It is now a few minutes past six, and I am already back at the office, ready to do a hurry-up job on this note. Later on tonight I will stroll down to the Red Cross Club for a toasted cheese sandwich and cup of coffee, then maybe I’ll come read two or three articles in the latest Reader’s Digest, and finally, to the show, the second one, which starts at 9 o’clock. And that will be another day behind me.
Let me give you the “atmosphere” here this evening, some “local color”, so to speak. I got off work at 5:30 as usual, and rushed straight for the mess hall to eat supper, as usual, for it is only recently that we have been given soup. When I got back to the barrack, I changed clothes, putting on my “fatigue suit”, which is a fancy name for the green overalls we wear when off duty. Now I’m here in the office, pounding on this typewriter. If I leave out some words and sentences here and there, you’ll know it’s because the radio is on, and I’m trying to listen to it and write this at the same time. The American armed forces have their own radio network over here, called the American Forces Network. At this moment I am listening to the GI Supper Club, a program of recordings which the boys have written in and asked for. Something like the Coffee Pot Parade that was broadcast over Station KWSC at Pullman. We always used to listen to it while eating breakfast at S. 909 Meadow. It seems to me like that was about 10 years ago. The radio has just finished playing “Seven Beers With the Wrong Woman”. Wonder if my Uncle Ralph requested them to play that. He used to be so crazy about that when he was my age.
As I came over here a few minutes ago, the wind was blowing like sixty. And since I have started on this post, it has begun and stopped raining a couple of times! The blackout curtains are pulled, but I can hear the rain coming down on the steel roof and hitting against the windows. It is almost dark when I go to work at 8:30 in the morning now, and it’s dark outside already tonight. Winter is upon us. Late next spring the sun will be coming up again at 5:30 and setting at 10:00 that evening, but I doubt that I will be here to see it.
Since going into the Army, I have become very much aware of the day-by-day weather and also the seasons. All soldiers, but especially those in the field, are interested in the weather. And it is never good weather, for the boys who are living in the “great out-of-doors”. If it isn’t too hot, it’s too cold, or too wet, or too dry, or too dusty, or too windy, or too muddy, or something. Those things are important to the man who is living in a foxhole.
As far as the seasons are concerned, Ireland has them, and it hasn’t. Depends on how you look at it. The ground is as green as ever, greener in some places. Most of the year’s crops are in now, eliminating many of the light tan and brown fields that I looked down upon from the air with so much interest while I was flying to England last month. The brisk wind that has been blowing lately has cleaned lots of the trees of their leaves. And even if it doesn’t look like our winter landscapes in Washington, one does know that it is winter, just as much as if there was snow on the ground and icicles were hanging from the roofs.
A post of this type may not do wonders for your morale; nevertheless, it does me good to write one a couple of times each year. Nostalgia, you know.
[letterstohome copyright 2008]