands. Stunned by the sudden intrusion, the man froze just long enough for Ross to swing his carbine, striking the soldier with the barrel. Then he drove the knife home, first in the heart, then several times to the throat.

Lutz, meanwhile, attacked the other soldier, driving his knife home repeatedly.

Geiger and Roesler ran up. Geiger entered the house as Ross was finishing off the Japanese soldier. He looked down at the dead man and said, “You did a good job, Bob. You looked fierce as hell.”

“I don't know how I looked,” he replied, gazing at his bloody knife and hand. “It hadda be done.”

He wiped the knife and his hand—some of the blood was his own since he had scuffed his knuckles in the struggle—on the dead man's uniform.

“Let's move on,” Lutz said.

Proceeding cautiously through the village, they searched each house, knowing there were eight more enemy soldiers around somewhere. Then Shullaw signaled a halt.

“I see smoke,” he said.

“I don't see any smoke, Bob,” Geiger said. “Are you sure it's not just mist?”

“It's smoke, I tell ya,” he insisted. “Let's check it out.” Approaching a hedge that hid the house Ross said had emitted smoke, the team split into two groups as before. Someone in the hut heard them and shouted a warning and the Scouts opened up on the house with their carbines. Five Japanese soldiers burst from the hut, firing, only to be cut down in the fusillade of .30-caliber rounds. An officer with a pistol remained inside and the Scouts poured a rain of bullets into the house, riddling the man.

One of the Japanese was wounded and moving. His bloodlust up, Ross stood over the man and struck him on the head with his M1A1 carbine, breaking the folding wire stock. Knives finished off the rest. The enemy body count was at eight, but Junior had said there were ten, so the hunt resumed. At the last hut in the village, a small cook fire was burning, but the two Japanese who had lighted it had fled at the sound of the gunfire. After searching the enemy's abandoned personal gear, the team moved back into the village and collected the belongings of the eight men they'd killed. They took any papers they found, as well as rifles, three pistols, a flag, a sword, watches, a leather dispatch case stuffed with papers and pens, and money. One of the slain had been a medical man, possibly a physician. They saw no signs of a radio station.

By nine thirty a.m. the team returned to where they'd dropped their packs. There they sifted through the items they'd taken. Going through the wallets had its somber side.

“Look at this,” Roesler said. It was a picture of a woman and children, probably the dead man's family. “Poor bastard.”

“Out here it's easy to forget that they have families back home just like we do,” Lutz said. “They're just average guys doing their jobs like we are, and it's by the grace of God that the boot isn't on the other foot, or they'd be going through our pockets.”

* * *

The team slogged back through the mud, Junior tagging along with Ross, who was the only man he could converse with. The young Javanese came in handy, since he knew where to find drinkable water, when there was any to be found. The team reached the banks of the Arso River and settled in for the night. After washing their clothes in the muddy water, they dropped into an exhausted sleep. As happened so often on this mission, their slumber was disturbed as rain began to fall overnight. For Ross, the rain was not the only problem. As he later told his buddy Geiger, he was haunted by the man he had knifed, the first he had ever killed, and whose body lay abandoned back in the village.

By August 18, their fifth day out, the men were in sorry shape. Dirty, footsore, and unshaven, most had jungle sores and insect bites on their arms and legs and crotch itch. Leeches clung to their skin and had to be removed. Lutz had two in his mouth. Plus, Ross's damaged shoes kept falling apart, and he tried to save them with makeshift repairs.

Arriving at the Tami River, the team encountered the engineer unit that had followed them part of the way inland four days earlier. One of the Scouts mentioned they had come from Arso. The engineers were astounded.

“HQ won't let any patrols under thirty men go farther than the Tami,” an engineer said.

The Lutz Team puffed up with pride, chalking everyone else off as a “bunch of softies.”

Geiger recalled that, throughout the walk, Ross had a difficult time, both with his disintegrating shoes and having to lug his own rifle along with a captured Japanese weapon. At one point along the muddy trail, Junior kept tugging on a phone wire that had been strung along the path. This kept pushing Ross, beside him, farther out into the muck. Fatigued beyond measure, Ross exploded and ran screaming down the middle of the trail, until he slipped and fell in the ooze. Geiger hurried to his friend's side and helped him up.

“Let me take that Jap rifle,” Geiger said, taking the now mud-clogged weapon.

“I think I'm going jungle happy, Geig,” Ross fretted, sweat pouring from him.

“Come on, buddy,” Geiger said. “You'll be OK.”

The team walked on, finally coming across fresh water, where they stopped for the night. Ross cleaned up his muddy clothes, as well as his own and the Japanese rifles. He apologized to the team for cracking up.

“Don't worry about it,” Lutz told him. “We're all on edge. We should be back by tomorrow morning.”

Ross threw away his now worthless shoes and donned several pairs of socks, and the men turned in.

The trail the next day was muddy as ever and the team, sporting six days of whiskers and filthy clothes, looked and smelled like hell. Gonyea and Roesler, at point, set a brisk pace that made it difficult for Ross and Junior to keep up, especially over the rutted terrain. Utterly exhausted, the sickly Junior broke down and Gonyea hoisted the boy onto his back. The men took turns carrying him. The team finally reached the truck trail and began following it, encouraged by the knowledge that they only had about two miles yet to go. Then they heard a truck engine. While the others rested, Geiger and Ross hurried toward the sound and secured a ride back for the Scouts, a blessing after five and a half days of walking.

“Thank God for those truck jockeys,” Gonyea said, as the vehicle bounced its way back along the dirt roads.

“Thank God for Ross,” Geiger said and smiled. “He told them we were desperate men and that we'd be willing to commit murder to get our hands on a truck.”

At 6th Army HQ, the ragged, dirty, smelly men drew gaping stares. They handed Junior over to G2, only to be told they were expecting Japanese prisoners, not Javanese laborers. “Phooey,” was the Scouts' general consensus. They had not been told anything about prisoners. The team was also told that G2 had neglected to inform the air corps about how far out the team had gone.