Seeing that I couldn't make it to the reunion, let me tell you a few interesting stories. Pretend you have a beer in your hand when you read this. 

A whole bunch of  us troopers arrived in or near Lae, New Guinea probably late Oct. or early Nov. of '44. We were replacements, yet to be assigned to units in the South Pacific theater. We spent most of our time drilling, exercising, and helping out at the various supply depots around there. 

The Army works in mysterious ways. One was that they made the mistake of putting a bunch of us in a warehouse that had canned foods in it. We would move cases of these from one location to another. At the end of the day they (the supply guys) would put us back on the 6 X 6 trucks to return to the replacement depot. Some smart NCO decided he'd better shake us down and had us off-loaded before the trucks took off. They found a whole lot of canned food stashed on the truck so they gave us a cursory body check and got us back on the trucks. "Wait a minute," some one said, "you didn't check very closely. Get them off again!" Well sure enough they found some more cans of food on the trucks. Another shake down and then off we went back to our area -- where we all enjoyed canned fruit for another day or so.

Just before Thanksgiving a few of the guys were called out to help distribute Turkeys to the company kitchens. Mistake. Our platoon got a turkey, of course, which we roasted over a fire in back of the tent area. Hardest part was to get the butter to melt for basting. But it was a good turkey spitted and roasted just right.

We were issued on a somewhat regular basis, stateside beer. Top Hat I think was the brand. Naturally, it was warm; what else could you expect in the summer tropic heat. So we would get a few bottles together and use the fire extinguisher foam and cold to "freeze" them up a little. Had some difficulty in finding full extinguishers after a while.

Finally, we were issued arms and ammunition. A difficulty came up when someone realized it was also beer night. Unfortunately someone took a tommy gun to the camp commanders tent. He shot it up in a Z shape. Good thing the commander wasn't in there at the time. About 11:00 P.M. we all had to fall out into the street (?) in whatever. There was some rain so a couple of guys had on rain ponchos but most of us were in our skivvies. Some had boots on but a lot were barefooted. The C.O. made a stern speech asking for the guilty guy to step up or for some one to say who did it. Naturally, that went over about like he expected. The company was divided into two groups. One group was told to march around a planned course in one direction and the other in the opposite one. When they came together they could turn around and march back. We started out like nice soldiers but we had trooper officers so after a hundred or so yards we all began to run, in the rain, dressed in whatever. It turned out to be about a 5 miler, but we didn't care the straight legged commandant wasn't a trooper and we sure knew that the punishment was no big deal to us.

Anyway, that's pretty much the story of the replacement depot in late '44.

Freshen that beer?