WORLD WAR II WAS THE DOMINANT international event of the 20th century. It changed the face of Europe, Asia and the Pacific in ways no one could ever have imagined. It also helped the United States awaken from its slumber to become the world’s foremost superpower. More than fourteen million young men and women, including Jack, Bill and me, got their “chance” to participate.

Jack and I spent countless hours fooling around with anagrams and solving puzzles. We had anagrams all over the damn house. Who knows what our parents thought. I personally found it crazy how those puzzles worked out. As time passed, Jack and I did it decently, and one day we received a message from the Navy, instructing us to visit the nearest Navy recruiter for physical examinations. During the months of our code-breaking training, the vicious attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii occurred on December 7, 1941, and I wanted to join the war effort.

Shortly after, we started receiving packages in the mail containing code-breaking lessons. Do’s and don’ts mostly. These typically consisted of a basic lesson in codes and a few examples to test our skill. The early lessons were simple, but they progressively became more difficult as we advanced. We learned all about frequency codes, letter usage, double transpositions and similar convolutions. Hell, to this day I could probably give a brief lecture on code-breaking.

Jack and I went down to take our physicals, and damned if we weren’t blind as bats. Without his eyeglasses, Jack could hardly see the eye chart from point blank distance, and I was equally half blind out of my left eye. “You guys can’t be in the Navy,” the recruiter told us.

“Why not?” we asked. “We hope to be code breakers. It’s not like we’ll be the guys lining up shots on a battleship.” We told him we’d been in code school and were asked to do this. He surely thought we were crazy.