The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [113]
Odell had his good luck Japanese bayonet that he had taken on November 30. But now he didn’t feel so lucky. None of the other companies had made it to Buna. What the hell made the general think he and his men were going to succeed?
Some of the men, realizing they would be walking into a death trap, refused to go ahead. “If you don’t get going, I have the right to shoot you,” Odell snapped.
“I heard safeties being clicked off,” says one of the soldiers who witnessed the altercation. “Fortunately, someone stepped in and cooler heads prevailed. I do believe that someone would have gladly put a bullet in Lieutenant Odell.”
Reluctantly, Odell’s platoon advanced. In front of the soldiers lay the bodies of other Americans who had tried to take Buna. Odell stepped over the corpses and when he and his men were in position they rushed the village. A storm of Japanese bullets greeted them. Odell screamed for everyone to get down, but not before the Japanese had taken out a number of men.
On the other side, Sergeant George Pravda organized his men. He was only a sergeant, but the company had already lost all its lieutenants. Besides, Pravda was as cool as they came and had already won a Silver Star for an attack on November 30.
Just a few days before, Pravda had come to a buddy’s rescue. Sergeant Jack Olsen had been doing reconnaisance work at Buna Government Station when he was shot in the leg. Unable to walk, he lay in the jungle waiting for someone to find him. He prayed it would be an American and not a Jap. He dared not yell out, though. His unit was not far behind. If he screamed, he would give away its position.
Olson swallowed twelve sulfa pills and waited. Twenty-four hours later, George Pravda found him. Pravda cut the bottom off Olsen’s fatigues, filled the wound with sulfa powder and wrapped it with the piece of cloth, then signaled to some litter men who managed to get Olsen out.
Now Pravda hesitated. He knew the trail ahead was a death trap. The last thing he wanted to do was to send these men forward. They were more than friends; they were family, brothers. While F Company trained in Louisiana, Pravda served as its reporter for the Daily Tribune in Grand Haven, Michigan. He knew who came down with measles, who was sunburned, who was a regular at the weekend picture shows, who was homesick, and because it was his job to check them in at night, who liked to carouse and who did not. He knew their wives and sweethearts, their mothers and fathers, the names of their dogs, their company nicknames—Baby Dumpling, the Bugler, Wrong Entrance—and laced his correspondences with amusing anecdotes and folksy yarns about life in Louisiana. He wrote about the heat, mosquitoes, mud, cotton and watermelon, fried chicken, funny deep-South drawls, black shoeshine boys.
The men of Company F relied on Sergeant Pravda’s discretion, and Pravda never disappointed them. He never printed anything that might give family members back home reason for alarm or sweethearts cause to worry about whether their men were straying. But after earning their trust, how could he now send them up against Japanese snipers, machine gunners, and mortarmen when he knew some of them were going to be killed?
Pravda instructed his men to remove their bayonets. It was an unorthodox way to run an attack, plus Odell had just ordered them to insert bayonets, but Pravda had been at Buna long enough to make the call.
“No bayonets?” asked one of his corporals.
“That’s right,” answered Pravda. “No bayonets.”
Pravda was worried that with bayonets the men would get hung up in the jungle’s swarm of vines and limbs.
Pravda and his men made it all the way to the mouth of Entrance Creek and inadvertently crossed over into Buna Government Station. When Pravda realized where he was, he called for reinforcements. He had made a wrong turn and now he and his men were staring at the biggest prize of all—the Government Station.
No one could believe the news. “He’s at the goddamn Government Station! We gotta get him some men!”
But the men never arrived,