This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demetow.

Out to the sea and back in and again.

The soldiers bivouacking in the low roll of hills and hill colored tents

Then lined onto trucks open to the air salt and damp and silver in the morning mist

To rumble down to staging grounds where once willow swayed by the sea just a few years before

Fort Pearl Harbor before a Japanese submarine sank an oil tanker not far from shore

And then the willows came out and the army corps of engineers came in and all hands were on deck

Like these men new recruits

Marched to the pier across gangplanks to huddle shoulder to shoulder in the landing craft

The low slung boats with the rear gates that drop like a jaw to spit men out into the tide

The thrum of the motor the shutter of propeller working free of the sea grass and kelp coming up from the bottom of Moro Bay

on the central coast of California

Sea otters sea lions

Some 16,000 servicemen late winter 43

Men from Muscogon and Chiboygan west Hartford and East St. Louis once male men and line cooks and all that

Now military training for the Pacific to take islands to take bunkers embedded in European cliff sides

Being tested and testing for the planners in the Pentagon new techniques for new battlefields for new phases of the war

New ideas that could be poured back into new weapons new methods for pouring men onto beaches

For getting them up hills under hailing bullets over razor wire past traps yet unknown

Being devised right then by men in Berlin and Tokyo out to sea and back again again and again the young men the seventh infantry the 88th

Sent to learn how to clear the thresholds of the lander to clear it faster this time to keep their ammunition dry

To keep their rifles above the water

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