And so, they said it would be a couple months before theyd call me. So, thats the reason why i did this baseball thing. I figured, well, you know, maybe i will flunk the physical or something. I dont know. But, anyway. So, it wasnt two days after i got the letter from the dodgers about going to almira that i got the letter from the navy to report to Church Street, to report to go to boot camp. So, i never got to play ball. I went over to Church Street to get sworn in. They gave us a perfunctory physical there. It was probably a couple hundred of us. They took us over they walked us over to penn station. We got on the train. It took us up to sampson, new york. This was a new boot camp. It was i dont know how long it had been open, but not very long, because we spent a lot of time, while we were there, helping build barracks for the guys that were coming after us. And i remember i went into when we got off the train, they took us in to give us a haircut and to examine us. And the dentist
Regular soldier in many cases looked very much like the one im wearing. The difference being, they would have the raised collar and they would have epaulets. Trotsky took the red army and said, i want to make it a working mans army. When you go to work, you dont wear a suit that has a raised collar and epaulets. You have a suit that has a laydown collar. As we saw on the front of that book, that was the early war uniform. It was a simple smock. The Rank Insignia were on the collar. As the war progressed, there was more and more reference to the past, to the heroics of the military achievement under the czars. So, a lot of the changes were made to kind of encourage that, to reinforce that. So, later on during the war, the uniform was now changed back to, in a sense, the czaristtype looking uniform. Again, the medals came back. Medals were prolific. The guard medals, the idea that there were famous czarist units. Now we were going to have elite Red Army Units to raise morale and encourag