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January 22, 1973

Dear Wanda, Jessica and Ted:

Among my souvenirs is a crumbling mimeographed copy of a telegram dated August 11, 1917.  It was from the War Department, and it informed the Commanding Officer, Officers' Training Camp, Fort Oglethprpe, Georgia, that I had been appointed Second Lieutenant of Field Artillery in the Officers' Reserve Corps.

I wasn't exactly being singled out for that honor. The same telegram bore the names of about 120 other men who were being commissioned from my company alone.  There were 15 companies in the camp and 8 or 10 such camps at other military posts scattered around the country.  So on that day our armed forces were strengthened, if that is the right word, by the addition of about 12,000 new officers.  Moreover the same camps were preparing to process a second crop, to supply the army of draftees that was being built up.

There had been more of us at Fort Oglethorpe, about 175 in each of the 15 companies, when the camp was opened three months earlier.  We were all put through a physically strenuous course of basic infantry training for the first month.  Then there was a second medical examination.  That weeded out many men who had passed their first one.  Each man who was kept on then selected the branch of the service he preferred, and I chose the firld artillery.  Over the last two months more men were dismissed because their instructors did not regard them as being suitable to serve as officers.

The camp was set up to accommodate candidates from Tennessee and the two Carolinas.  Those men made up a fairly homogeneous group.  We all thought and talked much alike.  Set aside from the rest, as far as speech was concerned, were the men from Charleston.  They did not drawl like the rest of us.  They spoke rapidly in high-keyed voices.  They made two syllables of the command "Fire!" ("Fi-yer!").  To them a car was a cyar and a board was a bode.

The oddest fish in the camp, however, were a good-sized group of overflow applicants sent down from New York.  There I made my first acquaintance with that political animal, the New York Irishman.  Any of us Southerners would have felt disgraced if we had toadied, or

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