“They came together from squalid Indian reservations, from the barrios of Phoenix and Tucson, from prep schools on the Hudson and coal mines in Pennsylvania, and they became the fighting team known as the Bushmasters. Lauded by MacArthur as among the finest units under his command, reviled by Tokyo Rose as 'bloody butchers,' the group began humbly as part of the Arizona National Guard. A year of jungle training in Panama, much of it spent fighting the Regular Army types who called them 'spics and blanket-asses,' earned them their nickname after the notoriously deadly pit viper found in the region. Thrown together by the fortunes of war, men whose lives would never have touched fought through the jungles of New Guinea and the Philippines, proving the Japanese wrong when they said a nation of mongrels could never overcome Bushido warriors.”

– Anthony Arthur,  Bushmasters: America’s Jungle Warriors of World War II (St. Martins Press, 1987)