July 16, 1943

July 16, 1943

Dear Mother;

You can't guess how I happen to be writing this letter at the hour of 1:00 p.m.  So far today I have had off except for a little walking.  I am sitting in the shade of a dispensary waiting to have an x-ray taken of my ankle.  1 week ago today I strained it playing push ball and have let it go until today.  The only reason I let it got was because I wanted to get in the training time but now I have 28 days so I can have all the time I want off if I have an excuse.  Otherwise you have to work just as hard as always.

The army is a great place to kill time.  If you had anything really wrong with you, you would die before a doctor would see you.  Through the ordinary channels it is impossible to get waited on immediately.  A fellow sitting beside me here has waited 2 days to get an x-ray taken which in itself takes only 5 minutes.  Whenever anyone goes on sick call you always take a pencil and paper because you get plenty of time to use them.  You may see records of the hours that men are sick, well take them with a grain of salt.  Most of that time seems to be spent waiting to be seen or for examinations.  Anyway I get a chance to catch up on correspondence and not get penalized for it.

I don't think that I told you that I have been to the Smith rifle range twice more this week, once to shoot the carbine and once to shoot the Thompson Sub-machine gun.  Each holds a thrill within itself.  The M-1 carbine is a very short .30 caliber rifle.  It is accurate up to 150 yards and has little more kick than a high power .22.  We had no score to get so the shooting was not too good but were familiarized with the piece and that's what the army wants.

M1 Thompson submachine gun

The Thompson sub-machine gun is the .45 caliber M-1 A-1 1928 automatic.  It also has very little kick but has a tendency to rise in the air when fired.  When you shoot it by single shots this is not noticeable but when you switch to automatic the muzzle just rises right up.  It will shoot 600 rounds per minute.

I suppose your not too interested in the foregoing so I will tell you about our trip to Arcadia.  We left here at 1:00 pm and left by the main gate.  This was so that we could get on highway #66 as soon as possible because that was the road we followed.  I guess that we passed the poorest section of this county or the whole state of MO is poor.  The people live in the poorest looking houses I have ever seen.  They are worse than the houses up around Dikes Pond.  The thing is that even in the towns we went through they were all the same with few exceptions.  People in N.E. should be glad they are there because they can at least make a decent living.  These people look like farmers and that don't (no erasure) doesn't seem to provide too good a lively hood.  Some of the farms looked better than others and they in general raised beef or had cattle of some kind.  We did see a lot of MO. mules and they didn't look too stubborn.

We went by several of the largest piles of sand I have ever seen.  Some covered an area about 1/2 mile sq and as high as 3 to 4 hundred feet.  They were just outside of some of the towns and we figured that the piles had something to do with mining.  No one knows just what they were from.

Most likely something like this from the many quarries in southern MO

Arcadia is a pretty enough place.  The worst thing about it seems to be the water.  They have no pure water so all you drink has been chlorinated.  You can really taste the chlorine and that isn't good.  Anyone could get to like this place if he could take a shower and eat off a Tray.  That is all I missed.  

Right now I feel like a nap so

With love

Austin