Don Fida, of Syracuse, visits the small boomerang-shaped Pacific island in his sleep. He remembers the way 22,000 soldiers of the 7th Infantry Division emptied a ship onto Kwajalein and worked their way across the 2.5-mile island, killing close to 5,000 Japanese and losing 177 of their own. He can picture the way a Japanese soldier crawled out of a bunker waving the underwear of a young American nurse who had been held, "worse than hostage," as he puts it. Fida said his unit rescued the woman, draped her with the clothes of a dead soldier and escorted her onto...