Frozen in Time (21 page)

In all, Turner’s crew made thirty-four supply trips and dropped 225 packages to the snow cave at the PN9E, the Motorsled Camp, and the men and dogs at Beach Head Station and Ice Cap Station. The supplies could have stocked a country store, including rations; fuel; toothbrushes and toothpaste; medical supplies; fur-lined mitts; woolen underwear; seventeen-inch wool socks; snowshoes; shovels; rope; pup tents; boxes of chocolate bars; grappling hooks; two dozen white handkerchiefs; sleeping bags; soap and towels; boxes of cigarettes; a dozen bottles of Coca-Cola; copper rivets; bundles of magazines; and two picnic hams.

On nearly every trip, in at least one package Turner and his crew tucked a note, either typewritten or scrawled on paper torn from a notebook. Some notes described the latest rescue attempt, some gave bits of news about the war, and some were written just to lift the spirits of exhausted men living like hibernating polar bears. The notes left out bad news, as they were written mainly to boost morale. For instance, nestled under the bomber wing, Armand Monteverde, Paul Spina, and Clint Best weren’t told that Clarence Wedel had disappeared in a crevasse or that their three remaining companions were stuck six miles away in the Motorsled Camp.

CAPTAIN KENNETH “PAPPY” TURNER.
(U.S. COAST GUARD PHOTOGRAPH.)

On Christmas Day 1942, the trio at the PN9E expected Turner’s crew to drop them something special, but the supply plane didn’t come. They had one remaining can of chicken, but that was a delicacy they were saving to celebrate their rescue. Eating it for Christmas would have felt like giving up. So they had a Christmas dinner of meat from C rations. They sang carols and reminisced about better Christmases they’d known.

The following day, Turner dropped a typewritten note, addressed simply, “B-17.” It included the Morse code alphabet, in the event that the men could get their radio working, and also the correct frequency on which they should broadcast. The note read:

We will keep you well supplied with food, etc., until you are removed to the Ice Cap Weather Station. Both the Motor Sled and the Dog Team are encountering difficulties, which is the reason for the delay. We’re sorry that we couldn’t be of more aid on Monday [for Christmas], but the high wind velocity made operations almost impossible. Every day that the weather permits we will be in the area dropping supplies and aiding ground operations. . . . Keep your spirits up as we’re trying to get you off as soon as possible. Capt. Turner.

T
HE SUPPLY DROPS
at the Motorsled Camp were so effective, and opportunities for exercise so scarce, that Spencer packed thirty pounds onto his trim frame. Tetley added fifteen. Most days, they rose in the dark around seven in the morning. After cooking breakfast, they worked to enlarge and maintain their under-snow quarters. They braved the blustery winds to collect newly delivered packages during the few hours of daylight. They also tried to send messages to Turner’s crew by arranging large and small objects in Morse code patterns, but it didn’t work. Neither did their attempts to use black oil to spell out words in the snow. They’d cook dinner in the late afternoon, sleep, then make coffee around midnight. They smoked cigarettes when they had them. One day bled into the next.

All the while, O’Hara was failing, shedding pounds faster than his companions were gaining them. He shriveled from a robust young man into a sunken-cheeked wraith. He dipped into and out of delirium. His legs were useless and his body’s systems were shutting down. O’Hara couldn’t hold down most rations, so Spencer and Tetley fed him soup from cans dropped by the B-17. When those ran out, they boiled rations into a soupy mixture, but that upset his stomach. O’Hara fared better on lucky days when Turner’s crew dropped them sandwiches with fresh meat.

Tetley and Spencer were doing their best to keep him alive, but nothing could save O’Hara’s frozen feet. Not massages, not fresh dressings, not prayer. Deprived of blood flow, they’d been dying for weeks. Dry gangrene did its witch doctor’s work, leaving the twenty-four-year-old lieutenant with blackened, mummified lumps below his ankles. As O’Hara lay helpless in the ice hole, nursed and protected by his friends, living tissue separated from dead flesh.

In layman’s terms, Bill O’Hara’s feet fell off into his boots.

The last thing he ever felt on his feet were Clarence Wedel’s hands sliding across them as Wedel fell into the crevasse.

O
N JANUARY 21, 1943,
Pappy Turner’s crew dropped a note to the Motorsled Camp with a bundle of wooden stakes and fifty red bandanna handkerchiefs. It described Balchen’s rescue plan and said a PBY Catalina/Dumbo would try to land on the first clear day. The note instructed Spencer to put his pilot training to work and choose a smooth, crevasse-free landing area and mark it with the stakes. Spencer was told to tie two bandannas to each stake, one at the top and one at the bottom, to create a gauge the PBY pilot could use to estimate distance from the ground. The note ended, “Be seeing you soon.” It was signed, “The Boys.” Spencer tucked it away for safekeeping.

On January 25, the two PBYs flew from Balchen’s base at Bluie West Eight across the ice cap to Bluie East Two. There, Pappy Turner and his crew briefed the rescue fliers about conditions. In the lead PBY, Balchen would act as supervisor and adviser to the pilot, Bernard “Barney” Dunlop, a thirty-one-year-old U.S. Navy lieutenant from Long Island, New York. The copilot was Lieutenant Junior Grade Nathan Waters, with two enlisted men, flight engineer Alex Sabo and radioman Harold Larsen, as the crew. Also assigned to Dunlop’s plane was Captain P. W. Sweetzer, the doctor at Bluie East Two, ready to treat O’Hara even before he left the ice. The second PBY would serve as a backup, in case Dunlop’s plane went down.

Also aboard Dunlop’s PBY was an experienced U.S. Army Air Forces dogsled rescue team consisting of Captain Harold Strong, who’d served in Alaska; sergeants Joseph Healey and Hendrik “Dutch” Dolleman, who’d made their reputations in Antarctica; and nine sled dogs. Balchen respected Strong as an Arctic veteran, and he knew he could rely on Healey and Dolleman, who’d been part of the trail team in the
My Gal Sal
rescue.

The crews and the planes were ready, but the weather wouldn’t cooperate. When January ended with no relief at the Motorsled Camp, Don Tetley grew depressed. A mission that he thought might take a few days had stretched to two months, with no end in sight. Two men had fallen to their deaths in crevasses before his eyes. As days turned to weeks, he focused his remaining hopes on being rescued before February 1, the birthday he shared with his wife.

Tetley’s target date arrived with no sign of a PBY. He became morose, thinking about what he was missing back home and how worried his wife must be. The Motorsled Camp was out of cigarettes, so Tetley glumly passed the hours collecting tobacco from spent butts. Sizing up his partner’s mood, Harry Spencer sprang a birthday surprise. When they’d been flush with cigarettes, he’d set aside a full pack for just such an emergency. Now he made a fuss of presenting it to Tetley with birthday wishes.

The gift was one of untold acts of kindness, large and small, that the men bestowed upon each other. Each one revealed a bond that was crucial to their survival. With every sacrifice, every shared cigarette, the icebound men expressed a stubborn refusal to surrender their humanity.

L
ATER THAT DAY,
Turner’s B-17 crew dropped Spencer the best possible reward for his thoughtfulness short of rescue: a pack of mail, including letters from his wife, Patsy, and a sweater she’d knitted him for Christmas. With it came another note from “The Boys,” saying that the PBYs had reached Bluie East Two and were waiting to fly. “We will try to get you out this time,” the note read. Tetley saved that one.

Two days later, the supply drop included a new walkie-talkie freshly arrived from the United States. The “two-way air-to-ground communication system,” as it was known, was in high demand, especially in battle zones. Now that the Motorsled Camp had one properly tuned to Pappy Turner’s B-17, the airborne cargo team and the grounded men could finally talk to one another. At first, the men’s cold breath froze the mouthpiece, so they thawed it out and put a sock over it. Then they introduced themselves to the air crew that had kept them alive. The contact came as a relief to Pappy Turner, who’d felt frustrated that he could “be so near those men that you could nearly touch them, and yet you couldn’t do anything about getting them out.”

Yet the wait continued for Balchen, Dunlop, and the PBYs. The winds were too treacherous that day and also the next. Blinding sheets of snow raced across Spencer’s chosen landing field, the drifts obscuring the bandanna-topped stakes. Turner and Spencer talked over the walkie-talkie about surface conditions, and Turner asked whether his crew should drop more spare parts for the motorsled. Spencer and Tetley had last worked on the machine more than a month earlier. Since then, it had disappeared under mounds of snow.

“For crying out loud,” Spencer answered, “we’ve been digging for two weeks and can’t find a trace of it!”

O’Hara’s hopes had risen when he’d learned of the latest rescue plans, but now he felt crushed by the delays. Emaciated and dehydrated, his skin a waxy yellow, his feet gone, he grew depressed. Spencer and Tetley feared that O’Hara might give up and die before the PBY arrived.

18

SHITBAGS

AUGUST 2012

“W
E NEED SHITBAGS
.”

“Sorry, Lou, I didn’t hear you.”

“Shitbags. We need shitbags. Get as many as you can.”

With that phone call, Lou sends me on a final errand before I join him and the North South Polar team for the start of the Duck Hunt. To satisfy his request, I visit a camping supply store to buy a glacier-load of disposable bags to fit a toilet that, minus bags, is just a plastic seat with a hole in it.

With seven dozen shitbags, a duffel bag filled with cold-weather camping gear, and a bottle of Shackleton’s reconstituted Scotch, I drive five hours from Boston to Somerset, New Jersey. There, Lou’s second-in-command, a logistics specialist and retired Army Reserve colonel named Steve Katz, has surrendered his suburban home for use as a staging base, to make sure that everything we need is in working order before we reach the ice. We’re leaving in two days aboard the C-130 from the Trenton-Mercer Airport, not far from Katz’s house, bound for Keflavík, Iceland, en route to Kulusuk, Greenland, en route to a glacier at Koge Bay, in search of the Duck’s resting place.

Neighbors drive wide-eyed past Katz’s tidy blue house, not sure if he’s holding a massive yard sale, planning a military assault, or hosting a traveling circus. The truth is a little of all three. Dominating Katz’s front lawn is an orange-and-gray dome tent called a Space Station, more than nine feet high and twenty feet in diameter. A yellow canopy stretches from the dome to a rectangular green tent bursting with camping and survival gear in various states of assembly. Across the lawn, a tall, slender young man—Lou’s twenty-two-year-old son, Ryan Sapienza—is erecting a gray tent the size and shape of a Porta Potti. Next to Ryan is a green plastic folding stool with a hole where the seat belongs. The shitbags have found their mate.

Lining both sides of the driveway and overflowing onto the lawn are twenty-five black plastic Pelican cases, each four feet long and two feet high. It looks like an outdoor showroom of open-lid caskets for rotund short people. Inside the big Pelicans and numerous smaller cases are water and fuel tanks, hoses, lights, ice axes, generators, coats, boots, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, gloves, boot dryers, doormats, freeze-dried food cans, ice drills, satellite phones, climbing gear, cooking supplies, plates, cups, metal utensils, clothespins, a rifle, aluminum foil, hand sanitizer, fire extinguishers, canteens, lighters, North South Polar baseball caps, baby wipes, glacier glasses, batteries, coffee makers, sunscreen, socks, shotgun shells, peanut butter, mission patches, paper towels, a shotgun, playing cards, Clorox bleach, spatulas, stoves, cookie sheets, toilet paper, Gatorade, ziplock bags, flashlights, waterproof pants, polypropylene underwear, and fleece jackets. And that’s not even the half of it. Nearly everything in sight has been tagged with yellow stick-on labels that identify the intended user or the object itself. Some wise guy has pasted a label on the handle of a pickax that reads, “
PICK AX
.”

Despite the mountain of gear in Steve Katz’s front yard, the shopping spree continues; it turns out that shitbags were hardly the last missing items. Team members disappear to buy more supplies, from reams of paper to rulers, fresh food to more clothing. Trucks from the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx crowd the winding street, disgorging boxes in all sizes. By the time we’re ready to leave, more than eight thousand pounds of gear will accompany us to Greenland, or about five hundred pounds per expedition member. Two thoughts cross my mind: the men in the PN9E survived for months with almost none of this, and now I know where my money went.

Playing joyful ringmaster is Lou, moving from one cluster of supplies to the next, holding a cell phone to his ear as he sets up a portable expanding flagpole. On it he hoists three banners: the American flag, the black-and-white POW/MIA flag, and a red flag he had made with a gold star and the words “Honor and Remember” above the names Pritchard, Bottoms, and Howarth. Lou turned sixty a week ago, and he’s balanced on knees that need replacing. But right now he’s like a kid at Christmas.

LOU SAPIENZA CHECKS ON EQUIPMENT DURING PREEXPEDITION PLANNING AT STEVE KATZ’S HOUSE.
(MITCHELL ZUCKOFF PHOTOGRAPH.)

He booms a welcome and throws an arm around my shoulder. “Let’s take a walk,” he says. Not five minutes after my arrival, Lou asks if I’d consider using my home as collateral for a bridge loan until the money from the Coast Guard arrives at the end of the expedition. He’s tapped out, and he needs to pay vendors for the supplies still arriving. I swallow hard and agree. In the end, the loan doesn’t come through, so instead we rely even more heavily on my credit card.

Moving with ant-farm enterprise around the yard and inside Katz’s home is the North South Polar crew. “They’re like the team from
Armageddon
,” Lou says, referring to the movie in which Bruce Willis saves the world from an asteroid with a gang of rough-and-ready eccentrics.

First among equals is Robert “WeeGee” Smith, a mechanical wizard who builds rally cars in Colchester, Vermont. The nickname WeeGee dates from his childhood, when an older brother couldn’t pronounce his prior nickname, Luigi, bestowed on young Robert in tribute to his Mediterranean complexion. WeeGee and Lou worked together in 1990 and 1992 during the Greenland excavation of the Lost Squadron P-38 known as
Glacier Girl.
For months during that project, WeeGee spent most days 268 feet below the glacier surface, carving the plane from its icy tomb: “I had never before worked in a place where it can kill you in a second, without batting an eye. It was great.” Long divorced, with an adult daughter and a teenage granddaughter, WeeGee is fifty-nine. His trim build, limitless energy, unlined face, and bright green eyes make him seem twenty years younger. He has a reputation for outhustling everyone around him, for refusing to suffer fools, and for having an almost mystical ability with machines. WeeGee’s primary job on the ice will be to operate an industrial-sized hot-water pressure washer called a Hotsy to melt holes deep into the glacier to investigate radar anomalies that might be the Duck.

Working nearby is Jaana Gustafsson, a forty-three-year-old Finn who lives in Stockholm with her husband and two daughters. Tall and attractive, with an engaging smile and a PhD in geophysics, Jaana (pronounced
Yah’-
nuh) is new to North South Polar. She’s already earned WeeGee’s respect by helping him hoist loaded Pelican cases weighing up to three hundred pounds. When I admire her fortitude, Jaana teaches me the Finnish word
sisu
, which translates roughly as perseverance but speaks more to strength of character. A land surveyor by profession, Jaana is an expert on ground-penetrating radar. On the ice she’ll strap herself to a radar unit made by her former employer, MALÅ Geoscience, with a flexible thirty-five-foot-long “dragon tail” antenna that she’ll drag across the glacier. Jaana’s radar work is supposed to confirm or rule out the anomalies identified by airborne surveys. One major problem: the radar equipment, shipped via UPS from Sweden, is hung up in customs.

Also in Steve Katz’s driveway is W. R. “Bil” Thuma, at sixty-nine the oldest member of the team, an endearing curmudgeon with a white Brillo mustache and a round belly he displays by opening his shirt in the August heat. An American-born citizen of Canada, Bil is a former
Glacier Girl
team member with fifty years of geophysical fieldwork and longtime expertise in the under-ice landscape of Greenland. Bil earns his living as a consultant, marketing technology for natural resource exploration in places like Libya, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia, his destination following the Duck Hunt. At the edge of the driveway, Bil furrows his brow as he reviews satellite photos of the Koge Bay glacier. He’s worried that the expedition will be a bust before it begins. “This whole area looks heavily crevassed,” he says. “I don’t know how Jaana can run the radar—if it arrives—without falling into one.”

Keeping Jaana and the rest of us out of crevasses is the job of North South Polar’s safety team, led by Frank Marley, the just-back-from-Afghanistan Army National Guard captain who earlier strategized by e-mail about polar bear defense. Frank is forty, easygoing, a solid mass of muscle and an expert outdoorsman. He’s also a third-year medical student with plans to specialize in expedition medicine. In Greenland, one gun will always be near Frank, just in case. Fellow safety team leader John Bradley, with close-cropped reddish-brown hair and the start of an expedition beard, is a mountain rescue expert, a veteran of lifesaving missions on Denali in Alaska, Mount Whitney in California, and Pico de Orizaba in Mexico. For a day job, John heads the climbing department at the Denver flagship store of outdoor retailer REI. Working alongside Frank and John is Nick Bratton, a veteran ice climber and mountaineering guide from Seattle whose day job involves designing land conservation programs. Tall and lean, with long strides balanced on size-fifteen feet, Nick’s peripatetic past includes a year working as a whitewater rafting guide on South Africa’s Tugela River, which he captured in a book called
Guided Currents
. Nick, who’s married to a mental health counselor, soon reveals himself to be the most safety-conscious person I’ve ever met; he’ll wait five minutes at the corner of a deserted intersection until the walk signal turns from red to green.

Lou’s son Ryan was supposed to join the safety team, but an accident this summer at a restaurant where he works almost severed two fingers. He’ll help manage the base camp and maintain the expedition’s daily log. An adjunct member of the safety team is Michelle Brinsko, a thirty-eight-year-old blond, blue-eyed physical therapist from Ohio with a sweet nature and fearsome biceps. Michelle is the Duck Hunt’s cook and provisions chief—she carries a notebook of camp recipes with the mission statement: “Failure is not an option”—and is in a relationship with Frank Marley.

After me, next to arrive is Steve Katz, just back from driving his older daughter to college in Virginia. Nearing fifty, with dark, thinning hair, Steve is built like a thick-shouldered fireplug. As a colonel in the Army Reserves, he led a Special Forces unit during the Iraq War and earned two Bronze Stars. Soon after Steve’s arrival, I learn that he’s also helped to cover expedition costs with a credit card.

The final member of the North South Polar team will join us before takeoff: Alberto Behar, the expedition’s chief scientist, a man whose résumé can make almost anyone feel inadequate: PhD in electrical engineering; two-decade career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including oversight of an experiment on the Mars rover
Curiosity
; robotics expert; rescue scuba diver; helicopter and fixed-wing pilot; emergency medical technician; faculty member at Arizona State University. Forty-five years old, married with three children, Alberto has been designated “highly qualified” to become a NASA astronaut and is awaiting word on an interview. His curly black hair and handsome face prompt Lou to call him “rock star.” Alberto has built a high-definition video camera that can be dropped into the holes that WeeGee melts in the ice, to determine whether an anomaly is the Duck or a hidden crevasse, a pool of water, or an otherwise false reading.

W
HEN WE REACH
the glacier, Lou’s plan calls for Jaana and Bil to use ground radar to confirm or rule out the anomalies identified by the air surveys; WeeGee to melt holes to any sites that look promising; Alberto to drop his camera down the holes for a look; Frank, Nick, and John to keep us safe; Michelle to keep us well fed and hydrated; Ryan to record everything that goes on and help manage base camp; and Lou and Steve to supervise, with me pitching in wherever needed. All this is supposed to happen during approximately one week at Koge Bay, regardless of foul weather, rough terrain, or technical problems.

After Lou explains what’s planned, private conversations reveal the team’s shared anxiety about the long odds against finding the Duck. Everyone here knows that the 2010 mission was a bust, and no one, except perhaps Lou, expects the Coast Guard or anyone else to fund another attempt if this trip fails as well. After innumerable “needle in a haystack” descriptions of what we have planned, a new metaphor evolves: imagine searching for a diamond chip buried deep beneath a frozen football field; your best tool is a straw that makes tiny holes into the ground, through which you peer down to see what’s below; if your holes miss by even a little, you’ll never find it; and you have a brief window to explore ten potential locations before being kicked off the field.

Lou says it’s a sure thing; everyone else has doubts.

At the moment, though, nothing will happen beyond our suburban staging area if we don’t get the radar equipment. Lou yells into his cellphone at a representative for UPS, which is supposed to get the radar through customs for delivery to us: “This is a Coast Guard operation. We’ve got an $8 million plane waiting for us, and you’re holding it up!” The UPS agent is apologetic, but can’t say when the radar might be released. Steve decides to remain behind when the C-130 leaves; he’ll carry the radar equipment on commercial flights when it clears customs.