Book Review: The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea - The Forgotten War of the South Pacific

I finished the book I was reading, Star Wars: Darth Plagueis, yesterday evening/this morning, and figured I better hurry up and finish the review of the book I read before it so I could get a bit caught up.  That and I just feel like blogging right this moment.  Silly, I know, but that's how it is.

Source: Amazon.com

The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea - The Forgotten War of the South Pacific by James Campbell

From the book’s cover (this synopsis was taken from the book’s website, GhostMountainBoys.com):

Lying due north of Australia, New Guinea is among the world’s largest islands. In 1942, when World War II exploded onto its shores, it was an inhospitable, cursorily mapped, disease-ridden land of dense jungle, towering mountain peaks, deep valleys, and fetid swamps. Coveted by the Japanese for its strategic position, New Guinea became the site of one of the South Pacific’s most savage campaigns. Despite their lack of jungle training, the 32nd Division’s Ghost Mountain Boys were assigned the most grueling mission of the entire Pacific campaign: to march 130 miles over the rugged Owen Stanley Mountains and to protect the right flank of the Australian army as they fought to push the Japanese back to the village of Buna on New Guinea’s north coast.
Comprised of National Guardsmen from Michigan and Wisconsin, reserve officers, and draftees from across the country, the 32nd Division lacked more than training—they were without even the basics necessary for survival. The men were not issued the specialized clothing that later became standard issue for soldiers fighting in the South Pacific; they fought in hastily dyed combat fatigues that bled in the intense humidity and left them with festering sores. They waded through brush and vines without the aid of machetes. They did not have insect repellent. Without waterproof containers, their matches were useless and the quinine and vitamin pills they carried, as well as salt and chlorination tablets, crumbled in their pockets.
Exhausted and pushed to the brink of human endurance, the Ghost Mountain Boys fell victim to malnutrition and disease. Forty-two days after they set out, they arrived two miles south of Buna, nearly shattered by the experience.
Arrival in Buna provided no respite. The 32nd Division was ordered to launch an immediate assault on the Japanese position. After two months of furious—sometimes hand-to-hand—combat, the decimated division finally achieved victory. The ferocity of the struggle for Buna was summed up in Time magazine on December 28, 1942, three weeks before the Japanese army was defeated: “Nowhere in the world today are American soldiers engaged in fighting so desperate, so merciless, so bitter, or so bloody.”

Thoughts from the White Board - June 26

Had a strange dream this morning.  I dreamed I was in Arizona attending an LDS temple open house, and in line with me was Ashton Kutcher.  Me and a couple of other guys started talking to him about the LDS faith and he was listening and said he wanted to hear more, so we went to another room and started giving him what in my missionary days we'd call a first discussion.  For those of you who know it, that was the one that had the blue pamphlet.  Needless to say, it was an odd dream.

On other news, life has been kinda rough lately.  The whole family has been sick, for one.  And money has been tight too.  The house is messy.  And I'm behind on working on my internship.  The good news is that it can't go on like this forever.  And even better, my wife will be graduating from her school in just under a month.  Hooray!  She has done so good, and I'm super proud of her.

Book Review: Eisenhower: The White House Years

Here's that review of Eisenhower: The White House Years.  Hope your day is "nifty," just like the fifties.



Source: Amazon.com

 Eisenhower: The White House Years, by Jim Newton

From the book’s cover:

If you think of our 34th president as little more than the babysitter-in-chief during the prosperous fifties, think again. Dwight Eisenhower was bequeathed an atomic bomb and was the first American president not to use it. He ground down Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism until both became, as he said, “McCarthywasm”. He stimulated the economy to lift it from recession, built an interstate highway system, and, for good measure, turned an $8-billion deficit in 1953 into a $500-million surplus in 1960. (Ike was the last president until Bill Clinton to leave his country in the black.)

The President Eisenhower of popular imagination is a benign figure, armed with a putter and little else. The Eisenhower of veteran journalist Jim Newton’s rendering is shrewd, sentimental, and tempestuous. He mourned the death of his first son and doted on his grandchildren but could, one aide recalled, “peel the varnish off a desk” with his temper. Mocked as a blunderbuss, he was in fact a meticulous manager. Admired as a general, he was a cham­pion of peace. In Korea and Vietnam, in Quemoy and Berlin, his generals urged him to wage nuclear war. Time and again, he considered and rejected it. And it was Eisenhower who appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren and who enforced desegregation in the schools.
Rare interviews with John Eisenhower, along with access to newly declassified documents, make for a gripping and revealing narrative.

Thought from the White Board - June 18

My wife should be in the midst of her hands-on practical test for her state boards right now.  Or maybe done with it.  Who's to say?  Either way, I hope she is doing well.  She has been so sick these past few days, and not sleeping good either.  I know I shouldn't wish the days away, but I hope this time of hardship passes by and that good days, or should I say better days, will follow.

Movie Review: Prometheus

Prometheus, 2012
(which could be subtitled, "How I learned to stop worrying and love the squid," to paraphrase Stanley Kubricks's Dr. Strangelove).



The other day I was watching Ridley Scott's masterpiece landmark fill-in-the-blank classic Alien. Must have been the three of four hundredth time that I sat through that little gem of a movie.  Anyway, I was thinking to myself: that the alien critter is bad news, but where did the space ship with the big guy in the funny elephant helmet come from?  And now, having just seen Scott's newest fare, Prometheus, can I say for certain where the guy who has colloquially been known as the "Space Jockey" came from?