Chapter 8 Ft Sill done, then home for 10 days

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I finished with Ft. Sill training and then had 10 days leave to forget the army. But everywere you went there were reminders. I don't remember how I got home but it had to be on the train. In Seattle there are two train stations. King Street station for the NP and the Union Station for the UP. But I don't remember one bit of what happened. Kay lived near downtown in a low income apartment one of the first built in Seattle. I could have walked there from the station about a mile away. It had to be a low income apartment as she lived on 80 bucks a month with Dianne. The apartment complex was filled with war wives. I don't remember anything about staying even one night there. All I remember is a time or two we went to the beach. I remember this because I have some pictures. The strange thing about the pictures is that the weather must have been fantastic and it looked like summer. But it was in winter. On closer look I can usually see some coats somewhere. Still it didn't seem to have rained.
Naturally we spent considerable time with her folks as her father had a car and made it easy to get around.
Here is a picture of Kay, me and Dianne at her folks house in north Seattle.
One time kay and I went to the beach at north Seattle. In those days you could build a fire on a beach.



I didn't deserve such great inlaws. They were wonderful. Reta her mom saved and treasured my letters to her from overseas. Her dad was great for providing me a place to stay when I was young and no place to go. All of her family were really nice. Cultured, educated and nice to a country bumpkin. But I loved Kay and told her I would never leave her. I was from a broken home and did not want to inflict anything like that on her. Now at 86 I have the opportunity to fulfill that promise.
Here is a picture of her in-laws at a family gathering at her Grandma and grandpa's house on Queen Ann hill in Seattle. The navy guy was her uncle Harold Hemry.

Chapter 7 Leaving Camp Roberts for Ft Sill

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Following is a lists of posts in the order they were created. The problem I have not yet solved is how to actually post this narrative in narrative order. Google always shows latest post on top so if this is a narrative you would have to scroll down to the first to begin at the beginning. But I will list links to each page and all you will have to do is click on the link to go to the beginning. You can start at the beginning by clicking on the links in order/

Chapter 1 Getting drafted
Chapter 2. Introduced to the army in basic training.
Chapter 3. More training.
Chapter 5 Shocking admission
Chapter 6 Training ends at Hunter Leggitt

One thing more about week ends at Camp Roberts. I don't remember now how long Kay was staying at Paso Robles but the one week end that I mentioned where we went to Merced we also visited some relatives near Chowchilla. It is a few miles south of Merced. We visited one aunt and uncle Begley, who had a son in the marines also visiting during a leave from training like I was. He was on his way to join the crew of the USS Saratoga where he was killed. He was the only one to get killed although many others relatives were in the military. However Kay and I, his mom and dad were in the front yard to see him off. I don't remember if his sister who wrote his story was also in the yard to see him off. I suppose she was. In any case I remember watching him make his farewell then turn and walk off. Never to return. He was such a good kid. Be sure to read his story, You might want to look up the Saratoga and if you see a movie of the battle you will see the plane that hit his battery and killed him. His sister Lavada did a music video of him which I highly recommend You can watch it here


What route the train took to get to Ft. Sill Oklahoma I don't remember now. But there, I was to take advanced training in radio procedure and other details of being an artilleryman.
We lived in huts and here is I was at this time.

When you look back over your life what you thought was a disaster or bad times might have all been for the best. You are still around are you not? Where would you be if other things had taken place? An incident happened to me at Ft. Sill that almost killed me. When you are unconscious for three days you are near death. What happened was that I was riding in a jeep when we had an accident at an intersection. I was sitting in the back and got thrown into the front seat and hit my head on some thing. This accident didn't seem to bother me all that much but a day or so late late in the evening I began to get chills and feel terrible. I somehow walked over to the aid station and told them how I felt. but instead of calling an ambulance right away they had me lie down on a bunk to see if I would get better. About six they finally called an ambulance and took me to the hospital. I sat next to the heater but still had bad chills. To make me more miserable they took me to the wrong one and had to take longer taking me to another one. In all this time I felt terrible. After being admitted I was in a coma for 3 days. My illness was from pneumonia. I had had pneumonia two times before this. An upshot of this was that after getting out of the hospital I recuperated for a couple weeks. This month of sickness plus 10 days of leave kept me from being shipped over seas arriving there still during the Battle of the Bulge. So in effect this pneumonia which almost killed me perhaps let me live to a ripe old age. So if you are still around maybe what has happened was for the best. Although I can be sure many of you will not agree with me. Here is a picture of me at Ft Sill after recovering but not shipped out yet. Taken in one of the little photo booths that used to be here and there.




Ft. Sill was a learning experience and not training as at Camp Roberts. So the experience was more pleasant. We learned to fire 105 howitzers, fire direction, more radio and so forth. Finally we came to the end of the course and spent 2 or 3 days putting our knowledge into practice in the field. Some of the gunners of someone didn't learn very well because on the last fire mission of the day someone misdirected the salvo and it landed just about a hundred yards away.

As a reward for graduating we were treated to a demonstration of time on target fire power of artillery. We all sat on a little hill to observe the demonstration of how all shells can land at the same instant even though they came from varying distances. In this instance they demonstrated the effect of the proximity fuse. During the war they invented a tiny vacuum tube. Its circutry allowed it to detect an object when the shell came near a target. They still didn't have transistors which do the job today. The gunners would set the fuse to explode the shell above the ground. Today the cluster bomb does the same job except over a larger area.



One other opportunity to get my picture in this post is to show some German artillery. Actually an 88mm gun on a tank. The 88 was some consider the best weapon of WW2. It was the main anti-aircraft weapon. American tankers said it's shell could go completely through an American Sherman tank. In one side and out the other. It was what got the Sherman to be nicknamed a Ronson after the famous lighter of the day. Being gasoline powered it tended to explode when hit. Here is a picture of it.