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The local mosquitoes were smaller than those of some other Pacific islands, but just as aggressive, and accompanied by a new pest, fleas. Insect life swarmed in clouds around every corpse. Men had plenty of water—too much, with the incessant rain. They supplemented rations with vegetables taken from peasant gardens. Most found that canned rations and stress combined to promote constipation, which they assuaged with a home-brewed laxative made of iron-ration chocolate and canned milk heated on C-2 composite explosive. The principal factor in their lives and deaths, however, was daily attrition from snipers, machine guns, artillery: “When the bullet hit Gosman’s head734, it sounded as if someone had hit a ripe watermelon with a baseball bat.” Each day there were fewer men to sustain the lumbering advances from ridge to ridge. They had phrases for those who survived in body, but were lost in spirit: “the thousand-yard look” “the bulkhead stare” “going Asiatic.” James Johnston wrote: “I thought of the old verse735 ‘I knew a lad who went to sea / and left the land behind him. / I knew him well—the lad was me / and now I cannot find him.’” A cocky, aggressive replacement named Anderson joined them, and on the first day contemptuously shrugged off Johnston’s warnings to stop wandering into caves. Johnston said resignedly: “I’m just trying to keep you alive.” After a brief taste of combat on Okinawa, tough young Anderson reported sick, and was never seen again.

Johnston departed too, after being hit by mortar fragments in the Awahaca Pocket. At the field hospital, a voice suddenly called out: “Anyone here from Nebraska?” The Marine responded, and was amazed to find himself talking to a kid he knew from home named Kenny Yant, now a medical corpsman. Yant held Johnston’s hand while a surgeon extracted the shrapnel from his body. A little nurse said: “Don’t sweat it, Marine. The doc’s about got it.” Johnston wrote: “Her touch felt like an angel’s736. She was close enough that I could smell her. She smelt like Camay soap.” Discharged from hospital, he was told that he was eligible to go home, but his battalion would like to have him back. He went home.

Rashly exposing himself on Tera Ridge737, Lt. John Armiger suddenly cried out that he could see through his binoculars a Japanese sniper taking aim with a telescopic sight. Everyone ducked save Armiger himself, who was fractionally slow to move. A second later, he was fatally hit in the abdomen. On 26 April, a mortar bomb landed beside Lt. Gage Rodman, a company commander in the 17th Infantry: “I knew I was shot, but the only blood I could see was on my leg. Then I caught sight of what seemed like several yards of pink tubing on the front of my trousers…One of my assistant squad leaders walked over to me and breaking out his first aid dressing, he made a temporary covering for my exposed intestines…At the 102nd Portable Surgical Hospital, I was operated on for the removal of the majority of the shell fragments and the manufacture of a colostomy to replace my severed bowel function.” For months Rodman’s life was despaired of, though he persisted in attempting to reassure his parents: “You see, I am out of any possible danger738 now. I am in a rear-area hospital. I might as well tell you I will be out of action for some months to come. I hope you won’t worry, because it is all convalescence from here on out.” Only on 3 July was the young officer fit for evacuation to the U.S., where he began to suffer brain abscesses, and thereafter remained semi-paralysed.

If the invaders were appalled by their predicament, that of the defenders was vastly worse. Japanese soldiers were dying at ten times the rate of Americans. Captain Kouichi Ito’s battalion of the 32nd Regiment used a thousand mortar bombs in twenty hours on 27 April, when it faced its first American attack. Having spent months preparing deeply dug positions, they found themselves instead deployed where they had only hastily scraped