Ed Wood in the Marines

This might be old news, but it came as a surprise to me. The information apparently  came from the book The Unknown War of Edward D. Wood, Jr.: 1942 - 1946 published in 2017. Author James Pontolillo filed a Freedom if Information Act request and got Wood's military records.

From Wikipedia:

In 1942, Wood enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, just months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Assigned to the 2nd Defense Battalion, he reached the rank of corporal before he was discharged.^[8] Although Wood reportedly claimed to have faced strenuous combat, including having his front teeth knocked out by a Japanese rifleman, his military records reveal this to be false; apart from recovering bodies on Betio following the Battle of Tarawa, and experiencing minor Japanese bombing raids on Betio and the Ellice Islands, a recurring filariasis infection left him performing clerical work for the remainder of his enlistment, and his dental extractions were carried out over several months by Navy dentists, unconnected to any combat.^[9][10] Wood later claimed (erroneously or otherwise) that he feared being wounded in battle more than he feared being killed, mainly because he was afraid a combat medic would discover him wearing a bra and panties under his uniform during the Battle of Tarawa. 

In another book on Ed Wood, his wife said she didn't believe all the stuff he told her about the war. Eddie was such a bullshitter, she said if I remember correctly. But, she said, she had been surprised that other things he said turned out to be true. 

She said he demonstrated in a swimming pool how they were trained to swim silently when he was an assassin during the war.

There's a scholarly article somewhere online arguing that Wood was an auteur. It wasn't many years after the war that he started writing scripts and, the writer said, nearly all of his scripts involved people rising from the dead in one way or another. It argued that this came from Wood's feelings about having killed men in combat.

Just "recovering bodies on Betio" would have been traumatic enough for most people. Even if he wasn't the killing machine he claimed to have been, the article could have been on the right track.