FARRAGUT STATE PARK - Leonard "Lenny" Metcalf arrived in the summer of 1943 at Farragut Naval Training Station after a long, hot and coal-dust dirty train ride from Los Angeles.

Now 96 and living in the Denver area, Metcalf traveled back to Farragut for the first time in 72 years.

During World War II, Farragut churned out men as fast as possible to fight, and Metcalf was one of them.

He spent several weeks at the station and Lake Pend Oreille for boot camp.

"I wanted to see how it is now," he said Saturday at a reunion for former boot campers at Farragut State Park. "I didn't know it was a museum now."

The buildings - including the hospital, barracks, and mess hall - are gone, although not the Brig. That houses the museum today.

It was hard-to-recognize place, he said.

"Wasn't much here when I came," he said. "They just had a house with bunks in it, and you go outside and did your training."

He still has memories of the place, despite the passage of seven decades.

Like the cold nights guarding the door leading to the officers' barracks.

"We had to stand guard on four-hour watch," he said. "Standing there with a gun for four hours."

He would go on to face much worse during the war.

His ship, the U.S.S. Aylwin, arrived at the site of the sunken U.S.S. Indianapolis, a heavy cruiser which had been torpedoed by a Japanese submarine after the Indianapolis delivered parts for the first atomic bomb.

Metcalf helped with burial of many of the bodies, which were in bad condition after multiple days of exposure.

He had to tie weights - heavy shells from ship guns - to the remains of some of the dead from the Indianapolis, sinking their bodies.

Many men from the ship died of exposure, lack of water, saltwater poisoning and shark attacks.

Saturday wasn't Coeur d'Alene resident Delmore "Bud" Moug's first reunion.

He has attended plenty of them.

He was at boot camp at Farragut starting in September 1943, arriving by train from Chaseley, N.D.

He arrives at each reunion with the hope of finding old friends.

"I've tried to find people that I'd known, but I have never found any yet," said Moug, 90.

One year he saw a name he recognized on the reunion registration.

"I went through that dang museum asking people, 'Is your name Lancaster?'" he recalled. "He must have registered and left ... But he'd be a 100 years old or better, now."

Another reunion regular, 89-year-old Duane Kock, of Sandpoint, arrived at the boot camp in February 1944 for several weeks.

"I couldn't believe all the trees and the mountains," he called. "That's what brought me back up here" after his time in the Navy.

He was from Beaver Creek, Minn. He would go on to spend six years in the Navy.

"It was a different way of life for sure," Kock said. "One of my buddies who came from the same area I had in Minnesota couldn't swim."

The friend couldn't get out of boot camp until he swam from one end of the pool to the other, he said.

So Kock, to be a good friend, took the test for the friend, he said.

Stories and bonds forged in such experiences bring the men back each year.

Approximately 25 men who completed boot camp at Farragut showed up for Saturday's reunion, said Farragut State Park Ranger Errin Bair, who helped with the event.

Along with Idaho and Colorado, men showed up from places like Oregon, Washington, Arizona and Utah, Bair said.

During 30 months of operation, more than 293,300 men went through boot camp at Farragut.

From the time it opened in September 1942 until March 1945, Farragut was the second largest U.S. naval training station.

In September 1942, months after ground was broken to build the base, the population there was 55,000. That made it the largest city in Idaho.

Organizers have already put together nearly 30 reunions for the Navy veterans.

"We're going to do it until no one comes," Bair said.