50
Russell C. Coile
else was swimming, or to spend an hour "policing the area,"
picking up cigarette butts. I qualifi ed as "marksman" with the
Pistol, Caliber .45 M1911A1 on the pistol range.
We learned how to lay miles of telephone fi eld wire and
operate switchboards. One of the students was hit by lightning
during a thunderstorm one afternoon when we were laying
wire. He was lucky he wasn't killed. A student from Cornell
ended up in the hospital when he accidentally stabbed himself
in the leg with one of his pole-climbing leg irons. The training
was great fun even if the heat, the dust, the rain and the mud
combined to give us a realistic taste of what providing Signal
Corps communications under fi eld conditions was all about.
I was promoted to Cadet Major in MIT's Signal Corps Unit in
my second year of advanced ROTC.
I'm in the front row, second from the right, with my Signal Corps unit
at Fort Monmouth, NJ.
My 1938 MIT yearbook, TECHNIQUE has a photograph of
the 28 student members of the ARMY Ordnance Association.