The Kokoda Trail: A Short Story

The last line of defence, that’s what we were. Untrained, unknown and unrecognised until this time. The battle on the Kokoda trail was the worst experience of my life. Day by day there was nothing left in my body; the only thing that kept me going was the urge to make it back successfully. We didn’t know much about the Japenese, just that they were highly trained and outnumbered us severely...that’s all that really mattered anyway.

Every waking moment was a living hell. It didn’t help either that we knew Australia was counting on us, yet, they had little faith in our ability to win…that was the perception amongst the ranks and evidenced by the nickname given to us - ‘chocolate soldiers’. That’s because they thought we were just going to melt out there, no chance of survival. We proved them wrong but it was at great cost.

Most of us hadn’t had any fighting

There was also the issue of health. Everyone was sick all the time and disease spread like wildfire in these conditions. We became accustomed to our friends contracting diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, scrub typhus and various other deadly diseases. All this made life unbearable. As if that wasn’t enough, we also had to deal with constantly wet clothes, which caused various uncomfortable skin diseases. As one of my associates, Hugh Buggy said, ‘their faces had no expression, their eyes sunk back into their sockets. They were drained by malaria, dysentery, and near-starvation, but they were still in the firing line, facing a much more powerful enemy with much heavier weaponry.’ This only begins to describe the conditions that we faced on the Kokoda trail.

Those of us from the thirty-ninth battalion, who were lucky enough to survive, came back to Australia with problems of our own. Many of us suffered from posttraumatic stress. This made it very difficult to get on with our lives and many of us turned to drinking and physical violence. Our lives were never the same