@KimLittleGush, Kim GUSH!
Your success fill me with hope and determination!
Since the beginning of the year I have been best by issues, and now I am packing to move. I am still writing, however, I am in a situation where it has been difficult, or impossible to Post what I have written. Using my phone I may read, PM, and post in the Forums. I cannot use my phone to post my Office 365 Word doc.X files. Nor do I have enough signal to use my phone as a "Hotspot"
I keep writing chapters of Aztlan Portal, as well as my side-project, a fictional story based upon real events of the US 4th Infantry Division. I do depict some well documented instances of activities of historical features. Most of the story is about a Platoon of fictional characters and fictional activities set amid the historical record of the 1st Battalion 8th US Infantry Regiment.
My story is not all about war. My MC decides to join a couple weeks after Nazi Germany invades Poland, more than two years before Pearl Harbor. He journeys from the small town where he has spent his whole life and is seeing things in real life that he had only seen on movie screens. There are more people in the Los Angeles Union Station than live in his hometown.
Railroad enthusiasts have compiled a Remarkable record of some 200 years of Railroad History! I have been able to find copies of the schedules of the trains (consists) he would have ridden. Some were printed merely weeks off from when my story is set. Historic phots, or in some cases recent photos of restored or preserved locomotives and train cars. Even menus, price lists, and descriptions of the various train cars.
I have an extensive, likely never to be published journey by train across the continent. I have been to many of the locations I depict, albeit, between the late 1970's to current time. Still, much of the desert is timeless. Other landmarks I have historic images from that time.
In the story I intend to post there is almost no mention of the cities and towns, nor mile markers listed in the schedule. I have used that information to describe riding a magic carpet of steel, travelling west into the setting sun, describing the remarkable hues of the "Painted Desert" I still have photos I took of some of these desert areas at sunset, sunrise, and other times when I was a teenage paratrooper.
I have always had an interest in railroads, and a passion for travel. I have recently learned that the diesel locomotive powered City of Los Angeles traveled at speed significantly greater than Amtrak does in the third decade of the 21st century! Airconditioning and other amenities are probably not what most people would expect in the waning years of the Great Depression.
I am trying to do a lot of "Showing not telling" one "tool" is the MC has the first model of Kodak 35mm color cameral (also can use B&W film), not made in Germany, that was popularized during the 1939 Worlds Fair "The World of Tomorrow" in NYC. There is technology that many might not be aware of existing "back then" it is also the era when there was still quite a bit of Horse Drawn vehicles, and all officers in the US Army were expected to be "Equestrians" there are class differences, poverty, ignorance, and racism.
The MC is a "gentile" from Utah, so he has experienced being a "discriminated minority" but also enjoyed generosity from members of the LDS church ("Mormons") and he knows they face prejudice too. In the segregated US Army, there was racism against Irish, Italians, Latinos, Navaho and members of other tribes, and it is rough for a person with a German (or other) accent too. Ignorance (5th to 8th grade educations being typical), yet many of those young men had passed through the "School of Hard Knocks" providing a different sort of education.
In 1939 the US Army was a mere 175,000 men, led by only 14,000 officers. More 25% of those 175,000 were stationed overseas (mostly the Philippines, Hawaii, Panama, and China). No base in the USA had more than 3,000 soldier, some a few as 100. The US Army was smaller than Poland, Portugal, Sweden, the Netherlands, and 14 others... in a few years it would have more than 8,000,000 Eight Million men in uniform!
Until March 1941 Basic Training was conducted by the unit a soldier was assigned to. Things were quite a bit different than what is depicted in almost all "war movies"
Anyway, your post has made me consider just how much satisfaction I am getting from writing about experiences that I hope don't just affect my MC but also have an impact upon readers; providing a perspective of the world at that time, that informs how they perceive "The Great Crusade to Liberate Europe" the slogging in rain and mud, or dust, or snow, getting seasick, and the sights of Paris, the dark dank Hurtgen Forrest, and the instances of combat
Enjoy your Bourbon & Coke, Kim Little!