July 27th

A cool 11 C this am. Took M into Vic General for her CT scan. Then some running about locally, picked up prizes for the Coop tournament. Did the Social bowl and picked up Joan V at 1000 at the ferry.

  He did follow me out and when he saw me waiting he stripped down to his pants as I had. Nothing more was said between us. He was almost a foot taller than me and was probably eighty pounds or more heavier. I guess he didn’t figure I would go on the attack so I kinda got him by surprise when I jumped and skidded between his legs and caught him with a back kick to the balls. It all would have ended in a few more moments as he went straight to his knees and I wasn’t letting up but the bar tender had called for the MP’s and one of the roving units was just a couple of blocks away.

  I ended up losing one of my stripes and Bates was knocked back to private. The Colonel told us it was lucky we were out of uniform or it would have been worse, then he docked us each a months pay for being out of uniform.

  I got shifted to different army bases three – no, four times over the next couple of years, got my second stripe back in no time then made it to Sergeant.

  Back in those days we usually got a few days off at Christmas, probably ‘cause the  brass wanted a holiday, we got rail passes so each year I went home to Eureka. Gotta admit it was kind of fun as now Ma was real proud not to mention Pa. Ernie had got married, Violet and John and young John had gone to Canada and Erma was off learning to be  a nurse or something but me and Ernie got real close again; it was like we had come closer in age. The poor bugger though had got hit by a tree when he was logging and it had shattered his one arm and it just hung there like a piece of meat. He told me once that it wasn’t what happened to his arm that bothered him so much, it was that he had planned to join up too and the accident ended that.

  As everyone in the world knows December 7, 1941 came along and my army life took a real turn in the road. Refresher courses, new equipment, fewer free weekends were the order of the day and all furloughs were cancelled. I was shipped out with about twenty others to some old town in the Nevada desert for some specialized stuff