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Sgt Roman F. Klick 36620923
HS 1393 Engr APO 73
c/p SF Cal
30 May 1945

Dear Aunty Clara,

Decoration Day, Wednesday

I had the craziest kind of dream last night. I dreamed that I was awake and sitting up in the office. It was night time and everything was dark and I could see all our four cots set up with the mosquito nets suspended over them. I was very tired and then suddenly I found myself laying on the cot and I had just awakened from a dream. Yet the dream felt so real that it seemed as if I had just been getting to bed at that time. Could that be possible I displaced my spirit body outside the mosquito bar? Sometimes I actually believe what the natives of that first island we went to, believe and that is the spirit body leaves a person while he sleeps and it is not right to wake a person up.

Our bunch of boys, Lewis, Sackett, Grauel, Norona and I are the best of friends all day long and when it comes to meal time we change completely and we argue and fight all the way thru it. Of course, it has become a standard joke that that is regular operation procedure and even before we get the ration boxes out, we are at it tooth and nail. Each one accuses the other of consuming more than his one-fifth share of the meal. We have a lot of fun though in doing all this ribbing.

Last night someone, suggesting that we make some Nescafe, started a mild outbreak of fires. Lewis tried to get a fire going first, then Norona and finally I put my hand at it and eventually my fire heated Andy Mathis's and my cup of coffee up first. But on the whole, we were lousy boy scouts.

This morning we were clinging to tree limbs as we climbed high into the trees of the neighboring grove for plums. They are almost not worth the while since the seed is so large and there is very little food to each plum. They have a combination taste of a grape and a banana and only a very few of the real red ones are ripe and sweet.

I thought I was doing pretty good by getting pretty well up into the tree where I could reach the end branches with a stick but I suddenly looked above me and a little Filipino boy had by passed me and was just about in the top branch. These people that live here seem to combine the natural agility of the jungle people we have seen with the intelligence of a civilized people and they can thus get along amazingly well.

I was talking to a Filipino guerrilla second lieutenant and he laughed when he talked about during the occupation the Japs were in the towns and the guerrillas were in the hills and since the Americans came the situation has been reversed. He said that for all those years they lived off the land by eating the fruit of the trees and getting their fresh water by cutting bamboo shoots down. Each section of a bamboo is a little fresh water cell.

O, yes, we were talking to the younger generation last night as we heated our coffee and they said they are allowed to smoke when they are twelve years old. Anyone younger than that who gets a cigarette, gives it to his mother.

So-long,   /s/ Roman   Roman