Monday August 30, 1944
Dear Folks,
I sure don’t deserve to get any letters if I donn’t hurry up and write so I had better get to it. I thought I could get it done yesterday but I was so busy getting cleaned and straightened up that I just never got it done.
I guess I’ll start back at about Wednesday of last week and bring my story up to date and maybe you can forgive my lack of writing. Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday morning we did firing at the field target to represent firing under combat conditions. For the exercises target to represent a man are scattered over the field at unknown distances and they sure are harder to hit than a neat line of bull’s eyes at exactly 200, 300 or 500 yards.
It started raining on Tuesday and we had a pretty miserable time for the rest of the week. We had a real hard storm just before time to get up on Thursday and we thought that the tent was going to blow over.
Friday morning we were scheduled to go through the mental conditioning course where you crawl on your stomach for 75 yards over logs, through barbed wire entanglements etc. while they shoot live machine gun bullets over your head. Of course, it rained all the night before and was raining that morning so you can imagine in what condition the ground was. Boy after we had dragged ourselves for 75 yards we were covered with mud from head to foot and we were soaked to the skin from above the knees on down where our raincoats didn’t cover. And our raincoats didn’t look like themselves when we were through. Its a wonder that working with wet clothes on for the rest of the day didn’t give us all pneumonia.
Then the rest of the day Friday was consumed by firing at moving ground targets with our own 30 caliber rifles and air targets with 22 caliber rifles. Boy the 22’s were op guns compared to the regular army rifles.
I have already told you what we did Sat. morning and then on Saturday afternoon we finished our bivouac by seeing some very interesting and informative demonstrations. Some of the real weapons such as hand grenades etc that we had been using dummies for practice were demonstrated to us at safe distances of course.
The most interesting thing we saw was the firing of the new weapon, the bazooka, which you remember coming out not so long ago.
We packed up our things on Saturday night and at midnight we fell out ready to start back to camp. We marched with the packs on our backs and rifles on our shoulders from 12:15 till we got here at 5:30. Boy were we tired and sore.
We got both yesterday and today off but the catch to it is that we must have all clean clothes and equipment when we fall out tomorrow. I spent my whole day yesterday cleaning myself up, and my rifle, mess kit, and clothes. I washed out my leggings, fatigues, pack and cartridge belt in the morning and thought that I could send the rest of the stuff to the laundry. But when I got all my socks, underwear, towels, etc. hunted up I found that I had more than my quota for one week’s laundry so I had to do another big laundry yesterday evening.
Even today we aren’t exactly free since we have already had to fall out about 5 or 6 times for odd jobs, etc. and then we have to get our blood typed this afternoon. I hope though that before the day is over I can get some reading, etc. done.
It sure is a pleasure to live in the barracks that aren’t even as well constructed as our chicken house at home. Those pup tents that we will spend the next two weeks in sure will make make us more glad than ever to see these barracks.
Well I’ve got to help clean machine guns so I’ll close for now.
Love, Donald