In Papua New Guinea, a journalist investigates the - Veterans ...

—or PNG as it's called, sometimes with
affection, sometimes in exasperation—is
the kind of place tourist brochures describe as "the land that
time forgot." It would be just as accurate to call it "the land
that forgot time." Schedules are not rigidly adhered to. In
the capital, Port Moresby, young men with no visible
means of support hang out along the roads and markets,
giving the place a laid-back feel but making it dangerous at
night. The topography of mountains and jungle, beautiful
but almost impassable, renders national identity elusive.
The six million-plus people—80 percent of whom live in
remote villages—speak about 850 languages, owe allegiance
largely to local clans and eke out a subsistence existence
hunting wild pigs and growing papaw and yams and other
foods. Many lives have hardly changed from past centuries,
except that cannibalism all but petered out in the mid-1970s,
and, with the blessings of missionaries, a lot of people now
wear castoff Western shirts and shorts. (It's not unusual to
encounter a fisherman paddling a dugout canoe wearing, say,
a Bucky Badger T-shirt from the University of Wisconsin.)
This past May, I visited PNG because I was eager to see the
country where my father was killed in World War II. He
was a war correspondent for the New York Times—Byron
Darnton was his byline—and the troopship he was on was
bombed as it was about to disembark soldiers onto a sandy
beach in October 1942. I was 11 months old at the time and
so have no memory of him. But of course New Guinea was
always more than a dot on the map for me. In our living
room we had a patriotic globe with stars to mark major
American battlefields. In my childhood naiveté, I thought
the manufacturer of the globe had put the one on Buna, on
the northern coast of what was then called Papua, to
commemorate the spot where my father fell.
New Guinea was conscripted into war, caught between the
Japanese and the Allied counteroffensive from the south.
For the most part Papuans did not fight, but both sides
pressed many into service as bearers, carrying supplies and
stretchers of wounded men across mountains and through
miles of steaming jungle. (Their nickname, unthinkable
today, was Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels.) Almost all of them have
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died by now. Yet the war seems anything but remote, largely
because its rusting relics are so much a part of the landscape.
Sunken freighters, submarines and troopships rest on the
bottoms of harbors and hidden bays. The blackened hulls of
bombed-out planes sit beside old airstrips, and debris from
hundreds of crashed planes lies camouflaged in the
mountainous rain forests and lowland jungles. So many
soldiers died—including many thousands of Japanese never
accounted for—that even today, after heavy rains, villagers
report an occasional skeleton rising up in the mangrove
swamps like a mummy in a horror movie.
It's not surprising, then, that PNG has become favored terrain
for war buffs. (Last year, an estimated 4,000 people made
the grueling weeklong trek on the Kokoda Trail across the
Owen Stanley Mountains, where Australian soldiers
pushed back the Japanese; as recently as ten years ago only
about 100 made the hike.) Poking around the pillboxes and
overgrown ruins of the Japanese bases at Buna and Gona,
Australian, American and Japanese tourists bump into one
another, sometimes in awkward silence. Perhaps more than
anything else, PNG has become a hunting ground for
"warbird" enthusiasts looking for missing plane wrecks.
Passionate treasure hunters, they like nothing better than to
hop into helicopters for spotting missions, hack through the
baking, merciless jungle, debrief villagers and hire local
guides, all for that magical moment when they might
uncover a Kittyhawk or Bristol Beaufighter that dropped
out of the sky more than 60 years ago. Among them are a
special breed, the salvagers, who not only locate the planes
but also extract them, or pieces of them, for export, usually
selling them to museums or to private collectors.
Of all the wrecks on PNG, none is as fabled as the "Swamp
Ghost," a B-17E Flying Fortress that ran out of fuel on an
ill-fated bombing mission in early 1942 and was ditched in
the Agaiambo Swamp about eight miles inland on the
northern coast. There the plane rested, intact and more or
less unmolested, in soggy splendor for 64 years—that is,
until May 2006, when an American salvager took it apart