Kokoda

• Rosie Mccrossin, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2015

There’s a certain point which all the boys reach eventually, when the mud and the leaves and the water all seep into you so much that if you start scraping it off, you end up scraping off your own skin. It’s not a metaphor; the other day Charlie just kept cutting it away until he looked at his hands and they were bright red, and he opened his mouth and he was screaming. I’d never seen a man cry before I came here. Now I see it every day.

Today I am walking at the front. It is my 18th birthday but I can’t tell anyone. The other boys walk in the middle, carrying the stretchers over their heads with the acid disinfectant and low desperate moans dripping into their faces, and behind them the sick boys wait to roll onto the stretchers when the others roll off. They are the ones who scream. They scream and fall over all of a sudden because the ulcers on their legs are bleeding or their malaria is crushing their organs or their skin is on fire. The other day, one of the boys on the stretchers fell off and his skull just collapsed in on itself and the sergeant shot him in the neck. He was bleeding from everywhere.

I am talking to the sergeant, smiling even though my legs are burning. The ants run all around like red water droplets on the ground. They climb up our legs and we don’t shake them off. The sergeant is telling me about his little daughter called Alice and how blonde she is, but he can’t describe it. We stop in front of a river which shouts and gushes and breaks water at us because of the rain. And I look up because I see the sergeant’s shaking fingers. And there is a Jap standing maybe 100 metres away, one hand on the trigger, one hand on his bottle which he is slowly pulling from the angry water. All these weeks crawling through the jungle like animals on an endless hunt for the enemy and he is right here, looking at us with his fingers shaking just like ours. It is the first time I have seen a Japanese person.

And then he shoots the sergeant, just like that. And the sergeant’s body is floating down the river which is filling with creamy blood in the foamy peaks. And the Jap is looking at me with his little black eyes and he almost looks like he is crying. And I shoot him. And at that very moment, my parents cut a cake back in Brisbane and my mother places the picture of me on the table and the jacarandas are in bloom and years ago on the same day I am born in the silvery morning at Herston. The army said I was too young to fight. But at the very moment the bullet ruptures the outer layers of his heart, I turn 18.