I know I should say something, I’ve kept it secret so long. It’s been only the three of us who’ve known about it for the last sixty-odd years. Still…what do I have to lose now? I don’t have a long time to live, lean in, my voice is failing…

Remember what I’m telling you, boy. This is history. I hate it, I hate to say it, I hate it so much, but I know that the truth always should be defended. Isn’t that what I fought for? Isn’t that why I enlisted? I never talked about the war, you know that. For good reason, though, boy.

Let me tell you about something that happened when I was nineteen. I know the exact date, because I wrote it in my diary…it was September 8th, 1942, in New Guinea. We Australians were holding off the Japs from the north, because the British were busy with the Chinamen taking the fight to the Japs in Burma and Singapore.

The Kokoda Track ran from Moresby to the south of New Guinea, all through the Bellamies and the mountaintops. You’ve heard of it in school, I know, but they teach nothing but rubbish in these schools. Let me tell you…

Imagine being out in a jungle on a hot summer night, pitch-black, with mosquitoes flying all around, piercing you hundreds of times in an hour. Imagine that, in pouring rain, the ground around you flooded and soaked in mud, and you’re carrying a heavy gun and backpack, on your belly to hide from an unseen enemy. Imagine doing all that, while people are dying around you, bullets whirring over your heads, soaked to the bone and hundreds of miles from the sagelands.

It was awful, boy. The Japs were suicidal, and they’d do anything to gain a yard of land. I saw Japs shot in the hips and chest rush forward with bayonets to kill an Australian before falling over. We laid in the mud, without changes of clothes for weeks and months, repelling back an enemy that we could barely see through the rain and mud.

A mate of mine was hit four times in the chest during a battle, and was spitting up bright frothy blood; he survived. You know Jimmy Steele? Took a shell in the hip and lost his legs. That was up in Kokoda.

Right at the start of September, after the rainy season had turned the area around Isurava into a muddy swimming pool, I was with my fireteam fighting the Japs in the jungle. I was between Nauro and Myola when we contacted the Japs. There were me, my sarge, and two other men.

We were moving through the jungle when we came across three Japs and four natives, who were guiding them. The Japs were dressed in Landing Force uniforms, and the natives were pointing the way through the jungle. My sergeant drew his Colt and positioned us to ambush the lot.

Well, he said go, and I raised my rifle up and fired, and sent a bullet through a Jap’s face. It wasn’t the first time I fired my gun in combat, but I can remember the sound and the smell as if someone was burning a wick under my nose. The Japs were surprised, and my three mates laid ‘em low like it wasn’t a thing. The natives were unarmed, and they raised up their hands to surrender.

There were two adult men who were nearly naked, with long fuzzy hair. There was another older native with a western-style shirt on, and a boy of ten years old in a loincloth, screaming and crying as he looked at the Japanese soldiers. At that range, our rifles did a hell of a lot of damage to those Japs.

…boy…

My sarge said they were spies and if we let them go they’d tell the Japs that we were in the area, and we’d all be killed. We’d have to get rid of these natives, so we lined the lot up and set them on the ground, and decided who would do it. We shot odds or evens between us…

Boy…I lost. I had to kill them. My mates stood back and the older native stood up, as emotionless as though he were going to the shop. The ten-year-old boy was watching with wide eyes, looking up at us, as though imagining us rescuing him.

I fired my rifle, and hit the man in the chest. He fell over, and the kid screamed. He wouldn’t stop, and the two native men left weren’t any the better for it. The second in line stood up, and bared his chest bravely.

He fell just as quick as the other. The boy was really losing his head now, holding on to the other man, who stood up, shaking. My mates looked intently as the man stood before my rifle, the boy shrieking and crying his eyes out. I leveled my gun and shot the man.

The boy was last in line. He wanted to run, or for me to spare him, but he knew he was getting the same as the others. He was crying so hard he vomited. He knelt on the pile of bodies before him, begging me not to do it.

And I had to do it. He was ten years old, naked, crying his eyes out. He begged me in his language to let him go…I can’t imagine him saying anything else. His face was wet.

I shot him, boy. I shot him in the chest and sprayed his blood across the ground. A rifle does terrible damage at a six foot range. To dwell on his condition would be pointless.

And that’s all, boy…I made it out alive, you know that. Even though I don’t have long to go, I wanted someone to know that. My sarge died in the war, and so did one of my mates. The other one died in ’59, in a plane crash. I’m the only one left in the world who remembers that little boy.

Remember it. Remember what was done for the country. Remember that for your country to be safe, for you to live in a free land, a ten-year-old boy lined up to be executed.

Remember that.