Well, on the 28th 0f November i reached my 18th birthday. I registered for the draft the next day. I knew it would not be many days before i heard from them for me to report for my physical. In the meantime i continued to work at the bakery. Pictured is George Riley my Father in Law. He had served in World War I and had a bout with meningitis while in France. He was a lot of encouragement to me and in fact was a real mentor to me.
Christmas came and the new year approached before i had to report to Camp Robinson for my physical. Needless to say, i passed the physical and would be drafted any day. There was an army recruiter at the base that day. He told everyone if they enlisted,the time they had to serve would be less than if we were drafted. There were five of us from North Little Rock who went ahead and enlisted. We were told to report at a certain time on the 14th of January to Camp Robinson. We were put on a bus at camp and sent to Fort Chaffee in Fort Smith, Arkansas. We were there less than a week before we were to be sent for Basic training. Kathleen came to Ft. Chaffee and we spent Saturday and part of Sunday together at the guest house. She had relatives in Ft. Smith so that worked out real well for her.
A couple of days later, we were put back on the bus and sent back to Little Rock to catch a troop train bound for we didn't know where. The train left Little Rock in the wee hours of the morning and we headed out to our destination. We knew then that we would be going to Fort Belvoir Virginia for training. The train stopped somewhere in Georgia or South Carolina as i recall. We sat on the train all day waiting on on another train to drop off some soldiers goint to the same place. I wondered at that time what Army life would be like. Why go to Camp Chaffee for 3 or 4 days and then turn around and come back to Little Rock. Anyway, i was in the army now and had to do everything their way. We arrived at Fort Belvoir on a late Friday and was processed and assigned to our barracks. The soldiers we picked up on our trip to Virginia were from Florida. Lo and behold, on Saturday morning we woke up to about ten inches of snow. The guys from Florida had never seen snow so they quiet supprised at this happening. We were told the next Monday it would be two weeks before we started basic. In the meantime they would take us out to the woods and we would cut timbers to be used in training. Ft. Belvoir was one of the main bases used for training engineers. They would use timbers to train engineers in bridge building which was one of the major functions in of engineers in the army. My brother Bennie had trained at Ft Belvoir and had been with the corp of engineers during all his military service in WW2and the Korean War. At this time i did not know where i would end up. I do know that i thought i would freeze to death during this two weeks. A lot of the fellows had never seen an axe or saw and it was amazing to see how awkward they were doing this type work. We were eighteen miles out of DC and twelve miles from Alexandria Va. It would be several weeks before we would be getting any pass anywhere. For two weeks we were Quarantined and could not go to the px except as a group for one hour on one night a week after it was closed for everyone else. Didn,t understand this either but that was the way it was. I recall getting several candy bars as finances allowed because it takes a while to get adjusted to army food. Thats enough of this for now.