Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top.
Training
Anti-Aircraft Artillery training, judging by the dates of the diarist’s journal, lasted five months. There was intensive combat training plus training on the set-up, maintenance, firing, and transport of the guns, field operations, and aircraft identification, not to mention camping in the New Mexico Desert for seven weeks.
Dad once told me they had flash cards with silhouettes of all of the known aircraft in the theater of operations — friendly as well as enemy — and that they had to correctly identify each one within seconds because they had to know which planes NOT to shoot at! I got the war from Dad in small sips. Also in that period, Dad received a certificate of completion of Basic Electricity, U.S. Army (Antiaircraft Artillery) Course from the National Schools, Los Angeles, California, on 13 August 1943! 
Next Up: The War
Training finished, they were given their furloughs. From what I have been able to find out online, furloughs were anywhere from one week to 30 days. Some accounts I found indicated that soldiers had to find their own way home or to wherever they wished to spend their time and make their way back to camp. This diary shows a gap just shy of two months from course completion to the next step. I don’t know if Dad traveled all the way to Chicago Heights and back and, if he did, if he was out-of-pocket or how long he was able to stay. But he was back at Fort Bliss by 20 December 1943.
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