This is Dart’s first letter aboard his new ship! He’s been assigned to the USS Haggard, a destroyer of a new design. He says most guys wouldn’t trade their destroyer duty for anything, so Dart is hopeful he’ll learn to like the small ship eventually. “It’s a good thing I’m already stoop-shouldered. Now I won’t have so far to go when I duck for the low overheads. I guess I’ve bumped my head a dozen times on things, as these ships do not seem to have been designed for long people,” he reports.
He explains to Dot that he’d tried to send more letters from the Admiral Coontz but running a censor board for such a huge ship became problematic and the men were ordered to stop submitting letters. Now, he says that his active duty will render his letters shorter and less frequent from now on.
At orientation today, Dart was assigned to the deck force, along with all tho other newbies who came aboard with him. He hopes to get assigned to the fire control stations in short order so that he can use the technical skills he was trained to do. For now, he’s a lowly deck-hand.
He was one of three fire control men added to the Haggard crew today. The other two were in his barracks at Shoemaker and in his compartment aboard the transport for the last several weeks, so he’s not entirely friendless on the ship.
He’s fervently hoping for mail very soon. He says he’s read all of the letters he’s received from Dot lately about 20 times. Now he longs for the time they can hear the sweet endearments rather than read them.
In his spare time on the previous ship he did several more sketches for “their” house, which he’ll send along as soon as he’s able. “We don’t have to have a second floor, do we?”
He loves her so much that he can hardly believe she happened to him. After his signature of “Goodnight, my Darling,” he signed his first name, but he also wrote his full name at the very bottom of the page. I’ve noticed that is his new practice for all the letters he writes from the ship. Perhaps that’s to help the censors identify whose letter they’re reading, although I don’t think it would be too hard to nail down which “Dart” was the author.
