The Airmen and the Headhunters

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Interview with Judith Heimann, the author of The Airmen and the Headhunters

The Airmen and the Headhunters
A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II
A Book By Judith Heimann

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A Conversation with Judith Heimann

How did you come to write THE AIRMEN AND THE HEADHUNTERS?

This story found me. I stumbled upon the bare bones of the plot while I was in the midst of researching the biography of an eccentric polymath Englishman, Tom Harrisson, whom I had met when he was our next-door neighbor in Borneo.

Harrisson (1911-1976), during an extraordinarily full life, managed during World War II to raise an army of a thousand blow-piping headhunters in Borneo to kill and capture Japanese from behind their lines. I had meant to include in my biography of him the whole story of the 11 Yank airmen who had been downed inside Borneo and were stranded there, and how he helped return them to their bases. But the tale, as I learned more about it from the survivors and their headhunter rescuers, got too big to fit in the biography.

I promised myself � and those readers who looked in the endnotes � that I would dedicate my next book to the story of the American airmen and their unlikely saviors. This is that story, as true to the facts as I could make it. It is the result of 10 years of research on three continents, including interviews of several dozen participants in the events described.

How did your years of experience with Borneo culture come into play?

My family and I lived on the island of Java (Jakarta and Surabaya) where my diplomat husband was assigned from 1958 to 1961, and I learned to speak Indonesian (Malay). In 1965-6, we were assigned to Kuala Lumpur, on the Malaysian mainland, where I also used my Malay. Next, we were sent to Kuching, Sarawak, East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo where we lived from 1966 to 1968. There I came to know some of the people of Borneo, as well as expatriate British, including my neighbor, Tom Harrisson. (I wrote my first solo book about him: The Most Offending Soul Alive, first published by the University of Hawa�ai Press in 1999.)

Someone else might have been able to locate and capture on paper the story as known to the American airmen, the Australian daredevil pilots, the North American missionaries and the other �First World� people involved, but I don�t know of anyone else who could also have tracked down the Borneo side of the story. Starting out from documents in a little-known archive of Harrisson�s war record in Canberra, Australia, I gradually over the years pulled together all the pieces of the story. My research included going to Indonesian Borneo to interview (in Indonesian) the tribes people involved.

Tell us a bit about your diplomatic service.

I started out, after college and ten years as a diplomat�s wife in Southeast Asia and Western Europe, as the researcher/writer of chapters on the history and society of eight countries in Asia and the Pacific for the �Area Handbook� Series, published by the Government Printing Office between 1969 and 1973. Then, having been the wife of a diplomat since 1957, I became � at my husband�s urging � a diplomat (AKA Foreign Service Officer) for the next 20 years, 15 of them serving in the same posts as my husband, John. After we had both retired, we were called back to serve as interim diplomats in Western Europe four times and, after he died in 2000, I served as an interim diplomat three times in Belgium and, in between and since then, in the Department of State. I currently work at the State Dept. a couple of days each week, writing situation reports on political-military subjects in an office called PMAT (Political-Military Action Team).

How did you come to receive the Department of State Award of Valor?

For helping to rescue a young American woman being held at gunpoint by a crazed Frenchwoman while I was U.S. Consul General in Bordeaux.

What makes THE AIRMEN AND THE HEADHUNTERS different from the other World War II survival stories we�ve read in the last several years?

What makes this story different from the usual World War II account is both that it has not been told before and the fact that the real heroes are the people of inland Borneo. The Yank airmen were very young, ignorant and � in the jungle setting � incompetent. As they all would admit freely, none of them would have survived their half year in Borneo if it had not been for the courage, competence and generosity of the inland tribes people, who were favorably inclined towards Americans because of their pre-war experiences with some remarkably courageous and tactful North American missionaries.

Do you think THE AIRMEN AND THE HEADHUNTERS contains a lesson, somehow, for the U.S.�s current leaders?

At present we are engaged in wars in countries whose societies we understand little, and with our reputation as the champion of universal human rights stained. At such a time, it is instructive to take another look at a war where we thought we were technologically all-powerful and realize that, in one instance � undoubtedly one among many � only the good will earned earlier by decent Americans saved the lives of our soldiers.

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