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outpacing his usually athletic, longlegged colleague.
    By the time they reached the river and started to canoe downstream to San Joaquin, Johnson noticed he was pulling most of the weight.
    â€œI feel lousy. Really lousy,” MacKenzie said as he staggered off to bed.
    The next morning Peace Corps nurse Rose Navarro, who had been sent in to help with translating, took one look at MacKenzie and pronounced his condition serious. She also noticed that Angel Muñoz, a Panamanian lab technician who had recently arrived from MARU to assist Kuns, had similar symptoms.
    Johnson and Kuns contacted Panama through a cumbersome radio relay system, and a USAF C-130 flew in that day—the Fourth of July—to evacuate the two ailing researchers.
    As he waved goodbye to MacKenzie, Johnson felt a feverish chill come over his body and thought, “Damn! I should have been on that plane too!”
    Over the next four days Johnson slowly hitchhiked his way, plane to
plane, across Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia, finally reaching the Gorgas Hospital in Panama.
    And now here he was, bleeding to death. To his left lay MacKenzie, on the right Muñoz. Johnson could imagine his brief obituary: “promising young research physician, born in Terre Haute, Indiana, 1929. Dead, age 34. Unmarried.”
    He knew there were two ways the virus could kill him. He’d seen it in San Joaquin. He might soon develop neurological symptoms, getting tremors and losing control of his muscles; eventually, he would have a grand mal seizure and die. Or the sheer volume of blood hemorrhaging from his capillaries would become so devastating that his body would go into shock and he’d die of cardiac arrest. Either death could strike in a matter of hours, or days.
    In any event, there was no cure, no antitoxin. There was just lying and waiting.
    After several more days of agony all three men showed signs of improvement, thanks largely to the efforts of an Army doctor flown in especially for them from Washington, D.C. Though he had never treated this particular ailment, the doctor had handled dozens of cases of another viral hemorrhagic disease called Seoul Hantaan, which first came to the attention of Westerners when 121 trench-bound American soldiers fighting in the Korean War died bleeding deaths that were not unlike the one threatening Johnson. (Nearly 2,500 U.S. soldiers suffered the Hantaan disease from 1951 to 1955.) 2 Nobody had yet identified the Hantaan virus and it wasn’t clear how the disease was transmitted, but U.S. Army doctors had discovered that patients’ chances of recovery were greatly enhanced by careful supervision of their electrolytes and fluids. In all hemorrhaging diseases, as the capillaries leaked out precious fluids and proteins, the delicate chemical balances of vital organs such as kidneys, hearts, livers, and spleens were severely disrupted. Long before the immune system had a chance to mount a counterattack against the Hantaan virus, the organs would cease functioning and the patient would either convulse or go into shock.
    Also in from Bethesda was Pat Webb, Johnson’s petite fiancée. Born in England and trained in both medicine and virology, Webb was doing research at NIH and had planned to move to Panama soon to join Johnson. Short, thin, and prematurely graying, Webb had an often caustic, opinionated style of speech. But for those who persevered, knowing Webb meant experiencing a woman possessed of a profound sense of humanity that infused her medical and research work.
    Now she sat beside her future husband and caressed, kissed, or embraced him whenever he could tolerate the pain of being touched. By deliberately touching Johnson to illustrate there was no danger, she hoped to allay the fears of the frightened hospital staff. 3 Webb’s fear was not the virus, but that Johnson would die, and a couple of times his condition seemed so grave she was convinced he wasn’t going to make it.

    The Army