Every military infantry division needs a name.

Most get numbers, and some have nicknames. The 42nd Infantry Division got a rainbow.

The story of how is one of the most interesting origin stories in American military history.

The diagnosis did not exist, but the damage did.

Post-traumatic stress disorder was not in the diagnostic vocabulary in 1945. It would not be formally recognized by the American Psychiatric Association until 1980, thirty-five years after the end of the Second World War, following the sustained advocacy of Vietnam veterans and the mental health professionals who treated them.

But the condition existed. It has always existed.

Interviewing survivors has nothing to do with interviewing.

You enter the room, make eye contact, introduce yourself, sit down, and listen. You hold open an invisible space, and invite memory to walk down its own lane. The survivors journey back, and you watch time bend as the past comes forward to meet them.

If you are observant enough, you witness the landscapes begin to fill the room, and you see the survivors’ eyes look into the eyes of their parents, sisters, brothers, and neighbors. The ghosts march in, and the atmosphere becomes alive with the memories of the living who are dead now.

That’s why it’s not just an interview.

The United States government looked at Vito Bertoldo and said: not you.

He was 4-F, what the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 established as unfit for military service. To be 4-F was to be deemed physically, mentally, or morally disqualified from service. For many men this was a welcome reprieve, but for some it was a point of contention, humiliation, and a catalyst for determination.

Vito Bertoldo had nearsightedness so severe that the Army rejected him, and stamped a document saying he was exempt from the draft. The machinery of wartime America, which was consuming men by the millions, looked at this coal miner from Decatur, Illinois, and determined he was not fit for the fight.

He enlisted anyway.