Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City New York the first day of 1919. He grew up as a troubled youth that was expelled from three boarding schools. The young trouble maker was finally sent in 1934 to Valley Forge Military Academy (VFMA) outside of Philadelphia Pennsylvania. Founded in 1928 the military boarding school was known as the "Little West Point".
Valley Forge educated many importance personages such as the former child Tsar Simeon II of Bulgaria and trained such famous warriors as H. Norman Schwarzkopf of Desert Storm fame, and the current US Navy's CNO Admiral Gary Roughead. It was at VFMA that Salinger edited the school's yearbook and penned a few short stories. He graduated from VFMA in 1936. Salinger spent the next several years spread from New York to Vienna studying, attending and withdrawing from colleges, doing his first serious writing and working for and with his Jewish father who was a meat importer.
US Army Signal and Counter Intelligence Corps WWII
In April 1942 Salinger was drafted under Selective Service and assigned to the Army. Since he had attended some college scored well on intelligence tests he was sent to the Signal Corps where he attended instructor school and helped train Army Air Corps Cadets. In October 1943 he attended training for counter intelligence at Ft Holabird, Maryland. Assigned to the intelligence section of the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th ID he waded under German machine guns ashore on Utah Beach on D-Day with a typewriter in his pack.
For the next eleven months he and his unit were involved in fierce fighting in the Hedgerows, the port of Cherbourg, Liberated Paris and pursued the Germans into the Hurtgen Forest. There he endured the frozen hell of frostbite, trench foot and the oncoming Nazi Panzers in the Battle of the Bulge. He entered Germany with his regiment and helped to liberate a concentration camp and participated in the interrogation of captured enemy prisoners of war.
Shortly after the close of hostilities, Salinger suffered a post traumatic stress induced nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. While hospitalized he married a German doctor and former Nazi party member. He was discharged in November 1945 as a Staff Sergeant but continued on as a contract employee interrogator with the Army for another six months. It is thought that his profound short story "For Esme, with Love and Squalor," written around a character who was a broken soldier, came from firsthand experience.
The war always remained with Salinger and his daughter Margaret related in an interview that she wasn’t aware as a child that her father was an author but she always knew that he had been a soldier. She further stated that, “It was the point of reference that defined everything else in relation to it”:
Valley Forge and the 12th Infantry today
Salinger immortalized Valley Forge as it would serve as the basis for "Pency Prep" in the Catcher in the Rye. Later the school was used in the filming of the cult classic Taps which deals with military cadets run amok. It continues its service today as a military prep school and college with over 600 cadets in uniform. The 12th Infantry Regiment is currently still attached to the historic 4th Infantry Division based at Fort Carson, Colorado. After WWII it served in the Vietnam conflict and in West Germany during the Cold War. More recently it served two tours in Iraq (2003 and 2005) during Operation Iraqi Freedom and has been in Afghanistan since June 2009. No doubt many of its soldiers and men have read Salinger's work without knowing they wore the same uniform he did.
Sources
J. D. Salinger: Author of The Catcher in the Rye Dies at 91, The Times Online Retrieved 1/29/2010
Johnson, Gerden The History of the Twelfth Infantry Regiment in World War Two, 1947
Reiff, Raychel Haugrud J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye and Other Works
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