Home | Return to Index

Cpl Roman F. Klick 36620923
Co "A", 353rd Engr Regt
A.P.O. #502, c/o Postmaster
San Francisco, California
26 December 1943

Dear Aunty Clara,

Sunday

Goodbye all dreams of not going to the office for two straight days. Hardly had I come back from breakfast this morning and straightened things out around my cot when 1st Sgt Cooley came up and said that Captain Hanton wanted to see me. Of course, we all knew what it was for because there were several fellows in the company who had been under the weather a little bit too much and committed a few misdemeanors and the follow up reports had to be typed.

I guess it took me two hours to type up three short letters and Captain Hanton even had a runner come down to see what the delay was. This bum finger of mine just wouldn't let me type a perfect page and sheet after sheet had to be ripped out of the machine and retyped. When I am typing to you as now, I can calmly erase my mistakes but when something is going to the Colonel, it had better be as near to perfect as possible.

Then, when I had finished with that job, Lt London, who had been Officer of the Day yesterday, came in with another report of still another infraction of good conduct by some other fellows. This one was a longer letter and I just couldn't get thru it without punching the wrong keys with that finger doing temporary double duty while the other one is incapacitated. Elmer Keck came in just before noon and I asked him to pound the thing out for me in a jiffy, which he did.

But that wasn't to be all my work for today. As I sat in the mess hall enjoying my lunch, Charley Murray came up to me and said that a message had come from Headquarters saying that I was to be CQ this afternoon. It wasn't my turn and in fact I found out we weren't even supposed to have CQ today but because further work might have come up from the Colonel concerning the above mentioned incidents, Mike decided it would be best to have two of us clerks on hand. He would have stayed but had an appointment in town and he said that if we had anything special to do, we didn't have to stay.

But still that isn't all to my Sunday duties. Brown wants to have his share of the Christmas fun so he has asked me to run the film for him this evening which I consented to do. He will have everything all set up so it will only be necessary for me to put on the records a half an hour before show time and then run off the show. The advantage will be that I'll have an A-1 seat for this evening's show up there in the projection booth. The picture is an unknown one by the title of "Crossroads."

Last night, after finishing the letter to you, I crawled under the mosquito netting all set for bed and read quite a bit of Galsworthy's early beginnings. I read so long as the other fellows were still up and left the lamp burning. Quite a bit of the Forsyte Saga and related works seems to have been taken from Galsworthy's own background.

There was no mail call this noon because quite a bit of mail came in. We will get it some time this afternoon, maybe about three-thirty. All I want is a letter from you because I'm not in the mood for answering any others.

It is one-thirty now and I will either write a short note to Aunty Florence or read some Galsworthy the rest of the afternoon or maybe to both.

This morning when the sun became too warm for sleeping, I took my shelter half and hung it up on the tent wall to shade my cot and was thereby able to sleep for an hour or so longer.

I had another crazy dream last night which woke me right out of my sleep in the middle of the night. I had dreamed that I was married and my wife looked just like that zombie girl in the movie we saw a few weeks ago. Well, that was blood curdling to find yourself married to a horror like that even if she was beautiful and I woke right up to get away from it all. Brrr, I'm going to stay a bachelor.

So-long,   /s/ Roman   Roman