I was trying to learn to walk in Pullman, Washington, where my father, a bacteriologist, was working on something "hush, hush" for the Army at Washington State University. I was actually born in Bethesda, MD when he was still working at Fort Dedrick (sp?) MD on the same stuff the year before. His younger brother had the misfortune of being a Marine legation guard in China when the Japanese declared war on us. He spent the entire war in a prison camp in Manchuria. Never talked about the experience; never said a cross word about the Japanese people. Spent the rest of his life in the Marine Corps, including Korea. A very gentle man, who bore his demons silently--I remember once when he came home to us from one of the binge/AWOL episodes that took him every five years or so. He was helping us run a line fence and took off his shirt in the summer heat. His back looked like the test pattern on an old TV screen--a mass of silver lines that were the scars from a whip. Every time he snapped and went on a bender, the USMC broke him back a grade and sent him to us for a few months of ranch work, then back to the Corps, where he was a good Marine and a good father and husband until the next episode. I hope, but do not believe, that our vets with psychic and physical wounds are as well treated today.

I also never knew an uncle on the maternal side who was a fine artist who ended up in an engineer combat battalion. He was wounded and captured on the second day of the Battle of the Bulge and then murdered by SS troops who were angry at his battalion for delaying their advance and apparently used to killing prisoners on the Eastern Front. All we have left of him are a couple of paintings.

Among my first personal memories are of the second anniversary of VJ Day, when we were living in Redondo Beach, CA and I got to stay up after dark to see the fleet firing star shells in celebration. I also remember seeing (and hearing) the Lockheed Ventura PVs and "blimps" that the Naval Reserve was using as trainers coming over the beach at the end of their "patrols" out over the Pacific in 1946. Those old radial engines had a unique growl that still means "airplane" to me!