Charleston, South Carolina was another "tent city". They spent one night there and the next day they were supposed to board a Troopship.
 

   They woke up early and piled into some trucks to go to the Port of Embarkation and by 10:00 they were back in Charleston. They weren’t ready for them. They tried again at 11:00 and two hours later were back in Charleston eating lunch.
 

   Another try at 3:00 and still no go. Finally, they got a box lunch and on the fourth try, they were allowed to board. As Dad was walking up to the gangplank of the Graceline Troopship, the Santa Paula, in the last group to board, an officer stuck a Tommy gun in his hands and said, "make sure no one leaves this ship!" Dad said that gun got heavy after hanging on to it all afternoon and evening. Especially with all the luggage he was carrying too.
 

 He later told me he was glad to give it back. Who would want to be responsible for cleaning that thing? All his buddies were looking down at him from above, joking, teasing. It was about ten o’clock that night when the gangplank was finally pulled up and he could give the gun back. There were about 2500 soldiers on board ship so it was a while before he could find his outfit. He ended up running into Jim Mauel in the passageway. Jim had saved them a couple of hammocks in a room with seven other guys.
   The voyage was an adventure too. About one week out, some of the refrigerators went on the blink and from then on, there were two meals a day, at nine o’clock and four o’clock. They ate mostly boiled foods at a table with rails, standing up, holding on to their trays to keep them from sliding away. On rough days, they couldn’t keep the coffee in the cup. Showers were taken on deck, twenty naked guys at a time using sea water and seawater soap. Not one woman on that ship. There was a PX, a Post Exchange that sold cigarettes, candy and goodies. Dad had given Mom just about all his money so she could get home after they got married, but he spent the two dollars he had kept. He was making $21 a month. He was bunked about two doors down from the 11^th Bomb Squadron Headquarters. They had a typewriter that he took over to write anything that came into his head, mostly funny, dirty stories that the guys all wanted copies of, so he learned to type and later on became the Chief Clerk Typist because of this self-taught skill.

After fifty-eight days on board ship, they had arrived in Karachi, India. It was so sandy, before they could move in they had to shovel sand out of the one story, stucco barracks, out of everything. He spent a couple of weeks there until he joined with an eight man Medical Unit headed by Doctor Melvin Wilcox. It was here the 11^th Bomb Squadron came together as a unit. The Cooks, the Mechanics, the Supply and Ground Crews, Office Personnel, Officers (It was here they first even saw Officers, as they had quarters on the upper decks of the ship and Dad was in the lower decks.) They did drills, marched, had to do KP, but also played baseball, sometimes three games going at once. They went into town to see the sacred cows and to see the snakes dancing out of baskets. Burt King, Dad’s buddy and Dad pooled their pay to buy a Kodak box camera. It became the communal camera. Whoever could afford to, bought film, borrowed and used the camera.