Phil Wood's Letters
Letter #11
I Long For Peace
To Margretta & Gretchen
Late October 1942
Wednesday[1]
Dear Girls,
The enclosed a little more than half of Sunday’s game – 1/3 of the weekend profit. So financially I’m doing OK. $150 in the bank, remainder of my uniform bill $180. I’ve paid $100, and $100 yet to come to me on a gratuity for it. But in a lot of ways I’m getting fed up with this place. Preparing, preparing – getting jittery with all of this at times, and would like to get out and put it into practice. Spend a lot of time thinking about it of course, and have come to no conclusions except that I long for peace. More than I ever thought I would hope for something that I couldn’t get myself. Oh well.
Rusty’s coming on the first & second weekends in November in all probability, which will leave the last three weekends for you all.
No marks yet but they’re coming out soon.
Love,
Phil
Footnotes
[1] Date unknown, presumably in October, 1942. Written on Quantico stationery.
The regularity of Phil’s correspondence drops off dramatically in the second half of Reserve Officers’ Class; this is, as he will later state, an indication of “busy-ness.” Student officers still sweated over their books and field problems – one of the most interesting being a week-long trip to Manassas, Virginia to study the tactics of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. The Marines got to practice maneuvering around a real (albeit dated) battlefield.
Phil is also more than ready for Rusty’s visit; since their summer plans fell through, he has not seen his girlfriend in several months, and the distance between Quantico and Indianapolis seemed very great indeed.