Guam - Above Agana & Bored

We still have not sent out any Morse Code since we ended Radio School in Farragut, ID (Feb 1944)! Also, we won't until we get set up, so what is holding us up, we ask? "Patience, patience - we just need to wait until the Marines take out a few pockets of Japanese soldiers at Barrigada, which is where we will set up a Receiver Station first and then we will have normal operations!" We nod our heads and then find we are in constant briefings, like this one: "There is a lot of dysentery and dengue fever, with flu like symptoms. No one knows what causes the dengue fever, but the medical community think it is caused by the fly, because there are so many! On the dysentery we feel it is caused by poor sanitation, so wash your hands and body parts that touch anything not YOU! Wow, that clears that up! Try not to catch dengue because it is back breaking painful!" But, we don't know what causes it - right? We left this briefing scratching our heads and that is why I remember it. Except for the hourly briefings each day we just do our own thing; write letters; take a makeshift bath when we think it's time; wash our duds and we are all anxious to hear from loved ones, or friends, so mail call is fun. We get a "smoking and beer break" every day and every day it's the same for me - I give my "smokes" to Bill Evans, from San Francisco, who loves to "French smoke - where you drag the smoke in and as you open your mouth you let the smoke out only to draw it back into your lungs!" Ugh! I don't like beer that Grandma Sophia Don doesn't make so I give this away too; usually 1 to buddy Joe Duran, who is from Durango, CO, and the other to any friend who wants one. Someone always does.