Injury Slight ... Please Advise

World War II survival story told by documentary film

By Jeff LeMaster

LITTLE ROCK — Col. Charlie O’Sullivan’s story is one tailor-made for Hollywood. There’s action, adventure, peril - everything a good movie needs.

At least that’s what Josh Baxter of Hot Springs thought when he met O’Sullivan four years ago. Baxter works for a video production company and works on other film projects in his spare time.

Pretty much all of his spare time over the last four years has been spent putting together a documentary film about O’Sullivan’s experiences as a fighter pilot during World War II. Baxter hopes to see all of his hard work pay off later this year.

“I was hoping to have it done by September, but I think that’s a little ambitious,” Baxter said. “It’ll probably be the end of the year.”

The film will re-create the events of Sept. 20-Oct. 20, 1943, during which O’Sullivan’s P-38 Lightning was shot down by a Japanese fighter over the jungles of New Guinea. O’Sullivan survived the crash and spent 30 days hiking through jungles and over mountains, ever wary of Japanese troops who were known to be in the area. It turned out his greatest threat came not from the Japanese, but from headhunting natives in the area who, after taking him into their village, cornered him in a hut and came at him with spears. The colonel, who was a captain at the time, had seen the natives use a bamboo shaft to extract the blood from a wild pig during a hunting trip.When he was cornered in the hut, the natives pulled out that same bamboo shaft as they advanced toward him.

O’Sullivan shot and killed two natives with his military-issued .45-caliber handgun and escaped back to the jungle. Heeventually wandered into an Australian military outpost and was returned to a U.S. military base at Port Moresby weak and sick, but alive.

O’Sullivan went on to have a distinguished career in the Air Force, including an assignmentas a commander at Little Rock Air Force Base in Jacksonville in the 1960s. He and his wife, Mareelee, retired to central Arkansas. The couple, in their early 90s, live in North Little Rock.

Baxter first met the O’Sullivans while working on a historical video project for LRAFB. It was the close proximity to O’Sullivan that led Baxter to settle on doing a documentary instead of a feature film - for now.

“When he told me the story, my first reaction was, ‘this needs to be a [feature] movie,’” Baxter said. “But all I really know is video production, plus no one was just going to hand over $30 million for me to go make this movie.”

Baxter opted instead for a documentary, with plans to write a script for a feature film later. The documentary is titled Injury Slight ... Please Advise, taken from a portion of the telegram O’Sullivan sent to the Army after finding the Australian outpost.

“I figure we’ve got this guy living right here, he’s still sharp, so why not let him tell the story?

“From an inspirational standpoint, this is about the Greatest Generation. We’re losing these guys at such a fast rate these days, it’s important to tell their story.”

The documentary will be more than just footage of O’Sullivan telling his story. Baxter is re-creating much of the story to provide a visual representation of what happened.

“When you think of documentaries, you think of a long video that’s boring that no one wants to watch,” Baxter said. “I wanted it to be action-packed just like the story is.”

Most of the scenes were filmed in Honduras, the tropical climate of which closely resembles New Guinea. Baxter will travel back to Honduras later this month for one final film shoot. The rest of the summer will be spent filming aerial footage of the dogfight between O’Sullivan and the Japanese fighter. In August, Baxter will take a small film crew to New Guinea to film the wreckage of O’Sullivan’s P-38, which was found in 1993. Baxter said that when it was found, O’Sullivan was contacted, andthe retired colonel expressed interest in traveling to New Guinea to see the wreckage. His contact in New Guinea advised against it, telling him that although it was 50 years later, his story was still told by the local natives and they considered him a ghost.

During the New Guinea trip in August, Baxter will also interview one of the Australian soldiers who was working at the outpost when O’Sullivan wandered in from the jungle. The soldier and O’Sullivan have exchanged correspondence throughout the last 64 years.

“That’s amazing,” Baxter said. “I have close friends from high school that I don’t keep in touch with.”

Baxter hopes this will be the launching point for his career as a full-time filmmaker. Growing up in Jacksonville, Baxter had an early love for making movies. His parents, who also now live in Hot Springs, were always willing to accommodate their son’s passion, and they and other friends and family members were the subjects of many early film projects when Baxter was in middle school and high school.

“We made a lot of Indiana Jones movies,” he said. “We had the hat, a whip and the leather jacket, and we’d find something that looked like an idol or something.”

One thing Baxter’s early filmmaking ventures taught him was how to improvise when it came to props andcostumes. That’s something he has carried over into his career as a filmmaker. For this project, Baxter built rifles to simulate the ones carried by the Australian troops whom O’Sullivan eventually found, bamboo huts to match those used by the New Guinea natives and various other props to match the military-issued equipment O’Sullivan had with him in the jungle.

“The challenging part of making [the military equipment] was making it look new,” Baxter said. “Col. O’Sullivan still has a lot of this stuff, but it’s 65 years old and it looks it. We had to make everything look new.”

Baxter and his wife, Susannah, did this through many hours of research, studying thelook and design of O’Sullivan’s uniform and equipment.

Baxter praised the efforts of his wife, who as a talented seamstress served as the film’s costume designer.

“She’s really put up with a lot ... and she’s done a great job,” Baxter said.

During the four years Baxter has been working on the project, he and Susannah have had two children, Ella, 2, and Annalise, 7 months.

One snag Baxter ran into early in the film’s process was funding.

“The search for funding went on for a couple of years,” he said. “In the meantime I was constantly changing ... I started to scale it back. I asked myself, ‘Is there any way I can shoot this in Arkansas and make it work?’ Every time I did that it would just sting a little bit.”

Help came in September 2006 in the form of Tommy Dupree, a developer in Jacksonville who had become familiar with Baxter when Baxter made a promotional video about Reed’s Bridge Civil War battlefield. Dupree is president of the Reed’s Bridge HistoricalSociety. In addition to providing some of the funding for the film, Dupree was able to travel to Honduras during a recent film shoot to see the process up close and personal.

“I went down there kind of as a vacation and watching the work,” Dupree said. “I enjoyed the vacation part. The work part got kind of tiring for me.”

If Dupree got tired, he didn’t show it during the film shoot, Baxter said.

“I felt bad for him because we shot some of the scenes pretty late into the night,” Baxter said. “But he was great. He helped carry stuff for us and was always willing to help.”

Baxter said this project has been much easier for having Col. O’Sullivan available as a resource for information.

“I have basically compiled this story - I haven’t had to go digging through archives,” Baxter said. “I can just call Col. O’Sullivan and talk to him.”

Once the film is finished, Baxter plans to enter it on the national film-festival circuit to try to gain some exposure. He said he hopes the film will eventually get picked up to airon the History Channel, the Discovery Channel or another television network.

Three Rivers, Pages 111, 114 on 06/10/2007