I showed up ~10 days after D-Day (after the big storm that knocked out the man-made harbor) and the Sea bees had already re-built everything they had built the first time, all while under fire. Their casualty rates were tremendous.

Patton walked across the Rhine (as did I, with my awe-inspiring typewriter*) on a bridge constructed by Seabees. But Patton didn't consider them soldiers, though. So they were deprived of most honors.


* Yes, sarcasm. But, yes, I did ruck a typewriter. I was an a military police translator as a native German speaker. I got medals the Sea bees didn't get and saw action only sporadically during the Battle of the Bulge.

I once dated an officer in the Seabees who was an engineer, rank of Capt. He worked at the Pentagon.

they will never violate. I find it hard to understand that so many years later, when it would make no difference, many of them would still keep these secrets. My Dad was involved in very top-secret work during WWII, and while he discussed a little of it with me shortly before he died in his 90s, he would never discuss it publicly. When a local newspaper interviewed him about his service during the 50th anniversary of the war, he lied and made up a humdrum story. When I suggested that he could tell the truth all these years later, he became quite angry about it and I never broached the subject again.

His work involved intercepting communications between Japanese submarines in the Pacific and decoding them using the code that the US had broken. It helped win the Battle of Midway. It had to be top secret because if the Japanese knew the code had been broken, they would have stopped using it and we couldn't listen in on their communications.