Original Document

"Days at Indiantown Gap were grueling: training, loading equipment for POE, inspections, inventories…It was hard-nosed business: tough calisthenics in the morning, which I enjoyed but the men hated; long, hard hikes with full equipment, dripping with sweat in the everlasting dust and only a small canteen of water to drink. The army lived in dust. Except when it rained. Then it lived in mud. When I was out in the field with no place to wash, I though enviously of those Navy guys with their showers."

"The camp was a veritable city. Row upon row of white wooden barracks in rectangular patterns stretched to the rim of the mountains on the horizon. Unpaved roads and parade grounds separated buildings. Everywhere, the brown, clinging dust blew in the glare of a roasting July sun. Indiantown was a gloomy place; I felt in the doomsday mood, the grim specter hanging over the tens of thousands of men waiting for the sentence of banishment that would come with orders to the port of embarkation. The warnings came in sequence; first, all leaves were canceled. Then wives and families had to go home, and men living off the Post moved into barracks."



Credit: From Joseph S. Frelinghuysen, Passages to Freedom: A Story of Capture and Escape. Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1990, pp. 11-12, 15.