Bill Pastore, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Jason Hardy, September 20th, 2006: part of the Saving the legacy project

Page 122

tn a swamp. Well it was dry when they built the camp. In the rainy a n it' l w. God, there's water almost to your knees, and alligators swimming down it. JAS: Geez. BILL: They caught alligators right in the middle-Oh god, it was fun. But nobody cared. Nobody gave a damn, you know. The river is where the big fight was. There's a sand pit, and they came across that, and they killed so many Japanese there you could walk across that river without getting your feet wet. Then at night they could see the glows coming down the river, and they started shooting at them. They thought it was Japanese in boats. It was the alligators. They could here them going down there, chomp, chomp, chomp, eating these dead bodies. JAS: What would you do with the dead bodies, the Japanese? BILL: With theirs? We would just bury them in a mass grave. They would just take them back, when they could get them-They didn't pick up their dead. The Chinese did; they picked up their dead and wounded. The Japanese would just leave them; and if they did take them back, they'd put them in caves, just stack them up in a cave. You could tell when they were there. Whew! They'd get ripe in the Pacific in a hurry. They didn't bathe. They wore a perfume. Oh, god, I can still smell it. Then I could smell it in their footprints, and tell you how long it had been since they had been there. It would last for maybe two hours. JAS: Wow. BILL: Strong. Then you'd get a faint whiff of it every now and then; but if it was strong, you could tell if they'd just passed you. They used a canvas shoe, but it had a split 121