A Spanish expedition heading north camped at a spring here and baptised two dying Native children. It was the first Christian baptism recorded in California.

The site is still on the base, reachable only with a guide from the historical society.

Twenty-nine Navajo Marines came here for signals training and built a code from their own language, one that existed nowhere in writing.

It went ashore in every Marine assault across the Pacific. Japanese cryptographers never broke it.

Camp Pendleton trained women Marines during the war, at a point when most of the Corps had no idea what to do with them.

Camp Pendleton was the first American base to take in refugees from Vietnam. Nine hundred Marines and civilians had six days to put up 958 tents.

The first 851 people arrived with what they could carry, and fifty thousand followed.

125,000 acres, roughly 70,000 people, and the Corps’ primary West Coast amphibious training base.

The beach is training ground the rest of the week.