There was land, empty farmland, that the military could use. And people were happy to see the military there, it meant good business. Patriotism, good business: the equation took root in Orange County, beginning with this war. The Santa Ana City Council, for instance, rented four hundred acres of the Berry ranch, for $6,386 a year, then turned around and rented the land to the War Department for a dollar a year, inviting the department to use the land for whatever they liked. It was patriotic, it was good business. The War Department made the ranch into the Santa Ana Army Air Base, and through the war 110,000 men trained there. They saw the land.

Next to the air base was established the Army Air Forces Flying Training Command, the “University of the Air.” Sixty-six thousand pilots got their wings there. They all saw the land.

The Navy established one U.S. Naval Air Station at Los Alamitos, and another in Tustin, to house its blimps. It dredged the harbor at Seal Beach, and relocated two thousand residents, and established the U.S. Naval Ammunition and Net Depot, at a cost of $17 million—all of it paid to the local construction industry.

Groves in El Toro were torn out to make room for the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station, El Toro, one of the biggest in the country.

Orange County Airport became the Santa Ana Army Airdrome. Irvine Park became Camp George E. Rathke, infantry training center. And through all of these military bases poured the men, and the money.

So much of the population was directed to the war effort that not enough were left over to farm. Mexican braceros were brought in to pick the oranges. German POWs were brought in to pick the oranges. A group of Jamaicans were brought in to pick the oranges. (“These Negroes have Oxford accents!” a resident said.)

But the soldiers, the sailors, the fliers, the airplane factory workers, they all served the war. Orange County became part of a war machine; and this military-industrial infrastructure was built, and left in place, and it provided work for the thousands of men who returned after the war, with their new families; they came, and bought houses built by the construction industry that had been so well primed by military construction, and they went to work. In the 1950s the Santa Ana Freeway was extended down into Orange County from Los Angeles, and then you could work in L.A. but live in Orange County; like the coming of the railroad, like all the other improvements in the efficiency of transportation, it fueled the boom, and the military-industrial machine grew again. And so the machine served the Korean War, and the Cold War, and the Vietnam War, and the Cold War, and the Central American War, and the Cold War, and the African War, and the Cold War, and the Indonesian War, and the Cold War, and the Space War … a war machine, ever growing.