The Bobcat Nation

Dear Ma and Pa,
I am well. Hope you are. Tell Brother Walt and Brother Elmer the Marine Corps beats working for old man Minch by a mile. Tell them to join up quick before all of the places are filled. I was restless at first because you got to stay in bed till nearly 6 a.m. but I am getting so I like to sleep late. Tell Walt and Elmer all you do before breakfast is smooth your cot, and shine some things. No hogs to slop, feed to pitch, mash to mix, wood to split, fire to lay. Practically nothing. Men got to shave but it is not so bad, there's warm water. Breakfast is strong on trimmings like fruit juice, cereal, eggs, bacon, etc. but kind of weak on chops, potatoes, ham, steak, fried eggplant, pie and other regular food, but tell Walt and Elmer you can always sit by the two city boys that live on coffee. Their food plus yours holds you til noon when you get fed again. It's no wonder these city boys can't walk much. We go on "route marches", which the platoon sergeant says are long walks to harden us. If he thinks so, it's not my place to tell him different. A "route march" is about as far as to our mailbox at home. Then the city guys get sore feet and we all ride back in trucks. The country is nice but awful flat The sergeant is like a school teacher. He nags a lot. The Captain is like the school board. Majors and colonels just ride around and frown. They don't bother you none. This next will kill Walt and Elmer with laughing. I keep getting medals for shooting. I don't know why. The bulls-eye is near as big as a chipmunk head and don't move, and it ain't shooting at you like the Higgett boys at home. All you got to do is lie there all comfortable and hit it. You don't even load your own cartridges. They come in boxes.
Then we have what they call hand-to-hand combat training. You get to wrestle with them city boys. I have to be real careful though, they break real easy. It ain't like fighting with that ole bull at home. I'm about the best they got in this except for that Tug Jordan from over in Silver Lake. I only beat him once. He joined up the same time as me, but I'm only 5'6" and 130 pounds and he's 6'8" and near 300 pounds dry.
Be sure to tell Walt and Elmer to hurry and join before other fellers get onto this setup and come stampeding in.

Your loving daughter,
LORRAINE

Hope this author isn't related in any way to Vince Devlin from the Mazzolium. Kind of amusing and somewhat of a paradox: with all these little fenced in sites along the HiLine (Montana has 200 of our countries remaining 500 intercontinental missles), well, I just can't understand what happened to our strong ROTC tradition and...Oh well.

Cat Grad wrote:Hope this author isn't related in any way to Vince Devlin from the Mazzolium. Kind of amusing and somewhat of a paradox: with all these little fenced in sites along the HiLine (Montana has 200 of our countries remaining 500 intercontinental missles), well, I just can't understand what happened to our strong ROTC tradition and...Oh well.

Those little fenced in areas -- that sounds really familiar. It was always good to know growing up that the first place a USSR nuke was going to strike was a mile from my bedroom. I always figured that would just make it quick and painless for us ... and then the wall fell and all was well.

...you can sleep better knowing the sites aren't where the Star Wars interceptors would hit any inbound or where the "bad guys" would strike first; but I'd sure hate to be on any coasts

I had no hidden agenda by posting that. I really just thought it was funny because when I was growing up there were a lot of "Lorraines" around and still a few today.

I remember Amazing Grace and Chuck, The Day After........all that paranoia.......I built a bomb shelter in 1989 because of seeing that....what a waste of a summer vacation.

The Israel sniper teams (women predominately) won the international sniper competion many, many times. That great Cat, Lones Wigger from Carter had a daughter that supposedly was a better shot than he was (probably still is). What happened to all of our national championships in rifle competition before 1980? Don't we recognize them simply because the NCAA took over the rifle teams at that point?