was soon looking for artifacts and finding them during my military training period in the deep South, searching in cotton fields and eroded gullies in Missouri, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas. While stationed outside of Austin, Texas, a friend took me to visit the archaeology museum at the University of Texas. There I chatted briefly with Alex D. Krieger, as I later learned, a renowned archaeologist. It was a brief but inspiring visit. One day in Alabama I even dropped out of drill formation momentarily—a daring move for a young trainee soldier—to pick up a flint knife I’d spotted. It’s one of the few early finds that I still have left. None of my army buddies at that camp knew that on Sunday when I regularly left on a day pass I was off to look for arrowheads. How they would have hooted if they had known that I was doing this in the company of a seven-year-old girl! I had met Khaki, that really was her name, on her grandparent’s farm outside of town. She was good company, and wise beyond her years. When I pointed to the beautiful clouds forming above us one day, she said: “Yes, but you can’t walk on them.”
Stationed for five weeks in 1944 at Finschhaven on the southern coast of New Guinea in preparation for the coming invasion of the Japanese-occupied Philippine Islands, despite a heavy workload I still kept on looking for artifacts. Bulldozers had cleared the forest growth to make a military campsite, in places scraping right down to the hard coral base. There must have been an early habitation site there, for I found five small ground-stone celts and several pieces of prehistoric pottery, all of which I gleefully pocketed. Let the war go on, I was still finding items of interest. Later, Mr. McKern wrote to tell me that the potsherds I’d sent him from New Guinea were similar to some he’d unearthed years before the war on one of the Tonga Islands in the Southwest Pacific.
I also found a few shiny flakes of obsidian on the bare dirt trails leading up the steep hills behind our temporary camp to a nearby native village—it was a long climb, but worth the effort, and a grand view over the surrounding forested range, jungle to the horizon. When I showed those pieces to the natives and asked about artifacts made of such material they seemed to know about them, but didn’t have any. Papuan villagers saw me so often they began calling me “New Guinea Boy.” Thanks to those people I acquired some interesting items of ethnological interest which I shipped to the Milwaukee Public Museum before we went into action. One of those items was a fine carved wooden bowl the natives had given me. About twenty inches long, it was carved out of black wood in the likeness of a crocodile, with the bowl in its back. The incised reptilian skin pattern was filled with white pigment. It was beautiful; they told me it was old.
Plodding up that jungle trail one early morning, I met a Papuan native man, a stranger, coming my way: colourful woven loin-cloth, braided arm-bands, wooden comb stuck in his bountiful hair. Any part of his apparel, I thought, would have been welcomed by the museum, but how do you ask a man for his clothes? We squatted down to chat, rays of sunlight streaming down through the tall trees and lighting up great scarlet flowers, white cockatoos flying high overhead. We both struggled to communicate in local pidgin-English; after an exchange of greetings, I learned to my surprise that he was hoping I could provide him with some condoms. It turned out that somehow he had misunderstood the function of prophylactics. He was anxious to acquire some because he thought that this would increase his sexual pleasure. Using a stick to make a sketch in the bare clay before us, I tried to correct his misunderstanding. A difficult exercise. Though he nodded agreeably as we parted, I’m not sure he really understood.
Corporal Robert Nero with Papuan friends in New Guinea, 1944. Courtesy Richard Fox.
One Sunday, village elders invited me to attend church with them. It turned out that they had been converted to Catholicism many years earlier by Dutch missionaries. I’m not religious, but it seemed appropriate to accept their offer. The church, like their dwellings, was mostly made of bamboo, but it was their largest building. Inside, there were rows of wooden benches on a clean, bare clay floor. A stout wooden crate comprised the altar, with a rusted tin can of G.I. vintage holding wildflowers. To my surprise, I was asked, as a guest, to sit on a bench at the front, facing the men and boys seated on one side, and the women and girls on the other side. During the benediction, one young woman nursed an infant and a bright green gecko, a kind of lizard, crawled along high up on one wall. At one point a large colourful rooster stalked past the sunlit door opening. It was enchanting. Everyone participated in the hymn-singing with great enthusiasm and skill. For me it was exciting and uplifting.
Another day, prowling through the burned remains of a dwelling, perhaps one destroyed by the Japanese—who at the time still held more northerly areas of the island—I found what I presumed to be a relatively recent artifact. That discovery led to the writing of a poem that later would be published—one of my first poems in print—I was elated.
In the Philippines I had neither time nor opportunity to look for artifacts; after all, we were at war. In northern Luzon, seeing handsome native Igorot men carrying gleaming steel-headed spears, filing down the narrow mountain roads beside us with their bare-breasted women and naked children, all of them bedecked with gold necklaces and bracelets, I thought again of the problem of collecting personal effects for the museum. Another day, I watched an Igorot man in full regalia being photographed by a soldier. When urged to do so, he thumped his spear on the ground, made an awful face and growled savagely at the camera. An impressive sight. A few minutes later, I overheard that colourful person as he identified Japanese-held positions, pointing to our Colonel’s map spread on the ground. I was intrigued to hear the Igorot man using the English language better than the officer. Afterwards, when I quizzed this English-speaking native, he admitted that he’d been educated at Oxford, and that he’d gone back to his native garments and spear in order to conceal his background from the Japanese.
SHIFTING VISION Watching tears streaming down the face of the Japanese speedskater last night as he received the Olympic gold medal I suddenly recalled how I felt mre than fifty years ago in the Philippines when I excitedly peered at prisoners-of-war: “Japs” standing glumly in a hastily erected stockade beside the road as we passed by awed to see the enemy alive and up close so thin and tired-looking, so shabby at variance with their dead in tidy uniforms.
Then the camera focused on the youthful
skater’s mother who put hands to her face,
moved across to fans waving bright flags
rising-sun flags, the same bright emblem
we young soldiers ardently sought:
gingerly tipping back drab Jap helmets
nervously, hopefully peering into pockets
even remorselessly looking under shirts
recalling the day I found, not a flag
but a packet of family photos: parents
slim pretty wife, two young children—
that’s when I stopped looking for souvenirs.
After the war, my spirits undampened, and encouraged and supported by the G.I. Bill, I returned to my university studies at Milwaukee. Restless and anxious to rid myself of some of my old ties, I gathered up nearly all of my carefully catalogued personal collection of arrowheads—nothing of great value, really—and took it all in to the Milwaukee Public Museum. Dr. Robert E. Ritzenthaler, then Curator of Anthropology, tried to discourage me from donating it, but he took if off my hands; no doubt the stuff sits in a box there to this day! Like McKern earlier, Ritzenthaler encouraged me to go on in university. When I somewhat tearfully mentioned to
