I can't remember much about my leave at home, but I must have spent it visiting with all the ones who did not go in the service. I had a good visit with the Montanyes and Lennie Pierce's family. When it was time to report, I went by train from Rochester to San Francisco. Bill Barnum and Al Bunnell from Cheshire gave me a ride to Rochester and we spent several hours having a big time in a bar before train time. We all staggered down to the depot and they poured me aboard. I survived and enjoyed the train ride across the country. The trains were always crowded then, but I enjoyed them. The train made an hours stop in Cheyenne, Wyoiming and I got off to have something to eat. The first person I saw when I entered the station was Al Johnson, the big Swede, standing there! That wouldn't happen again in a million years. We made the rest of the trip together and stayed overnight in a San Francisco hotel.
The next morning we took a taxi across the Golden Gate Bridge to Hamilton Field. It was good to be back among all the fellows from flying school. We Just hung around there for a couple of weeks, not yet knowing what we were going to be flying. We had classes everyday on engines, aerodynamics, and air craft identification. They would flash silhouettes of friendly and enemy aircraft on a screen from all different angles and we had to identify them immediately. We also had classes in aerial map reading and continued to have them even when we were in England flying missions.
After all this time it is difficult to remember the correct sequence of events as we were stationed at four different locations in the following weeks. I will attempt to note all the events even though they may not be at the exact field. After a week at Hamilton we went by train to Tonapah, Nevada to start flying. We stopped for a couple of hours in Reno, Nevada and four of us headed for the nearest bar. I ordered four whiskey sours and told the bartender to just keep them coming. After the first hour the crowd had grown bigger and the drinks were still coming. I didn't know who was drinking them, but when I got the bill, I paid for 75 drinks! I had to help the others back to the train as they had a lot of trouble crossing several train tracks on their way back to our train. Tonapah was at the foot of a mountain range and the airfield was out in the valley toward the next range. It was flat country with nothing but sand and brush. The buildings were just wooden shacks and the wind blew the sand everywhere. It was in the food, in our beds, and over us most of the time. We arrived here on June 23, 1943 and were going to be checked out in the P-39 airplane. This plane was the one used in the early part of the war in the Pacific and had become obsolete. They were shipped back to the U.S. to be used for training pilots as all the new planes were going to the war zones.