Jim Elliot's Killers Become His Family's Brothers

The radio crackled at eleven that morning, and I was the one standing closest to it, coiling a length of cable I had no reason to be coiling except that my hands needed something to do while we waited for Johnny Keenan to come back on the air. Marj Saint was three feet away, and three other women were pressed in around her, and none of us breathed right until his voice came through again, thin and flattened by static, telling us what he could see from the Piper Cruiser as he banked low over the brown water of the Curaray.

I had been at Shell Mera long enough to know the sound of a pilot trying to keep his voice level. Johnny had that sound now. He said he saw the stripped skeleton of the other yellow plane sitting in the shallows, and nothing moving anywhere near it, and then, a quarter mile downriver, he said he saw khaki trousers and a white shirt, a man face down in the current, not swimming, not fighting the water at all.

Marj did not cry out. I remember that most, because I had braced myself for it. She simply went very still, the way the jungle goes still before a downpour, and somebody's hand found her elbow, and the radio kept talking into the room as though it had no idea what it had just done to us.

Word came slower after that, the way bad news does when there is a river and a hundred miles of green between you and the truth. Quichua Indians who had known Ed McCully identified him by sight before nightfall on the Wednesday. The current would not give his body up. They left his size thirteen and a half shoe on the bank, the way you'd leave a marker on a trail, and they brought his watch back instead, and somebody had to carry that watch the rest of the way to Shell Mera, and I remember thinking a wristwatch had never weighed so much in anyone's hand.

I had watched all five of those men load a plane at one time or another, and none of it seemed possible sitting in that room. Nate Saint I knew best, because he was always tinkering with something — a wing strut, a radio bracket, a bucket-drop rig he'd built himself to lower gifts on a long rope while circling a jungle clearing at low altitude, letting the plane's own turning motion swing the bucket down to earth without ever landing. He built that thing with the patience of a man who believed there was a way through anything if you were willing to keep trying. Jim Elliot I knew as the one who prayed the longest and laughed the loudest, and Pete Fleming was quieter, always with a book, and Ed McCully carried himself like the law student he'd once been, and Roger Youderian had the bearing of a man who had jumped out of airplanes over Europe during the war and was not afraid of much on the ground. Between the four of them and a fifth, they had spent thirteen flights that autumn dropping gifts down into the Auca clearings — a cooking pot with ribbons tied to it so it would flutter as it fell, buttons, shirts, an axe head, knives, photographs of themselves so the Waorani could see the faces behind the gifts. The Indians had sent things back up on the same line — a headband, woven thread, a smoked monkey tail — and every man at that base had allowed himself, cautiously, to hope.

On Friday the thirteenth I was part of the group that went in on foot and by canoe, twenty-five miles of jungle that swallowed the trail behind us as fast as we cut it. We met Ecuadorian soldiers coming the other way, and more Quichuas, and an American military officer, and a photographer from Life magazine named Cornell Capa who kept his camera dry under his jacket even when the rest of him wasn't. We found the beach they had called Palm Beach. We found an overturned pot with beans still in it, cold, untouched, exactly the kind of small ordinary object that undoes a man faster than the larger horror does. And in the water, weighted down or simply too heavy with grief to rise, we found four of them — Roger Youderian, Pete Fleming, Jim Elliot, Nate Saint.

I will not describe what four days in a tropical river does to a body, except to say that the men beside me, hardened as they were, turned their faces away more than once, and that some of the men still had spears standing up out of them, eight feet of chonta wood driven through cloth and skin as if the river itself had grown thorns. We buried what we could just inside the treeline, working fast, because the sky had opened into one of those downpours that turn jungle paths into rivers themselves within minutes, and I remember the sound of shovels in mud competing with the sound of rain on leaves, and nobody speaking except to give directions.

They were young. Twenty-seven to thirty-two, all of them husbands, all of them fathers — eight children among the five families, the oldest barely school age, and one more baby not yet born who would arrive within the month and never know a father except through photographs. I carried that fact back out of the jungle with me the way you carry a stone in your boot, feeling it with every step and unable to stop.

Three of those men — Saint, Elliot, and McCully — had known each other years before any of us met them, back at a college in Illinois where Saint had spent a single year and where Elliot and McCully had been the kind of men everybody on campus already had opinions about, athletes and jokers and, underneath all that, men who prayed with an intensity that made older missionaries slightly uneasy. Fleming had joined them later, and together the four had begun to talk, quietly at first, about a tribe the lowland Quichua called Auca — savage — a name given by outsiders that told you more about the outsiders' fear than about the people themselves. Perhaps five hundred of them, scattered across a stretch of forest not much larger than the state of Connecticut, moving their clearings often enough that no one outside the tribe could reliably find them twice. Everyone who tried was met with spears. A Swedish-led expedition years earlier had been turned back the same way, no one hurt, but no one welcomed either.