On the road between Kweiyang and Liuchow, Spring 1945 Vintage gelatin silver print; 8" x 10"

Artillery unit, Kiangkoa, April 1945 Vintage gelatin silver print; 3.5" x 5"

Finally a transfer for me to go to New Delhi arrived. I was assigned to the 164th Signal Corps Photographic Company, whose area of operations included China, Burma and India, with headquarters in New Delhi. I was billeted with other American officers at the luxurious Imperial Hotel, with even less work to do, if that were possible, than I had in Kanchapara. My chance to leave came when one of the my officers in my outfit reportedly committed suicide in Kweiyang.
We took off from Assam for Kunming, my unit's HQ in China. I was a raw, semi-trained 2nd Lt. in the Signal Corps, 22 years old, and without a clue as to what was going on. Scarcely able to walk under the weight of my equipment, I struggled onto the airplane, and sat on the floor next to some uncommunicative Chinese soldiers. I leaned back in the curve of the bare fuselage, hugging the heavy parachute which was a totally foreign object to me. We were in a death crate called the C46, a hulk of a cargo plane barely sustained by two undersized motors. As we puffed oxygen through our masks, the planet's highest mountains glowered beneath us and loomed on both sides.
Behind the door to the cockpit, the third red alert light shone as we descended, a sure sign that Japanese Zeros were tailing us, using us for cover as they bombed the runway. I scrambled from the airplane into the night's bewildering disorder--no contacts, no commanding officers, no what-to-do-next. I ran until I somehow arrived at a dimly lit wooden shack which reminded me of a bar. It was crowded with mostly Chinese patrons, where everyone was drinking hot yellow rice wine. The next thing I remember, was waking up with a hangover in my outfit's billet, the headache. rendered irrelevant by the thrilling fact that I was in the China of my dreams. I had stepped through the looking glass, into the pages of Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China, a book which I first read in 9th grade and never forgot.
Of course I was joining up with Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang instead of Mao and the Red Army.

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