Cpl Roman F. Klick 36620923
Co "A", 353rd Engr Regt
A.P.O. #502, c/o Postmaster
San Francisco, California
13 December 1943

I received five items in the mail today. One was a Christmas card from Uncle Leo and Aunty Lillie with a dollar bill enclosed. The second item was a letter from Uncle Leo and Aunty Lilly. The third and fourth items were V-mail letters from you dated the 1st and 2nd of December. And the last but by far the most important was a V-mail, also from you, dated November 30th. Yes, Aunty Clara, that hand drawn Christmas greeting was alright. A form of greeting such as that in which a person does something out of the ordinary for another is always appreciated and is extra nice. Robert Browning was not a poet of sonnets yet he wrote one hundred of them for Elizabeth Barrett; Leonardo Di Vinci was not a poet but an artist yet he wrote a poem to his mother; Dante was a poet so he drew a picture and by doing so it meant so much more than usual.

Today was my day off but I was busy working until ten o'clock anyway but after that time I took the typewriter up to the tent and wrote an answer to Eleanor Angsten. But I write one answer and another letter comes in so there is no such thing as catching up. In the afternoon I meant to write a letter to Mr Gonzalez but instead of that I gained some of my long lost sleep by becoming dead to the world from twelve-thirty until four-thirty. During that time I had some of the craziest dreams imaginable.

I dreamed that Tom Muzik I knew in college was on our island as a USO civilian. He was afraid to go back home because he had heard about his father's embezzling (going on the assumption that it was his father) and then the dream became all tangled up with a baseball game, a retreat parade and Sgt Driscoll coming back wounded with a purple heart and a weakened spirit. It was all very much in detail and very real like. But you certainly did have a futuristic dream when you imagined me in what must have been one of those helicopters and holding it motionless so that you could climb aboard. I wouldn't doubt but that that very thing may become possible but there probably wouldn't be a necessity for it since the plane could land itself just as easily as staying in the air at that point.

I'm typing this letter in my tent because I have never brought the typewriter back down to the office. I don't very well care to either because it seems that our tents are much freer of those mosquitoes than the office is. And because I just got back from taking an early evening shower, I do not want to put any of that lotion on. The shower tonight was actually scalding and we had to give ourselves a brisk rub-down with the towel before dressing up again. However, I don't suppose that in a warm climate like this that we would suffer any ill effects from walking about after a hot shower.

You know what has got me to wondering? Just what will be the situation at Rathborne now that the different changes are in effect? Hackbarth said that I could always call RH&R my second home and it was he who got me into the Personnel Department with the eventual possibility of going down to the plants with the new machines. Now that he is president it should seem a cinch to get back a good job. Then with Roy Miller and Franklin Bristol as vice-presidents, fellows who were just up the notch a bit, I have people that I can talk to without considering them as so high up but just ordinary fellows who I had worked with for years. I also wonder whether the place will be worth coming back to at all after the war is over. There will be the other fellows coming back also who will want jobs that are equivalent to the ones they left.

A couple of the boys were in town yesterday and they were telling me about the soldiers and sailors drinking bottled beer on the outside of one of those bars. That seemed like a lot of baloney to me because there doesn't seem to be any beer on the island to hear the fellows talk. Those lemonade stands in town are a standard joke because everyone calls them bars.

So-long,
/s/ Roman
Roman