July 18, 2024:
One of the hut areas we were in was across a high fence from an aircraft factory where big B-24 Liberator bombers were made. There was an airstrip, too, and the big four-engine planes came and went low over the tops of the huts. Once one belly-landed, going through the fence near our huts. No one was hurt, but several of us ran down to see the crash.
— E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed
At the time Sledge was in boot camp there at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot my grandmother was working in that B-24 factory. Rosie the Riveter, of Clinton, Arkansas. She would have worked on those very planes which took off so low over the trainees' huts.
That was December of 1943. One year later, in December of '44, Sledge was at Pavuvu for rest and rehabilitation with the 1st Marine Division after the battle of Peleliu. At that moment the father of my grandmother's child was in snow on the northern front of the Battle of Bulge, with the 84th Infantry Division. My grandmother's child, my mother, eight years old, was locked in a closet in a house in El Cajon.
Sledge grew up comfortable, in a warm Alabama home with two parents who loved him and African servants who took care of them all. His trauma was later, with the Old Breed.