I have made every attempt to preserve the original text, including typos. For his obvious grammatical mistakes, I have included the necessary "[sic]." In cases where his handwriting is illegible, I have rendered my best guess as to the word, and highlighted it in red.
There's a few points of clarification that need to be made about my process in general. Perhaps this project would be easier to understand if I were to compile the documents in chronological order. That way we could start from the day that Vernon was drafted, and trace his trip from St. Paul to boot camp, to North Africa, up through Sicily, and finally into mainland and Northern Italy. This would probably answer a lot of strategic questions. To which Army Divisions was his tank battalion attached? What were their strategic objectives? Why were they in Northern Italy in 1945 when they were at one point in Casablanca? Etc.
I don't have answers to a lot of these questions because I'm not a history professor, and I've decided to compile the documents in order of "least complication." While Vernon has some very thorough records that document his life all the way back to the beginning of 1942 - before he was even drafted - his later journals are much more thorough, and more importantly, much more legible. I figure that it will be much more easy to start with his good handwriting, and work my way backward to his hastily-written scrawl.
I will create other editing rules as I encounter problems, and will make sure to keep this page updated so that everyone is up to speed on what my rules are.
