San Juan, 1/30/44

Dear Gio.

Please don’t use the term “piss” in polite correspondence- it gives the reader the unhappy sensation of a pain in the ASS.

No use worrying about the draft. You can’t realize the sinking feeling you must undergo when comfortably reclining in your chosen atmosphere one night and realizing that on the morrow- your induction days- it’s to be lost to you. The surroundings you loved, the people of habit traded for an unknown quantity. A person can’t appreciate what it is before going through it. Home the back of realization on the past of all of you that weekend I came up from D.C. bag and baggage and didn’t look so good, only having said goodbye to a city of choice, a home of choice and people of habit, the prop completely kicked out from under.

Personally, I hope you didn’t get drafted at all. Military life is no help to sealed people and because of being subject to stupid orders from above you lose the power to think for yourself which was what made you stable. You get the feeling of doing less than you were before if stationed where there is no action. You read about brave men dying, see wasted manpower all around you, especially in the States. Thousands of useless sailors in Norfolk, Philly, Bainbridge, New York. Presume it’s the same in the Army. For instance, how was Kittel aided the war all this time? It’s not his fault, if the answer is negative. A lot of good come out if evil. In losing control of your life, being stranded in out of the way places, you see more already than ever before what is really important to you as an individual, what has meaning; what hasn’t. To be true to yourself regardless of cost: the doubt of others.

…Chas.