Chapter 7

September 20, 1917
Dear Mother and Father,
As you can see from the postmark, we are deep in the heart of Dixie. I have no idea why the Army named a camp in Alabama after George B. McClellan, but that is where I am. Camp McClellan is no more a camp than I am a soldier. What it is is a raw scar in the piney woods where a lot of hard-working men in ill-fitting clothes are sweating to build a place to live and train. They could have picked a hill where we would get a breeze now and then, but this is more of a big shallow bowl in the Blue Ridge. So far it has rained four days of the six we have been here and only the bugs don't seem to mind that.

Our platoon has spent most of the time scratching insect bites, digging out stumps and tending fires where we burn off the stumps and the underbrush with the help of a lot of kerosene. And we are no longer the Maryland Brigade but almost everything else, including all of the tedium, is the same.

The trip down wasn't too bad and before we left Silver Spring's station we all got what the Red Cross called a comfort kit and most men call a "housewife" with needles and thread, a toothbrush and such and some men got a Bible too. We had mess calls at the stops and got our ration of soup, beans, coffee and bread - the same thing every time. They get us up in the dark and they finally let us sleep long after it has gotten dark again. Eight hours of sleep is unknown down here.

Anyhow, Taps has just sounded so it must be ten o'clock. We now begin our nightly fight against various things that crawl out of the woods when it is dark. Bring on the Germans, that's what I say, they couldn't be as bad as the gnats, ticks, chiggers, flies, mosquitoes and other things that crawl, fly and hop on us.

With love, Sammy

September 22, 1917
Dear Millie,
I know I promised to try to write you every week, but that is not going to be possible I fear. We are busier than the proverbial one-armed paperhanger, and there are a multitude of sharp-eyed sergeants down here that do not give any of us a spare minute to ourselves. We have to ask permission to stop and scratch. Besides, we are living in tents and in mud and down here so paper does not last long - it melts or molds.

I am writing this while I eat my chow so if you see grease spots, that is the reason. I must admit that the food has been getting better but it is still awful monotonous unless you like beans, beans and more beans. And I miss you every time I have a second to think about missing you.

We are building the camp so we can learn to be soldiers in it. We don't have guns; we have tools. I guess you heard that we are now a part of the Blue and Gray Division, the 29th Division. More and more come in every day and are set to work making the camp bigger by cutting down the trees on this hilltop. The 115th is now called the 58th Brigade but it is the same bunch of fellows except for those who have gone over the hill - that means they skedaddled.

The worst thing about army life, other than not being able to see you, is the smell of the place and of us too. I sure will be glad when we have a bathhouse that is more than a latrine. It is a good thing it has been pretty rainy because none of us has had a real bath since to got here.

Hope you and your family are well. I will write again as soon as I can. My address here is on the back of the envelope, and I sure would appreciate a letter or two or three.

With love and kisses, Sammy

September 25, 1917

Dear Mother and Father,
Believe or not I received two letters from you and two from Millie, one from Lucinda and one from Robert today. I feel like the richest man in Camp McClellan.

And it is really starting to look like a camp with buildings framed up in raw lumber along a grid of arrow-straight streets that intersect like those down in D.C. There were a bunch of carpenters here when we marched in (and we walked so long coming from the train, I was sure we were lost) along with a company that was sent down early and with the help of all the 29th Division boys, we have got a lot of trees cut down, some barracks under roof, shelters over the latrines, a real mess hall where we can eat without being rained on, a makeshift hospital of sorts and the officers' quarters just about finished. Boardwalks connect everything.

I hate to admit it, but we do smell something awful. I think our smell is even keeping some of the bugs away, but I noticed toward evening that there are buzzards circling overhead. That's not a good sign.

The army life is a life of routine. It is 5:45 when the bugler calls us out and it is 10 at night when he sends us to bed and in between we run from job to job and then sometimes wait before they run us again. Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait, that is the army life.

We are learning the manual of arms. My Springfield rifle, which felt heavy at first, seems to be getting lighter and easier to manage. There is a lot of complaining and some cussing, but most of us are learning. For those that don't or won't, they have built a stockade up in the northwest corner of the camp.

There's goes the sergeant's whistle. Got to run.

Love, Sammy

September 26, 1917

Dear Millie,

I got two letters from you yesterday. Two! They sure did smell good and all the guys in our tent are jealous of me. Today we were ordered to wash our clothes. So after PT and breakfast, they brought around these big tubs and the mess hall guys boiled gallons and gallons of water and pretty soon, there we were, twenty almost naked men washing everything we owned as fast as we could and hanging our stuff on ropes strung between the half-finished buildings. Good thing it was hot and sunny. And it's a good thing everybody had inked his name inside his clothes since they all look the same.

Of course, we washed ourselves too while we were at it, standing on the duckboards and trying not to laugh at each other, and we tried to kill all the things that had been living on us since we got on that train. Then, while we were still in our underdrawers, we did more PT and then put on some damp clothes and got back to work while the buckets were dumped and hauled off for another platoon to use.

I don't know where our rifles are today, the ones we drill with when we drill which is about three days out of four. The only men down here with guns and ammunition are the MPs that try to keep men from going a.w.o.l. which means "over the hill." I can't imagine anybody trying to run from this place because nobody knows exactly where we are except that it is a long and winding road back to the railroad tracks and a lot of dense forest between here and there. If there is a town called Anniston nearby, we have not seen any sign of it.
It is lights out. Good night.

Love and kisses, Sammy

October 2, 1917
Dear Mother and Father,

Last night we slept on cots for the first time and under a tarpaper roof instead of canvas. That is progress. The barracks do not have any windows yet so birds and bats and bugs fly in and out freely, mostly in I think. But we do have sinks and indoor plumbing now but no hot water yet, and I don't think we are going to have any soon. The latrine has one mirror in it and the guys trying to shave in that area are a danger to each other, especially the ones still using those throat cutter razors. My safety razor works just fine, and I have to shave every other day now or I get yelled at. Tell Robert that on Sunday since he likes to make fun of my beard.

We still have not done much of anything you would call soldiering, but we have sharpened our building skills and, sorry to say, our cussing vocabularies. The guys who came down here with some fat on them are beginning to show signs of muscles, and I now know why some people are called rednecks. We are all rednecks here at Camp McClellan. If I knew exactly what a peckerwood was, I might call us that too. It is what some of the Southern boys call each other.

We are learning to do things the Army way, even lacing our shoes straight across instead of zigzag, and boy have we learned to salute.