The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [77]
BOOK THREE
Train the arm and school the eye.
Steel the heart to ice-lipped death.
They are God’s who learn to die
Having learned life’s shibboleth.
C.T. “BUCK” LANHAM, “INTERIM”
Umi yukaba, mizuku kabane,
Yama yukaba, kusamusu kabane,
Okimi no he ni koso shiname.
Kaerimi wa seji.
(Across the sea, corpses soaking in the water,
Across the mountains, corpses heaped upon the grass,
We shall die by the side of the Lord.
We shall never look back.)
OTOMO YAKAMOCHI, “UMI YUKABA”
Chapter 12
THE KILL ZONE
ON NOVEMBER 16, the Australians had just completed their crossing of the Kumusi River at Wairopi and began marching on Gona and Sanananda, northwest of Buna village via the Buna-Kokoda track. On the coast, the 128th moved out, too, in the hazy light of a tropical morning. The men lined their dog tags with rubber tubing so the clang of metal on metal would not give them away in battle. In addition to their packs, they carried canteens, knives, first aid kits hooked to their belts, cigarettes, Zippo lighters, two extra bandoliers of ammo per man, and hand grenades.
After weeks of idleness, they were happy to be on the move at last. One officer remembered the mood as “like the eve of a celebration to come. We were to go in to ‘raise the flag’ and there was to be a great victory for the American forces with very little effort on our part.”
For the first time since landing on the north coast the men appreciated the island’s luxuriant beauty—the picturesque coastline with its regal coconut palms, waves lapping at the sandy beach, a blue sky stripped of clouds, the first bands of sunshine filtering through the trees.
It was a puzzling thing to see—soldiers moving into battle without a touch of gravity, hardly conscious of their own mortality. Gangly young men, soaked to the bone, chuckled and gibed with each other and told jokes, the raunchier the better, raising their voices not to overcome rampaging fear, but to deliver punch lines. Though they were tired from having walked twenty miles through knotted jungle with bad feet, fevers, and oozing sores, and though they were hungry after the previous night’s meager dinner of rice and boiled, under-ripe papayas, they believed what they had been told: The beachhead was lightly defended, they would mop up, they would kill a few starving, near-sighted Japs, take a few scalps maybe, knock out some gold fillings, and push on up the island’s north coast toward bigger battles and then get back to civilization as quickly as they could. Once home, they would drink, race fast cars, date every pretty gal they could, take baths every day, eat until they could not stand, and sit on their front porches and wave to passersby.
Despite their initial cockiness, by the afternoon the men were beat, and they, too, rid themselves of everything they considered nonessential. But even after lightening their loads, they struggled in the 100-degree heat. By nightfall it was all they could do to wade a waist-deep creek. After crossing, they made camp at the creek’s mouth, near the village of Boreo, just north of coastal headquarters at Hariko.
Just behind the encampment, soldiers were assembling two Australian 3.7-inch mountain howitzers, which would provide long-range artillery for the attack. Using a captured Japanese barge, General Albert Waldron, Harding’s artillery officer, had brought in Australian mountain guns and two hundred rounds of ammunition early that morning. It was a daring move. He and his crew put ashore in an area that had not yet been scouted by Allied troops, unloaded, and then headed back down the coast to Oro Bay to pick up General Harding and his party, the members of a portable hospital unit, two 25-pounder field pieces, 81 mm long-range mortars, .50 caliber machine guns, rations, radio supplies,