Free Shadows In the Jungle by Larry Alexander Page A

on the hazards of the duty and asked why he volunteered. If his answer was a flippant “To kill Japs,” or some similar bit of bravado, he was rejected.
    At the conclusion of the interview, the man was dismissed. As he rose and headed for the door, Bradshaw or Williams would say, “Stop! Without turning around, there are items lying here on the table. Name as many as you can.”
    Those who did not recall an adequate number, even to the brand of cigarettes and make of watch, were sent back to their units.
    Robert Teeples, then twenty-five and a member of L Company, 128th Regiment of the 32nd “Red Arrow” Division, volunteered after he transferred out of his former unit “in disgust.” He had been busted to private for missing pill call, during which men were given bad-tasting Atabrine to stave off malaria, after he returned from the hard fighting at Buna.
    Interviewed by Bradshaw, he was asked if he was afraid to die, how far he could swim, and would he be squeamish about killing another human being. Teeples soon became a member of the ASTC’s first class.
    Jack Geiger of New Jersey joined the army in 1943 and, after basic training, was assigned to the 422nd Regiment of the 106th Division. But before the Golden Lions could ship out for Europe (where the division would be decimated during the Battle of the Bulge and two regiments, including Geiger’s 422nd, surrounded and captured), Geiger and a number of other privates were pulled out to serve as replacements bound for the Pacific.
    Geiger ended up with the 31st Division at Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, where the unit prepared for debarkation. He arrived in New Guinea in February 1944 and worked a stint as a jeep driver, ferrying pilots from their barracks to the airfield.
    â€œIt was great,” he recalled years later. “I didn’t have to do all that crazy training with the division.”
    Eventually he was sent back to his unit, I Company, and it was there that he saw a notice tacked to the company bulletin board calling for volunteers for intelligence work. With no idea what he was in for, he applied. Geiger went through the initial interview with his company officers, packed his gear, and was sent to see Bradshaw. Of the almost one hundred men who went with him, only fifteen were selected for Scout training and sent on to the ASTC at Mange Point. Geiger was one of them, joining the Scouts’ third class.
    Lt. Wilbur Littlefield, a twenty-one-year-old Californian with the rugged good looks of a young Clark Gable, was on New Britain with the 40th Division, 160th Regiment, when he caught word that a new unit was being formed. A product of Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, all the Los Angeles-born man knew about this unit, he later recalled, was “that they wanted volunteers for a dangerous mission behind Japanese lines.” Littlefield, who had yet to see any action, was one of three officers and twenty-six men from his company to volunteer, which guaranteed stiff competition since only one officer and six men from the entire regiment would be selected for further consideration. Littlefield recalled that, “in typical army fashion,” the first officer selected by the company “couldn’t even read a map.”
    â€œI don’t know how he ever got his commission,” Littlefield said.
    Sixth Army G2 was furious that the division commander tried to pawn this man off and sent an officer of their own to make the selection. By coincidence, before the war this officer had been a teacher in the Los Angeles high school Littlefield had attended. The two knew each other and Littlefield got the nod and would be a member of the ASTC’s third class.
    Born on a farm forty miles northeast of Seattle, Oliver Roesler was a Pacific Northwest lumberman. He had been a University of Washington ROTC student until the war broke out, at which time he threw his books into his school locker and went