• Byron "Whizzer" White
  
• Grandpa remembered his Morse code the rest of his life, and would sometimes entertain us kids by translating short statements we made into "dees" and "dahs."
  
• Can confirm he would also occasionally say something was "this-a-way, not that-a-way" and smirk at his own private joke.
  

• What they did out in the desert was, apparently, play cribbage all day, a game grandpa played the rest of his life. That board and pegs came out every single time the family got together.
  
• It's kind of interesting how by 1944 they were clearly rushing as many bodies through training as possible. Didn't pass the eye test? Get closer, okay you passed. Didn't hit the target once? Are you infantry? No? Doesn't matter then.
  
• Grandpa did indeed fall in love with Hawaii later in life, and he and my grandma took annual trips to Honolulu for decades, back when you could do that on two high school teachers' salaries and later pensions.
  

• Battle of Guam (1944)
  
• Given that he mentions staging out of the Marshalls, it's likely he went ashore as part of the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade.
  
• I haven't watched The Pacific, but as far as I know war movies and the like gloss over the whole "throw all of your poo poo overboard" part of an amphibious assault.
  
• All-time Hall of Fame Greatest Generation Understatement in this one: "We were quite far from the actual battle, perhaps a mile away." Uh, I'd still call that pretty close!
  
• As you might have guessed from his lack of knowledge of guns and tents, Grandpa was a city kid. He never had any desire to do outdoor activities as long as I knew him.
  

• This is probably the most well known family stories. Grandpa told this one often but pretty much never talked about the actual landing.
  
• In fact he talked about the landing so little that when I was chatting about all of this with my mom over the weekend she was honestly under the impression that he didn't set foot on Guam until weeks or even months after the invasion. The fact that he went ashore just behind the Marines was a real surprise.
  
• There are a few other shenanigans he got up to that didn't get written down here, including getting skilled at forging various higher-ups' signatures to get goodies for his unit.
  

• In most pop culture, it seems that the war ends and everyone is instantly home. But of course that's not how it worked.
  
• The "baby aircraft carrier" would likely be a Bogue- or Independence-class escort carrier. It doesn't really matter but I find it interesting and glad he included at least some details about what kind of ships he was on.
  
• This must have been before his sleep apnea got really bad or they would have had to wake him up because his snoring would have disrupted the service.
  
• The idea of grandpa out on the town all night is, like I imagine it is to most of us, an incredibly foreign and frighting concept.
  

Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Feb 27, 2024

• Wold-Chamberlain NAS is, today, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Joint Air Reserve Station
  
• In researching that I learned that MSP's actual official name is Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport/Wold-Chamberlain Field, which I had never heard before despite living here the majority of my life.
  
• "Home," at this point, would have been Saulk Centre, MN, which from northern Minneapolis is about a 90 minute drive on modern roads and likely a lot longer in 1946.
  

Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Feb 28, 2024

• Turns out experience and training while in the service sometimes doesn't translate to a career in the civilian sector? That's something I'm sure nobody here can relate to.
  
• WCCO is pretty much the news/talk radio station in Minnesota that's not public radio. Lots of boomers/gen x-ers can recite commercials that aired on the station from memory.
  
• Mrs. Miniver was a newspaper column that got adapted into a book and then a film, and I guess then a high school play.
  

• 511th Infantry Regiment
  
• Colonel Haugen later died from wounds sustained during the Battle of Manila.
  
• "Scooter" (I never heard anybody refer to him by that nickname) came home from the war with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and a significant amount of PTSD.
  
• Grandpa always hero-worshiped his older brother, even before he was an actual war hero. We're pretty sure that's why he always downplayed his own wartime experience, frequently describing it as "nothing." From reading these I think we can all agree that's not the case.
  
• I only met Gene a couple times; his health deteriorated pretty early, plus the PTSD made it so he wasn't a particularly pleasant man for a kid or teenager to be around. I don't think he ever actually talked about his service outside of this account.
  
• Speaking of which, I'm not 100% sure what this article was written for, but in doing some research I found that there was a book about the 511th written in 2009, which I've now got on my Kindle and will report back if my Grunkle Gene comes up in it.
  

• No, you didn't miss it; he didn't actually say what caused the job to fall through, and I don't think I ever heard although I'm sure my mom knows.
  
• The brown tree snake has wreaked havoc on Guam, but was successfully contained in Hawaii.
  
• I would have been 4 when this all happened and I've always wondered what life would have been like if grandma and grandpa had ended up staying on Guam.
  

Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Mar 12, 2024

• Delta Queen
  
• I have seen that $50 bill.
  
• My mom escaped this fate but her youngest sister has frequently complained about how she had grandpa as a bus driver in elementary school and then as a teacher in high school, meaning she could never get away with anything.
  

Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 07:45 on Apr 4, 2024

• No, Dr. Spock.
  
• This won't mean as much to anybody else, but "something is going wrong but we're just standing here bickering about a neat article I just read" is a very "our family" thing to do.
  
• There's no way grandma wasn't insanely pissed at him for that stunt, doubly so because he was right.
  
• Apparently The Great Corn Dump is still talked about in that town.
  
• Thank you, mysterious car owner in 1934, for not killing my grandpa and ensuring I wouldn't be born.