This
is a story about an adventure of two crew 7 members on
Guam. As told by Elmo Huston and Ralph Hardin.
We were one day standing in front of our Quonset hut where
a small palm tree had been planted in almost solid coral.
We were trying to water the poor thing. During our ministrations
a P-51 flew over us and crashed into the jungle very close
by. We thought we had better get out there and see if
we could help.
We
were a little leery of going into the jungle. Just a few
nights before the Marines had set up a perimeter in our
area because they thought there might be an intrusion
by the Japanese.
We
took off into the jungle, anyway, and soon found that
we could very easily get lost. Elmo had his pocketknife
with him and he started to blaze our trail. As we got
out further we found we had no reference points to guide
us. No mountains, no sun, nothing, so we decided we had
better let the Marines do the searching. They had captured
the island and knew more about moving through it than
we did.
We
turned to retrace our steps and discovered that we could
not see our last blaze. We decided that one of us should
stay where we were and the other would start back to find
the blaze. The one who stayed put soon found that the
other one was circling to the left. There was quite a
discussion about this since the one out looking for the
blaze insisted that he was not veering to the left. Finally,
to settle the disagreement, we exchanged the tasks and
soon found that both of us did, in fact, veer to the left.
We
had to work out another method of finding our way back.
Elmo said he had paced off about the same number of steps
between blazes. We tried to pace off about the same distance
and then we did a half moon to see if that would turn
up the blaze. After much effort, this finally worked.
Fortunately, we did not have to go through this procedure
to find each blaze. When we were walking between blazes
we suddenly heard a lot of commotion off to our left.
We both thought we had bought the farm since there were
hundreds of enemy soldiers hiding out in the jungle. Our
only weapon was Elmo's pocketknife.
A wild boar with tusks at least a foot long stormed out
of the brush and took off in another direction leaving
us able to breathe again. A wild boar can be very dangerous
so we were happy to get back to our hut and be ready to
fly another "safer" mission.
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