Sept. 29, 1943
Wed. 9:00 P.M.
Dear Folks:
Well I guess I might just as well write while I have a chance to. It rained again today. I was scheduled to go up on an instrument ride at 5:00 P.M. I was sitting in the plane when they called off flying. It got black and started to lightning and thunder. And then it started to pour and it really poured. So I didn’t get to fly today.
I shot 2 rounds of skeet today. I got 18 out of 25 on the first round. On the second round I had 19 targets out of the first 21. Then I came up to the last station with 4 shells to shoot and I missed 3 out of those 4 and ended up with 20. I had 23 targets almost in my hand. Shucks.
Unless I flunked my final in gunnery, I am finished with ground school. I had 90 in Pilot’s Information File final exam. I had 97 in Naval Identification, 96 in Navigation, and I don’t know yet what I got in Aircraft Recognition or Gunnery. I am just getting so I can concentrate on learning stuff. That 4 year lay off after school made me pretty rusty.
I got a letter from Ma and one from Dort yesterday. Boy that house must look a lot different now. I won’t know how to get inside the place. Dort asked about gunnery school. I will get 2 weeks of that before I graduate. I hope. They can only take 70% of the class. They take the ones they think are most liable to make good fighter pilots. Well anyway the ones they take go down to Matagorda Island. This is a little island out in the Gulf of Mexico about 60 miles from here I think. Our squadron will go the last 2 weeks we are here. Some of Class 43-J goes down about Sat. The last of 43-I returned from the island today. We get some arial gunnery before then.
I will graduate Nov. 5 and don’t figure on me being Lt. Bessey either. That little episode in Basic will decide for them that I will be Flight Officer Bessey. There isn’t much difference. Flight Officers and 2nd Lts. get the same pay and enjoy the same privileges and courtesies. A flight officer wears a blue and gold bar while the 2nd Lt. wears a gold bar.
I should get home in time so I can do a little pheasant hunting with Jim. I should be able to hit something after practicing on those skeet. Can you get shells at all? I’ll tell you what, Jim. If you can get a gun and the shells to shoot in it, I’ll buy you a shotgun. That is if the folks think you should have one. If you can, you get one and I’ll give you the money for it.
Boy those old Germans are really getting it on the neck now. If they aren’t careful, there won’t be any left for me to blow out of the sky. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want this war to last. But I would like to get a crack at the Japs or Germans after going through all this training. But if they go and make an instructor out of me, I’ll be stuck for a year probably. I would like to get a chance to fly in combat before I quit flying. If I could make the right connections, I would stay in flying for a few years after the war. There is a great future in flying. If I was a kid just out of high school and figuring on going to college, I believe I would take aeronautical engineering. But the flying end of it is too hard on a person for me to stick to it for many years.
Well folks I better close for now. I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to write again. So don’t get worried.
Yours truly,
Alva
Ancestors Across the Ages 