Army & Navy: Thoughts in the Jungle

Excerpts from the diary of an American engineer who salvaged a $500,000 bomber forced down in the jungle near the headwaters of the Amazon:

July 28—Left 1:30 p.m. on Beechcraft No. 2 and scouted jungle for three hours. No success.

July 31—Located plane in small clearing.

Aug. 6—Arrived at Turiassu. Continued to Santa Ana. Arrived 9 p.m.

Aug. 7—Stream forks. . . . Left canoes to continue on foot . . . decided to cut trail to try and locate plane. Bearings S. 72° E. . . . Put under observation by native Indians. They actually believe we are crazy for doing this. . . . Jungle night studded with an incredible concentration of stars per square lightyear. A hammock strung between two trees at the edge of the clearing. The hut is quiet. Voices recede and stop. The jungle night takes over . . . a big cat prowls around looking for something to kill. . . . Presently she materializes out of the night. Instead of reaching for the coffee cup she presents to me, I take her hand—dawn would reveal a rather bulging hammock with a hastily dropped coffee cup under it.

Aug. 12—Four days of sweat, bad food and virgin jungle. A bushmaster bit me in the left index finger—had to shoot the end of the finger off to avoid dying.

Aug. 13—It must be luck or the patronizing hand of an angel. Trail broke out under left wing of B-24 bomber. For the scouting planes that are checking on us we wrote a large three dots and one dash for victory and success.

Aug. 14—Feel like a gentleman of leisure. Would like a tall, sleek, beautiful brunette to bring me my coffee. . . . Scouted clearing and ran set of levels for a proposed take-off strip.

Aug. 15—If women knew how beautiful they look in the semidarkness of a bedroom they would become exclusively night prowlers. The day a woman forgets her vanity and realizes the power of uninhibited surrender, the day of the prowling male is finished and the period of man the domesticated animal begins. Total length of take-off strip—5,000 feet.

Aug. 19—Finger doing fine. Monkey meat is plenty tough but ah!—the spareribs. Man is a four-dimensional animal because he can project his personality into space by his creative powers. Woman is three-dimensional.

Aug. 26—It feels like Saturday. Two thousand five hundred feet of take-off strip cleared. Food delivered by parachute.

Sept. 8—Civilization is the great birth-control agent—nature in the raw, a baby every year.

Sept. 11—Take-off strip ready. Big day tomorrow.

Sept. 12—Bomber take-off successful. Delivered same at Army base.