Author Description

As World War Two started to envelope the South Pacific, the Japanese, well established at their base at Rabaul located north of the Solomon Islands, invaded Guadalcanal at the south end of the Solomon Island archipelago, and started to construct an airfield for the planned invasion of Australia, and by extension, New Zealand, some 1,200 miles across open water to the south. The U.S. Marine Corps First Division landed at Guadalcanal on June 8, 1942, in a desperate bid to wrest control of the Island, along with the airfield under construction, from the tenacious grip of the fanatical Japanese. The lives of many, friend and foe, were inexorably drawn into the conflict, irrevocably changed in the process: Clinton, a Texan cowboy who joined the Marines after he killed the son of a wealthy Mexican ranchero owner south of the Rio Grande, and later landed at Guadalcanal with The First Division. Brian, an Australian plantation owner at Guadalcanal, who, at the behest of the U.S. Navy, entered the perilous existence of a Coast Watcher spying on Japanese military activities of the nightly forays of the Tokyo Express down the 'slot'. Kathina, daughter of a well-to-do politician in the African country of Mali, who served as a Marine Corps nurse at Guadalcanal where she met Clinton. Yoosef, a Siberian sniper thug, who exercised his profession on any target of opportunity that appeared in the cross hairs of his sniper weapon, whether American, Japanese, Australians British Coast Watchers, island natives, or just about anyone else. Pele, a Mexican who came north to join the Marine Corps, and landed at Guadalcanal with the Corps' First Division. Buford, an Army Air Force B-17 bomber side-gunner shot down by Japanese Zeros over the Island, and who had a brief tragic encounter with Brian as they were pursued by Japanese marines through the jungles of Guadalcanal. The conflict is replete with South Pacific ground, aerial, and sea action involving fighter aircraft, submarines, destroyer