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At 10:00 p.m. the evening before the assault, Boice and Bailey and their men maneuvered into position through thick sago swamp. Bailey felt the same poignant ache for home he always felt on the eve of battle. Only a week earlier he had received a packet of seventeen letters from Katherine. He read the letters hungrily and then he reread each one slowly three or four times until he knew their details by heart.

Katherine had also sent along three baby photos of Cladie Alyn. Swelling with pride, Bailey passed them out among the company.

Back at home Katherine and Cladie Alyn were on their way to the Bailey farm to share Bailey’s most recent letter with his mother, Mamie. Mamie loved to have Katherine read the letters aloud to her, to hear the cadence of the sentences, her son’s words.

Katherine looked forward to the visits, too. Even when she and Cladie were dating, she enjoyed going to the Bailey farm. She loved its simple grace: the white house with a porch across the front, the barn that Jim Bailey, Cladie’s father, had built with lumber cut and milled on the farm, the fenced-in yard with the big oak, and the creek that wandered through the pasture behind the house. Now Katherine imagined how it would be when her husband returned. She and Cladie and Cladie Alyn would go down to the creek. They would roll up their pants and wade in the summer trickle.

Jim Boice was feeling good. He knew Christmas was approaching and while in Australia, he had made arrangements with Block’s Department Store in Indianapolis to have presents delivered to Zelma and Billy and his mom. It was a special service the family owned store offered to soldiers. Boice imagined Zelma and Billy’s surprise when they received the gifts. For Billy, he had ordered a pedal fire truck; for Zelma, hard-to-come-by nylon stockings and perfume; and for his mother perfume, too.

Boice was no pessimist, but sometimes it was hard, even for a man who had been taught since he was a small boy to look on the bright side, to imagine getting out of the jungle alive. He had been lucky; he had made it over the mountains. Once he got to Buna, Lady Luck was still at his side. In battle he had not been scratched. Somehow he had avoided the sniper’s bullet on scouting trips. All the while, men were dying around him. He had prayed, but so had the others. Why did God hear one man’s prayers and not another’s?

Perhaps God would spare him long enough to let him hold Zelma again and to bounce Billy on his lap. Perhaps next year he would make it home for Christmas.

Boice would have given anything to be home. Instead, he was preparing to try to take the Government Station, the toughest target yet. Perhaps, though, God really was listening to his prayers. On Sunday, December 13, while in reserve, the battalion found time to conduct church services. Boice kneeled, laid his rifle down beside him, and bowed his head. The following day, the 127th captured Buna Village. Now, as they prepared to attack the Government Station, Boice hoped that perhaps it could be accomplished as easily. He had seen enough good men die.

At first light on December 19, Boice ordered the men to inspect their weapons. Jastrzembski, DiMaggio, and Stenberg had checked and rechecked theirs all night long. They knew how to care for their weapons. One of the guys in the company joked that he could take apart and put together his M-1 almost as fast as he could get his girlfriend’s dress off.

Shortly before 7:00 a.m., the first part of the plan went into action. Nine B-25s dropped 100-and 500-pound bombs on the Government Station. Fifteen minutes later a dozen A-20s bombed and strafed the coastal track between the station and Giropa Point. At 7:30 the mortars began firing. The bombardment lasted fifteen minutes.

At 7:45, Boice and Bailey led their men in the attack with the support of a rolling mortar barrage. They had not covered more than twenty yards when they got caught in fierce cross fire. The barrage had done little but antagonize the Japanese.