The Interpreter from Java

by Alfred Birney

  At last, I sighted a number of barracks on our right, fenced off with barbed wire. Our driver headed straight for them and pulled up outside. We scrambled down from the truck, guns at the ready, and walked up to the gate to find it secured with a heavy chain lock. Seeing faces at the window of the small gatehouse, I fired without hesitation. The others blew out the windows with their automatic weapons.

  ‘Keluar!’ I shouted. ‘Come out and give yourselves up!’ Moments later a group of men emerged with their hands above their heads. One was carrying a machete. I gunned him down and shouted at the others, ‘Buka pintu lekas! Kalau tidak lekas, kamu saja bunuh! Open the gate quick, or I will shoot you dead!’

  In no time, the gate to the camp was open. We shot and killed the gatekeepers and kicked down all the doors. Crying women and children came out of the barracks. Some of the women fell to the ground and tried to kiss my feet. I was shocked by this and jumped back to stop them. The most wretched were seriously undernourished. We asked them to gather their humble belongings and walk to the main road. Any remaining guards who tried to escape were gunned down.

  Two empty trucks arrived at the camp to collect the half-starved women and children. We used the pelopors we had arrested as pack mules. We put helmets on them, loaded them down with our heavy weapons and made them walk ahead as guides and decoys. When they began to slow us down, we killed them.

  A mile down the road we arrived in Tengaran, the site of another sugar factory. More fierce resistance was waiting for us. Two armoured vehicles and a Sherman tank hit all the enemy’s positions with artillery fire and .50 calibre machine-gun fire. As soon as the barrage was over, we attacked. The pelopors were well camouflaged among the bushes, some holed up in concrete pillboxes, built by the KNIL before the war and hard to spot. Flamethrowers and bazookas had to be deployed. The fighting was tough but we steadily wore down their resistance and ran to the sugar factory in formation to take the buildings while minimizing any damage. Between fifteen and twenty of us charged into the big factory hall, where pelopors were still planting explosives among the machinery. A brief exchange of gunfire was enough to wipe them out. In an adjacent hall, we came across two pelopors trying to set fire to piles of gunny sacks. I quickly shot them dead, found a fire extinguisher and put out the blaze. With a stick, I separated the smouldering sacks and doused them with the rest of the extinguisher’s contents. Meanwhile I heard intense gunfire coming from the machine rooms. By the time I got there, six dead bodies lay on the floor, one of them a Jap.

  The boys from the Demolition Group set about disarming the time bombs and booby traps among the machinery. We moved on, leaving behind a detachment of marines to guard the place until the main force arrived.

  We continued our advance towards the strategic town of Bondowoso. Blue Column split up to attack in a pincer movement. I stuck with the assault troops. Our trucks drove straight through the residential areas. Whenever we drew fire, we stopped the trucks, leapt out and ran for the houses on either side of the street, giving as good as we got.

  One by one, we searched homes and offices for military documents. I kicked down the door of a Chinese dentist’s house to discover five blonde women, all of them Indos.

  ‘What are you doing in this Chinaman’s home?’ I asked, seeing the fear in their eyes. ‘Are you prisoners?’

  They nodded. I turned to the dentist. ‘Why are you holding these women against their will? What have they done wrong?’

  He looked at me as if dazed, but said nothing. I hit him with the butt of my gun.

  ‘I asked you a question!’

  Groaning with pain he said, ‘I kept these women here to protect them from the pemudas, to stop them being brutally raped. You know what I mean.’

  ‘It’s true,’ one of the women whispered, ‘but we have to pay him. We have no money left and he abuses us because we can no longer pay.’

  The women burst into tears. Other marines entered the house and began a rapid search of the rooms. They returned with a Colt revolver and a Sten gun.

  ‘Why do you have these weapons?’ I asked the dentist.

  ‘To protect my property,’ he answered.

  Suddenly one of those poor women shouted, ‘No, sir! He is lying. He is an officer with the Indonesian National Army.’

  One of the marines addressed me in Dutch. ‘We’ll take him outside and shoot him. Who knows what else he has been up to.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ I said.

  As I was telling the women that they could pack their things and travel with our column, several shots sounded outside.

  With the other marines, I carried out house-to-house searches for weapons and documents. Some were still occupied by armed pemudas, but we made short work of them. A handful of prisoners were taken and transported to the back of the column. The further we advanced, the more weapons we found. In the end we almost filled an empty truck with the revolvers, rifles, ammunition, grenades, portable cannon and mortar shells we seized. We left the explosives to the Demolition Group, who detonated them on the spot. All this meant it was late afternoon before we had control of Bondowoso.

  *

  Our next major objective was Jember, the city where my father was born. The column advanced through the villages of Grojogan, Tamanan and Sukowono and on to Kalisat, where there was a railway station. In no time, we had the whole complex under our control. And on we went.

  Dead beat, we called a halt in the village of Arjasa. I asked a couple of farmhands to take me to the village head. The good man invited me onto his veranda and served me lemonade, biscuits and other treats. He was delighted to see Belandas again and told me how the entire population was suffering under all kinds of coercion imposed by the guerrilla units. The village head gave me a wealth of intelligence on troop movements in the area. Kalisat was not the only village being terrorized by the Indonesian Army. The commander of the column added this information to his map.

  After an hour’s rest, we were on our way again. The closer we came to Jember, the stiffer resistance became and the commander decided our best bet would be to cover the short stretch from Arjasa to Jember on foot. Minesweepers walked ahead and I followed with the infantrymen. We stuck to the verges, sometimes walking on grass or through dry gulleys, other times ploughing through the undergrowth. Snipers hidden among the dense foliage made life difficult for us. Some had even lashed themselves to the crowns of coconut trees. We also came under heavy fire from small kampong houses. We had to lie flat, then spring to our feet and run in a zigzag pattern. Bullets whistled unnervingly past my ears and left scratches where they glanced off the outer shell of my helmet. Even so, I managed to take out a few snipers. Their dead bodies hung in the trees above us.

  A short distance from Jember, we were ordered to march to a small station, where a train was getting ready to depart. We reloaded our guns with armour-piercing rounds and soon eliminated the engine driver and the stoker. That train would be going nowhere.

  I ran onto the platform and saw a pemuda take cover behind a woman with a child in her arms. He aimed his rifle at me and hooked his left arm around the woman’s neck. The child let out a heartrending cry. I took a dive and fired at the innocent woman before I hit the ground. My bullets went straight through the child and the mother and the pemuda. I had no choice. It was kill or be killed. The sight of the three dead bodies turned my stomach. The mother and child had nothing to do with this war. I had taken a cruel decision, but there was no other way. That bloody moment will be with me for the rest of my life. Sometimes it jolts me from my sleep and I roll out of bed and primed to shoot, until the contours of the room become visible and I remember where I am.

  A few miles from the centre of Jember, we drove through suburban streets lined with the grand homes of the wealthy. We jumped off the trucks to search the houses. I stopped at a house with a gilt-framed nameplate, home to some prominent Indonesian or other. As I opened the gate and walked up the path to the front door by the veranda, I caught sight of gun ba
rrels sticking out of the windows. In a reflex, I opened fire and dropped to the ground. Spotting the danger, my mates did the same. From the ground, I blasted the front-door lock to pieces, then leapt to my feet and charged into the house. Three marines were right behind me. I entered the dining room in time to see a uniformed man clambering out of the window. Before he could jump, I fired two shots. He slumped forwards with a muffled cry and tumbled into the garden. I kicked in the doors of the adjacent rooms while my mates searched the back of the house. Shots rang out and I heard them swear loudly.

  In one of the rooms, I found a beautiful Indonesian woman. She was sitting with tears in her eyes, shivering with fear. I prodded her chest with the barrel of my gun and snarled, ‘Where are your husband’s weapons? Hand over all the military and political documents in this house. Do not try to hide anything from me or I will blow your head off. Understood?’

  Trembling, she went over to a wardrobe and took out a Parabellum semi-automatic pistol and cartridges, a samurai sword and a thick briefcase.

  ‘Who were the men we shot?’ I asked.

  ‘The man you killed in the dining room was my husband,’ she sobbed. ‘He was an Indonesian Army captain. The four in the back of the house were his colleagues.’

  There was no time for sentiment. I called to my mates and we left.

  A little while later, we stumbled across an Indonesian Army barracks and were greeted by a volley of rifle and machine-gun fire. We had to fight tooth and nail to gain control of the compound, one block at a time. I fixed my bayonet to my rifle, ready for man-to-man combat but the marines had no time to waste and wiped out the machine-gun posts with grenades and mortar shells so we could get on with sweeping the site. When it was all over, I trudged back to the truck, feeling suddenly exhausted and sickened by all the killing. At the outset I had carved a notch into the butt of my gun for every life I took, but by this time I had lost count. How many had I killed? A hundred? More? Yet I felt no remorse, except for the woman and her child. I was simply taking revenge for everything the Indonesians had done to me and those like me. I did not yet know how much killing I had left in me.

  *

  The main force of Blue Column advanced on the centre of Jember, and most of the Marine Brigade Security boys from SHQ-II went with them. I stayed with the assault platoon and E and F Companies. We stuck to the outskirts and at nightfall set up camp in a suburb, having cleared the area of extremists first.

  We established a string of guard posts and tried to snatch some shut-eye in dry gulleys and by the sides of roads. My helmet was my pillow. But sleep was denied us. Shots rang out in the middle of the night, and we were fired on at close range and then from further off. Everyone was wide-awake and no one had even an hour’s rest. When dawn broke, we were all miserable. There was no coffee. We had to make do with K rations and the filtered ditch water in our bottles. By way of breakfast, I cracked open a tin of chili con carne. It tasted fairly spicy and did me some good.

  Back on the trucks, we headed for Mangli, where we stormed another factory complex, this time a large rice-husking plant. I ran into the machine rooms with two marines just as pemudas were about to detonate their mines. A very close call. Gunny sacks were ablaze in the storeroom. I ran in and spotted two pelopors making off across the steel roof beams. I waited until they were above the fire and shot them dead. Their bodies hung from the beams and as the flames grew higher there was the sickly smell of burning human flesh. I ran back to the machine rooms where the Demolition Group were busy defusing explosives, surrounded by pemuda corpses. Those boys risked their lives time and time again. We had the utmost respect for them.

  We had gained control of the rice-husking plant. A small garrison of marines stayed behind to guard it.

  On the road from Mangli to Rambipuji we encountered roadblocks and landmines, but little in the way of hostile fire. In Balung, six miles or so beyond Jember, we stopped for a while. A couple of our men had been wounded and one soldier was dead. We radioed for ambulances and reinforcements. Our intel indicated a strong enemy presence around Kencong and as we approached the village, our armoured vehicles moved ahead and began firing their on-board weapons. As the trucks drove parallel to the railway embankment, we began to draw heavy, long-range fire. We jumped off and lay along the embankment. Fanatical Hizbullah units came charging in from three sides and the order was passed from man to man: ‘Go light on the ammo! One man, one bullet! Save the last bullet for yourself!’

  I still had two hand grenades, three cartridge slings and a beltful of cartridge clips. I took the slings from around my neck and placed them on the slope in front of me. The Hizbullah fanatics came charging towards us screaming ‘Merdeka’ at the top of their lungs, most armed with only clubs and bladed weapons. We let them get within 150 yards or so, then opened fire. They dropped like flies. It was wholesale slaughter, so bad that we ran out of ammo. The bodies of countless fanatics were piled along the entire line and still they came. I had just fired my final cartridges when I heard the order: ‘Prepare for bayonet charge!’

  I fixed my bayonet to my rifle. Out of nowhere came the blast of heavier artillery. Our armoured vehicles had doubled back and were firing at the crazed Hizbullah charge. From the other side, F Company came to our aid. They finished off the last of the fanatics and we heaved a collective sigh of relief. It chilled our blood to see those Hizbullah fighters running straight into our line of fire. Not one escaped with his life, their bodies were stacked like sandbags. It was a horrific sight but there was no time to dwell. New supplies of ammunition and hand grenades were dished out. Here in Kencong too, a detachment of marines stayed behind. The plan to occupy all of Java’s Eastern Salient rolled on.

  *

  From Kencong we advanced in the direction of Ambulu, another notorious stronghold of fanatical Hizbullah and Masyumi groups. They too were primitively equipped: only a small number had laid their hands on Japanese firearms. These fighters were led by bloodthirsty kyai, Islamic clerics whose only weapon was a sacred kris, its wavy blade smeared with a mixture of prussic acid and arsenic that turned the metal a dark reddish-brown. The slightest scratch would cause agonizing death within the hour, accompanied by raging fever and dreadful palpitations. The kyai were also festooned with amulets, signs of immortality and sanctity. To them, this was a holy war. They never took prisoners but carved their fallen enemies into pieces.

  The area around the village was remarkably quiet, with only a few elderly villagers pottering about. Observing their looks and their movements closely, I realized that they were signalling to fighters concealed in the thick undergrowth around the many kampong houses. As a kind of pathfinder, I walked ahead and warned the marine closest to me, ‘Signal to the men behind that we are completely surrounded by the enemy. Spread out and walk on. Do not stick too close together. Fix your bayonet to your gun. Save the last bullet for yourself!’

  Then the fighting erupted. The bastards came at us from all sides, yelling ‘Merdeka’ in piercing howls that made the blood run cold. Before long, our attackers were dropping by the dozen in a hail of machine-gun bullets.

  I found myself eye-to-eye with a fanatical kyai. He spat all kinds of curses and waved his sacred kris menacingly. Blind to everything around me, I slammed the muzzle of my gun into the sand and muttered a counterspell in High Javanese: ‘Thou art made of dust and into dust thou shalt return!’

  My gun was loaded with vicious phosphorus and tracer bullets. Still cursing the kyai, I walked towards him and fired twice in quick succession. The bullets hit him full in the chest and belly, and he fell backwards, groaning. ‘So much for immortality,’ I sneered in Javanese. I thrust my bayonet into the fanatic’s belly and gave it a quarter turn, so when I pulled it out his guts came with it. The phosphorus wreaked burning havoc with the bloody mess at my feet. I looked up to see five enemy soldiers bearing down on me but the marines coming up behind made quick work of them.

  I thanked my mates and fired a tracer bullet at a sm
all boarding house. It caught fire. We sent everyone who came running out straight to hell. Again we found ourselves facing down charging hordes. The .50 calibre machine guns on every truck were blazing. Lying on my front, I looked up to see body parts flying in all directions. The sight made many a marine puke, but this was no time for compassion or self-pity. We fought on doggedly, our hearts full of hate. I felt nothing but exhaustion. Every muscle, every nerve in my body was straining. The threat of death came from all sides, hidden in the bushes and the trees, beneath roof tiles that could lift up at any moment.

  Many marines took a bullet. A few were killed. The medics ran back and forth with stretchers. The warring sides were too close to allow air support, and we sent in the big guns. Our Sherman tanks let rip and eventually, even the most fanatical enemy fighters turned and ran.

  *

  We left a detachment of marines behind in Ambulu to keep control, while the main force headed inland to Bangsalsari, another hotbed of Hizbullah and Masyumi resistance. Night fell but there was no end to the fighting.

  The marines had been trained for conventional warfare, but this was a guerrilla war and the advantage lay with the Indonesians. This land was theirs. They knew the terrain like the back of their hand.

  I kept my bayonet fixed to my rifle, as did the infantrymen. We took it in turns to sleep, leaning against the wheels of the trucks, gun in hand and eyes half-open, plagued by armies of mosquitos. Man-to-man fighting broke out sporadically. I had cause to draw my fighting knife and my uniform was soon stained with blood. It was dawn before the fighting died down. We did not permit ourselves time for breakfast but prepared to move on again. To be sure, we left a larger detachment of marines behind this time and the company commander radioed for reinforcements from Jember and Bondowoso. Shortly afterwards, we received word that F Company was on its way. This left us free to push on towards Sumbersari and its many coffee, tea, rubber and tobacco plantations, some owned by Nolans, the legitimate heirs of my late father’s family.