I just wanted to say my father was a seabee in WWII and was also from Michigan.  He has been gone since 1972.  It is such a small world I wondered if he and Elmore were in the same place.  He was in the Philipines possibly Bouganvilla.  He operated a dozer among other things and came to the Seabees through the Navy.  I discovered Mr. Leonard while reading Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series.  The Kinsey character reads a lot of Elmore Leonard.

Elmore graduated from high school in 1944, joined the Seabees and was stationed in the Admiralty Islands, but saw no combat.