20. GI Joe Waiting I am waiting to ship out from Fort Lewis Wash. We arrived there on Christmas eve 1956 and shipped out about ten days later, all we had to spend was our flying $20. And that was gone before we knew it.

Christmas morning we were informed that we could invite our families for a turkey dinner and all the trimmings, sure, here we are tree thousand miles from home and the family is take a drive to Fort Lewis, we all got a kick out of that one. We graduated from our various classes in Fort Gordon at 11.00 AM on Dec. 21, 1956 and they transported us to a waiting train which we boarded at 1.00 PM for the west coast then unto Korea.

I must say it was a very nice train ride , we saw some of the most beautiful scenery that there is to see in the USA, but it was depressing going through many small towns and countryside with all their Christmas lights shining so bright, in some stations we even had people waving at us as we cruised by their towns.