Warren Nelson - University of Nevada, Reno

This was something that was very
interesting. Having been around people as
much as I had in the gambling business it was
easy for me to talk to these young fellows and
draw them out. I was very interested in the
testing end of it.
I interviewed people well, and the main
thing they started to do was having me
conduct these tests. My voice was always
good and strong, so I was able to test a good
many people at one time giving these tests at
diff erent locations. Actually, I became sort of
the chief tester and gave 10 tests to as many as
twenty thousand Marines at one time. Th at’s
how fast we were turning them out.
We started out in San Diego and later
got split up into two groups, and I traveled
the Eleventh, Twelft h, and Th irteenth Naval
Districts for almost two years just catching
up with the people in the Marine Corps that
hadn’t had these classifi cation tests or hadn’t
been classifi ed.
Captain Presley was a very good man, a
very nice man and helped me along a lot. He
was sent overseas and that was my object too.
I told him to be sure and send for me; he said
he would. When he got over there he wrote
back to me and told me there was no reason
for me to go overseas because I could do a
better job in the states and for me to stay there.
I think that two weeks aft er I got out of
boot camp, I made corporal; two weeks later
I made sergeant, and a month later I made
staff sergeant. And that’s probably as fast a rise
you’d ever see in the service. However, it was
in wartime and they needed the help very bad.
I stayed a staff sergeant for eighteen months
and then went to tech sergeant.
I spent four years in the Marine Corps, all
of it in personnel classifi cation, moved around
a great deal and wound up in the Department
of Pacifi c in San Francisco. I transferred a
hundred and twenty-nine times, and my
Military Service, 1942-1946
23
papers showing my transfers in the Marine
Corps had to be higher than my head when
they were stacked up. When I fi nally got sent
into San Francisco, I had traveled from Seattle
down to San Diego as far east as Denver and
all over the Pacifi c northwest and southwest,
as far as that’s concerned. We traveled in a
group and fi nally we went to every place they
had a Marine station, and this included the
recruiting offi ces in each little town. Had the
opportunity to go back into Butte, Montana,
and Great Falls, Montana, my home town,
to interview the people there and give them
the tests that had to be given. It was a pretty
satisfying job because you were able in some
ways to help people do what they really
wanted to do in the Marine Corps which had
never happened before.
I fi nally got sent to San Francisco, and we
were stationed at Oak Knoll Hospital. I was
there for quite awhile with a group handling
people that came back from overseas. It was
a pretty depressing thing because you’d get
men come back that had their legs shot off
and arms shot off ; they had to be tested and
all. And most of them were pretty pitiful. It
was a job that was real hard to do because of
the people you had to handle. We also went
through all the Marine Corps prisons and did
those people, and that was very depressing
too. However, the good part of it was that you
were able to help a lot of young people and
send them aft er they came back from overseas
and send them close to their home towns
where they wanted to go. So it compensated
for the depressing part of it, compensated by
the good things you could do. I became very
interested in this type of work and thought I
was really fi tted for it.
I was transferred to San Francisco and
got a new commanding officer. I became
very well acquainted with him; his name was
Bernard J. Alpers; he was also a captain. He