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But for high school, we had to go by bus to the city. I graduated from high school and went to work with Bethlehem Steel, making armor plates for battleships. The job was in the defense industry, which meant I was exempt from military service. But I had two crazy friends, Rod Strohl and Carl Fenstermaker, who talked us all into going into the paratroops. The three of us enlisted in August 1942 and stayed together through most of the war. All of us were in the hospital at one time together. All three of us came back after the war.

CHAPTER THREE
    Young Lions, West

Earl McClung
    I was born April 27, 1923, on the Colville Indian Reservation, up in northeastern Washington State. I’m three-eighths Indian. My mother was half Indian, my father was a quarter.
    During the Depression we were poor but we always had enough to eat. There was always wild game. We always raised a garden. My mother always canned. Eating was never a problem, but sometimes it got awfully cold in the winter because the building we lived in wasn’t that good.
    Hunting and fishing—that’s what I loved to do as a kid—anything outdoors. I trapped beavers, muskrats, coyotes. Once in a while I got a mink. I killed my first deer when I was eight years old. I was with my father. We were on horses, quite a ways up in the mountain. There was snow on the ground. He spotted it and handed me his rifle. He said, “Here, you want to shoot a deer?” I sat down and shot it. We dressed it up and brought it home. It was really something—it sure was to me, anyway—I was beside myself. Ammunition was hard to get for one thing, and I was amazed that he let me shoot his gun. That’s why I knew I better not miss. His gun was an old World War I 30-40 Krag. I had a .22 that I carried all the time and I was pretty good with that. I had killed grouse before but never a deer.
    On an Indian reservation, you more or less learned to fight before you learned to walk. If you don’t learn to fight, you wouldn’t get on your feet long enough to learn to walk. It guess it was tough growing up, but I never really thought about it. I thought that’s what everybody did. I never noticed alcohol while growing up, but some of the kids did. I never drank until I got in the service. After the war it got to be a bigger problem.
    I went to school in a little town called Inchelium, Washington. There was one teacher and eight grades, maybe only fifteen kids total. I never did really good in high school. We had a lot of work to do around the home, and I missed a lot of school. They drafted me in February 1943, which didn’t matter to me—I knew I was going in anyway. I wouldn’t have graduated until June of that year, but they graduated me early.

Ed Pepping
    I was born in Alhambra, California, on Independence Day 1922. Growing up, we always had big family celebrations on the Fourth of July. Mom made a birthday cake in a huge dishpan. Everybody came over, and we had enough people in my extended family to make two softball teams.
    Dad used to work twelve to fourteen hours a day. During the Depression he worked for Ralph’s Grocery Company in Los Angeles, but the store he worked for was destroyed during the big earthquake of 1933, so Dad was let go. After that my dad and uncle painted houses for thirty-five cents an hour, doing whatever they could to make ends meet. We grew vegetables in our backyard and ate healthy foods. We did all right.
    During the Depression we had nothing but we had everything—we had each other. We didn’t need to have television to entertain ourselves. Many times we kids just sat on the lawn in a circle and played games or talked. Everybody in the neighborhood had a lot of friends. We played kick the can, rode bicycles, and roller-skated. Everybody had roller skates. We took the skates apart for the steel wheels and made box scooters out of wooden boxes and old two-by-fours.
    Our neighborhood was a combination of Latino and Caucasian families. All the kids played