John Gossett grew up in a small farmhouse on Shiloh Church Road bordering the Camp Croft World War II training site, where his dad was an engineer and mom was a post command driver.
At 83, the retired Army colonel still recalls vividly as a child watching from his bedroom window where many of the estimated 250,000 soldiers who trained there during World War II used live artillery fire. That hill there and all the way back to Pauline was maneuver areas, where troops moved and ran tactics, he said, pointing past the fence line that contains his cattle. Course, we haven t had any worry about it. Soon as the war was over, we went right back (to) farming.