1600 hours, 9th August 1942

I’ve decided to record the events of this day both for the sake of posterity and for the wellness of my own mind, because what I’ve seen is both unbelievable and incredible. I feel like I must’ve hallucinated all of it. Some part of me supposes that if I write it all down, I'll somehow be able to discern fact from fiction. Ridiculous, I know, but I don't know what else to do.

Deciding where to begin will be difficult. I suppose the gist of it is that I was stationed on four different field hospitals in the Pacific for the last three years. At first, I couldn’t believe how many soldiers and marines were just sitting there waiting for someone to have time to see to them. They were like sardines in a can for a while, but the beds had a nasty way of clearing themselves up. There weren’t enough doctors or nurses to go around.

I was transferred from the 7th Evacuation Hospital on Tongatabu to the USS Respite to serve as chief nurse. The Respite was a passenger liner that had been refitted into a hospital ship that was participating in the raid on Guadalcanal. Her mission was to receive injured sailors and marines, provide them with medical care, and maintain a calming atmosphere all throughout. To be completely blunt, the Respite was falling apart when I arrived. No one ever told me what exactly happened, but the crew was working short staffed, including the medical personnel. People kept dying without anyone close by to replace them, I suppose.

Then came August 9th, the day on which I begin to write this journal. Just before it happened, I was in the dining hall-turned infirmary trying to get on top of all of the casualties that hadn’t been processed yet. I remember that it was a pain in the neck to concentrate, more so than usual. I may have gotten used to seeing people come and go, but screaming still had a way of hanging onto me and never letting go. I found that tapping my feet and humming a song helped a tad.

I was seeing to Private Meyers at the time. He had a gunshot wound to the shoulder, thankfully nothing a little penicillin and morphine couldn’t put right. If it wasn’t for the blood pouring out of his side and the bullet that I yanked out of him, you wouldn’t have been able to tell there was anything wrong with him. He peered around at the stream of nurses, doctors, and patients like an excited puppy and would barely sit still for his shots. I remember telling him, ‘Mister, if you keep jittering around, I’ll do the Japs a favour and finish the job for them’.

Despite the moaning coming from the rest of the infirmary and the sound of planes screeching by our ship, he looked me in the eye and smiled. ‘I’d like to see you try’, he said to me. Men. Somehow, by the grace of God, I managed to not stick him like a pig.

What happened next is hard to describe. It was like the Respite passed into a bubble. All at once, all of the noise from the battle popped out of existence. My first thought was that we’d been hit by a torpedo and my eardrums were bleeding all over the place. But the groaning of the other patients didn’t stop and my fingers were dry when I rubbed them against my ears. If I wasn’t dead, then I had no reason to stop what I was doing. I moved on to the next fellow, then the next.

Eventually some sailors rushed through the infirmary, spewing some hogwash about something or rather. The other nurses, particularly that Kelly Mason and her friend Rachael Alves, turned into stunned meerkats whenever the strange conversations drifted in. I gave them both good smacks on the backs of their heads and told them that a woman doesn’t gossip or eavesdrop, not when there’s work to be done. Kelly is a good girl, just easily distracted. Rachael, though, is bad news, I tell you. They went back to caring for the wounded marines, as did I. I didn’t think anything of it. Not until I decided to take a look for myself. I supposed that if the girls had any trouble, they could go to Doctor Klein. Make him work for once.

I put on my dress jacket and went up to the deck to see what all the fuss was about. I still don’t understand it. I saw the sky above us at Guadalcanal earlier today. It was tinged with yellow and filled with twirling fighter planes, big black puffs of artillery fire, and plumes of smoke that traced their way up from the scuttled ships that surrounded us. All of that was gone. The sky was a putrid grey and filled with fog that reminded me of an early British morning. I didn’t see any Zekes, friendly boats, islands in the distance, nothing. Squat. I couldn’t even see the darn sun.

Then I pressed myself up to the railing and looked into the water. That’s when I got another shock. The water looked like gas spilling up against the hull. It was misty, thick, and not too far removed from the gunk that was clogging up the sky. I saw a sailor nearby gawking at it the way I was. When I asked him what the devil was going on, he didn’t seem to hear me. Either that, or he thought it wasn’t worth wasting time telling me that he had no darn clue.

I walked the ship from bow to stern. In every direction, I couldn’t see anything apart from the mist. Eventually I ran into a few sailors who knew how to answer questions. They told me that it just happened. Just like that. One second it was clear, the next second it wasn’t. Obviously, I didn’t think that was a very good answer. The sky doesn’t just change. Dozens of Jap vessels and aircraft don’t just up and vanish. But those boys kept saying that they do.

The bridge was roaring by the time I got there. I’m not exactly meant to come and go whenever I like, but I felt that the circumstances warranted an exception. Sergeant O'Hara, a marine, was already there watching the heated discussion. Captain Westvallen was giving the navigator, Ensign Mendez, an earful about losing their heading so badly that they wound up in another hemisphere. Mendez was too gobsmacked to even acknowledge that he was getting blamed for everything. I saw him holding up charts and trying to compare them with the nothingness around us. A bit of a ditz, that one.

‘Makes him feel better, blaming other people down the ladder’, O'Hara muttered to me. Shrapnel had torn across his face during the first wave of landings at Guadalcanal, leaving him permanently disfigured. Half of his head was wrapped tightly in bandages, covering his left eye and most of his face. The little that I could see wasn't half bad.

Westvallen’s XO, Lieutenant Caradine, was trying to smooth things over the best he could, which wasn’t very good in the grand scheme of things. His argument made perfect sense. He said that every crew member on the bridge saw that the environment just changed around them, so it wasn’t Mendez’s fault. That was the problem, you see. Caradine made sense.

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It was around then that a gigantic tremor shook through the entire hull. There was nothing in front of the ship the second before. I spoke to the helmsman, the two lookouts, and the quartermaster afterwards. They agreed with me. It was just like how the sky changed. One second it was this way, then the next second it was that way. A pale beach appeared in front of the Respite and her bow rammed right into some rocks that lined the coast. I fell onto the ground, as did a handful of other personnel on the bridge.

O'Hara gave me a hand and pulled me to my feet. From anyone else it would've felt patronising but for some reason, it didn't strike me that way.

Everyone filtered out of the bridge, stood on the deck, and stared at the landmass that seemed to have just dropped out of the sky and into the sea in front of us. For me, it was one of those times where I wasn't just at a loss for words, but I was at a loss for thoughts. Westvallen barked at his men to assess the hull for damage, but it turned out there was nothing but a minor dent in the plating.

The island itself was about two hundred feet away from the Respite. Covering the beach was the finest, smoothest sand I've ever seen. It looked like powder. Beyond that was a dense tree line that O’Hara said would've been bad news if there were any Japs lurking about. It makes me laugh now as I'm writing this down. The whole darn world just turned upside down and we were still thinking about them. We had bigger fish to fry.

Westvallen must've been too distracted by everything, otherwise he would've given another earful to the broad foolish enough to just stroll onto his bridge uninvited. Instead, he gave O'Hara orders to take a team onto the beach and secure the tree line. I remember before the sergeant left, he looked at me and gave me a wink.

O'Hara and his boys were taken ashore on a lifeboat. By that time, Kelly had wandered up from below decks. I'll never forget the look she had on her face as she peered up at the sky, then down at the water. It was pure shock. She started trembling. She asked me, 'Grace, where in God's name are we?'

I wrapped my jacket around her shoulders and told her that everything was going to be alright. The two of us watched as O'Hara and his men made landfall and filtered off the boat, sweeping their weapons across the trees. They were so far away that each man was no larger than a fingernail as they scampered around out there.

One by one, they disappeared into the trees. Then came the shots. A lot of us hadn't been that close to small arms fire before. It's strange, isn't it? We were accustomed to being strafed by fighter craft and learned to ignore warship cannons, but a handful of rifle shots sent us flopping onto the deck like fish.

I was pressed against the deck, but I kept my eyes on the trees. Breathing got real hard all of a sudden. I just had to see. I had to see if O'Hara was alright. The shrubs were pushed apart and three of the seven marines stumbled out, firing blindly behind them. I couldn't make out their faces. Each of them collapsed onto the beach at staggered intervals. Then there was silence. I lost track of the time, I was too busy sweating bullets, but it must’ve been ten minutes at the very least before anyone felt safe enough to move.

There was only one thing I wanted to do. There weren't any corpsmen or medics onboard and I happened to be right there. When Westvallen was calling for another team of marines, I volunteered to join them. I told him that there was no knowing what shape those boys on the beach were in and they needed medical attention ASAP. They might not have been able to make it off the beach. He didn't like it, that was plain as all hell to see. He made a habit of rubbing his chin stubble when he was annoyed. No one in the Nurse Corps was meant to see the frontlines, but after growling to himself for a while, he said that our situation was extraordinary. I’m pretty sure I was thinking what he was thinking; better to lose a nurse out there than the ship’s doctor. He procured for me an M1911 pistol, a belt holster, a life vest, a medic’s helmet, and a pair of combat boots that were going to do me more good in the sand than the white leather shoes I had on.

Next thing I knew, I was on our second lifeboat surrounded by lightly wounded marines with a medical kit slung over my shoulder. I knew two of the men there, I treated them myself. As a Japanese-American, Corporal Tanaka attracted all of the wet socks in the infirmary while his leg healed up. I had to scare them all off. Tanaka was too quiet and reserved to do anything about it, you’d think he liked being treated that way. Corporal Winters was part of the 52nd Defense Battalion, an all African-American division. I had to dig shrapnel out of his back yesterday and he told me lovely stories about his family back home.

Our lifeboat ran ashore right next to O’Hara’s and the marines moved with this rehearsed fluidity that took me by surprise for a second. I was used to seeing them bedridden. As they moved forward toward the trees, I managed to reach the three bodies lying there in the sand. All of them were dead before we even got there. First one had a massive laceration across his torso from collarbone to hip. No bayonet could’ve made an incision like that. The second body was run in straight through the stomach with a hole punching out the other side. The third had a four-inch deep slice in his throat.

Tanaka led us into the forest after that. It was terrifying. My head spun at every footstep, every rustling leaf. I realised that you had to be crazy to do what they did. The next thing we saw was someone hunched over in a clearing. It was a marine I didn’t recognise, vigorously trying to pull something out of O’Hara’s body. An arrow was sticking out of his gut and the marine was thuggishly trying to twist it and pry it out. I ran over, hollering at him to stop. It looked like I knocked him out of a trance. His eyes darted up to meet mine. Then I watched him die as an arrow struck him in the back of the neck. The arrowhead jutted out of the front of his throat.

O’Hara managed to crawl towards us as Tanaka and the rest of us were frozen in fear. I don’t know how, but I managed to hold onto my wits long enough to see a shape move forward from within the forest. It was dark and hazy, but it was like a cluster of overlapping discs. Winters unloaded the magazine of his Thompson, reminding everyone else to follow suit. It was a blur after that. I just remember sticking O’Hara with a dose of morphine before Tanaka propped him up as we hoofed it back to the lifeboat. It felt like the marines didn’t stop shooting until we pushed the boat off the sand. I watched the coast the whole trip back to the Respite. I didn’t see anything come out from behind those trees.

Right now, as I mentioned earlier in this here entry, I’m trying to come to terms with what in the hell just happened to me and my ship. The ocean changing beneath our feet is certainly more concerning than a bunch of boobs flinging arrows at us, but the boys don’t think so. They can’t stop talking about it. Tanaka says they were some kind of savages. Winters doesn’t think so. He says they were well organised. Whatever they were, it doesn’t matter to me. Right now I'm waiting for Doctor Klein to assess O’Hara and decide what we’re going to do about the thirty-five inch wooden skewer sticking out of his gut. Maybe then I'll have something to do so I can get my mind off of all this.