Colophon
The story is the author's: the characters, the choices, the writing itself. The research, the editing and grammar assistance, and everything on this site — the layout, the songbook, the trailer, the maps — were AI-assisted or AI-generated. Both halves are worth naming plainly. The squadron histories, timeline, and route maps above are drawn from primary and secondary sources on VMF-213, VMF-114, and VMF-323, cross-checked where the record itself is incomplete or contradictory. The thirteen Briefing Room maps are interactive, built to trace Hack's documented route stop by stop. The Songbook's seven tracks were generated with Suno, an AI music tool, from lyrics and mood notes written for specific scenes in the books — they're original compositions, not covers or samples, but they were not performed by a human band. The trailer was assembled the same honest way: the character and aircraft stills were generated with Google's Gemini image model from detailed shot descriptions, then animated, sequenced, and scored by hand — no video-generation tool was used, and nothing in it is archival footage. The squadron badges are original illustrations redrawn from reference photos of each unit's real insignia, not the licensed embroidered artwork itself; the “Official Patch” links point to the genuine article. The site's code, layout, and writing were developed in collaboration with Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant.