The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [120]
Mitchell washed the dried blood and sand from the soldier’s face. The soldier came to, and when he did, he was terrified, expecting the Americans to slit his throat. Instead, Bottcher gave him a drink and poured water on his chest. Then he and Mitchell bandaged the soldier’s leg, gave him a piece of chocolate, and delivered the prisoner to an aid station.
As worn out as the men at Bottcher’s Corner were, the rest of the battalion was in no better shape. After twelve all-out attacks on Buna Village in three weeks, Stutterin’ Smith’s 2nd Battalion was barely capable of holding the ground they had won. Companies had been reduced to the size of platoons, platoons to the size of squads. Companies E and F each had fewer than fifty soldiers left to fight, a quarter of their original strength. The battalion that had crossed Ghost Mountain with nearly nine hundred soldiers now had fewer than three hundred men left.
At the roadblock four miles southwest of Bottcher’s Corner, on the other side of the Girua River, the Japanese attacked, and time and again Huggins and his men held.
“The situation was utter chaos,” Huggins recalled. “Nobody knew what was going on. We were green kids….”
Second Lieutenant Bill Sikkel saw the chaos first hand. He and Captain Russ Wildey managed to sneak and shoot their way north toward the roadblock. The foray took the better part of a day, and because they had not been issued compasses, they had to guess their way through the jungle. They arrived just in time: Huggins and his men had been under attack for thirty-two hours and were running low on ammunition.
Sikkel was struck by the scene. Bodies of the Japanese dead lay scattered around the flanks. The Americans hugged the inside of the slit trench waiting for the next Japanese attack.
The patrol spent the night, and the following morning Sikkel and Wildey brought out seventeen wounded and sick men and navigated their way back to the battalion command post. Sikkel was used to the jungle. Two weeks before, on the eve of his twenty-second birthday, just before setting out on his first patrol, he had emptied his pockets and told Father Dzienis to send the contents back to his mother in case he did not make it. He had been maneuvering through the swamps and the tangled forest each and every day since then. Doing it with wounded men, though, was especially dicey. He kept a close eye out for the deer-like imprint of the split-toed Japanese tong. It was a sure sign that snipers lurked nearby.
Back up the track from where Sikkel had come, not far outside the southwest perimeter of the roadblock, Lieutenant Hershel Horton had gone out on what he called a “mercy patrol” to pick up the dog tags of Keast’s group. After hearing the story of the ambush, he figured Keast was dead, but part of him could not help but hope. Perhaps his friend was lying somewhere in the jungle, still breathing.
When shots burst from behind a thicket of sago palms, Horton and the three men with him dove for cover. Horton was hit. His buddies tried to crawl to him, but Japanese snipers had them pinned down. When the shooting subsided, Horton realized that his buddies had somehow made it out. He then dragged himself forty feet through the mud to what he described as a “grass shanty.” Wounded, with bullet holes in his hip and right leg, “semi-delirious,” and without food or water, Horton waited for two days for his friends to return. Finally, on December 3, one of his buddies, accompanied by a medic, was able to reach him. But the two men could not lift Horton, so the medic gave Horton a drink of water, which he lapped at like a thirsty dog, then bandaged his wounds and promised to return as soon as possible with help. True to his word, the medic came back with help the following day. He gave Horton water again, but when an enemy sniper shot and killed his assistant, the medic was forced to crawl away. Lying in the hot sun, Horton craved fluids and pawed at the jungle humus, trying to dig a hole deep enough to reach water. “Life,” he wrote