Tommy-gun in the Latrine

On June 20, 1943, Ralph writes on Camp Swift stationary to his Mom and Dad, happy to be back in camp, but finding he won't be there long.

"Well, we're back in Camp Swift, but not for long. Right now we're orphans. We got here about midnight Friday night. The 527th loaded us into a truck and then dumped us out in front of what was our barracks when we left. But, when we went in the barracks we found it full of strangers. We went into what used to be our latrine and a guard with a tommy-gun ran us out of there. You see, the 147th went to Louisiana for maneuvers about two weeks ago, and a Tank Destroyer outfit had moved into our barracks. Every last man of Company A is gone, except 4 or 5 who were transferred out of it before they left. One of them, a fellow who was in my barracks before I left, finally found us yesterday, and we all but kissed him, we were so glad to see him.

We finally had to go back to the 527th and stay the rest of Friday night. Yesterday morning we were "adopted" by the 553rd Engineers. They put us and the 207th boys who were in the same fix, in an empty barracks, gave us clean sheets and pillow-cases and we eat in their mess hall. They also went to a lot of trouble to locate the belongings we left here. After about umpteen miles of red tape we finally caught up with the barracks bags we left here, but there was hardly anything in them except our winter clothes. Evidently, they have taken everything we might use or anything valuable along to Louisiana. We were expecting to find the rest of our clothes and the laundry that we had to go off and leave, but I guess they took that stuff all along with them. As a result we didn't have a clean piece of clothes to our names, so we had to wash them. It took me from 8:30 to 12 o'clock this forenoon to wash the pile of filthy stuff I had, and it still isn't clean. We just took it in the shower room, undressed, got a G.I. brush and soap and went after them."

"....We still haven't found our mail. The mail clerk from the 553rd is trying to locate it. If it's here in camp He'll get it for us, but I imagine they took it with them to Louisiana. Gosh, how I would like to get hold of it. I suppose you have been writing right along so there should be a nice big pile when I finally catch up with it."