The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [114]
Back at the field hospital, where Pravda would spend the night, doctors were working to keep men alive. On December 3, when Russell Buys was shot and went back for medical attention, he warned the medics to expect heavy casualties because soon there was going to be a “big push on.”
Buys knew what he was talking about. Though he was a cook, cooks at Buna did not get a break. They fought shoulder to shoulder with the riflemen. In fact, Buys had already taken a few Japs and risked his life in the process.
While guarding the company command post, he had seen enemy soldiers crossing Entrance Creek by way of the wood bridge. When he reported the activity to Gus Bailey, Bailey treated him like anything but a cook.
“Well, then, get up there and shoot ’em” was all Bailey said.
Buys had something of a reputation in the company. He had grown up on a farm in Muskegon, where he was always shooting something. At Camp Beauregard he had finished at the top of the company on the firing range, using .22s and .30-06 bolt-action rifles. When the scores came in, the officer in charge chided the rest of the guys. “You guys let a cook beat you!” he roared. “You sorry SOBs, you let a goddamn cook beat you!”
Buys crept up toward the creek and squeezed between some mangrove roots. Then he put his M-1 to his shoulder and sighted in on a spot about two hundred yards away on the bridge. When a group of Japanese soldiers tried crossing he sent three of them spilling into the creek.
On the day Buys was shot, Bailey had sent him to the front lines to get hot rice to the troops. On the way back a firefight broke out, and Buys took a blow to his shoulder that felt as if a heavyweight fighter had unloaded on him. Turning around to punch the SOB who had hit him, Buys realized that he had been shot. He did not know if it was a Jap sniper or one of his own guys. It did not matter to him—a Jap bullet or friendly fire, “it hurt the same.” Another bullet flew just past his head, and Buys dropped to the ground. When the shooting stopped, he crouched down low and hustled back to the aid station. The medic on duty told him he was a lucky man—the wound would get him out of Buna and they would not have to amputate his arm. The bullet had just missed shattering his shoulder bone.
East of the trail, Herman Bottcher looked sternly at Jastrzembski and DiMaggio. “I want eighteen men,” he said. They didn’t dare say no.
Per instructions from Bailey and Captain Hantlemann, Bottcher had already scouted the approach to Buna, where the Americans had run into murderous fire from snipers, machine gunners, and roving patrols. If he and his men could get around the interlocking bunkers and pillboxes, they could isolate the village from Buna Government Station.
Far to the right of the trail, Bottcher and his men slipped through a field of kunai grass and pushed north through jungle packed thick with sago and nipa palms. Overhead, the trees’ branches were knotted and twisted. “Watch the trees,” Bottcher warned. “Be on the lookout for snipers.”
It was late in the afternoon. Already the fruit bats were gathering in the sky. Like the late-day rains, the men could always count on the bats. They left their treetop lairs and swirled through the forest canopy on wings the size of a hawk’s.
Ahead Jastrzembski saw it—a pillbox. What the hell were they going to do now? He had no sooner said the words than he saw Bottcher bent over at the waist zigzagging with slabs of mud stuck to his boots. He slipped a grenade through the firing slit of the pillbox and dove into the jungle. Jastrzembski watched with relief as the grenade exploded.
After taking out the pillbox, they forded a tidal creek, holding their guns high over their heads, knowing that one Japanese machine