Shadows In the Jungle by Larry Alexander

back what they learned in the Scouts. A few did that, while others were ordered back because their units needed them. In fact, many units had no intention of letting them stay because they didn’t want their best men siphoned off. The needs of the army were paramount and dictated how many teams were retained.”
    A few decided on their own not to remain and join a team. Terry Santos, for example, heard his old unit, the 11th Airborne, was being put on alert for a drop, and asked to go back. There he led a reconnaissance platoon and was lead scout on the Airborne Division’s famous rescue mission at Los Baños in the Philippines.
    Bob Teeples was one of those graduates retained by the Scouts. He remembered being “mighty proud” of the inscription on his diploma stating that he was “proficient in all subjects.”
    For all of the Alamo Scout graduates, whether assigned to a team or returned to their original units, the difficult training forged a bond of mutual respect and solidarity between the men.
    Wilbur Littlefield, who would be in the ASTC’s third class, was in the hospital with dengue fever when he heard he was retained and was told to select his team.
    â€œThe guys were all for each other,” he recalled. “They were close-knit.”
    The ASTC graduated its first class on February 5, 1944; four teams under Lts. John R. C. McGowen, William F. Barnes, Michael J. Sombar, and George S. Thompson.
    Training was over. Now it was time to go to work.

CHAPTER 4
    The First Mission
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    McGowen Team: Los Negros Island, February 27-28, 1944
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    C olonel Bradshaw stepped off the PT boat at Finschhafen even before the vessel had been secured to the pier. Striding along the wooden wharf, followed by his XO, Capt. Homer A. Williams, he headed for a jeep that would take him to General Krueger’s headquarters.
    This was the day Bradshaw had been waiting for. Summoned from his own HQ on Fergusson Island, he had been handed a mission for his newly activated Alamo Scouts.
    On February 5, just twenty days earlier, four teams had graduated from the Alamo Scout Training Center: twenty-four highly trained men, all piss and vinegar to prove their mettle. Two of those teams would be joining him at the Finschhafen briefing. Which one would actually undertake the mission, Bradshaw had yet to decide.
    One team was led by Lt. John R. C. McGowen, a twenty-five-year-old Texan from Amarillo who, like many of the men in the first graduating class, had come to the Scouts from the 158th Infantry Regiment.
    Having graduated with a master’s degree from Texas A&M, where he was also enrolled in the ROTC program, McGowen had worked in Panama for the United Fruit Company before the war, joining the army immediately after Pearl Harbor. (His draft board back home evidently was slow to get the message and bombarded his mother with demands that her son report for duty, even after he had been sent to the southwest Pacific.)
    A man of perseverance, driven to push himself to his limits and beyond, McGowen volunteered for the Alamo Scouts despite his lack of swimming prowess. The amount of swimming required by the Scouts proved a monumental challenge, but “grit and determination like no one else,” his wife Christine later recalled, led him to succeed.
    McGowen had a daring, never-say-lose attitude that Bradshaw liked. During training, to keep their reflexes sharp, Scout candidates were encouraged to launch surprise attacks on each other, officers included, at any time of the day or night. McGowen chose to attack Lt. Carl Moyer, the group’s rough, tough self-defense instructor, diving at Moyer’s feet and taking him down. McGowen’s action won everyone’s admiration, including Moyer’s.
    The other team joining Bradshaw at Finschhafen was led by Lt. William Barnes, a twenty-six-year-old graduate of the University of Tennessee who, in 1938-39, had been a member of the