January 15, 1944

Switch On Pop,

This is the letter in which I'll try and give you an idea of the place that we're now located at.

First, I hope that you're in the best of health because you'll need to be to go through this ordeal. My letter writing isn't the best or the most interesting. Well anyway, here goes:

The field is located about four and one half miles away from town. The bus service is fairly good. They run every half hour. The place itself reminds me of Matagorda Island where I took my gunnery trainmen as a cadet. The sand is about six inches deep and it reminds me of tramping though snow.

There are no walks of any kinds in the place and very little grass. The trees are few and far between and then they are scrub pine.They rise into the air like the limbs on some tall ungainly woman. They are quite tall with no branches extending from the trunk until the very top of the tree is reached.

The tropical foliage is in bunches and then that is just what grows wild. The buildings are all one story. The old officer's quarters that are not being used right now were so called "hutments". They were nothing but tar paper shacks with no windows, but they had these huge shutters that opened upwards exposing about half of the whole side of the building the daylight. The latrines are small modern building that are set off from our barracks about one hundred feet.

Our present quarters are long narrow buildings made out of cement blocks. The stoves are very similar to these old pot-bellied stoves. If it's cold enough for a fire we have to make it ourselves. We do however, have orderlies to sweep and make out beds (not bad). Each latrine serve for three such barracks.

To take a shower you have to wear your GI shoes out to there because of the deep sand and dirt you encounter on the way. Our mess building is part of the officers club. The meals are very good and the prices are as follows: Breakfast 35 cents, Lunch 45 cents, Evening meal 45 cents.

The club is about 300 years away from our particular abode. The club itself is very nicely furnished but it is not much frequented by our crew. Why, I don't know. Most of the boys either want to go to sleep or town. I'm know as "Rip Van Mac".

The P.T. we get will make anybody tired. We get P.T. every day, but Fridays and Sundays we all have to run around the whole field. This is a total of five miles and that's too much even for me. The first time nearly killed me, but yesterday I hardly minded it and I'm not getting use to is because one just doesn't get use to such torture.

The airport itself has two runways with a hanger on each end of the field. These are nothing more than shelters where they do most of their heavy maintenance, They have no doors on them what so ever. All of the planes are kept outdoors.

The place is slowly developing bit it will be at least another three years before it will actually look like something.

We have a good big PX but that's all I can say for it. The theater is also used for church. There are no sort of seats but wooden benched to sit on. They do get some good pictures but I can't tell you about church because I've told you before, Sunday is just another day to us.

The surrounding country side on all sides is nothing but swamp. If my motor ever quits, I'm staying with the ship and riding it down and them I'm going to sit on it if it doesn't sing until someone rescues me. On my low cross country trip I really got a good look at this section of the country looked like. I flew right down on the ground. I even looked for alligators but didn't see any. However, I did chase a few stray cows around.

An order came out yesterday that from now on we were to fly from sun rise to sun set. We've had some pretty bad cover over  casts and we've lost a lot of flying time, so they figure on making it up (on our time).

Up until yesterday we had only one phone on the field was accessible to us. Now we have two (wonderful isn't it) two whole phones for fifteen hundred men.

Love & Kisses to All

Al