About a year later I saw his medical records. It said the seizure may have been alcohol related. At least that's what the paramedics wrote down. Tom said he got them after he hit his head falling off that truck back in Colorado. They put him on dilantin and told him not to drink. I knew that wasn't happening. After awhile he refused to take the meds at all.
Sometime in the spring they went out in the field for another exercise. They took packed duffel bags with them, played their war games and returned. Tom brought back an extra duffel bag of stuff. He said that he had marked his bag with a big white "X" on the bottom and grabbed it when he got off the truck along with another cooks bag who was supposed to pick it up at the mess hall.
In the mean time the guy had hauled his own bag home and I don't know whose bag Tom had but it never went back to the rightful owner. I was really getting irritated with him.
About a month before this, the nurse lady wanted to borrow money off of him. I think she borrowed about fifty bucks if his story was true. She didn't pay him back. They were about to be shipped out somewhere else. Tom was getting real upset about it.
The guy was in the Army, too and had also been out in the field. He had left his duffel bag on the back porch still packed. Tom reached over the divider and took it. He took what he wanted to keep out of it and then put the bag back over there. Nobody said a thing. This was just not the way I was raised. Maybe they did things differently in the Army but I didn't have to like it.
From my letter to mom:
(Christmas day, I saw a mongoose. It ran across the road in front of the
bus. The driver told us what it was. - This would have been
the bus bringing me back from the hospital after Tom was admitted.)
(I love you all and my kids. Kiss them for me.
I got Scruffs letter but I thought it was from George. He didn't sign his name.
- Scruffy was our dog and George our orange cat)
(Some asshole brought in a bucket of kimchee and put it in the refrigerator. Now
everything smells like a rotten fridge.
The manager of this apartment block went to the post office for my mail because
I couldn't. They are awful nice to us, but the black couple next door received
an eviction notice. They have two cats and a rabbit and dirty clothes hanging
off the back porch. - Well, that explains where they were going to
when they left the apartment)
When ever we had time and enough money to do it we would visit some place we hadn't been before.
I loved the military museum. I always took photos but most didn't survive. This is the only one I can find so far.
I bought several copies of the newspapers, the special editions that came out after December 7 1941. They had boxes of them. I don't think they were copies. I think at that time they just printed a lot of them. They were yellowed with age but I supposed even if they were re-prints they would be yellowed by then. For me it was like holding a piece of history in my hands.
Tom was more interested in anything having to do with guns.
I found one more that interested him.
A sunset someone gave me.
This one was taken along the north shore. The north shore had bigger and stronger waves and in some places it was really rocky and dangerous.
This one was given to me for my collection which was growing fast. I was told it was taken in Hawaii but it didn't look like anything I'd ever seen. It looked much more like Colorado. Sometimes I think guys liked to fool me so I don't know for sure.