What Japanese Soldiers Whispered in the Rain When Australia Counterattacked—A Lost Notebook, a Broken Radio, and the Night the Jungle Changed Sides Forever
The jungle at Milne Bay didn’t roar.
It breathed.
It exhaled damp heat through the palms and mangroves, through the mud that swallowed boots and the rain that never seemed to finish falling. It breathed into canvas tents, into rifles wrapped in oilcloth, into the bones of tired men who had stopped counting the days and started counting the minutes between downpours.
On the edge of a half-finished airstrip—more mud than runway—Private Tom “Bluey” Collins held a mug of tea that tasted like metal and hope. The steam rose in a thin line and vanished, defeated by the wet air.
Bluey wasn’t blue. Not his eyes, not his mood. His hair, once bright as beach sand, was now dark with sweat and rain. “Bluey” was just what you called a bloke when you couldn’t be bothered learning his real name, and by the time anyone did, it was usually too late.
He watched the sky. The clouds were low and bruised, scraping the treetops like they were trying to hide.
“Stop staring,” Corporal Frank Leary said beside him. Leary was older, leaner, and had the kind of face that looked carved by bad news. “Sky won’t answer back.”
Bluey tried a grin. “It might. If I look hard enough.”
Leary snorted, then glanced toward the line of palms beyond the airstrip. Past the wire and the muddy pits and the shallow trenches, the jungle sat like a patient animal.
“They’re out there,” Leary said quietly.
Bluey nodded. He didn’t need the reminder. Everyone could feel it now—like a pressure behind the eyes. A sense that the trees were listening.
A runner splashed through the mud, waving his arm. “Message from Signals!”
Leary set down his tin mug and took the slip of paper. His eyes scanned it, and something in his posture tightened.
“What?” Bluey asked.
Leary didn’t answer right away. He folded the paper once, then again, as if making it smaller would make it easier to swallow.
“They’ve landed,” he said finally.
Bluey’s tea went cold in his hands. “Where?”
“Near Waga Waga. And further up the coast.” Leary’s jaw clenched. “They’re moving inland toward the strips.”
Bluey felt his heart climb into his throat. He’d heard stories—whispers passed from unit to unit like contraband. Islands taken fast. Garrisons surprised. Men disappearing into green silence.
Milne Bay wasn’t supposed to be like that. Milne Bay was supposed to be the line that held.
Bluey looked again at the jungle. It didn’t move. It just breathed.
Then a new sound joined the rain: the distant thump of engines, low and steady, like a drumbeat coming closer.
Leary squeezed Bluey’s shoulder. “Finish that tea, lad.”
Bluey’s fingers tightened around the mug. “Why?”
Leary’s eyes were flat with certainty. “Because tomorrow you might not get the chance.”
On the other side of that breathing jungle, Corporal Hiro Shimizu adjusted his pack straps until the webbing cut into his shoulders in exactly the right way.
Pain was a kind of measurement. If the pain was even, the pack was balanced. If the pain was uneven, you fixed it.
Hiro had learned that long before the jungle.
He was twenty-three, though the humidity made everyone feel older. His uniform was damp and stained with red-brown mud. His boots squelched with each step, and the air clung to his skin like an extra layer he couldn’t peel off.
The men around him moved in a long, careful line. They didn’t speak much. Here, sound traveled. A snapped twig could become a warning bell.
Their lieutenant—Watanabe—held a compass and kept checking it like he didn’t trust the world to stay put.
“We are close,” Watanabe murmured at last. “Soon we will see the airfields.”
Hiro didn’t answer. He was watching the ground.
The jungle floor at Milne Bay was a map written in small details: crushed fern, disturbed mud, the faint line of a boot heel that didn’t belong to them. Hiro could read those details better than most. It wasn’t magic. It was practice.
He stopped, lifted a hand.
The men behind him froze instantly.
Watanabe stepped forward, eyes narrowing. “What is it?”
Hiro crouched, fingertips hovering over the mud. A footprint, half-filled with rainwater.
Not theirs.
He looked up toward the trees.
Someone had been here recently.
Watanabe’s lips tightened. “Australians?”
Hiro swallowed. He had been told Australians were relaxed, slow, confident in their distance from the war. He had been told the southern troops would scatter when pressed hard enough.
But the jungle didn’t care what you were told.
The jungle only cared what you did.
“We should move with care,” Hiro said quietly.
Watanabe’s eyes sharpened, but he nodded. “Yes.”
They moved again, slower now.
Rain slid down Hiro’s neck. It felt like the jungle was trying to erase them as they walked.
A mosquito whined near his ear. He brushed it away.
His mind drifted, uninvited, to the letter folded in his pocket—a piece of paper that had survived oceans and inspections. A letter he’d written to his younger sister, Aiko, and never sent.
He had written it on a night when the sea was calm and the horizon looked like a line drawn by a patient hand.
Aiko, he’d written. When I come home, I will bring you something from the southern islands. A shell, maybe. Something that proves I saw the world.
He had meant it then.
Now, in the Milne Bay rain, “home” felt like an idea, not a place.
A faint sound drifted through the jungle.
Not thunder.
Not rain.
A low thrum that rose and fell.
Watanabe’s head snapped up. “Aircraft.”
Hiro listened. The engine note was different from the planes they used.
It sounded like something hunting.
The men melted into the trees, pressing close to trunks, holding breath.
The sound passed overhead, then faded.
Watanabe exhaled. “We must hurry. They guard the skies.”
Hiro didn’t say what he was thinking.
If they guarded the skies, maybe they guarded the ground too.
The first clash didn’t feel like a battle.
It felt like an accident.
Bluey was on a work party near the strip, hauling timber with hands already blistered raw, when the alarm ran through the camp like a gust of wind.
Shots cracked—sharp, sudden.
Men shouted.
Someone yelled, “To the line!”
Bluey dropped the timber, grabbed his rifle, and ran.
Mud tugged at his boots. Rain slapped his face. His breath came in quick bursts.
At the edge of the airstrip, the wire trembled—someone had hit it, tested it.
A shadow moved between palms.
Then another.
Leary appeared beside Bluey, face set. “Stay low. Watch the tree line.”
Bluey lowered himself into a shallow trench. The mud was cold against his stomach.
His eyes burned as he stared into green.
A shape darted.
Bluey’s finger tightened on the trigger—
A flare went up from somewhere, throwing pale light across the palms.
And for a brief, heart-stopping moment, Bluey saw them: figures in dark, wet uniforms, moving with purpose, not panic. They weren’t running blindly. They were stepping like they knew exactly where to go.
Leary fired first. The sound punched the air. Others joined—short bursts, controlled.
The shadows scattered into cover, then returned fire from the trees.
Bluey’s ears rang.
He kept his head down, heart hammering, trying to remember every training instruction he’d ever heard.
Leary leaned close and shouted over the noise, “Don’t waste rounds! Wait until you see the shape!”
Bluey nodded, jaw clenched.
A muzzle flash blinked from the tree line—then another.
Bluey lifted his rifle, aimed at where the flash had been, and fired.
The recoil kicked his shoulder. The sound felt too loud for the world.
The jungle swallowed everything: flashes, shouts, the sharp smell of burned powder.
Then the rain thickened, as if trying to smother it all.
After a long, brutal hour that might have been ten minutes or ten years, the firing eased.
The shadows faded back into the trees.
Leary lifted his head cautiously, scanning.
Bluey’s hands shook as he lowered his rifle. He realized his mouth was open, drawing breath like a drowning man.
Leary’s voice was hoarse. “That was a probe.”
Bluey swallowed. “A what?”
Leary’s eyes were hard. “A test. They wanted to see where we were thin.”
Bluey’s stomach tightened. “Are we?”
Leary didn’t answer. He stared into the jungle like he was trying to see tomorrow.
Then he said, quietly, “We will be, if we let them choose the time.”
That night, in a small hollow under broad leaves, Hiro Shimizu dried his hands on a rag that would never be dry again.
The men around him were quiet. No one joked. No one boasted.
One of the younger soldiers—Takeshi—kept rubbing his wrist like it hurt. His eyes were wide, fixed on nothing.
Lieutenant Watanabe sat with his back against a tree, map spread on his lap. He stared at it as if the paper had betrayed him.
Hiro listened to the rain.
He had heard Australians today. Not their language—he couldn’t always catch words in the gunfire—but their sounds: short calls, steady shouts, the rhythm of people who knew where their friends were.
That rhythm didn’t match what he’d been told.
Takeshi finally whispered, “They were ready.”
Watanabe looked up sharply. “Of course they were ready. We are disciplined. We will press again.”
Takeshi swallowed. “But… they didn’t run.”
Watanabe’s mouth tightened. His pride was a shield, but shields didn’t stop doubt from slipping around the edges.
Hiro spoke carefully. “They are not alone.”
Watanabe’s eyes narrowed. “You mean Americans?”
Hiro shook his head. “I mean this place itself. The airfields. The planes. The jungle tracks they know. They move like they belong here.”
Watanabe’s jaw clenched. “We belong anywhere we step.”
Hiro didn’t argue.
He pulled out his notebook, the small one he kept wrapped in cloth. He didn’t write propaganda. He didn’t write grand speeches.
He wrote what he saw.
He wrote to remember his own mind.
Tonight, under the wet canopy, he wrote:
The southern soldiers did not scatter. They waited. They answered.
Then, after a pause, he wrote a line he didn’t fully understand yet:
When Australia strikes back, it does not roar. It arrives.
He stared at the words.
Takeshi leaned closer, whispering, “What are you writing?”
Hiro closed the notebook. “Nothing important.”
Takeshi’s voice trembled. “Do you think we can still take the strips?”
Hiro looked into the darkness beyond the leaves.
Somewhere across mud and wire and breathing jungle, Australians were digging, listening, preparing.
“Maybe,” Hiro said.
It was the truth he could afford.
Two days later, the counterattack began—quietly, like a tide.
Bluey felt it before he understood it.
A shift in orders. A tightening in voices. A different kind of movement: men carrying packs, checking weapons, wrapping rags around metal parts so nothing clinked.
The officers stopped talking about “holding” and started talking about “pushing.”
Bluey sat with his section under a tarp, rain ticking on canvas like impatient fingers.
Leary knelt in front of them. “Listen up,” he said. “We’re not waiting for them to pick at us. We’re moving forward. Slow and steady. We take back ground, we keep it, and we don’t get clever.”
One of the men—Hughes—raised a hand. “Where are we going?”
Leary’s gaze was steady. “Into the green.”
Bluey’s throat tightened. “We’re attacking?”
Leary’s lips twitched without humor. “We’re reminding them they don’t own the night.”
A runner arrived with a scrap of information: Japanese units had been seen near a track. Another probe. Another push.
Leary looked at Bluey. “You ready?”
Bluey tried to swallow. His mouth was dry despite all the rain. “Yes.”
Leary’s hand touched his shoulder briefly. “Good. Then keep your mates close.”
They moved out at dawn.
Not in a grand charge. Not yelling. Just a long line of men slipping into jungle that could swallow a whole army if it wanted.
The air was thick. The ground sucked at their boots. Leeches found skin like they had appointment times.
Bluey focused on Leary’s back, on the rhythm of steps, on not falling behind.
Every so often, Leary would stop, listen, raise a hand.
The jungle was never silent. But there was a difference between “alive” and “watching.”
They reached a bend in the track, where the trees opened slightly and the mud held a faint slope.
Leary raised his fist and froze.
Bluey froze too.
A sound drifted from ahead—low voices, careful movement.
Leary signaled: Enemy.
Bluey’s heart hammered so hard he thought the sound would give them away.
Leary’s eyes met his.
Then Leary did something Bluey didn’t expect.
He smiled—thin, quick.
And he whispered, “Now we show ’em.”
The Australians moved forward in a careful sweep.
Bluey’s boots sank, but he didn’t stop. His world narrowed to the shapes between trees.
A Japanese soldier appeared suddenly, eyes widening in surprise.
Not fear—surprise.
As if he hadn’t expected Australians to be the ones stepping out of the rain.
Someone shouted—not a cheer, not a taunt. A short, sharp call of direction.
Then the jungle erupted again.
Bluey fired when he saw shapes, then moved when Leary moved. He didn’t think in sentences anymore. He thought in breath, step, aim, duck.
It wasn’t heroic. It was survival, shared.
They pushed forward, meter by meter, through mud and vines.
At one point, Bluey slipped and nearly fell. A hand yanked him up—Hughes, eyes wide.
“Stay with us,” Hughes panted.
Bluey nodded, breath ragged. “Always.”
They reached a small clearing, and the resistance broke—shadows retreating deeper.
Leary lifted his head, listening.
Then, from somewhere just beyond, Bluey heard something that made his skin prickle.
Not English.
Japanese—low, urgent.
But one word stood out, like a pebble in a shoe.
“Minami…”
Leary’s brow furrowed. “What’s that mean?”
Bluey shook his head. “No idea.”
Leary’s voice was grim. “Doesn’t matter. Keep moving.”
They did.
But Bluey couldn’t forget the sound.
It didn’t sound like arrogance.
It sounded like realization.
Hiro Shimizu ran not because he wanted to, but because the jungle had given him no other answer.
The Australians had come from the rain again—quiet, coordinated, closer than expected. Their movement wasn’t frantic. It was deliberate.
Hiro’s unit had expected to push toward the airfields. Instead, they were being pushed away from them.
Watanabe shouted orders, but the track was chaos now—mud, bodies, gear, rain.
Hiro grabbed Takeshi’s arm, pulling him behind a tree trunk.
Takeshi’s eyes were wide. “How—how are they here?”
Hiro’s breath came hard. “They followed our tracks.”
Takeshi swallowed. “But we were careful.”
Hiro shook his head. “Careful is not the same as invisible.”
Takeshi’s hands trembled. “What do they want?”
Hiro stared into the green where the Australian calls echoed.
“They want us to leave,” Hiro said simply.
Watanabe stumbled into their cover, face flushed with fury. “Cowards! Move forward!”
Hiro met his eyes. “Lieutenant, they are not stopping. They are pressing.”
Watanabe’s expression twisted. “We press harder.”
Hiro’s voice dropped, calm but firm. “If we press without knowing where they are strongest, we will be walking into their hands.”
Watanabe’s eyes flashed. Pride, anger, fear—twisted together.
Takeshi whispered something under his breath in Japanese, a phrase Hiro had heard older soldiers use in training camps.
“Minami no kaze…”
The southern wind.
Hiro looked at Takeshi. “What did you say?”
Takeshi swallowed. “My sergeant used to say the southern wind was soft. Warm. Full of beaches.”
He forced a bitter laugh. “This wind has teeth.”
Hiro’s chest tightened.
Watanabe barked, “Enough talk! Move!”
But even Watanabe’s voice sounded less sure now, like someone shouting at an ocean.
Hiro’s mind raced.
He knew something now that no briefing had prepared him for:
These Australians were not waiting for permission to be fierce.
They were already fierce, quietly, in the mud, in the rain, in the way they came back.
Hiro ducked as fire cracked nearby, then shouted to Takeshi, “Follow me!”
They moved along a side track, slipping through a patch of mangroves where the ground was slick and the roots twisted like hands.
Behind them, the Australians advanced—not fast, but unstoppable.
At a bend, Hiro glanced back.
Through the rain, he saw an Australian soldier’s silhouette—rifle up, head low, moving forward like the jungle belonged to him.
Hiro’s throat tightened.
Without meaning to, he whispered the words that would later survive in his notebook:
“They counterattack like they’ve been waiting for this.”
Takeshi looked at him, eyes wide. “What did you say?”
Hiro didn’t answer.
Because answering would have made it too real.
Back at the makeshift Australian command area, the rain finally eased enough for planes to be heard clearly.
Bluey watched them—small shapes slicing the gray sky, returning like faithful birds. The sound lifted something in him he hadn’t realized was sinking.
Leary approached with a bundle in his hands.
“What’s that?” Bluey asked.
Leary’s mouth tightened. “We found it in a position they abandoned.”
Bluey leaned in.
A notebook, wrapped in oilcloth. Damp but intact.
Leary flipped through pages carefully, frowning. “It’s in Japanese.”
Bluey swallowed. “Can we read it?”
Leary shook his head. “Not us. But Signals has a bloke who knows enough.”
Bluey stared at the notebook. “What if it’s just… personal?”
Leary’s gaze softened for half a second. “Everything’s personal in a place like this.”
He handed it to Bluey. “Run it to the tent near the radio. Tell ’em it might matter.”
Bluey nodded, heart thumping, and jogged through mud toward the signals station.
Inside the tent, a young lieutenant with wire-rim glasses looked up from a radio set.
Bluey held out the notebook. “Found this.”
The lieutenant took it carefully, eyes narrowing. “Where?”
“Forward position,” Bluey said. “Left behind.”
The lieutenant flipped through pages, scanning symbols. “This is… neat handwriting. Whoever wrote it wanted it readable.”
Bluey hesitated. “Can you tell what it says?”
The lieutenant pointed at a repeated word. “Minami,” he said slowly. “Southern.”
Bluey’s stomach tightened. “They’re talking about us?”
The lieutenant’s eyes flicked up. “Maybe.”
He turned another page, then froze.
“There,” he murmured.
Bluey leaned closer. “What?”
The lieutenant traced the line with his finger, translating aloud, slowly:
When Australia strikes back, it does not roar. It arrives.
Bluey’s throat tightened.
The sentence felt like a mirror held up to the mud and fear and quiet courage.
The lieutenant exhaled. “Whoever wrote this… they respect you.”
Bluey stared at the page.
Respect from an enemy wasn’t comfort.
But it was truth.
And truth could be fuel.
Over the next days, the counterattack continued—more than one push, more than one muddy track reclaimed.
Australians moved with grim patience. They learned the paths. They listened for the smallest shifts. They pushed the Japanese forces away from the airfields, back toward the coast, back toward the sea they had come from.
Bluey’s world became a loop of rain, movement, exhaustion, brief moments of stillness, then movement again.
He saw friends stumble with fever and keep walking. He saw medics work in mud like it was an operating table.
And he saw something else too: the Japanese soldiers were not the faceless shadows he’d imagined.
When the fighting paused and the jungle held its breath, Bluey sometimes caught glimpses—men wet and tired like him, eyes narrowed with focus, hands shaking not from fear but from strain.
One afternoon, after a short, brutal push, Bluey found himself in a shallow trench line that had been abandoned quickly.
Inside, among scattered gear, was a small tin—like a keepsake box.
He opened it.
Inside was a folded paper boat made from a scrap of newspaper, carefully shaped.
Bluey blinked.
It made no sense here.
Unless someone had made it in a quiet moment, trying to remember being human.
Leary approached, scanning. “What you got?”
Bluey held up the paper boat. “This.”
Leary stared at it, then looked away. “Leave it.”
Bluey hesitated. “Why?”
Leary’s voice was low. “Because if you start collecting their small things, you’ll start collecting their faces too.”
Bluey swallowed.
Leary’s eyes softened slightly. “And you can’t carry that and still move forward.”
Bluey set the paper boat back carefully, as if placing it back into someone’s memory.
Then he followed Leary deeper into the green.
Hiro Shimizu wrote more as they fell back.
Not because he believed the words would change anything. But because if his mind was going to unravel in this endless wet maze, he wanted proof that he had once understood the world.
They reached a temporary coastal position where the ground turned sandy and the air smelled faintly of salt. It should have felt like relief.
It didn’t.
The Australians were still pressing.
Watanabe’s orders were sharper now, more desperate. The lieutenant’s confidence had turned brittle.
One night, Hiro sat under a ragged tarp with Takeshi, listening to distant aircraft.
Takeshi stared at the dark sea. “Do you think we will be picked up?”
Hiro didn’t answer immediately.
He watched the water. It looked calm, like it didn’t know what men were doing on its shore.
Then Hiro spoke, carefully. “We were told this would be fast.”
Takeshi let out a thin laugh. “Everything important is slow.”
Hiro’s mouth twitched despite himself. “Yes.”
Takeshi swallowed. “What do you think the Australians are saying about us?”
Hiro thought of the notebook, the words he’d written, the line that had surprised even him.
He imagined Australians reading it someday.
He imagined them hearing his voice not as a threat, but as a man trying to describe something honest.
“They are saying,” Hiro replied softly, “that we are stubborn.”
Takeshi nodded. “We are.”
Hiro stared into the rain. “But they are stubborn too.”
Takeshi’s voice dropped. “What did you write? About them?”
Hiro hesitated, then spoke the phrase he’d heard men whisper in fear and awe during the retreat:
“Minami no kaze wa ha ga aru,” he said quietly.
Takeshi frowned. “The southern wind has teeth.”
Hiro nodded.
Takeshi whispered, “Is that what Japanese soldiers say when Australia counterattacks?”
Hiro stared at the sea, heart tight.
“Yes,” he said. “Because when they come back, it feels like the jungle itself is pushing you.”
Takeshi’s eyes shone with something complicated—fear, respect, sorrow.
He whispered, “Maybe we should have listened to the jungle.”
Hiro closed his eyes. “Maybe.”
The final push at Milne Bay didn’t end with a grand speech.
It ended with the rain easing, a coastal silence, and the knowledge that the Japanese forces were leaving—pulling back to the sea, retreating not because they had run out of courage, but because the ground had refused them.
Bluey stood on a muddy rise, looking toward the coast.
Smoke drifted faintly over the trees.
Leary stood beside him, face unreadable.
“We did it?” Bluey asked quietly.
Leary exhaled. “We held. And then we pushed.”
Bluey swallowed. “They’ll come back.”
Leary’s gaze stayed on the horizon. “Maybe.”
Then he added, voice low, “But now they know we do too.”
Bluey’s mind flashed to the notebook line:
It does not roar. It arrives.
Bluey looked down at his hands—mud-caked, shaking.
“What did they mean by that?” he asked.
Leary’s eyes narrowed. “They meant we don’t waste noise.”
Bluey nodded slowly.
In the distance, a plane passed overhead, its engine note steady.
For the first time in weeks, Bluey felt something like space in his chest.
Not joy. Not celebration.
Just… breath.
Months later, when Milne Bay was quieter—still wet, still green, but no longer trembling with immediate threat—a small meeting took place in a tent near the airstrip.
A handful of officers, a translator, and Bluey, who had been told to bring the notebook again.
The translator was a middle-aged man named Mr. Sato. He wasn’t military. He’d been living in Australia before the war and had volunteered his skills, carrying a sadness in his eyes that never quite left.
He flipped through the notebook carefully, as if handling a living thing.
“This writer,” Mr. Sato murmured, “he is… precise.”
Bluey sat on a crate, hands clasped, listening.
Mr. Sato read quietly, translating bits—observations about rain, about mud, about how the southern soldiers moved.
Then Mr. Sato paused on one page.
His brow furrowed. His voice softened.
“What?” one of the officers asked.
Mr. Sato hesitated. “This is not information,” he said slowly. “This is… confession.”
Bluey’s throat tightened. “Read it.”
Mr. Sato looked at him.
Then he translated:
They told us the Australians would scatter. But the Australians came forward, not backward. They came from the rain, from the quiet. They did not shout to make themselves brave. They were already brave.
Bluey stared at the page, unable to blink.
Mr. Sato continued:
What did we say when they counterattacked? We said the southern wind has teeth. We said: do not mistake silence for softness.
The tent was silent except for rain ticking on canvas.
An officer cleared his throat awkwardly. “Can you tell who wrote it?”
Mr. Sato shook his head. “There is a name once.” He pointed. “Shimizu. Hiro.”
Bluey repeated it softly. “Hiro.”
The name sat heavy in his mouth. Not an enemy label. A person.
Mr. Sato closed the notebook gently. “This soldier,” he said quietly, “did not hate you. He feared you. He respected you. And he missed home.”
Bluey swallowed. “What happened to him?”
Mr. Sato’s gaze lowered. “I do not know.”
Bluey stared at the closed notebook.
Outside, the jungle breathed.
And for the first time, Bluey understood something that had been too big for him during the fighting:
The most dangerous lies weren’t the ones that made you fear the other side.
They were the ones that made you underestimate them.
Years later—long after the rain had dried on uniforms, long after names had been carved into stone—Bluey sat on a veranda with a cup of tea that tasted, finally, like tea.
His hair had gone gray. His hands still shook sometimes, but he’d learned to live with it.
A young journalist had come to interview him about Milne Bay.
“What was it like?” she asked, notebook ready. “When the Japanese attacked? When you counterattacked?”
Bluey stared out at his small backyard, where a tree swayed gently in the breeze.
He thought of mud and wire.
Of Leary’s hand on his shoulder.
Of the notebook line that had haunted him, then steadied him.
He smiled faintly. “It was wet,” he said. “It was loud and quiet at the same time.”
The journalist leaned forward. “Did you ever hear what Japanese soldiers said about Australians when you struck back?”
Bluey’s eyes narrowed, surprised. “Where’d you hear that?”
The journalist shrugged. “It’s a rumor. That they had a phrase.”
Bluey chuckled softly, then reached into a drawer beside his chair.
He pulled out a photocopy of a single notebook page—creased from years of being unfolded and refolded.
He slid it across to her.
“I didn’t hear it with my ears,” he said. “I read it later. Written by a bloke named Hiro Shimizu.”
The journalist’s eyes widened as she read the translated line.
Bluey’s voice softened as he spoke it aloud, the way Mr. Sato had once translated it in the tent:
“They said the southern wind has teeth,” Bluey murmured. “They said don’t mistake silence for softness.”
He looked up at the journalist.
“And if you want the truth?” Bluey added. “That phrase wasn’t about us being scary.”
He tapped the paper gently.
“It was about us being there,” he said. “About coming back. About refusing to be pushed off the map.”
The journalist swallowed. “And what did you think, reading that?”
Bluey leaned back, eyes distant.
“I thought,” he said quietly, “that the jungle heard everything. Even respect.”
He stared at the tree swaying in his yard.
Then he smiled again—small, tired, real.
“And I thought,” he added, “maybe if more people wrote down what they really saw… we’d have fewer wars built on bad stories.”
The journalist closed her notebook slowly, as if suddenly aware of the weight in her hands.
Bluey lifted his tea.
To the rain.
To the mud.
To the quiet courage that didn’t need shouting.
And to a lost Japanese notebook that had preserved one honest line:
When Australia counterattacked, the southern wind had teeth.
