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But when I was seventeen my father had been called back in service. He had been in World War I, he was called back in for number two,

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and I volunteered when I was seventeen for the service. They had a special program for seventeen-year-olds and I was sent down to Alabama. 


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I had a quarter at the university in Tuscaloosa and a quarter at Auburn, [Laughs] so I learned more about higher education in Alabama than I had otherwise,

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and I was in the service. What they did, this was toward the end of World War II and there was what they called the Battle of the Bulge in Europe.

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It was sort of the culminating engagement when the American lines were all drawn out and Gen. Patton played a big role in saving the day.

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So they were sending all eighteen-year-olds to Europe because they needed human beings. It was a slaughter there for awhile. So one of the Senators,

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a United States Senator, Robert Taft, who was the son of a former President, objected to so many eighteen-year-old boys being killed,

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so they pulled all of us out that were eighteen from Fort Meade where we were ready to go to Europe and sent us to Texas for three months,

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June, July, and August. Texas is still hot and it was hot then. I was at Camp Maxey, Texas, which is up on the border of Oklahoma.

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More infantry training, mainly a good case of Poison Ivy out in bivouac, etcetera, and then completed that.

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By that time the European war had concluded but the Pacific engagement was still underway, and I got in a troop train in Texas

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and we went to the West Coast and on to the Philippines. I was in the Philippine Islands roughly a year and a half, largely in Manila

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but we had landed in Leyte, which was the famous landing for Gen. MacArthur. But anyway, my year and a half, more or less, in the Philippines, mainly in Manila, was a very interesting experience.