through operational training and on our flight overseas until the crew was broken up at the replacement depot in Italy. Harold Morris had graduated from a different advanced school than I but we now became the best of friends. Harold was married. His wife's name was, and is, Bernadine. I think they were married immediately after graduation. The rest of us were all single.

During this operational training we had our first experience in army bivouacs. We left the airplanes and were hauled out to some of the sand hills near Alliance in 6 by 6 trucks to live under field conditions. We slept in shelter halves snapped together and ate out in the open. We cleaned our utensils and metal plates by rubbing them in clean sand and then shaking the sand out. I don't remember too much else about that three days. We did learn how to survive under those conditions in the field.

Before long, after only a few weeks, we were loaded on a troop train and moved once more. This time it was a larger train. We even had a dining car. Not like the commercial trains but with an army field kitchen set up in a boxcar. We were two or three days moving from Alliance, Nebr. to Lawrenceville, Ill. Again, we were on the lowest priority in the railroad. We were shunted onto a siding in the Chicago stockyards one entire afternoon. Several of the fellows were from Chicago and could have visited friends and family had they known that we would be there that long. Lt. Frederick Koran was one. Fred had been in the same barracks with Kenneth Juve, Raymond L. Miller, Vincent G. Miller, and me, in advanced at Pampa, Texas. He was engaged to Alice Tryanski in Chicago. At George Field, halfway between Lawrenceville, IL and Vincennes, IN we were back in civilization. There was green grass and trees. Fred's family consisting of his mother, sister, and stepfather brought Alice to visit one of the first weekends we were there. We later spent a weekend or two in Chicago visiting them.

I don't know what happened to the old DC-3s we were using at Alliance. At George Field we had nothing but C-47s. Now we were learning to tow gliders. Former child movie star, Jackie Coogan, was a glider pilot who came to our base and taught us to fly the gliders. We needed to know what the glider pilots faced in order for us to do the best job of towing and releasing them in the proper spot and at the proper altitude. The typical glider mission was to land in a field the first wave of paratroopers had secured. To land as near the perimeter of the field as possible without crashing so there would be room for those coming afterward. We each spent an hour or so handling the gliders.