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

They were welcomed to the war with the roar of a rocket.

They knew the sound. They had been warned.

The infernal hum of the V2, the Nazis buzz-bomb that had terrorized England.

They knew what to do. They had been trained.

So they spent some of the first moments of their tour of duty, ducked,

and hoping it wouldn't die.

And when the explosion came, far enough away that they all lived beyond their first real day of World War II.

They didn't know that it would be the only time that they would come under fire.

That their days shooting rifles and tossing grenades into bunkers

and basic training were the last ones in which duty would require they wield weapons of war.

But their hardest days were just ahead.

For when the women of the Sixth Triple Eight,

held as America's first all-black female battalion,

though there were at least three Latinos in their ranks, too.

When they arrived at the weather warehouses on a grey morning in Greyburming, England,

and dragged open the groaning doors,

they realized what they were in for.

In the gloom of the cavernous room, the weak winter sun swatted away by blacked-out windows,

was a mountain of male,

hundreds of thousands of letters and packages,

with more ceiling to floor untold millions stuffed into other dark warehouses.

...