On February 4 an invitation to the White House interrupted this schedule. My family and I were ushered into President Roosevelt's office. I had known… - Alexander Vandegrift

In spring, when Virginia smells sweeter than any place I have since visited in the world, we went blackberrying to bring back loaded pails which Henrietta, my mother's cook of long years, baked into fragrant and delicious pies. Summers we swam in the Rivanna River, a muddy little stream about two miles from town; sometimes we fished it from an old flat-bottomed boat and occasionally pulled out a perch or catfish.

The Virginia town of Charlottesville is a good place to remember. I was born there on March 13, 1887, and lived there until 1909 when I left for a new home, the Marine Corps. Forty years later I returned, then moved to Florida, my present home. Charlottesville is still a good place to remember.
To me Charlottesville will always be a little town sitting quiet at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the home of some 8,000 people, dirt streets lighted by gas lamps, a yellow glow that on a winter evening peeped comfortably through the drawn drapery of the red-brick houses on East High Street- my route when I was hurrying to explain to my parents why I was late for supper.

We knew that America needed a shot in the national arm. Since December 7, 1941, our national heritage had yielded to a prideless humiliation. Half of our fleet still sat on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The Philippines were gone, Guam and Wake had fallen, the Japanese were approaching Australia. What Admiral King saw, and what he jammed down the throats of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was that just possibly the mighty Japanese had overextended. He saw that just possibly a strike by us could halt their eastward parade. The only weapon he held, the only weapon America held, was a woefully understrength fleet and one woefully ill-equipped and partially trained Marine division.