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At Amanty I fell into bad habits.  We had poker games nearly every evening and it was not the penny ante that I had played with my fellow-Tennesseeans on shipboard.  The stakes were higher.  Over my two years of army service I came out a net winner, but I had a run of bad luck at Amanty.  I recall one dismal session when I played until midnight without winning a single hand.  I lost $80 that might and sold a pair of boots to settle my score.  Then one evening we had a party to celebrate the opening of a new mess hall.  We did nothing but sing and drink.  We were drinking champagne flavored with cognac, and I did not realize how potent the mixture was.  I became more drunk than I have ever been before or since.  I remember being escorted back to my barracks by a pilot named Battle from Columbus, Georgia.  He insisted on holding my arm and i resented it.  When I woke next morning I saw the ceiling revolving slowly in a counter-clockwise direction.  When I got out of bed I could not stand.  So I missed the roll-call and setting-up exercises we routinely had before breakfast.  For that I was confined to camp for a week.  Three or four others shared my puni punishment, and it was not a hardship since there was nowher I wanted to go.  But I felt disgraced.

In the army you meet many men briefly and casually.  I met some at Amanty whom I disliked, some oddballs, and some whom I would have wished to know better.  In that last category I recall a pilot named Dykema, who played the piano and reminded me of Don Davidson.  At that drinking party he played accompaniments for our singing.  In the pauses between our choral numbers he woulfd play snatches of Chopin.  He was from that Dutch colony around Holland, Michigan.  Like Kenny, he went off with the 91st and I never saw him again.  I stayed at Amanty until early in April.  Then an order dated April 6 sent a group of us for a tour of duty with the French.  I was to report to the Commandant de l'Aeronautique of the Fourth French Army, at Chalons-sur-Marne.

In 1938, with Helen, I revisited Amanty.  Nothing was left to show that the Americans had ever been there.  The ground that had been the landing field was back in cultivation.  All the buildings were gone, the thrifty French having no doubt put the lumber to good use elsewhere.  Young trees had been planted where the barracks had stood.