Warren Nelson - University of Nevada, Reno

We joined in San Francisco. Th e fi rst thing
to happen was they wouldn’t take Hughie
Connally because he had been an amateur
fi ghter and had so many teeth knocked out.
Th ey wouldn’t take him until he had some
bridges made, so he came in two weeks
behind us.
Howard and I went to boot camp together.
It was a terrible transition for me. I was almost
thirty years old, had worked in a gambling
house almost all my life and here I was in
a platoon with sixty fellows, none of them
over twenty-one. I could do anything they
could do, but I couldn’t do it as long because
I’d wear out.
These young fellas would come in all
pooped out at the end of the day and lay down;
you’d think they were gonna die, and thirty
minutes later they’d be up playin’ uh—touch
football or something. When I come in from
a day, I lay down and couldn’t get up again,
missed many a meal that way. Although I
was in pretty fair shape going in, it was very
diffi cult for me.
4
Military Service, 1942-1946
We got sent to the rifl e range, Camp Elliott,
and while there, I contracted pneumonia, the
thing they call “cat fever.” I had a temperature
of a hundred and fi ve and was very ill. Howard
was real worried about me and went to the
drill instructor, and he fi nally sent me to the
hospital. Th ese guys were so tough, it’d be
hard to believe the things that they did to the
recruits at that time. However, I made it to
the hospital, and I was real lucky I didn’t die.
I stayed very, very sick for awhile. Th ere was a
corpsman there who kept changing the sheets
and moving me from bed to bed because of
the high temperature and the perspiration
that I was coming with. Probably if it hadn’t
been for him I wouldn’t have made it.
I was in the hospital probably three weeks
and came out, and I was very weak. I got out
about Christmas time, and the doctor there
asked me where I lived. I told him Reno,
Nevada.
He says, “Well, you know you can’t go up
there because it’s out of the bounds, but I want
to give you a four-day furlough, and if some