In 1923, the War Department dredged up the files on one of the three Army divisions created just before World War I’s Armistice Day. The division had never seen combat and had no personnel, but soon the 96th Infantry had headquarters in Portland, Oregon and command posts peppering the Northwest. A decade later, as the Nazi terror spread through Europe like cancer, officers manning the 96th’s desks transferred in droves to other divisions in the prelude to another world war.

But from the moment the United States joined the Allies on December 8, 1941, the day after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, it was clear that this war would be far more serious than the last one. Division after division headed for combat, some to Europe, some to the Pacific. Five months after that war declaration, the 96th Infantry was back, with Major General James L. Bradley, a World War I veteran, at its helm. One memoir said, "killed in victory, the 96th had been reborn in calamity."

As he prepared to fill the ranks of his reorganized division, Bradley told a nation of future recruits, "We kill--or we get killed." Vernon Duncan, my grandfather, was one of those recruits.

I pull into my grandparents’ driveway and park behind their white Crown Victoria, hoping to fill in some blanks about Grandpa’s service in the Army. The concrete is stained red from the iron in their air conditioner/water system and overshadowed by an ancient magnolia tree. Mold grows on the immense branches, leaving its slimy green residue on the hands of two, possibly three, generations of Duncans that have climbed them. I walk into the garage, which is packed with bicycles, stools, ladders, old furniture and bug spray and make a quick right into the always-unlocked kitchen door. I don’t knock, but the characteristic whine of the hinges betrays me as I step onto the thin brown carpet of the kitchen. The air smells of the Duncan-Heinz chocolate-chip cookies and Oreos stashed in a heavy green jar in the corner by the refrigerator. The jar’s strategic placement once kept it safe from the hands of tiny grandchildren, but now there are only two grandchildren out of the 14 that still strain to reach it. The rest of us have long since moved up to the candy jar full of Werther’s Originals caramels on top of the fridge. Grandpa always recites the old Werther’s commercial, chuckling as he hands one of us a piece. "My grandfather gave these to me, and now I’m giving them to you...."

I look through the bar window and across the dining room and spot him in his tan recliner, asleep with his mouth open, a golf tournament blaring on the television set. He calls this "checking his eyelids for holes." Hollering from the bedroom, Grandma greets me and suddenly Grandpa is on his feet, meeting me in the dining room. "Hey," I say, "I saw you sleeping out there." "No, I wasn’t," he denies, "just watching a little golf." There is always some sport on their television, depending on which of his three sons, two sons-in-law or nine grandsons is visiting. Most of the time it is golf, sometimes baseball--Chicago Cubs, preferably--but on one desperate occasion, I even saw motorcycle racing on the screen. No one watched it, but it was on.

Grandpa wears a blue-and-tan striped golf shirt with "The Players Championship" embroidered on the sleeve and polyester sports-shorts. At 77 years old, his walk is quick and jaunty, and he flashes his wide-open and jovial smile. Joke books fill the bookshelves of the house where they’ve lived for over 40 years. His favorite jokes are ones on heredity. "You know," he says, eyes flashing with mirth, "if your parents had never had kids, you wouldn’t either." His white hair is cut short, having stopped just short of balding on top many years ago. I lean to kiss his darkly-tanned cheek and catch a whiff of Old Spice cologne--my favorite.

My grandfather, Vernon Duncan, was born in Hudson, Illinois, a small city north of Bloomington in 1920. His parents, James and Sarah, raised nine children, six boys and three girls. Grandpa graduated from Bloomington High School and eventually became the manager of the National T, a grocery store, in Dwight, Illinois. Across the street from National T sat Copton’s Dairy Shop, where he met my future grandmother, Emma Simpson, a waitress who worked there. They married in January of 1942. She brags about slipping him "extra scoops" of ice cream. "Don’t tell Mr. Copton that," he laughs. "He’d roll over in his grave."

On October 26, 1942, Grandpa reported for Army duty in the 96th Infantry Division, 382nd regiment, five months after the division’s reactivation. Because he was 22 years old, a little older than the usual draftees of 19 to 21 years old, and the division needed to fill its ranks, he quickly became a squad leader, staying in a "semi-private" room in the barracks with two other men. Most of the division came from the central states: Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Arkansas and Texas. "You’d be surprised how many of them couldn’t read or write," he says. "And, you had to teach ‘em that, you see."

The 96th started their training in October, 1942 at Camp Adair in Salem, Oregon. Split into the 381st, 382nd, and 383rd infantry regiments, two field artillery battalions and one engineer battalion, the men then went to the woods of Fort Lewis, Washington for unit training until the summer of 1943. They sweat the summer out in the Oregon desert. The "Barbs" section of a Salem newspaper read, "Military experts emphasize the importance of the desert campaign. It’s a good place for the Allies to get hot." After additional training in Adair, the division transferred to Camp White in Medford, Oregon, weeding people out during intensive sharp-shooting training. It was here that they were dubbed the Deadeyes for their aim that was always on target.

The Deadeyes by Orlando Davidson calls Colonel Macy Dill, in charge of the 382nd regiment, "a fiery, bantam size fighting man whose omnipresent cigarette and walking stick became legendary in the front lines of the 382nd regiment." Except for its colorful leaders, the 96th was an unknown and undistinguished division to the civilians in the Northwest. But the War Department knew well its capabilities and in Spring, 1944, named it an amphibious division, slating it for combat in the Pacific.

Grandpa and I settle into chairs around the walnut dining room table to talk about the war. He is not one to bring the subject up on his own, and the only true tip-off that he was even in the Army is stashed in his office, a shadow box of ribbons, medals, pictures and shrapnel. Today, he surrounds me with books, the shadow box, papers and a file folder bursting at the creases. He struggles with where to begin, fidgeting, folding and refolding his hands, playing with his large knuckles, flipping a stack of plastic placemats. Grandma bustles in and out of the room, filling the air with the smell of Estee Lauder’s Youth Dew and distracting him for a moment. Finally, he settles into the narrative, sketching each move non-chalantly, folding his hands, flinging his reading glasses around, fiddling with whatever is in reach. I suspect that it is as hard for him to talk about the war as it is for me to ask him about it, what it was like, how it felt to be an expert marksman, aiming at another man. Maybe he doesn’t want to tell me. Maybe I don’t want to know.

After the 96th received its amphibious orders, the men moved to San Luis-Obispo in California for training. In the spring of 1944, they shipped down to San Diego and made practice landings, sloshing through the waves onto beaches again and again, all the way up to San Luis-Obispo. In Sacramento, they went through the final stages of training, and in July, 1944, from Pittsburgh, California, the 96th Division shipped off of the mainland United States. Stationed at the Scofield Barracks in Hawaii, they continued to practice landings on the beaches of Maui.

"Everytime we moved," he says, "Emma followed. She always managed to find a job and a place to live." Their first child, Mary Anne, was born in 1943, while he was stationed in Washington. "It would have been a lot tougher if Emma hadn’t gone with me. Many of the men had never been away from home, so it was hard on them. But if I had some time off, I could always take a bus into the city and spend time with her and Mary Anne." He tried to get her to move back home in the final stages of training, but she wouldn’t hear of it. So he spent his few last days with her, and then shipped out to Hawaii. She moved back to Illinois and lived in his parents’ house. "The only fair-haired one in the house," he says. She decided to go to nursing school.

The division believed it would first go to Yap, a small island no one had heard of east of the Philippines. Suddenly, their fate changed. Before lifting anchor, General Bradley was called into Pacific Fleet headquarters. No one knew what happened in that conference until the division flagship, the USS Rocky Mount, had cleared the Hawaiian harbor and dropped off its local guide. On September 15, Bradley called a meeting to say, "Gentlemen, ...the XXIV Corps is now under General MacArthur and will attack Leyte in the Central Philippines on October 20." The change was so sudden that not even the other ships in the convoy knew for some time, and the men on those ships, determined to know their enemy, continued to study maps of Yap. Manus in the Admiralties served as the final tableau for problem-solving and their last stop before heading to war.

As they drew closer to the Philippines, the 6th Ranger Battalion began clearing the beach. The division reached Leyte Gulf on the prescribed morning. Along with a few other ships, the battleship Tennessee, which had been damaged in the Pearl Harbor attack, barraged the beach with its 14-inch guns. At final count, 2720 rounds of high explosives had hit the beach within 39 minutes. Bombs and rockets from planes and landing craft infantry finished what the ships didn’t reach. Then, the amphibious tanks slid into the water, each one with a group of 40 men. The moment of truth had come.

Grandpa’s eyes light up when he tells me about he and the rest of Company K in the belly of one of those tanks. He says, "The one thing I remember is when we were in the craft, it swung around and around on the anchor and you could see the beach. But if you looked to the side, there were landing craft as far as you could see--15 to 20,000 men, all starting towards the shore at one time." They didn’t encounter much opposition the first few days, but on the second night, the Japanese undertook a banzai attack, running at the front lines. It was not successful. The infantrymen were called "doughboys," a nickname carried over from the Civil War for uniform buttons that looked like dumplings. Every night, the doughboys dug in, spending many nights in the rain, shooting everything that moved above ground. "Most of the time, it was just a caribou. But sometimes, it was a Japanese." The division fought in Leyte until the spring of 1945, and in the end, stayed long after the others had left to"mop up." Grandpa and his company guarded a radar station in Tacklobin, on the gulf where MacArthur made his promised return. Grandpa was then granted a field commission to second lieutenant and transferred to Company E. Total division losses in Leyte were 400 men. The Japanese lost 7,700.

The 96th Division had the least amount of time to prepare between battles: They literally went from one battle to the next. That next battle, Operation Iceberg, would be on Okinawa, 330 miles from Japan. The 32nd Army of Japan took up the defensive on Okinawa, covered by airborne divisions, surrounded by waters filled with suicide craft, and what was left of the Imperial Fleet floating to the North. The 96th Division, severely undermanned, started toward the beach at 8 a.m. on April 1, 1945 along with the 7th Army Division and two Marine divisions. As morning dawned on Love Day, as it had come to be called, the gun boats again cleared the beach. The first wave of troops hit the beach in 30 minutes. The 382nd Battalion stayed behind as a diversion, later landing behind the other two battalions.

By 11:30 a.m., the American troops had taken back Kadena and Yomitan Airfields, the two main airfields on the island, clearing them by nightfall. There they found four "Cherry Blossoms," suicide planes with 1.8 tons of explosives in their noses. The Japanese Army, crippled by the loss and lack of manpower after their main counteractive force had been transferred to another battle, tried guerrilla warfare and operated out of caves. The American troops later found fake tanks and bamboo decoy planes designed to draw fire away from the Japanese. The Japanese commander in charge of operations in Okinawa, Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, said in his book The Battle for Okinawa that he considered the battle a hopeless one for his Army, that they were ignored by their headquarters, and that he once thought that he should have committed suicide along with the other officers. The 96th Division lost 1,600 men in Okinawa, with 7,600 total casualties, dead and wounded included, 2,000 more than any other division. The Japanese lost a more staggering 31,000 men.

Grandpa remembers that the sky was clear and beautiful on that Easter morning when they landed on Okinawa. That night, the sky was still bright, but this time it had a more sinister light. Bombs, anti-aircraft missiles and suicide bombers exploded throughout the night. The opposition on Okinawa was quick and fierce, and on April 10, he was wounded, shot in the lower back with a fragmenting bullet. At least that’s what he thinks it must have been. Instead of talking about the incident, he shows me where it hit--right above his belt--and where it left a much bigger hole as parts of it exploded out of the other side of his back. Because the wound’s severity, he was flown to the hospital on Guam instead of taking the usual hospital ship. He shrugs his shoulders and says, "but that would have been all right." The day after he reached Guam, President Roosevelt died.

Grandpa is reading Yahara’s book, says it is very interesting to see the battle from another perspective. "We never could see masses of Japanese, only a few at the time. But they could see where we were. I could only imagine what it looked like to see all of us coming up on the beach." He thinks about their belief that if they were killed for the Emperor, it would help them in heaven. He says, "But us, you’d fight if you had to, you know, but not stupidly."

He spent a month in the hospital at Guam, lying on his stomach while the wound grew together from the inside out. The patients played cards, watched movies, read a little, and somehow, the time never seemed too slow. After Guam, the Army sent Grandpa to Hawaii for surgery, where he spent an additional two months in a hospital on a hill overlooking Oahu. When he was finally well enough, he was reassigned to the base on Oahu to continue training recruits until October. He golfed in his free time, and when the war was over, helped pull up the barbed wire that had been strung around the island. He came back to the mainland on the USS Saratoga, landing at Pittsburgh, California, and was discharged at Camp Adair, where it all began.

At the end of the war, the 96th Infantry Division was deactivated at Camp Anza, California. There were only 2,000 men left in the division after battle casualties and transfers. Bradley said, "For you, this is one of the happiest days of your lives. For me, it is about the saddest. I won’t say goodbye, because someday, somewhere, we’ll meet again. I salute you--the finest men I have ever known--and wish each of you the best of luck." On February 3, 1946, the 96th Division was no more.

After a year and a half away from his family, Grandpa went back home to Illinois, Emma, Mary Anne, and the National T. In 1948, their second child and my father, Vernon William, was born. The family moved around with his job until the Korean War began, and the reserve officers were called in for a physical. Not knowing what would come next, he went back home, "fat, dumb, and happy." But in October, 1950, Grandpa was on active duty again, this time for only nine months, training recruits in Mississippi.

Afterwards, he heard about a job with State Farm Insurance, and in 1953, transferred to Jacksonville with the company. The family moved into their present home in Glynlea, then a new neighborhood. They had three more children, John, Steven, and Kathleen. While working at State Farm as an auto-division manager, he took correspondence courses in insurance and law, and eventually worked as a legislative liaison for the insurance industry. He retired in February, 1985 after 38 years with the company.

Now, all of their children are married and they have 16 grandchildren. Three of their children live in Jacksonville. Grandpa stacks the pantry to the roof with cracker snack-packs, Duncan-Heinz cookies, and canned soft drinks. The backyard is wide and long for games of baseball, soccer, or early attempts at golf. His latest acquisitions include a computer, so that one day he can "surf the net," a CD player that he uses to play Patsy Cline music, and, his favorite, a cellular phone. When he is not at home, he is playing golf with his senior’s group at Selva Marina--hence the dark tan--or serving as a lector at Christ the King Catholic Church. This summer, he will go to the 40th reunion of the Deadeyes in St. Louis, where the first Deadeye reunion started with around 70 soldiers. Now, the reunions average around 600 GI’s plus their families, although there may be as many as 4,000 still alive from the 8-to-10,000 men that originally served in the 96th Division. "But they can’t really make it," he says quietly, "because so many of them were injured, and some are ill, and it’s all they can do to keep going, you know, so...."

As we wrap up our conversation, he tells me, "I feel pretty fortunate to have been where I was instead of Europe. Being in the Army didn’t bother me that much. Some of the other guys around me were pretty upset by what they were doing, got battle fatigue and all. But it was just something I had to do." I look around at the table. The shadow box holds two bronze stars, one for each battle, a purple heart, and a piece of shrapnel that worked its way out of his back many years later. The yellow file folder lies open, remembrances of the war spilling out onto the table: dollar bills signed by his company before each battle, a fading black and white picture of Company E, printed money from the occupation of both islands, the telegram that told Grandma he was injured, newspaper clippings, one of the flags that each Japanese soldier carried with him. I hold on to the dollar bills for some time, trying to read the names. There is a two-dollar bill for Okinawa. The corner is torn off because one of the men thought it was bad luck to carry a whole two-dollar bill. I want to ask him how many of those men died there, how many he saw fall, who he still sees at the reunions, who he misses. But I look up into his quiet face, absorbed in memory, and instead, I put the money back in the plastic bag and close the folder. Perhaps these are his words, how he wants to share his memories with me. Maybe instead of stories, these pieces of a bygone era tumbling onto the table connect him to moments and feelings inaccessible by words. I thank him for talking to me, and tell him that sometime this summer, once classes are over, I will teach him how to surf the net.