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replied with a wink.
    Capt. Richard “Doc” Canfield of Pittsburgh had seen duty as a frontline medical officer on Guadalcanal and was working with the 52nd Evacuation Hospital in New Caledonia when Bradshaw approached him. Canfield agreed to serve as medical officer, as well as to oversee camp and mess hall cleanliness. He would also be tasked with teaching the Scout candidates advanced jungle first aid. Typical of the tropics, Canfield would also spend a great deal of time trying to prevent or control malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, and the other myriad of afflictions that could knock a man out of action as effectively as a Japanese bullet. Canfield became very popular with the unit as the inventor of “torpedo juice,” a concoction of fruit juice and torpedo propellant, guaranteed to loosen the tongues of even the most tight-lipped of men during the debriefing after a mission.
    Assisting Canfield would be his team of medics, men like Dominick Cicippio, a Norristown, Pennsylvania, boy who transferred to the Scouts from the 24th Division. Cicippio and the other medics would not accompany Scouts on missions. Instead, they remained in camp, helping tend those who returned injured or were down with illness. They also implemented Canfield’s program of camp sanitation and safety, a job that included, Cicippio recalled, inspecting the area each morning for any of the island’s ninety varieties of snakes, especially the lethal taipan and the death adder, who might decide to take up residence in the camp overnight.
    The post of adjutant was vacant until April 1944, when Bradshaw tapped Lt. Lewis B. Hochstrasser, who had just graduated from the training program and had impressed Bradshaw. A Billings, Montana, native, Hochstrasser had joined the Montana National Guard in 1932 and enlisted in the regular army on January 8, 1941. As adjutant, his duties included payroll and censoring mail, as well as instructing the volunteers in message writing and how to use the army’s Intelligence Handbook.
    Except for Hochstrasser, Bradshaw’s staff was assembled by Thanksgiving 1943. His next task was selecting instructors. For these jobs, Bradshaw turned to former members of the recently disbanded Naval Amphibious Scouts, men who had already mastered such skills as rubber boat handling, infiltrating enemy lines, scouting and patrolling, and communications and intelligence gathering. These were all talents his candidates would need. Only the best instructors would do.
    One of Bradshaw’s first choices was Lieutenant Beckworth, the young Naval Amphibious Scout officer who had led the mission to Gasmata in October and had been kidnapped by the navy on his team’s return.
    As the war progressed and classes of qualified men graduated from the program, some of them were invited to stay on as instructors. One of these was Lt. Sidney Tison, a former member of the Allied Intelligence Bureau who won a Bronze Star in 1943 after he infiltrated Luzon from the submarine Nautilus , linked up with Filipino guerrillas, and led a raid on a Japanese installation that killed two hundred enemy soldiers. Another graduate-turned-teacher would be Lt. Henry “Snake” Baker, another Bronze Star winner in the Philippines, who had rigged the fuses of captured Japanese artillery shells in order to blow up three trainloads of enemy soldiers and equipment.
    * * *
    Having assembled his staff, Bradshaw turned his attention to the camp itself. According to the orders from Krueger, the location was up to him, provided it be in the vicinity of 6th Army headquarters. Also, because of the highly classified nature of the unit and the nature of its training, the location had to be near water and yet secluded.
    At first Bradshaw scouted locations on Goodenough Island, or Morata to the natives, one of three islands in the D’Entrecasteaux Island group, just off the northeast coast of New Guinea. This island had been home to 353