It began for me in the midsummer of 1942 when I and my best friend, Leonard Melvin, started to enlist in the Army Air Corps. We traveled thirty miles to the Ft. Meade Cavalry Post at Sturgis, South Dakota. We arrived at ten in the morning and were given the Military version of intelligence tests at the time. After the tests, which ended shortly before noon, we were herded into a room, stripped and measured for height, weight, blood pressure and pulse.

The corpsman who measured my buddy, Leonard, told him he was eight pounds underweight for admission into the Cadet Corps. We'd been scheduled to report in one week for final physical checks and results of our IQ tests. Len asked the Doctor in charge what he could possible do to gain the needed weight of eight pounds. “Drink lots of milk and eat bananas.” The advice he was to follow for seven long days.

The big day finally arrived and I went to my friend's home to pick him up at eight o'clock for our half-hour drive and wait for the ten a.m. physical as scheduled. Len got into the car accompanied by a half-dozen large bananas and two quarts of milk. Our conversation, about being Ace Pilots who would remove literally hundreds of those Dirty Japs and Bastard Germans from the skies, was punctuated by Len's banana munching and milk gulping.

We arrived at the central building of Ft. Meade with a little less than an hour to wait before we would be checked, and either accepted or turned down, as two of Uncle Sam's Fighting Airmen. There were many offices in this complex and the main hallway was a very busy thoroughfare with men and women going to and from their various places of occupation.

We again were stripped, assigned lockers for our clothes, and given a neck chain with a small sack for the locker key. We were crammed into a rather small room and told to wait for medics who would measure our vital statistics. After a few minutes, the tremendous amount of liquid Leonard had consumed began to pressure his bladder and in turn his penis. Any time a group of young men under the age of twenty observed one of their own with an erection, the remarks were certain to have nasty connotations. When the people finally entered the room, I yelled, “For Christ's sake! Weigh this man first.” They did, and Leonard barely made the minimum weight. He screamed, “Where is the pisser?” Informed it was down the hall to the right, he rushed out of the room toward a desperate relief. Probably my good friend, Leonard Melvin, was the only individual who ever made the hundred-yard dash through a hall populated by both men and women, with an erection that only a 19 year old male could produce under extreme circumstances.

The longest six months of my life were from August, 1942 until February 1943 when my orders to report to the San Antonio Cadet Classification Center finally came through. Railroad tickets were sent to me to go to Omaha and then to San Antonio. Of course I had a beautiful girlfriend, who at the time was the love of my life. She and my parents and a couple of other friends were at the depot when I boarded the day-coach for the first part of my trip to join the ranks of famous fighting men. We hugged and kissed our good-byes, I entered the train and found a seat by the window next to a couple of men in sailor's uniforms.

The waves from the platform and the airborne kisses were my final mental images of leaving home. The fight started when one of the sailors said, “I sure wish I was going to be screwing that gal instead of some 4-F son-of-a-bitch after her stud is gone." The military police assigned to the car stopped the fracas before much damage was done to the participants. In fact, we became pretty well acquainted before we reached Omaha.

It was six days and nights before the troop train reached San Antonio in the middle of a misty, rainy night. It seemed like hours before the cars we had become almost welded to finally stopped and we were directed to hit the deck. It's hard to recall the total misery, frantic homesickness, and bodily filth of the new Cadets who lined up by the train cars on the brick ramp. We still wore our civvies from our various places of origin and had no idea of the military future we faced.

Then we heard the chant coming from twenty thousand “veterans” who had been in the service from all of three days to three weeks, “YOU'LL BE SORREE!” In retrospect, I've never felt so low, so insignificant, so absolutely nothing, in my entire life.

The first weeks at the Classification Center were spent taking tests for placement positions and arduous physical training programs. Our group knew we were due for shipment to a primary training facility by the first week of April. We'd even had, not one, but two weekend passes into the big Texas City with the Alamo Shrine.

My assigned bunk was on the upper floor of a two story barracks. Lavatories, showers and drinking fountains were located on the ground floor. One night, a short time after taps, I was awakened by a terrible thirst. So down the steps I went for a long drink of water. Moments after returning to my bunk, nausea overwhelmed me and the rest of the night was spent vomiting the water I kept ingesting. By reveille, the grandfather of all headaches was throbbing, pulsing, screaming inside my skull and stealing my consciousness from me.

The group cadet Sgt. called an ambulance when he became aware of my condition, and it was a hazy trip “over the hill” to the giant military hospital associated with the Classification Center.

The structure was a series of clapboard constructed wards, arranged around a center hub like the support strands of a spider web. Each ward was reserved for a grouping of medical conditions. I was assigned to the influenza ward according to the initial diagnosis of my problem. After three horrible days and a spinal tap, the report was definitely cerebrospinal meningitis. Masked orderlies wheeled me into an isolation room where I faded in and out of consciousness.

Later, I discovered the time lapse had been twelve days. Awakening to look in the face of a man with Major's insignia leaning over me, I learned he was the physician who had taken care of me. His name was Blondell. It seems, according to the Doctor, about 93% of victims of this condition lost their lives. He was cognizant of the newly developed sulfa drugs and had injected massive amounts of sulfanilamide into my bloodstream to subdue the meningitis bacteria.