Dear John:

I’m taking a few spare minutes here this morning to drop you a few lines. I dropped in at your home the other night to pick up your address as we have sort of lost contact since moving around these last few months.

Anyway, I am out, and have been out since December 8th. I arrived in the country through the port of Boston on December 4th, having made the crossing in 9 days from Antwerp aboard the “Rennselaer Victory”. We hit some real rough weather on the way over this time too, but not as rough as some of the ships that came after we did.

While I was at your house, your mother let me read one of your letters, and I guess you were pretty disgusted with things over in that neck of the woods. I can understand all of that very well though. After I was separated from my unit in Germany, it took just a month for me to arrive in the states. So you can see that there was a lot of waiting in between. But once you are on your way, the waiting around comes easy. At least that’s the way it seemed to me. We spent ten days around Antwerp alone. They had nice camps insofar as shelter and entertainment was concerned. Yes, even the food was better there than it had been in most of the other places on the continent. We had our Thanksgiving dinner while there, or at least one of them. We had another aboard the ship at sea.

After I arrived in this country, things worked out pretty fast. We went immediately to Camp Miles Standish which was the distribution point for the port of Boston. We had a delicious steak dinner there. About 24 hours after our arrival in Boston, we were on a train and on our way to Fort Dix. We were there from the night of the 5th to the 8th and was discharged then. It took about 36 hours after we got our names on a roster before we began processing, and the last 36 hours there were getting our records ready, having our physical, etc. in preparation for discharge. Considering the number they discharged daily, I don’t think things were handled bad at all.

But now I am back with IBM at the same old job. At times it does become a little monotonous, coming to work every morning at the same time in the morning and quitting the same time every night. But I have the car running — yes, the old Chevy. I managed to buy two new synthetic tires for it and am going to have a couple more recapped which will fix me up in pretty good shape. I am living with my brother in Twin Orchards, and so far everything seems to be working out fine. I haven’t done any skating as yet since I have only had the car running for less than two weeks and have been quite busy with other things such as relining the brakes, trying to go to night school and take advantage of the G-I Bill of Rights. You’d be surprised how many guys are trying to take advantage of these too. With the government allowing 65 bucks a month for living expenses and 500 bucks per term for tuition, it is really something to be considered.

Well, I could ramble on and on here, but I better get back to work. Drop me a line when you can and I hope you’ll be on your way back soon.

Russell

Vestal, NY USA