Work in the Stockade - 11/23/1917

112th Sanitary Train

37th Division

Nov. 13, 17

My Dear Dad: -

Rec. your letter of 21st, also Mother's of same date. Will try to see that everyone gets an equal share of eats & sox, which the Aux. sent. 

Mother asked about donations sent from Blade Bounty Baskets, they were somewhat of a joke. I got a pkg. of Bull Durham, I gave it to one of the fellows who smoked "cigs". I was requested by the Blade to write about them so they could publish my letter, but when I saw what came I couldn't get the nerve to tell them what the fellows thought of them. However some of the other fellows in other outfits must have fared better.

I have a new job already. One other fellow, acting as asst., & myself have charge of the "Sick-Call" over to the "Stockade" (camp prison). We doctor all those needing medical attention. For cases too deep for us, a Med. Officer, from the Military Police, takes care of, or tells us what to do. We report at 7:00 in the morning & 4:15 at night. Have a regular dispensary over there. One of the guards lets us in & out, at will. Rather nice, so long as we are able to get out, but we'd be in a pickle if we got in and couldn't get out. I like that kind of work.

Love to All
Howard

So naive, I always just though Bull Durham was a baseball team and a movie starring Kevin Costner. Here's what I learned about Bull Durham tobacco:

A magazine ad for Bull Durham tobacco, for example, includes a photo of five Army officers deployed along the U.S.-Mexican border in 1916 relaxing and taking time to “roll their own.” The accompanying caption reads, “Wherever you find a group of U.S. soldiers you’ll always find the ‘Makings’.” It shouldn’t surprise, then, that Bull Durham, branded as “The Smoke of the Red, White and Blue,” sold all of its cigarette production to the War Department two years later to satisfy U.S. troops’ craving for tobacco “over there.” So great was the urge to smoke to relieve the boredom and tension of war in the trenches General Pershing himself was said to have remarked that cigarettes were more important to our Soldiers than bullets!

I amazed that Howard didn't smoke - you'd think he's need a cigarette or two after working in the stockade every day. The stockade would have been quite the rowdy place to be stationed. Here are some excerpts from a memo from 1918, presumably correcting some issues that Howard may have experienced with his "patients" in the jail:

"It is believed that the confinement of old offenders with young soldiers is very injurious to the latter.... Men who are drunk should be promptly confined and held in close confinement until sober; otherwise the officers who duty it is to confine the soldier practically become responsible for actions of the soldier committed while the solider is mentally irresponsible. Drunken soldiers need not necessarily be placed in the Stockade and will not be sent there if there is any other suitable place in the regiment or detachment where they can be closely confined...It is believed that having a large number of prisoners in a regimental guardhouse is useless, and injurious to the disciple and morale of the command."