Friday, May 13, 2022
I was. a Navy entomologist and I met Mike in maybe my 2nd year of duty, when I was posted to NAMRU-3 Cairo, Egypt. We met at a Navy Preventive Medicine Conference in Virginia Beach in 1988 or 1989. Barry Annis & Mike shared a room in the same hotel and we met over beers, dinners, and the conference, too. Soon after that conference I think we had a Navy Entomolgy get-together meeting at the DVECC Unit at NAS Jax. I think we met another time for the big annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene held in - New Orleans!!! That was the start of a lasting friendship and lots of great times. I had the good fortune to be posted to the Navy's NAMRU-2 laboratory in Jakarta, Indonesia and shared a huge LITBANGKES warehouse office with Mike for a couple of years. In 1992 Kevin Baird, Mike Bangs, Trevor Jones, and I worked together on malaria studies in the new transmigration settlement of Arso X, near Jayapura in Irian Jaya. Jayapura was also known as Hollandia Bay and was the site of an amphibious landing by the Army's 41st Div.from April to June, 1944. I remember the place well because the village and landing beaches there were still cluttered with tanks, and LCTs. Base G was a favorite place for R&R when we had a break from our mosquito and malaria project in Arso X. We made up the "Irian Brotherhood" - a band of brother Naval officers and scientists who did a series of important studies to compare non-immune host responses to malaria in children and adults experiencing malaria for the first time. We also studied the long-time malaria immunity of the native Irian Jaya people who lived in the village of Bate, an hour's walk through the jungle to a village on top of the hill overlooking Arso X. It was on one of our twilight hikes up to Bate that we were confronted by a large cassowary, and I was afraid for my life, having heard that these giant birds would attack and eviscerate you with their sharp claws....lucky for us, that big cassowary was the villagers pet. We all shared a dirt-floor 2-room cabin that was built from the hardwoods felled to create the new agricultural community of Arso X. Mike surely remembered the yard-long earthworm that surfaced in our cabin one day. He coined the term "shimmer time" the hottest time of the day when you would look out and see the landscape around you shimmering in the heat. Mike I miss you but we had so many amazing adventures and great times, I will never forget you.
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