Camp Blanding
Basic Training
"They took me right away."
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"They took me right away. I went to Camp Blanding, Florida right away...It was hot and [there were] snakes. One guy put the machine gun down and looked right straight at a seven-foot rattlesnake...
We had to learn everything because…I think seventeen weeks was the training and it took twenty-one weeks because we had to learn artillery and everything to replace the originals. We were just the replacements so we didn’t know what we were going to do. A rifleman, artillery."
Editor's note: Because of the intense fighting in Europe in the winter of 1944, the U.S. Army needed additional soldiers and fast-tracked recruits such as Jimmy Doi, who had initially been rejected.
