The upshot is that the Nipponese had, since 1940, marched thousands of tribesmen out of the cool, clean interior of the island to its hot, pestilential edge, and put them to work. These slaves had enlarged the big cavern where the Nipponese built their air raid shelter and command post; improved the road to the top of Eliza Peak, where the radar and direction-finding stations were perched; built another runway at the air field; filled in more of the harbor; and died by thousands of malaria, scrub typhus, dysentery, starvation, and overwork. These same tribesmen, or their bereaved brothers, had then watched, from their redoubts high in the mountains, as Sean Daniel McGee and his comrades came and stripped the Nipponese of their armaments and concentrated them all in the airfield, guarded by a few dozen exhausted GIs who were frequently drunk or asleep. Those tribesmen worked around the clock, up there in the jungle, making spears, until the next full moon illuminated the sleeping Nipponese like a searchlight. Then they poured out of the forest in what Sean Daniel McGee describes as "a horde," "a plague of wasps," "a howling army," "a black legion unleashed from the gates of Hell," "a screaming mass," and in other ways he could never get away with now. They flattened and disarmed the GI’s, but did not hurt them. They flung tree limbs over the barbed wire until the fence had become a highway, and then swarmed into the airfield with their spears at the ready. McGee’s account goes on for about twenty pages, and, as much as anything else, is the story of the night that one affable sergeant from South Boston became permanently unhinged.