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As we watched the raid, we heard an airplane engine to our right. We turned, looked down a big valley below our ridge, and saw a plane approaching. It was a Zero flying up the valley toward us, parallel to and level with the crest of our ridge. It was moving so slowly it seemed unreal. Unarmed, we gawked like spectators at a passing parade as the plane came across our front. It couldn't have been more than thirty or forty yards away. We could see every detail of the plane and of the pilot seated in the cockpit inside the canopy. He turned his head and looked keenly at our little group watching him. He wore a leather flight helmet, goggles pushed up on his forehead, a jacket, and a scarf around his neck.

The instant the Zero pilot saw us, his face broke into the most fiendish grin I ever saw. He looked like the classic cartoon Japanese portrayed in American newspapers of the war years, with buck teeth, slanted eyes, and a round face. He grinned like a cat, for we were to be his mice. We were a fighter pilot's strafing dream, enemy infantry in the open with no antiaircraft guns and no planes to protect us.

One of my buddies muttered in surprise as the plane went on by to our left, “Did you see that bastard grin at us—that slant-eyed sonofabitch. Where the hell's my rifle?”

It happened so fast, and we were all so astonished at the sight of a plane cruising by at eye level, we almost forgot the war. The Japanese pilot hadn't. He banked, climbed to gain altitude, and headed around another ridge out of sight. It was obvious he was coming back to rake us over. It would be difficult to avoid getting hit. No savior was in sight for us.

As we started to spin around and rush back down the ridge seeking safety, we again heard a plane. This time it wasn't the throb of a cruising engine, but the roar of a plane at full throttle. The Zero streaked past us, going down the valley in the opposite direction from which he had first appeared. He was still flying at eye level and he was in a big hurry, as if the devil were after him. His devil was our savior, a beautiful blue Marine Corsair. That incredible Corsair pilot bore in right behind the Japanese as they roared out of sight over the ridge tops. The planes were moving too fast to see either pilot's face, but I'm confident the emperor's pilot had lost his grin when he saw that Corsair.

On our patrols during April, we investigated many Oki-nawan villages and farms. We learned a lot about the people's customs and ways of life. Particularly appealing to me were the little Okinawan horses, really shaggy oversized ponies.

The Okinawans used a type of halter on those horses that I had never seen before. It consisted of two pieces of wood held in place by ropes. The wooden pieces on either side of the horse's head were shaped like the letter F. They were carved out of fine-grained brown wood and were about as big around as a man's thumb. A short piece of rope or cord held the pieces together across the front, and a rope across the top of the animal's head held the pieces in place on each side of the head just above the opening of the mouth. Two short ropes at the back of the wooden pieces merged into a single rope. When pull was exerted on this single rope, the wooden pieces clamped with gentle pressure against the sides of the animal's face above the mouth, and the animal stopped moving. This apparatus combined the qualities of a halter and a bridle without the need for a bit in the horse's mouth.

I was so intrigued by the Okinawan halter that I took one off a horse we kept with us for several days and replaced it with a rope halter. My intention was to send the wooden halter home—I remember that a bright piece of red cord held the front ends together—so I put it into my pack. After 1 May, however, it seemed increasingly doubtful that I would ever get home myself, and my equipment seemed to get heavier as the mud got deeper. Regretfully, I threw away the halter.

We grew quite attached to the horse our squad had adopted, and he didn't seem