Desert Training Fun for Soldier

HENDRICKS

Posted By: Volunteer: Sherri
Date: 2/28/2014 at 13:03:32

..D KEOSAUQUA, IOWA . . . . THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 1942

Desert Training Fun for Soldier

Robert Hendricks of Douds, Tells of Chasing Lizards, Rats and Snakes Out of Tent.

Robert Hendricks of Douds is having as much fun as at a wild animal circus. He's even training his own varmints, or chasing them away.

Here's the way he tells about it in a letter to his father, George Hendricks, from a training post in southern California:

Boy, I'm sure in a wonderful place. I mean by that when I go to bed I wonder what animals I'll get up with. It is funny and not too funny, either. Before I got my bed unrolled I had a desert rat in bed with me. Snakes, scorpions, and everything.

This is a desert war training area and it's sure a good one. We cleared cactus off to make room for our tents.

I'm sure in place, it's so dusty and hot. I think I'll get a mine out here when the war's over, and just stay out here.

Just now I'm a beautiful specimen, with all my hair cut off. I'm as tan as a Negro, and a aim to let my whiskers grow. Came back just now from a 70 mile drive in the desert.

There isn't much here-30 miles from the nearest place and it's a small town-but I like it.

You never have a drop of sweat on you if you're in the wind, but in five minutes after you get out of the wind you can wring water from your shirt. Let some unprotected part of your body be exposed to the sun and wind-and you're cooked.

I've eaten enough sand to hold my feet down-no danger of ever flying off. Your hear that sand grinding inside you. If anybody ever tells you that you can't feel a dry heat, just call him a liar. You can feel it if it's hot enough.

I'm thinking of getting a 15-day furlough and come home for awhile. They can draft about 9,000,000 more good men to fill my boots for that long. I'll have to save up a couple of thousand dollars for railroad fare.

I just ran a lizard off my bed. Glad he wasn't in it.

A kid here just sat outside the tent to get a tan-and has he got one! Looks like a red-hot pepper.

I'm getting so hard I tried to dive a nail in my chest but it just bent. I then got a diamond drill, and the fire flew.

Blackouts don't bother us here. It's blacked out from sunset to sunup. We don't have electric light here.

P.F.C. Robert B. Hendricks
Q.M. Det. Bn., A.P.O. 351
Desert Training Center,
Indio, California

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