COLUMN ONE : S. Pacific’s War Rusts in Peace : World War II remains unforgettable and unavoidable in the South Pacific--sometimes dangerously so--and tales of valor are as live as abandoned ammunition.

VONA VONA LAGOON, Solomon Islands —  White-haired and nearly toothless now, Moses Sesa still recalls his date with history almost half a century ago.

An American PT boat was missing in Blackett Strait, where Japanese destroyers battled nightly with U.S. sailors. Sesa was sent with six other native scouts to search for survivors. Finally, he spotted footprints on the beach on tiny Naru Island. He followed them until he found a gaunt, half-naked man with a boyish face and a Boston accent.

“We asked, ‘Who are you?’ ” Sesa recalls. “He said, ‘I’m American.’ He said, ‘I’m Kennedy.’ ”

John F. Kennedy, the castaway skipper of fabled PT-109, eventually went on to be America’s 35th President. And Moses Sesa, who helped rescue him? Now 67, he is a barefoot, soft-spoken Melanesian who wears a tattered loin cloth, called a lava-lava, as he fishes each day on a sapphire lagoon from a dugout canoe hewn from the trunk of a goliti tree.

Sesa proudly keeps a yellowing, signed photo of Kennedy and a rusting tie clasp of PT-109 that the President sent him, as well as six tarnished Pacific Service awards. He lives with most of his six children and 32 grandchildren in thatch huts on a palm-fringed coral island near a cloud-wreathed volcano. They have fruit trees and a lush garden, but no electricity, running water or radio. Still, they have something else.

“Some evenings, when we sit down, we love to hear Second World War stories,” says Sesa’s eldest son, Eddy, who helped his father fish one recent morning. “And our daddy telling us stories. We tell them to his grandchildren. So we all know he was a scout. And we are very happy he helped Kennedy and the Americans. We love the story.”

Stirring stories of valor and courage, of hardship and death, are more than a distant memory here in the South Pacific. Rusting relics and aging survivors still abound from some of the war’s most bitter fighting in some of its most inhospitable terrain. Their sacrifice takes center stage next month at the 50th anniversary of Guadalcanal, a fierce battle that was a turning point in the Pacific war.

Up to 1,000 U.S. veterans and their families are due in Guadalcanal on Aug. 7 to commemorate the bitter, six-month struggle that was America’s first counteroffensive and first land victory against seemingly unbeatable Japanese troops in the grim days of 1942.

The visiting Americans will find a malaria-ridden, densely jungled island that has changed little since U.S. troops fought their way up the Solomons to Tarawa, Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and finally to victory in 1945.

Obscure islands and atolls became epic battles; Guadalcanal was the first. It began almost by accident, when U.S. Marines waded ashore to capture a newly built Japanese airstrip.

Soon both sides poured in men, ships and planes. Besieged 1st Marines beat back charge after charge on Bloody Ridge. Warships battled in a shark-infested strait soon renamed Iron Bottom Sound. Hundreds of P-38 fighters and enemy Zeros screamed overhead in deadly dogfights. Fever, disease and starvation killed more than guns.

In all, at least 1,600 U.S. troops and 5,000 sailors died at Guadalcanal; so did about 20,000 Japanese.

Largely forgotten since the war, Solomon Islanders have not forgotten the war.

Domonic Otuana, 57, still recalls the first pilot who parachuted into his village. “We thought it was Jesus coming down,” he recalls with a laugh. “We thought he’s coming from heaven. So we all kneeled down and prayed.”

Partly because Japanese veterans built a solemn memorial overlooking the battlefield a decade ago, the U.S. Battle Monuments Commission and an American veterans group are rushing to build their own marble memorial in time for the anniversary, complete with detailed panels and a map of the bloody campaign.

As often happens here, bulldozers clearing the hilltop site last January uncovered the remains of an American soldier, plus an Ace comb, a hand grenade and a brass belt buckle.

“That was unusual,” says Charles Stevenson, 69, the monument’s Scottish-born architect. “Usually, we find Japanese. They’re everywhere. I even got the bones of a Japanese when I dug a new driveway for my house.”

Other war remains rust in peace, littering the country. Parts of 108 Zeros, “Betty” bombers, seaplanes and other abandoned Japanese aircraft rot on jungled Ballalae Island, once an air base in the western Solomons. In some, trees grow through the cockpits. On Guadalcanal, 35 amphibious tractors, used to ferry invading Marines ashore, are abandoned in waist-high kunai grass behind Tetere Beach.

Divers are drawn to a wrecked Japanese submarine and sunken cargo and troop ships still filled with sake bottles, supplies and the odd tank. They also go to see a bullet-riddled but otherwise intact F-6F Hellcat Navy fighter that sits in 30 feet of crystal-clear water near Gizo. Fish swim through the cockpit, and coral grows on its guns and tail. A Zero sits in water off the town dock.

In all, up to 2,000 planes were shot down or crashed in the Solomons. Most have never been found.

Robert Ballard, the Massachusetts-based undersea explorer who found the Titanic and the Bismarck, is coming this August. He will use his deep-sea submersibles to search for some of the 108 ships, including two U.S. aircraft carriers, that sank in the Solomons’ seven major naval battles. Probably no other area has so many major sunken warships.

Honiara, now capital of the Solomons, didn’t exist until American troops built it as a major staging point. Their military hospital operating theater is now a school auditorium. Nearby, a grass airstrip is a golf course. Wartime Quonset huts are used as warehouses and garages.

Marsden strips, once laid for runways, hang as garden fences. An antiaircraft gun rusts on Red Beach, where the Marines first landed. Unexploded bombs and airplane propellers are used as lawn ornaments.

“It’s like living in a time machine. Unbelievable!” said Patrick Murphy, 43, a Kentucky entrepreneur who has spent three years trying to persuade authorities to let him reclaim wrecked warplanes, spent shells and other relics for sale to collectors.

One of Murphy’s more ambitious proposals is to rebuild wrecked Zeros and P-38s, fit them with computers, smoke bombs and machine guns firing infrared lights, and let well-heeled war buffs duel it out overhead at $7,000 or so an hour.

“Every young guy in the U.S. would like to go out and shoot a Japanese plane down,” he explains. “I’m sure it’s the same in Japan. People are running out of entertainment. . . . This could be kind of a wartime Disneyland.”

Bruce Klahr, 47, of Boulder, Colo., is ready to enlist. The retired businessman says he may be the world’s leading war tourist: He’s visited battle sites in 102 countries, from Anzio to Wewak.

For Klahr, the Solomons is tops. “It’s a world-class wreckage site,” he says excitedly, climbing atop a twin-tailed P-38 Lockheed Lightning in an outdoor museum. “Usually you see one gun here, two tanks there, three planes there. This is incredible!”

But the war lives on in a deadlier fashion, too.

Australian and Solomon Islands ordnance and explosive teams have destroyed more than 45,000 bombs, rockets, mines, mortars, artillery shells and other projectiles since 1987, mostly on Guadalcanal.

A special U.S. Army demolition team arrived last year to remove 109 artillery shells of mustard gas found on tiny Mbanika Island. The deadly gas was not used; apparently it was stockpiled in case the Japanese resorted to chemical warfare.

On a recent morning, Solomon Islands military Sgt. Eddie Sikua led a four-man team into the wilds of Hell’s Point. Just behind Henderson Airport, the point is a steamy mix of mosquito-filled swamp, thick-canopy jungle and now-overgrown bomb-cratered runways. Once the brutal battle was won, the Americans used the area for an ammunition dump, and later, a military dumping ground.

In recent months, Sikua’s men have gathered thousands of yellowing American and Japanese grenades, rusting 155-millimeter shells, anti-personnel mines, machine gun bullets and more. Much of the ordnance has only grown more dangerous over time. “They get more unstable,” Sikua explains. “The fuses get corroded. They begin rotting away.”

One of Sikua’s men hacks a path into the fetid forest with a long machete. Creepers and tangled tendrils slow the pace, while towering trees and lush foliage block the sun above. In the dimness, a mortar stand rusts in damp moss. A truck chassis is wreathed in vines. A dozen 105-millimeter shells are half-hidden under a bush.

Finally, the trail leads to a clearing where about 5,000 rusting grenades and shells are neatly piled, awaiting demolition. A frog jumps atop a stack of 60-millimeter mortar rounds.

Near the bomb craters, Pvt. Albert Ilisia reaches down and picks pellets of cordite from the dirt. He lights a match, and the debris quickly flares with a white-hot flame. Watching, Sikua says clearing Guadalcanal will take decades. “It’s uncountable,” he says with a shrug. “It’s everywhere.”

The war still claims victims on neighboring Papua New Guinea, the big, forbidding country that saw some of the war’s earliest and grimmest fighting. At least 120 people have been killed and others maimed in the last three years by wartime ordnance, mostly trying to remove powder from unexploded shells or to salvage the brass casings, said Leith Anderson, head of the national disaster and emergency services department.

“It’s become a bit of an epidemic,” Anderson says at his office in Port Moresby, the capital. “Some people are silly enough to attack (a live shell) with a chisel and a hammer. Sometimes they get lucky. Sometimes you pick up the pieces. If there are any.”

About 800 warplanes are missing in Papua New Guinea, though new sightings are regularly reported.

Charlie Wintawa, assistant curator at the war museum, found a crashed P-39 Airacobra last July in a remote swamp after a local villager reported seeing a ghost in an American uniform. Wintawa is convinced the pilot died in the wreck. “The seat belt was still closed,” he explains.

The Pentagon’s Hawaii-based Central Identification Laboratory still visits every six months to search crash sites for bones. So do salvagers and collectors, who have been caught smuggling everything from a nearly intact Zero fighter to a supposed remnant of PT-109.

Probably the best-preserved relic is the “Swamp Ghost,” an American B-17E Flying Fortress bomber that belly-landed in the waist-deep Agiampo swamp Feb. 23, 1942.

It was found three decades later, still with coffee in a vacuum bottle and loaded machine guns. Crew members who survived the grueling five-week hike back to base have spent the last eight years trying to persuade the Port Moresby government to let them move the plane to an Air Force museum at Travis Air Force Base.

But few war stories have lingered as long as PT-109. A dramatic account of the rescue first appeared in The New Yorker during the war. Kennedy later credited the article, which portrayed him as a hero, with helping him win election. A bestseller was followed by a romanticized Hollywood film in 1963, shortly before his assassination, adding to his legend.

It was early on Aug. 2, 1943, and the battle had moved from Guadalcanal up to the New Georgia islands. Each night, Japanese warships and transports from Rabaul ran supplies to beleaguered troops, roaring down “The Slot,” a natural island passage in the 1,000-mile archipelago.

Lt. (j.g.) Kennedy, then 25, was ordered on patrol. Unknown to him, four Japanese destroyers were returning to base. In the inky darkness, the huge Amagiri rammed his plywood PT boat, leaving the crew in a sea of burning gasoline. Two died instantly. The 11 survivors swam the next day to Plum Pudding Island, with Kennedy pulling the most seriously burned man.

Surrounded by Japanese bases, the men hid in the brush and posted lookouts. Despairing after four days, they swam to Olasana, a larger island. At night, Kennedy or another man would swim into the channel, hoping to signal a passing PT boat. Unknown to them, an Australian “coast watcher” on a nearby island had sent natives out to search for survivors.

Robert J. Donovan’s best-selling book, “PT-109,” says scouts Biuku Gasa and Alfred Basili first found the castaways. Kennedy had Biuku split a coconut, then carved a message inside with his knife: “11 alive need small boat--Kennedy.” When the message arrived, the Australian sent seven scouts, including Moses Sesa, for the rescue.

Sesa says he found Kennedy, half-starved and covered with coral cuts, under a bush. They put him in a canoe, hidden under palm fronds for the paddle back.

On the way, three Japanese planes buzzed the canoe. “Kennedy asked us to wave,” Sesa said. “We were frightened.” The planes flew on, and Kennedy eventually went back on a PT boat to save the rest of his crew.

Sesa insists he is “happy” he helped rescue Kennedy. But there is a tinge of bitterness, too.

“Kennedy said, ‘You are helping me, so I will help you in the future,’ ” he says. “So far, though, nothing.”

Only as he waves goodby does he show his other war memento: four fingers are missing from his left hand. They were blown off when he tried to remove explosives from an “American shell” after the war.