Don's Naval Officer Training in WW II

Note: I described the life of my father, Don Leu, in a story I posted a few months after he died in 2002. On this page I describe his experience during World War II as he went through naval officer training before joining SACO in China in 1945. His challenging path to becoming an officer in the U.S. Navy was similar to thousands of other young men during World War II.

My father, Donald Leu, grew up during the 1920s in a comfortably middle-class household in the Ballard area of Seattle, Washington. His father, George, owned and operated a small but successful grocery store in Ballard called "Leu's Market." George was a good grocer, and a kind man who had a habit of extending credit to his customers.

After the stock market crash in 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, George's grocery story began to struggle. Nevertheless, he continued extending credit to his customers, who increasingly were unable to pay their debts. As a result, George lost his store in 1932 and the Leu family was plunged into poverty. George opened another grocery store, this one in downtown Seattle, but that store failed, too. Finally, in desperation to support his large family, George opened a small grocery store in the town of Skykomish, nestled in the Cascade Mountains 50 miles east of Seattle, where he had heard there were good opportunities.

The Leu family had lived in relative comfort in the 1920s, but by 1933 they were desperately poor. For several years, George worked in Skykomish with his eldest son and sent money back each week to the rest of the family, who were still in Seattle. In 1939, young Don and his brother Bill, both in their teens, moved with their mother to Skykomish and the family was reunited. But the Leus had very little money, so Don worked at every menial job he could find. The family lived two miles from Skykomish, in a shack at a rural settlement called Miller River. During the school year, Don ran those two miles to school and back each day, helping him become a good athlete and a star basketball player at Skykomish High School, a tiny school but with one of the best basketball teams in western Washington.

Don's brother Bill graduated from Skykomish High School in 1940 and joined the U.S. Navy, and Don graduated the following year, in June of 1941. Wanting to leave Skykomish and hoping to become a teacher, in September 1941 he enrolled at Western Washington Teacher's College (now Western Washington University) in Bellingham, Washington, thus becoming the first person in his family to attend college.

Don was blessed with a sharp mind and a photographic memory and could've chosen just about any career path he wanted. But teaching was the only profession he considered (or was even aware of), having come from the provincial confines of rural Skykomish. He got a job on campus working in Western's library and joined the college's track team, specializing as -- of course -- a two-miler.

Don's teaching plans changed a few months later, however, after the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. The next day, as the country entered World War II, my father, like thousands of other young men, enlisted in the military to defend America. He chose the U.S. Navy, following in the footsteps of his older brother Bill, who had survived the attack on Pearl Harbor aboard his ship, the Navy tanker U.S.S. Neosho, that was docked there on Battleship Row.

Don mentioned to the Navy recruiter in Bellingham that he was in college, so the recruiter suggested that instead of becoming an enlisted seaman, Don should enter the Navy's officer training program. The recruiter explained that the Navy was starting an officer training program, called V-12, for young men currently in college. The recruiter suggested that Don enlist in the U.S. Naval Reserve, finish another full year of college at Western Washington, and then enroll in the V-12 program to hopefully become a naval officer. Don agreed, so that day he enlisted in the Naval Reserve.

Before I continue, let me explain this unique program called V-12. Through the 1930s, the U.S. Navy had about 300,000 officers, enlisted men and staff. Most naval officers at that time were trained at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, a comprehensive four-year program that graduated a handful of officers every June, just enough to replace those who were retiring from service each year. But the situation was changing dramatically in the months before the the U.S. entered World War II. The Navy desperately wanted men, and after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, hundreds of thousands of young men around America volunteered. In fact, the Navy would grow to over three million personnel by 1945, a ten-fold increase from its size in 1940.

After the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, the Navy also suddenly needed thousands of officers to lead the huge influx of volunteer enlisted men. Finding enlisted men was relatively easy, but finding men who could be qualified officers was not. The U.S. Naval Academy only graduated a few hundred officers every year, so where would the Navy find -- and just as important, train -- these needed officers? As it turned out, they found many of their future naval officers on college campuses. And the Navy trained many of them on those same campuses in an innovative and expedited officer training program.

The Navy had begun recruiting college students around the country in the late 1930s and early 1940s, encouraging men (and later women) who were attending college to enlist in the U.S. Naval Reserve. The Navy was especially interested in college students because they considered anyone who was in college to be educated and motivated, traits they were looking for in future officers. The Navy figured that if America was suddenly plunged into war, these men in the Naval Reserve could be quickly trained to become officers.

Masses of young men suddenly joined the war effort after the U.S. entered World War II in 1941 and this depleted campus enrollments all across the nation, so the Navy decided to form a partnership with educational institutions. The emptying college campuses could be used to teach naval officer candidates instead of college students, and the men who graduated from this expedited officer training program would greatly supplement the small number who were graduating each year from the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

Above: Don's naval career began here on the high plains of North Dakota. The Teacher's College in Dickinson was one of over 100 colleges around the U.S. that were converted into Navy V-12 schools during World War II to train officers. This photo was taken around 1940, a few years before it became a V-12 school. The large building is May Hall and the dormitories are on the left. All of these buildings still exist and are now part of Dickinson State University.

The Navy called this new system, designed to churn out officers quickly, the V-12 program. On July 1, 1943, they opened dozens of V-12 schools in mostly-empty colleges across the country. Thousands of officer candidates embarked on this path and the V-12 officer training program continued until it was terminated in 1946, expanding to a peak of 131 schools around America during the war. This new officer training program was highly selective as well as mentally and physically rigorous, and it consisted of three successive schools of varying durations:

V-12 School was, as shown here, the first in a succession of increasingly-competitive and rigorous naval officer training programs through which the candidates were funneled. Most officer candidates who passed the eight-month V-12 school were immediately sent to Pre-Midshipmen School, a brief program that involved more classroom training (and more winnowing). Those who passed Pre-Midshipmen School were sent to one of the Navy's Midshipmen Schools that had popped up around the country during the war.

Midshipmen School consisted of three months of intense, hands-on training and lessons in seamanship, as well as more classroom instruction. The officer candidates here were known, either proudly or derisively, as "90-Day Wonders" (in contrast to the naval officers who studied for four years at Annapolis). Officer candidates who graduated from one of the Navy's Midshipmen Schools -- after about a year of officer training altogether -- became commissioned officers in the U.S. Naval Reserve. Like at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, most new graduates received the rank of Ensign, the lowest class of naval officer. From Midshipmen School, most of the newly-minted officers were quickly deployed to the front lines of World War II.

If the candidates failed any of the three officer training schools, they were immediately sent to the Navy's boot camp to instead become enlisted men. Washing out of officer training school could be traumatic for some candidates, many of whom who had pinned their hopes (and those of their family) on becoming a naval officer. There were usually no farewell parties or even goodbyes for those who washed out because it was too awkward. Instead, the rejected candidates often just packed their things and quickly left without saying a word.

My dad told me that the tense atmosphere in the officer training program was very much like in the 1982 movie, "An Officer and a Gentleman," which portrayed the rigors of passing the Navy's Aviation Officer Candidate School. That movie, by the way, was one of my parents' favorites.

Throughout World War II, the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, continued to slowly graduate naval officers. Those who graduated were officially "USN" (United States Navy) officers. But the Navy also operated this parallel, highly-condensed V-12 track for officer candidates who were in the Naval Reserve (USNR), including my father. USN officers sometimes looked down on USNR officers because they hadn't completed the four-year coursework at Annapolis. But the Navy needed officers fast during the war and their intensive V-12 / Midshipmen's School system dramatically reduced the time needed to train an officer, from four years down to just one. In so doing, the V-12 officer training program also funneled a large number of raw candidates down to a much smaller cadre of highly-trained officers.

The system was very successful and many V-12 alumni went on to distinguished military and civilian careers. This included future Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Senator Patrick Moynihan, White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger (who served under President Kennedy), and TV host Johnny Carson.

A few weeks after finishing his sophomore year at Western Washington Teacher's College in Bellingham, Washington, in June of 1943, my father packed his bags and traveled about a hundred miles south to Seattle. From there, and with dozens of other raw officer candidates, most of whom were also in their late teens or early 20s, he rode on a train a thousand miles east to Dickinson, a small town in western North Dakota.

Dickinson, on the barren Great Plains, might seem like an odd place to train future naval officers. However, V-12 school was entirely classroom study. And there at Dickinson Teacher's College, the group entered the Navy's V-12 officer training program, their first step in becoming naval officers. The Navy V-12 program nationwide had opened just the day before, on July 1, 1943, in dozens of colleges across the country. Don and his colleagues would therefore be in Dickinson's first class of officer candidates, and in the U.S. Navy's first class, as well.

(Today, Dickinson Teacher's College is known as Dickinson State University. You can read about my 2001 visit to Dickinson here: News: December 3, 2001).

Don spent eight months attending class in Dickinson (and starring on Dickinson's small football team), and he completed the V-12 program in February 1944. According to my dad, the Navy V-12 school "was like a small, weak college. We had biology, chemistry and psychology. But I never did figure out how that was related to what we were going to do," he told me many years later.

But living in North Dakota had its upside because the day after Don arrived in Dickinson, on Saturday, July 3, he met a young woman named Anne, who would become his wife (and my mother). Don and Anne met that evening at a dance in Dickinson held by the local citizens to honor the Navy recruits who had just arrived in town. Anne had graduated from Bismarck High School a few weeks earlier and was visiting a girlfriend of hers in Dickinson, 90 miles west of Bismarck, that Fourth of July weekend.

Anne initially didn't want to go to the dance since she "didn't like Navy men," as she told me with a chuckle years later. But her girlfriend's mother was on the dance committee and was desperately trying to round up young women in Dickinson that weekend so the men would have partners to dance with.

My mother went to the dance with her girlfriend very reluctantly but she quickly perked up after she met my dad there and danced with him. One of the rules of the dance was that the Navy men weren't allowed to ask the women for their phone numbers or for dates afterwards. However, many of the men, including my dad, conveniently overlooked that rule and asked my mom if they could walk her home after the dance. "Several men asked me, but he was the one who I wanted to walk me home," she told me years later with a smile.

The next afternoon Don and Anne went horseback riding outside of town and later that summer, Anne moved from Bismarck to Dickinson to be closer to him, having landed a job in a bank there to support herself.

Another V-12 student at Dickinson, Pierre Salinger, also took an interest in Anne and asked her out a few times. Pierre would later go on to become the White House Press Secretary for President John F. Kennedy, but he struck out (many times) with Anne. My father later said that Pierre was a ladies man and could really play the piano, and that he was an intelligent and interesting fellow. But he also said that the portly Pierre couldn't do a single push-up.

Anne made a Thanksgiving meal for Don and his buddies at her apartment in Dickinson that November, one of the first meals she ever cooked. A few months later Don and Anne got married in a slap-dash "ceremony" just over the state line in Montana. They rode a bus there with a few other V-12 recruits and their fiancés on a Sunday morning, several couples altogether who had decided to get married. It was all done secretly and with no documents or papers since officer candidates weren't allowed to be married and could be immediately kicked out of the program if anyone found out. A somewhat hung-over Justice of the Peace, whom they had woken up, presided over the mass ceremony and simply stated a few words and then said, "I pronounce you married" -- not quite the glamorous wedding, I'm sure, that my mother had always dreamed of.

Back in Dickinson, the cadets tried to keep their marriages quiet. However, word got out a few days later and the men were called into the office of the school's Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Gerald Bradley (see newspaper below for photo). My dad spoke up for the group:

Lieutenant Bradley:		I've heard a rumor that some men here got married last weekend.
Apprentice Seaman Leu:		Yes sir. We've heard that rumor too, sir.
Lieutenant Bradley:		You understand that anyone who's married will be dismissed from V-12?
Apprentice Seaman Leu:		Yes sir. We do.
Lieutenant Bradley:		Now, I'm going to ask you a question and I want you to answer "No." Did any of you men get married last weekend?
Apprentice Seaman Leu:		No sir. We did not.
Lieutenant Bradley:		All right, dismissed!

Don and Anne got married again 10 months later, in West Palm Beach, Florida, after she learned she was pregnant, but this time -- and with Don now an officer -- they made it official. So, in fact, my parents were actually married twice, something I didn't learn until my dad told me, a few months after my mom had died in 1999. She'd never mentioned being married twice. I think she was embarrassed to admit that, because of the strict Navy rules, they had to keep their first marriage quiet and that it had, in fact, been somewhat dubious.

Above left: My father, Donald Leu, in 1943. Like all V-12 inductees, he was an Apprentice Seaman, the lowest rank in the U.S. Navy.

Above center: My mom, recently graduated from high school in Bismarck, moved to Dickinson that fall to be closer to my dad. She got a job in a bank and lived in this rustic motel/apartment near the Navy V-12 school.

Above right: My dad is second from the front, with his Navy buddies outside of May Hall at Dickinson State Teacher's College.

Above left: My dad and mother ice skating near Dickinson in the winter of 1943-44 a few months after they met.

Above center: A Dickinson school paper from September 1943 featuring a picture of the V-12 commander there, who had grilled my father about being married. Note that Pierre Salinger, who was a fellow V-12 officer candidate and would later become President John F. Kennedy's Press Secretary, wrote the column on the left.

Above right: Don's certificate of graduation from Navy V-12 school in February 1944.

After graduating from the Navy's eight-month V-12 school at Dickinson in February 1944, Don -- still just a cadet like all other officer candidates there -- was advanced to Pre-Midshipmen School, located in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Pre-Midshipmen school involved, again, mostly classroom instruction but was more rigorous than V-12 school. My father told me that Pre-Midshipmen School was mostly a holding facility until space opened up at Midshipmen School in Chicago.

He spent about a month at Pre-Midshipmen school but wasn't overly impressed with Asbury Park (apologies to Bruce Springsteen). The officer candidates were mostly confined to a hotel, where they studied at night and lived. They spent their days in a large classroom building nearby, a brick structure that was, for their safety from saboteurs, surrounded on all sides by barbed wire and guarded by armed MPs (Military Police).

The coursework at Pre-Midshipmen School was more difficult than at V-12 School and several officer candidates were dismissed by the Navy in a continual program of attrition. Don's roommate in their shared hotel room had fretted openly to Don about possibly failing his classes. One evening, when Don returned from his classwork, the man was simply gone, having been dismissed by the Navy. He hadn't even left a note.

The strain of the competitive coursework became obvious to everyone one morning at breakfast in the mess hall when an officer candidate, distraught about being recently dismissed from the officer training program, took out a .38 revolver and shot himself in the head. Don mentioned the incident, rather matter-of-factly, in a letter he wrote to Anne, who was still in Dickinson.

Don graduated from Asbury Park in April 1944 and, with the other officer candidates, rode a train to Chicago, the site of a Navy Midshipmen School and the final hurdle before becoming a commissioned officer. Several armed MPs accompanied them on the train to protect them from saboteurs (officer candidates during the war were apparently a prized bunch). In 1940 the Navy had opened a Midshipmen School at Abbott Hall, a combined classroom and dormitory tower on the campus of Northwestern University near Chicago.

Don studied at Midshipmen School in Abbott Hall for three months in an intensive program that included classroom instruction as well as -- finally! -- some hands-on seamanship. It was on a Navy ship (something like a small destroyer) on Lake Michigan with live fire training. The 90-day Midshipmen program was rigorous and, as with every stage of officer training, many candidates washed out. In fact, of Don's five closest friends at the V-12 school in Dickinson six months earlier, only one was still an officer candidate, the others having washed out along the way.

Don had a secret advantage over his colleagues, however: my mother, Anne. Anne had taken a train from North Dakota to Chicago to be close to him. She struggled to find a place to live in Chicago, which was bustling with wartime activity, but she eventually found a room at the Pearson Hotel nearby and then found a job with a book publisher to support herself. The Navy officer candidates, including Don, spent their weeks confined to Abbott Hall a few blocks away, but they were allowed weekend leave if they didn't have any demerits for that week. With the anticipation of spending a weekend with Anne, "you never saw anyone clean up their act so fast," he told me years later with a grin.

After spending many late nights with the books and many days on Lake Michigan learning seamanship, my father passed Midshipmen School in July 1944, almost exactly one year since he had begun his officer training program (and had met Anne). It had been an intensive and stressful program, and much faster than the four years that officer candidates spent going through the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. But commissioned as an Ensign, Don had made it through the rigorous training program and was now an officer in the U.S. Navy.

Above left: A guide to Asbury Park, New Jersey, that my dad picked up while in Pre-Midshipmen School there in March 1944.

Above center: Abbott Hall at Northwestern University, home of the U.S. Navy's Midshipmen School in Chicago during World War II.

Above right: A dinner menu that my mom ordered from when she stayed at the Pearson Hotel in Chicago, near Abbott Hall.

Above left: My mom's ticket to the Midshipmen's School graduation ceremony in July 1944.

During his final weeks at Midshipmen School in Chicago, in the summer of 1944, my father learned about a special operations program the Navy had recently started called "Scouts and Raiders." Known today as the Navy SEALs, it was an elite program that trained sailors for amphibious assaults, such as the landing on D-Day at Normandy in France, which had happened just a few weeks earlier.

The Scouts and Raiders would be the first group to go ashore during amphibious landings, to prepare the site for the landings and obtain information. As such, they were specially trained in new-fangled scuba gear (some of the first ever developed), a variety of innovative weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and underwater demolition (also known as UDT -- underwater demolition teams) to clear submerged barriers. The Scouts and Raiders would be the point of the spear during amphibious invasions, as reflected in their motto years later: "We led the way."

The Navy had posted notices throughout Abbott Hall seeking volunteers for the Scouts and Raiders program among the graduating officers, so my dad, always looking for adventure, signed up for the program. Like everything in the Navy, entry into Scouts and Raiders was competitive. In fact, many who applied for the program were rejected during the interview sessions at Abbott Hall -- but Don was accepted. The Scouts and Raiders training program was located at the Navy's new Amphibious Training Base (ATB), which was in Fort Pierce, Florida. So after Don received his officer's commission in Chicago in the summer of 1944, he and Anne packed their bags once again.

The U.S. Navy had created its first "special operations" group in 1942, which was based in Little Creek, Virginia. They trained a handful of men there for amphibious invasions, but they decided they needed a better site where they could train on sandy beaches and away from public view, and at a location warm enough to train year-round. In 1942, the Navy sent a scouting party to Florida to find a better site. The group, comprised of several senior officers, began in St. Augustine in the north and worked their way down the coast, methodically eliminating possible sites from contention. The scouts then visited Fort Pierce and were impressed with a mostly-uninhabited barrier island there called South Island (later called South Hutchinson Island). The island was large enough for a training facility to accommodate over 10,000 servicemen and, with its narrow causeway, could easily restrict public access.

The Navy appropriated the land without consulting the locals and began building their new Amphibious Training Base there, which opened in January 1943. The Scouts and Raiders were one of several amphibious Navy groups that trained there during the course of the war. Over the next three years until it closed, over 110,000 men were trained at the Fort Pierce ATB, mostly from the Navy but also 25,000 members of the Army. At its peak, about 18,000 men and women were stationed at the Fort Pierce ATB, which was commanded effectively by Navy Captain Clarence Gulbranson, a member of the initial scouting party and a stern, no-nonsense stickler for protocol.

Above left: The Fort Pierce Amphibious Training Base (ATB), looking east towards the Atlantic Ocean from the city of Fort Pierce, Florida in 1944. Most men here lived in the cabins and barracks in the foreground. They did most of their training on the east side of South Island (in the distance) and on North Island (to the left).

Above right: This is an aerial image of the same area in 2021. The U.S. Navy SEALs Museum is located on North Hutchinson Island, just off the image to the north. The ATB was torn down after World War II and today nothing is left of it except a few historical markers.

Above left: Many men at the Fort Pierce ATB lived in cabins constructed of plywood and canvas. The cabins were hot in the summer, cold in the winter and were often filled with biting sand flies. Living here was a "memorable" experience.

Above right: One of the classic training drills for the Scouts and Raiders involved lifting 400-pound logs with your team.

Above left: The Navy SEALs still use this technique of lifting and throwing palm logs in their training.

Above right: The sailors also did a lot of small arms training. This group is inspecting submachine guns.

Above left: The men frequently trained in rafts, and often at night. Padding in the back of a raft one night, Don was accidentally hit in the face with a paddle, knocked unconscious and fell overboard. He nearly drowned.

Above center: A sailor training with some newly-devised "scuba" gear, such as it was. Don's training at Fort Pierce instilled in him a love for scuba diving, which he passed onto his children many years later.

Above right: A Navy frogman carry C-2 explosives (similar to plastic explosives), preparing to demolish a landing barrier.

Above right: The men did a lot of blasting in the ocean (and on the beaches) during their training at the ATB. The explosions rattled the dishes and windows panes of residents in Fort Pierce, two miles away.

Above left: Sailors carrying an LCR (Landing Craft - Rubber), better known as a rubber raft. This is on the beach at Fort Pierce.

Above right: The sailors also trained with LCVPs (Landing Craft - Vehicle, Personnel), known more commonly as Higgins Boats. Don accidentally beached one of these while showing off in front of Anne one afternoon. He could've been dismissed from Scouts and Raiders if his commander had found out, but helpful onlookers on the beach pushed the boat back into the surf.

Don and Anne arrived in Fort Pierce in August of 1944 from Chicago and rented the top portion of a duplex on Easter Avenue, given the limited housing options on the base for married officers. At the Fort Pierce ATB, Don was assigned to a group of about 300 Scouts and Raiders trainees called "Roger 3." The men in the group didn't know it at the time, but the Roger groups -- named after the "Jolly Roger" of raiding pirates -- were being specially trained for operations in China. They would be incorporated into a little-known group there called SACO, the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, a joint operation between the U.S. Navy and the Chinese military. Roger groups were trained on a quarterly schedule, with a new group coming in to be trained every three months.

Scouts and Raiders from the Roger 1 and 2 groups, which had graduated several months earlier, were serving effectively with SACO in China. The U.S. SACO leader there, Commander Milton Miles of the U.S. Navy, was so impressed with these specially-trained sailors that he wanted more, so he asked the Navy to send him as many Scouts and Raiders as possible. The Navy complied and created a series of Roger groups that were trained in Fort Pierce. The first group, Roger 1, consisted of about 150 Scouts and Raiders who had shipped out of Fort Pierce in early 1944 bound for China. My father was in the third group, called Roger 3.

On the first day of their training in Fort Pierce, the Navy loaded the men in Roger 3 onto a ship, took them a mile offshore into the Atlantic Ocean and told them to jump into the water and swim ashore. Nearly half of the group didn't make it and were fished out of the ocean with boathooks, then they were dismissed from the program. My dad, however, managed to swim ashore. This would be the beginning of a hyper-intensive week of training they called "Hell Week," a term that's still used by the Navy SEALs.

The Scouts and Raiders training, which lasted three months, was extremely challenging and competitive, and over half of the initial group of 300 washed out. "It was really difficult because we had the top people there," Don said of his fellow colleagues. He had always been athletic, having starred on the Skykomish High School basketball team, but this took athletic competition to a new level.

"Every morning we'd run for two miles down the beach, then each team would throw palm tree logs to each other," he told me. "We also did a lot of training in the swamps nearby and learned how to survive in the jungle. There were a lot of snakes -- pythons, cottonmouths, and water moccasins -- and we ate them for dinner. We learned how to live off the land. We also learned how to use explosives there and take out bridges," he said.

They also did explosives work back at the Fort Pierce ATB camp, sometimes with humorous consequences.

"An Admiral came down from Chicago to inspect our camp one day and we were blowing up palm tree logs, which he watched from a safe distance. I put too much dynamite in one charge, though, and the log sailed clear over his head," he admitted with an embarrassed smile. "Our commanding officer rushed down and said, 'Leu, Leu -- I know it's you!"

The training at the ATB was challenging and sometimes hazardous. In fact, my dad nearly died while paddling a rubber raft in the ocean during a midnight "sneak and peek" surveillance training exercise.

The sailor in front of him, paddling furiously through the heavy surf, smashed my dad in the face with his paddle and my father was knocked unconscious and fell overboard into the ocean. One of the men in the raft quickly reached down into the inky water and thrashed around, trying to find him. Fortunately he grabbed my dad just before he slipped out of reach, then he pulled him back into the raft. My dad spent a few months in the Navy hospital in Jacksonville recovering, during which he permanently lost his sense of smell after a botched surgery. For the rest of his life, his crooked nose served as a visual reminder of that near-fatal accident.

Don recuperated in the Jacksonville hospital, then he resumed training with the Scouts and Raiders in Fort Pierce in the spring of 1945, having been pushed back into the next Scouts and Raiders group, Roger 4, because of his lengthy recovery. By early May, they all knew they were bound for somewhere in Asia because Germany had just surrendered. They figured they would be involved in the upcoming invasion of Japan, which was probably going to happen sometime in 1946 or 1947. Later in May of 1945, towards the end of their training program, the Navy started teaching them Chinese, so they figured they were heading to China -- and they were right.

Above left: Anne and Don moved into this duplex at 1230 Easter Avenue in Fort Pierce. Anne enjoyed picking oranges from the groves out back.

Above right: I found the same house during my visit to Fort Pierce in 2005. It hadn't changed much in 60 years.

Above left: My parents got married (a second time -- this one officially) and had a honeymoon, all in 24 hours. They spent their brief honeymoon here at the fancy Hotel Pennsylvania in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Above right: The receipt from their honeymoon stay at the Hotel Pennsylvania. Rooms here cost $7 in 1944. This and several other items on this page were from a scrapbook that my mother had kept of their time together after they met in North Dakota and throughout World War II. She kept the scrapbook hidden but I discovered it after she died in 1999. No one, not even my father, had ever seen it.

Above right: Don training with a 30-caliber machine gun at the Fort Pierce Amphibious Training Base. I believe this is the only photo of him ever using a gun. He believed in peace, not war, but he also felt strongly about defending America.

Above left: The ATB had some of the best athletes -- and consequently, one of the best football teams -- in the entire country. Many of the sailors here had recently played professional football with teams like the Detroit Lions and Chicago Bears. Understandably, they went undefeated.

Above center: My grandmother Helga visited my parents in Fort Pierce in the spring of 1945, shortly after my mom had her first baby (and Helga's first grandchild).

Above right: The Fort Pierce ATB's newspaper was called "The Mock-Up" in reference to all the mocked-up facilities throughout the base that were used for training.

Above left (3 documents): This is the roster of the enlisted men in the Scouts and Raiders "Roger 3" class that began training at Fort Pierce in the fall of 1944. Don had started in the Roger 3 class in September 1944 but, because of his hospital stay that winter, he finished and graduated with Roger 4.

Above right: The discharge and transfer order for Ensign Walt Lowell in Roger 4, after graduating from Scouts and Raiders training. Don had a similar order. Don and Walt met in the Roger 4 class and became good friends, and they would travel together to India and into China during World War II. After the war, Walt became a student of Don's at Michigan State University and, after graduating, became a professor at Southern Illinois University.