(2 of 10)
Not so lucky was a quiet, self-effacing American medical missionary from Torrance, Calif., who for two months had been a pawn of the rebel regime in its negotiations with the U.S., Belgium and the legal Congolese government of
Premier Moise Tshombe. Periodically sentenced to death as an "American spy," periodically reprieved when things seemed to go well for the rebels, Dr.
Paul Earle Carlson, 36, caught a slew of bullets through head and back as he tried to escape the slashing gunfire.
"Carlson was not singled out," says Mike Hoyt, who saw the surgeon die.
"He arrived late at the rear of the column with two other Americans. They started running and went over a wall.
Then he started over. He just didn't make it. It made me sick. He had been through so much, and to be killed at the very end." Lost Rites. Moments after Carlson died, the Belgian paratroopers arrived, ami at their approach the Simbas took to their heels. The troops secured the airport, quickly fought their way into town. Surprise, speed and Simba cowardice kept the slaughter near Lumumba Square from reaching major proportions. But across the Congo River, in Stanleyville's Rive Gauche section, the Simbas found 28 other victims. The hostages were hacked to pieces on the street. Among them were four Spanish nuns and a number of Spanish and Dutch priests. According to a witness, the priests were beaten and then their throats were cut. After similar treatment, the nuns were placed on top of them. The usual mutilations were carried out on the" sexual organs, and flesh was cut from the bodies to be eaten.
One Belgian who escaped said: "We bought our lives with beer and money.
The fathers and nuns had nothing to ransom their lives with." Of some 1,300 whites in Stanleyville, all but 60 were rescued. Of the dead, at least 29 were Belgian, one Canadian, two American—Carlson and another missionary, Phyllis Rine, 25, of Mount Vernon, Ohio.
The survivors, grey with shock and gaudy with bloodstains, hiked the mile and a half to the airport. There bullet-riddled U.S. C-130 transports—winged by rebel ground fire during the airdrop —waited to fly them to Leopoldville and safety. "It was not a happy, singing group," said Hoyt with grim understatement, "although I couldn't help feeling glad to be alive." By 10:27 a.m.
the first transports were back in Leopoldville. They were chockablock with living, dead, dying and wounded. They kept coming all day: crisp white nuns and an old priest in a black Homburg; two little girls, bloodstained, holding tightly to their dolls; a mother and daughter in pajamas and no shoes; a baby with its feet sticking out of an airline bag.
The dead were set down in front of a U.S. Air Force hangar, and Belgian Catholic priests performed the last rites.
There had been notime yet to provide coffins. U.S. Ambassador George Mc-Murtrie Godley watched two marines drape the Stars and Stripes over the body of Dr. Paul Carlson. Someone had taken a New Testament from Carlson's pocket, to be sent to his wife.
The Question. A single life, or even a hundred, may not appear to mean much in the grim reckoning of Africa.