The Liberators by Chris Lynch

Author:Chris Lynch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2015-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

In a gesture to maybe make up for leaving us behind for so much of the war, the Corps and Navy send us into Choiseul on a fleet of four destroyer transports, marking a definite step up in class and menace from everything that has carried us previously. And these transports are jacked up even further with the addition of six regular destroyers serving as escorts.

It is all adding up now to something important, which is something this outfit needs. The brass finally seems to understand that. They practically read the thoughts of our battle-starved battalion when they code-named the mission “Operation Blissful.”

That all contributes to the general confidence we as a unit carry into our landing at Voza behind Colonel Krulak. Though if you’re being led by The Brute and your confidence is still AWOL, then you should probably just stay back on the boat.

One of the Australian coastwatchers who’ve been helping out as scouts and native liaisons all over these islands is supposed to shine a light to signal that we will get no opposition. When he doesn’t as we near land, things get more tense and we gear up for resistance right from the start. Yet when we hit the beach looking for a certain kind of trouble, that trouble seems to have managed to elude us one more time. We land unimpeded, and immediately we’re on the move with our fifty-pound packs on our backs.

The beach at Voza sits at about the midpoint between our main interests of Choiseul Bay up at the northwest end of the island and Sangigai down in the southeast. There is enough moonlight to see the expanse of pretty white-sand beach for some distance in each direction and a scattering of thatch-roof huts big enough for people to live in. I wonder what they make of the likes of us tromping right through their paradise of a front yard.

That strikes me as funny for half a second.

People live here?

People live here?

But there isn’t time to admire beaches or dwell on the mixed luck of the people who live on them. We march, platoon by platoon, one hundred and fifty yards straight from the sea to the tree line that welcomes us to the jungle of Choiseul.

Except that it doesn’t. Welcome us, that is. This jungle is at least twice as dense as what we found on Vella Lavella, and we have to fight our way through every foot of it in order to make any progress at all.

“This is what we wanted,” Klecko says as he pushes his way into the relentless lushness just ahead of me.

“This is what we wanted?” I say. “I don’t recollect wanting this stuff at all.”

“Silence on the line!” Sergeant Silas hisses, short-circuiting communications for the duration.

The duration turns out to be a test of everyone’s endurance. The path to our plateau of choice is three miles of very steep gradient. The heat, which is so constant in these islands you can quickly forget you were ever comfortable, is more intense than anything we have encountered yet.

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