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Sgt. Samuel B. Tabor
31070292
38th Evacuation Hospital
APO 763, c/o Postmaster
New York, New York.
August 14, 1943
BRYANT SERVICE CLUB
1 YOUNG ORCHARD AVENUE
PROVIDENCE, R. I.
U. S. A.
“AFRICA”
Greetings to the Bryant Service Club:
It was rather a pleasant surprize [sic] to receive your Memorial Day letter about two weeks ago. That is the way the mail goes with us; sometimes very slow service and at times it gets as low as ten day service which is considered very rapid delivery for us over here.
I am now on my second year of foreign service having spent some time in England prior to our coming to Africa on the invasion last November. Since being in Africa I have visited such large cities as Oran. Constantine and Tunis and several smaller towns and points of interest too numerous to mention, I had the opportunity to visit the ruins of Carthage a short time ago. Of Course there are a lot more recent ruins now.
During this time I have spent in Africa we have always lived and operated the hospital entirely in tents. The enlisted men have lived in their small pup tents. The boys have made many variations of homes by combining more tents and by building them up higher by use of sides of boards, tin or anything available. On the whole the boys have them fixed up quite cozy. Of course we have the old fashioned open type of plumbing, with a few modern variations. We wash up and shave in our helmets and even wash out a few clothes in them in a pinch, but most of the time for laundry purposes we can either get a pail or empty five gallon cans that previously had dehydrated potatoes in it. We have had showers varying from a steel drum up on a bank with a pipe and improvised shower head on it to the present outfit we have which is a GI portable shower unit which pumps the water from a tank into a overhead arrangement of four shower heads. In cool weather which is very rare now they can also heat the water with this outfit. Although it is very hot now with the temperature running up to 125 in some instances, last winter and spring ice on a helmet of water was a common sight, For a while we thought Hitler had ruined the heating plant here in Africa, but if he did it sure is working fine again this summer.
With the first year of my foreign service there has been some very good news for the folks back there and I only hope that in my second year on this side of the pond we will be able to give the folks much better news.
One of the many Bryant
Alumni in the service,
Sgt. Samuel B. Tabor
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