Thursday Nite
Dear Grandparents,
I will start a letter tonight but I am pretty tired and I don’t suppose I will get a half dozen lines written. I wrote a letter to the folks tonight so I am getting tired.
Well we have been working hard and learning much during the last week. You would be surprised how many different phases of fighting are taken up in army training. We are learning to
(Friday)
Fight with all kinds of weapons and even without weapons. We also spend a lot of time drilling, taking exercises, learning camouflage, etc, etc, etc
Yesterday I had a little accident on the obstacle course. I slipped on one of the hurdles and hit my head. It raised a nice little bump and burst open a place a little over half an inch long by my right eye. The doctor put two stitches in my head but the whole thing couldn’t stop me. I only lost a little over an hour’s work altogether. It didn’t hurt much and I can hardly tell it today so I dn’t want you to worry a bit about it.
Tomorrow we are supposed to go on a ten mile march and spend the whole day in the field. While we are out like this we spend our time learning tactics, camouflage, scouting, etc. For our dinner on days like this a truck comes out from the kitchen here and brings it to us. Sometimes we even have better meals when we eat in the field than we do in the mess hall.
The folks tell me that you have been having old Topsy as a regular visitor lately. I guess the first time she did this was when Richard and I stayed there just before I left. I was glad to hear in your last letter that you are getting some of the things accomplished at the school that you wanted to get done, such as waxing the hall floor and getting the flag pole up. I would like to see how the floor of the hall looks with seal-o-san on it. I suppose that it is cold enough that Grandpa must be getting acquainted with the furnaces by now.
I wonder if you had any trouble in Orestes with the Halloween boys this year. Halloween was like any other and you hardly realized what day it was. In civilian life, even if you don’t have a celebration, you at least talk about what day it was and the little things like this are what make military life a little hard to endure.
(Friday night)
Well I will try to finish this letter tonight. This is the third hitch at it but surely I can finish it as I have about an hour before “lights-out”. I will tell you what we did today since I can hardly remember what we do from one day to the next. This morning we practiced with bayonets and dummy hand grenades and this PM we had a lecture on field fortifications and dug one man trenches. The trenches we dug today were 2 ft. wide by 2 ft. deep by long enough to lay down in.
I got your letter today at noon. It sounds like you are getting some things done at the school house. I know just about how big a job it is to clean those down-stairs rooms and to wash the windows.
Well I want to get a good-night’s sleep for the march tomorrow. So,
Love,
Donald