Word: coconuts
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Curious soldiers clustered on a New Guinea riverbank. As the late afternoon sunlight slanted through coconut-palm fronds, a raft drifted around the river bend. Small frizzled-haired Papuan natives guided it slowly to shore. Heedless of cries of "Don't bother, we'll get it for you" from the soldiers on the bank, four Australian soldiers aboard the raft slowly gathered up possessions that only a soldier can truly treasure-firearms, rain capes, a few battered odds & ends. As they turned their sunken eyes shoreward, the shouting and chatter of the spectators ceased. The crowd parted...
When the sergeant landed, the natives, attired in loincloths and belts of coconut husks, were in the midst of a happy community feast. Main dish: the ten wives of a neighboring tribe's chief...
...vegetable-oil-based cream shampoos, bottled in jars like cold cream as substitutes for vanished liquid coconut...
...Solomon Islands 750 Japanese were trapped, then "massacred" by tanks which ground hundreds of the bodies into the rubble and splinter of a coconut grove. At Milne Bay in New Guinea 120 Japanese were "slaughtered" by U.S. and Australian troops slugging it out for a vital airfield. Far north at Kiska Harbor in the Aleutians, U.S. bombers and escorting fighters flushed land troops and "mowed 'em down like straws." These were actions that the Japanese, fighting just as desperately, could respect. They could also understand the U.S. strategy of kill-or-be-killed...
Meanwhile, the routine camp life goes on. The Marines bivouacked in encampments over an area of jungles and palm trees. The palm trees here are part of the world's largest coconut plantation, owned by Lever Bros., and are the source of copra for soaps that are sold all over the globe...