Sunday April 23, 1944
Leesburg Range
Fort Jackson, S.C.
Hello Family,
You couldn’t guess what day this is, I’ll bet. Well it is Sunday evening. Besides being on K.P. I believe that this is the first Sunday that I have had to do a day’s work. We got up at 5:00 this morning and was out on the range at daylight.
I didn’t put in a very hard day’s work but it was a pretty long day. All of the firing I did was this afternoon and this morning we drilled a little just to fill the time till our time for firing came. Of course I was on a couple of little details.
We fired the carbine today and we have about half of our record firing done with it. In case I never have told you a carbine is a small 30 caliber rifle. Although it has a 30 caliber bullet the shell is only a little over an inch long.
I suppose we will finish the carbine tomorrow and then be ready to start on something else.
I sure spent a great day yesterday. I was on K.P. again. We got off for a couple hours in the afternoon while we came out here but we didn’t get off last night till about 2130. Of course after that getting up this morning was quite a task.
This is sure a nice place out here compared to the range at Ft. Benning. We sleep in tents but they have floors in them and have electric lights. We also have mess halls here and don’t have to eat out in the rain as we did before.
And speaking of rain this sure has been some day. It started out with fog and then began raining about the middle of the morning. After that it rained off and on all the rest of the day (in fact it is raining some now.) Of course as you will probably guess it was raining almost all the time I was firing. Part of the time it was raining so hard that I would have to stop and blow the water out of my sights before I could shoot.
I don’t know whether you are in the habit of it or not but I wish you would share this letter with Grandma Carver. It has been quite a spell since I wrote and I doubt seriously if I’ll have any time to write her this week. This is to Grandma: I got your letter last night and was sure glad to hear from you.
I hope everything is alright back there. I’m still hoping and I think maybe I’ll be seeing you before too many weeks.
Lots of Love
Donald
P.S. We didn’t have to walk out to the range this time. We rode in trucks. I’m thinking of more to say now than I did before I signed off. I am getting my first taste of sleeping on camp cots. They are pretty good sleeping but since you can’t tuck the covers in it is pretty hard to stay covered up. I’ll figure up some system to overcome that though.