Free Islands of the Damned by R.V. Burgin

It wasn’t long before that land crab had skittered up his trousers and out across his chest.
    Sarrett came out of there with his KA-BAR knife, slashing that mosquito net from one end to the other. Just— whoosh —and he was out of that hammock. Didn’t make a sound.
    I never did tell him who put that land crab in his hammock.
    I thought the mosquitoes were worse than the land crabs. We joked that the big ones would hold you down while the little ones sucked you dry. We had a mosquito repellant but it was absolutely pungent. You’d pour a little bit out of a bottle into the palm of your hands and spread it around. It would keep the mosquitoes off, but you could hardly live with yourself. It was hard to tell what was worse, the mosquitoes or the smell.
    We were also fighting a more serious problem. We called it “jungle rot.” It was a fungus that would invade your armpits, ankles and crotch, and spread beneath your belt. Damp underwear seemed to promote the fungus, so some stopped wearing underpants—those whose underpants hadn’t already rotted off. The only thing that would relieve the itch was gentian violet, an antifungal medication. The corpsmen would paint all the places you’d scratched raw and the festering rash of pimples under your arms. Everybody had that purple stuff on them. We were a colorful mess.
    But at least we were out of combat. We cooked pancakes over an open fire, and I was able to go swimming in the ocean a couple times. It got deep pretty fast twenty-five or thirty yards out. I dove to the bottom and looked around. There were a lot of shells and starfish scattered on the ocean floor, things that seemed strange and wonderful to a boy from an east Texas farm.
    One day we were washing our clothes in the ocean and I waded out to where it was waist deep. I looked up and here came two Jap bodies floating along. I guess they’d been killed on airplanes or ships. We got out of the water pretty fast then.

    The Japs had pretty much melted into the jungle. In February we climbed into LCMs and made a series of landings eastward along the coast from Borgen Bay. We hoped to catch up with the Japs and cut off their retreat to Rabaul. We’d land and conduct a patrol for a day or two, searching jungle trails for signs of the enemy. Then we’d move on, leapfrogging another unit that had landed farther up the coast.
    We found a few stragglers. They’d leave two or three behind with knee mortars and a machine gun. We called them knee mortars because they had a folding arch that looked like it could fit over your knee. They wouldn’t use it that way, of course, because there was too much kick—it would break a man’s leg—but we called it that anyway.
    When we’d come up on the Japs they’d open fire. If we didn’t get them, they’d move farther up the trail and set up again. By late in the month we’d captured a major enemy supply dump, meeting only occasional resistance.
    When we went on patrol we’d take along war dogs that could sniff out Japs. After a while I realized that I could smell the Japs, too, if they were in the area and the wind was right. It was just like hunting in the woods back home, when I could smell a squirrel or a deer. But the smell of Japs was completely different from anything I’d ever smelled. They told us they could smell us, too. They said we smelled like goats.
    We’d have a dog with us, and the Japs would be sleeping in these A-frame lean-tos they made of palm leaves. And the dog would get you in real close, like a bird dog. Japs would be inside, napping or just lying around.
    We’d go in both ends at once and bayonet them or slit their throats. We didn’t want to shoot them and let anybody else in the vicinity know we were around.
    The first time we went out on patrol we captured three and took them all the way back to battalion headquarters. By then the rain had rotted out our shoes and our clothes were just about falling off our backs.
    At the battalion they