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January 27, 1973.

Dear Alice:

Among my souvenirs is a crumbling mimeogtaph copy of a telegram dated August 11, 1917.  It is from the War Department to the Commanding Officer, Officers Training Camp, Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, announcing that I had been appointed second lieutenant of Field Artillrty in the Officers Reserve Corps.  I was not exactly being singled out for that honor.  The same telegram bears the names of 120 men in all who were being commissioned from my training unit, Battery 8.  Our camp included 15 such units.  There were 8 or 10 similar camps running simultaneously at army posts scattered over the United States.  On that day therefore the armed forces of our country were strengthened, if that is the right word, by the addition of about 15,000 mew officers.  Moreover all those camps were preparing to begin training a second crop, to supply the army of draftees that was being built up.

When we entered, three months earlier, there had been more of us, about 175 in each company.  During the first month we were put through a physically strenuous course of basic infantry training.  Then we all had a second medical examination, which eliminated a great many.  The survivors were each allowed to choose his own branch of service, and I chose field artillery.  Over the next two months more men were eliminated because their instructors appraised them as unsuited for officer rank.

Though Fort Oglethorpe is in Georgia, it is just across the state boundary from Chattanooga.  Its training camp had been set up primarily for candidates from the Carolinas and Tennessee.  The men from those states made up a fairly homogeneous group who talked and thought pretty much alike.  Set apart from the rest of us, as far as speech was concerned, were the men from Charrleston.  They had none of the southern drawl.  They spoke rapidly, on high-pitched tones, and they pronounced certain words in odd ways.  To the Charlestonians a board was a bode, a bear was a bee-ah, and a car was a cyar.  They made two syllables out of the command "Fire!" (Fi-yer!").

Fort Oglethorpe also received an overflow of candidates from New York who could not be accommodated at Plattsburg.  It was my first

Transcription Notes:
. Smithsonian instructions: Keep words in their original spelling, even if it is technically “wrong.”