Abstract:
Life A-La-Military! For two and a half years this was all we knew. We started our tour in a North Carolina boot camp and later traveled across the oceans on a floating G.I. Hotel. We passed through the Panama Canal, across the South Seas, below Australia, and finally landed in Bombay, India, ever mindful of the loved ones we left behind. There in India we traveled by rail at 20 to 40 miles per hour, which allowed for contact with hundreds of local people. On one interesting day in particular, we even saw Mahatma Gandhi. I would occasionally flash back to my youth to the movies we saw of Frank Buck’s adventure series in Burma’s Huck-Cong Valley. It was universally thought of as the wildest jungle in the world and certainly the scariest place we could have imagined! A few years later, there we were with the orders to build a road through the Huck-Cong jungle with the understanding that it was the only choice if we wanted to return home alive!