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My father was posted at Fort Jackson in South Carolina when the war came to America on December 7, 1941.
In an April, 2001 newspaper article, he told a reporter, "I was eating Sunday dinner in the Wade Hampton Hotel with the Blackman family (a family he met while at Fort Jackson) when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Where you were and what you were doing is just something you don't forget."

My father shipped out in May, 1942 to Ireland, and then went to Scotland to train for the North Africa campaign. He boarded a ship in Liverpool, England and sailed for Africa on Nov. 8, 1942. They landed in a port in Oran, Algeria, and worked their way up to Tunisia.
When the campaign in Africa was over, he was moved to a little place above Oran where he was trained for the impending invasion of Italy.
He landed in Italy in September, 1943 and "went through the whole boot, from the toe to the top" and ended up at Lake Como, in the Italian Alps.
He came home on June 18, 1945. Three years and one month from day he had shipped out.

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This picture was taken at Fort Bragg in the fall 1940. Daddy is the first on the left. They had no idea what was coming, and I have to wonder how many of these guys came home from the war. Daddy never talked about it, and I didn't ask.