February 1, 2 and 4, 1944

February 1, 1944 Tuesday

Dear Honey,

Tonite I have a slight case of the blues, for no good reason. Many little things make me feel down, tho. Guess the main one is that Phil Doucoumes, no less, dropped in on me tonite and I had only 10 free minutes to talk to him. He must have walked quite a ways to find me and it must have seemed to him as tho I was scarcely civil. You can’t get out of study period evenings, so there was little I could do except say hello and tell him what there was to say about the place. Told him I’d have more time on the week-end if he could come then. Fine thing when you can’t speak to a man from “back-home.” I don’t realize how tied down I am until something like that comes up. There just is no time to do anything except O.C.S. training, so it is lucky that there is nothing else I want to do here, usually. I have no distractions as a rule, so I don’t feel as tho I was being hemmed in very often. Phil is here in a casual company, waiting aviation cadet training. Hope I see him again at a more auspicious time.

Also I spent all my time after supper moving my bunk again – back to a spot just beside where I used to be. They closed up the squad room I moved to and moved us all into the big room I was in. Ah, futility. Also picked up a gig today, which gives me two this week. Had charge of the platoon during drill today and did about the best I’ve done. Lt. Shalala wasn’t there, however, so don’t know as much good came from it.

Oh, I could complain forever tonite, but I really don’t feel that bad about it all. I just don’t get enthusiastically despondent anymore. Just have periods where I care less what happens than at other times.

Still haven’t got that letter to the folks written yet. If I didn’t have to move every night I might get to it.
Well, bye for now. I always love you,

All yours,
Wallace

P.S. I hope this ray of cheer does much to brighten the corner where you are! I’ll do better soon, Honey, you wait and see.


February 2, 1944 Wednesday

Dear folks,

I deeply apologize for not writing before this week. Now I see that the reason that I was waiting was to get the income tax blank. It looks pretty complicated, and a thing that only a civilian could figure out, so I’ll fiddle with it and return to Jay Russell for processing.

Life here has been zooming along as usual here. We go on studying one gem after another, each one bigger than its predecessor. We are up to the Caliber 50 machine gun now, which is a bigger gun than I have ever fired before. We’ve got some coming that will make it look like a pop-gun, tho.

Am taking a course in teacher training a couple of hours every day. It is very G.I. but you learn a lot of practical stuff that is necessary for teaching. We are going to give talks and lessons to the rest of the class for practice.

This week I have been acting as the Candidate Lieutenant of our platoon and have had some fun being official at it. It is a very easy job with quite a lot of power.

Was glad to get your letter. Guess there’s nothing I need, Ma; things run pretty smoothly here.

This is a very short letter, but I’m stealing the time to write this much. So just pretend it’s a big, long letter and I’ll send a good one as soon as I get a chance.

With love,
Wallace


February 2, 1944 Wednesday

Dear Mrs. Nelson,

Marjorie did not tell me that you are going to have a birthday this Sunday. I have ways of finding out, tho, so I decided this would be the time to send my log over-due letter to you.

I went over the P.X. tonite and looked and looked for something that would make an appropriate remembrance. They didn’t even have a good birthday card, and I don’t know as you could use a “dog-tag” chain or a pair of brown socks. So I’m sending some pictures of George Washington I had, and hope you will like them.

Hope you have a swell birthday and a big celebration.

By the way, they say that anyone born in February is bound to be famous. That’s what my mother always told me, anyway. Maybe she is prejudiced, tho.

With love,
Wallace



February 2, 1944 Wednesday

Hello Honey, it sure seems good to get writing to you tonite. Just seems good, that’s all. Guess it’s because I can write anything I want to now. Anyway, I love you very much and wish I could write more than I’ll have time to.

Tonite I found out that to date my marks in D&D have been satisfactory or better for so far in the course. That makes me feel rather good, since I know that should be my low course. Haven’t had anything else yet that threatened to get seriously tough. Teacher training might kick me in the teeth if I don’t do some work in it soon. I will.

Today we had some fun on an anti-aircraft gun that is indoors and shoots little plastic pellets by air-compression. We use it to practice A.A. fire. Fire at toy planes the size of Carlton’s white transport. There is a control board that has a switch to supply gun sound, recoil and battle noises. Turn them all on and you’ve got quite an uproar. We also crawled around some new vehicles – an M7 assault gun carrier, an enormous M10 tank with turret armor as deep as an arm’s length, and a big tank destroyer. A good many others, but these were outstanding.

Your dress sounded very attractive, but I still can’t see how you made it so fast. It takes me that long to sew on a button. Enjoyed your week-end letters very much, Bun. In fact, I’m still re-reading them. I’m all thru as platoon lieutenant tonite, and can return to the background for a while. I love you, Marjorie, you can always be sure.

Al l yours,
Wallace


February 4, 1944 Friday

Hello Honey,

Frankly I’m surprised to get a chance to write tonite. The week-end rush closed in on Thursday this week. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday we are busy; Thursday, Friday and Saturday we are busy and getting a little panicky about it all. I couldn’t write last night because I had to prepare for a test on the 50 cal. Machine gun and get up a ten minute talk on Military Courtesy. Had both today. I had very little preparation for the talk, and it went quite smoothly in spite of that. Noticed that my voice is improving. Getting my tone better, I guess, with all this command practice and speech training. Sometimes my own voice frightens me! In this Teacher Training course each man gives a short talk and a prepared lesson to the class. Each candidate writes out a complicated rating form for each talk and lesson, one gives a critique of the talk and then there is a discussion of each one. Eventually I will see all the rating sheets on today’s talk.

Got surprised today again, Hon. This is really a war of the future – bumped into a whole lot more new “Buck Rogers” weapons today. We finished machine guns when we fired at anti-aircraft targets yesterday with the big 50 cal. That was my weapon! Scored a possible on stationary targets and riddled the moving targets at 500 yards. It is fired from a tank turret. But I was going to talk about Buck Rogers – after leaving machine guns we started on grenades, rockets, and mortars. [That’s] where we find the new stuff. We began work on the “Bazooka” today and will fire it very soon. That is strictly a futuristic job, and powerful. They say it will pierce 3 inches of armor plate – and it is fired from the shoulder! Whee!

Speaking of Buck Rogers, I have also been playing Buck Jones. Those moving targets we fired at are run on rails around a big circle. They go by a gas engine at about 15 mph. They go around all alone, but when you want to stop them you jump on to the side like a cowboy, kick, the clutch into neutral and pull back on a side break. It is almost as thrilling as firing. You run along side of them, grab a rail and jump. Pretty soon a foot lands somewhere on the side and you hang there with left arm and leg flying free. With your left arm you reach over into the thing and turn off the motor and then coast in working the break from the side. If you don’t work fast you ride right by the scoring platform and have to push it back. I piloted all mine into the right spot, tho. They look something like a railroad hand car with a big sail on them.

The reason I can write tonite is that there is not much to study for tomorrow, but we have to spend 2 hours in the study room. I have 94 things to do to get ready for inspection tomorrow but can’t start at them until 9:30. That gives me time to write you, anyway, so that’s good.

In one of your recent letters you said that you couldn’t become reconciled to us being separated. That’s easy to see. I feel the same way, when I think about it. The only thing to do is accept it and not think about it. Nothing is more unchangeable than the past. Being exasperated at what has happened is like thinking how near you came to not getting gigged, after the gig list is already posted! There’s just nothing you can do but forget it and work toward not letting it happen again. It doesn’t seem fair and should never have happened. But it did. Don’t try to fight it now. We’ve got a future. That’s what I keep telling myself. No matter how lousy things look – and they look pretty glum sometimes – I just say I can’t expect anything now – I can just wait it out and someday things will be valuable again. And that’s not just whistling in the dark. Things will look up. That’s more certain even than that they aren’t so good now. Our future will come. We can’t tell how soon, but it will. It doesn’t matter much what happens until then, really. We can wait it out. It’s interesting, even if it doesn’t mean much.

I love you always, Bunny,
Wallace