[snip from link]

For most of my lifetime, I heard only rumors in my family of the tragedy that Victor’s death entailed. His grandparents died shortly after in deep depression; my father, who had graduated from the same high school and college at the same time with him, and who joined the Marines with him (before transferring to the Army Air Corps to fly on 39 B-29 missions), rarely talked about how the loss had wrecked the close-knit Swedish farm family. Occasionally strange what-ifs surfaced — had he really been killed just hours before the mountain was stormed? Had he lived, would he have farmed the home place? Been a teacher? Had a family nearby our own? For the past 40 years I have bumped into dozens of residents of his small hometown of nearby Kingsburg, who although strangers, on recognizing my name, used to lectured on what a good man Victor was — he was killed at 23 — and how hard it would be for anyone to live up to such a namesake.

But mostly my family remained quiet, and either did not know the exact circumstances of Victor’s death, or — more likely — chose over the half century to remain silent about it. Now that my father and all who knew Victor in the family are gone, I decided to discover what had happened on May 18, 1945.