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Welcome To Hell
Johnny Strange
Johnny Strange’s first impression of Guadalcanal was the smell. It drifted across the dark water from the even darker blackness of the island—an island squatting among the waves, a monster waiting to swoop down out of the darkness, pluck him off the deck of the ship and gnash his bones into pulp. The nightmare smell slipped in on a tiny breeze as he stood sleepless on the deck of his transport. Dank, sick, rotten—a death bouquet oozing from the primordial swamp that was Guadalcanal. It was a stinking miasma whose foulness stirred up in Johnny’s soul the archetypal fear of every man since hunter-gatherers roamed the vastness of the primitive wilderness—the fear of being killed and eaten by some prehistoric beast in a god-forsaken waste. The smell came fi
