[hot – sometime after Basic at Fort Jackson, South Carolina – written on “United States Army” stationary – mentions “news” – perhaps after D-Day?]
Thursday Noon
Dear Folks,
I’ll start this now and I’ll be just a little ahead of myself tonight. This is a pretty sweltering day and I hope it is a little more pleasant back there. We had a pretty hard day so far and I think we are going to do a couple hours of hiking this afternoon. So far the really hard part of our work was a period of physical training and an hour of bayonet drill and believe me this i swork.
To top it all off I don’t feel like work today. I haven’t had to take any shots for a while but yesterday afternoon it had to be done again. I got a smallpox vaccination, a tetanus and a typhoid shot. I don’t suppose the other two will bother me but the typhoid is sure sore today. The arm is about hail(?) and I just ache all over. It really made me grit my teeth to take those arm exercises this morning.
Yesterday all day except for about an hour in the afternoon when we were the shots was spent doing basic subjects like we did this morning.
What do you think of the news by this time? I sure hope things go well as they have in the last few days. I just wonder how these developments will effect me.
Thurs Night
I sit down now to write and I find myself wondering what I am going to say. I just about hit the nail on the head when I guessed about this afternoon’s work. We spent over half the afternoon hiking out and back from a training area so we didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend out there. But I guess they consider the hiking part of the training too.
I sure have been a drag to myself today. I just seemed that part of the time I wouldn’t be able to put one foot ahead of the other.
I got a letter from Aunt Mary this evening and from what I can gather she isn’t feeling very well yet. It’s been three months now and so surely her tonsils weren’t the only trouble.
Aunt Nora also sent me a very nice box of cookies that I received tonight. They were really good and we all got a very big kick out of them. And I forgot to say anything about them but those cookies int the last box from you really were something. You can send that kind to me any time you want.
Well I want to take a shower and hit the hay. We got in late tonight and I didn’t get to take a shower before retreat as I’ve been in the habit of doing. So I’ve still got it to do.
Hope everything is well with you. I’ll not put an airmail stamp on this but save it for some other time.
Lots of love,
Donald