July 29th

15C this am. Got our company on the 10 am ferry. Relaxed in the back yard and read the paper, early lunch then bowled.  Got the teams selected for the Coop tournament for Wednesday/Thursday.  Out for dinner at friends, home and in bed at 10:45.

  I got a little more convalescent leave, got awarded my second Purple Heart along with a bronze star and a silver one. I wanted to go back out but orders came for me to head to a special training facility that had been set up in Oregon. I remember thinkin’ ‘Jesus how much more training do they think I need?’ Well as it turned out I wasn’t bein’ trained I was going to be one of the trainers and that led me to getting to be a Master Sergeant.

  I don’t know how many guys I stuffed through that ‘special training’ but I knew after what I had gone through and was lucky enough to come through they needed something extra and the officers that had been selected for the camp knew it too.

  We weren’t easy on those boys but everything we did was for their own good, I did have one guy take a shot at me one day, he missed and not by much. After I got through tuning him up he was court martialled and sent off to one of our prisons, I forget which.

  Sometimes I would wonder if we were too hard, if we pushed them too far, then one day I was ordered to report to the base commander, a Colonel.  “Christ’, I thought, ‘now what have I done?’

  After I saluted he told me to stand at ease, then he actually went and poured a couple of shots of booze and handed me one. “Well Master Sergeant, I got a letter here I want to read to you.” He then proceeded to read from a page that was laying on his desk.  “Letter of Dispatch, Attention of Base Commander Colonel Hargreaves.” I don’t remember what it all said and although there was a copy of it for me I lost it a long time ago. But it said something about the quality of the troops being combat prepared as a result of the training they had received at our camp.  It thanked the Colonel for identifying which training sergeant stood out above the others and then ‘requested’ that “my personal thanks and congratulations be extended to Master Sergeant Roy S. Harvey”. Would you believe it, the thing was signed by General Douglas MacArthur! Christ, God had patted me once again.

  Well the Colonel shook my hand, told me to drink up, poured us each a second and sent me on my way.

  I put in about a year at that camp and I was getting damn tired of it all. Me an’ the other training sergeants would usually hit the booze pretty hard every chance we got, for a little while it usually let us forget about things and sometimes gave us the energy to go chase a skirt or two.

  Then one day I got this idea that maybe I should be back out again where the fighting was goin’ on, how was I to know if everything I knew was still the right stuff. I had a Captain that was a pretty good guy, he had seen quite a bit of the real stuff as a Lieutenant and would know what I was talkin’ about. So one day out on bivouac I asked him if he would vouch for me if I asked for active duty. He made me explain why I wanted to do that and it wasn’t long before he was nodding and soundin’ kind of interested. Finally he said, “Okay Sarge, I’ll help you with the paper work and I’ll support your request.”