The rest of July and all of August we flew P-39's from Hamilton Field. From here we made cross country flights to Reno, Nevada, Oroville, California and Sacramento, California. We also started gunnery practice here. The P-39 had a 30mm cannon that fired through the nose of the propeller and the targets were along the shore of San Francisco Bay. We would dive down at the target and shoot the cannon. We also had practice at aerial gunnery. One of the planes was used as a tow ship and towed a cloth target about four feet wide and twenty feet long on a cable behind the plane. The tow ship would fly up and down the coast while the other planes would fly toward the target at 45 degree angles and shoot the 50 caliber machine guns which were mounted in the wings. Each pilot had different colored chalk on the bullets and they would thus leave a colored hole in the target when you hit it. I flew tow several times and you never felt safe as those characters were using real bullets. Just once someone hit a tow ship. Shooting from different angles at the target taught us how far ahead of the target you had to be to aim in order to hit it. We shot 100 rounds each and one time I had 51 hits! The tow ship had to fly low over the field and release the target before landing. We never liked to fly the tow ship as it was so monotonous flying back and forth for hours. We started to fly more formation flights of two or three planes and another plane would try to "attack" us from out of the sun or from the clouds like an enemy would. This taught us to keep our heads turning all the time to keep track of the sky all the way around us. We would take evasive action to try to keep the enemy ship from getting behind us. We also did a lot of formation flying close to the ground which trained you to stay close together in formation. In the tomato and vegetable farms in the Sacramento valley the pickers would be out in the fields with crates stacked about six feet tall and we would fly down so low that we blew the empty crates over. I imagine we were cussed a lot! A couple of times someone would come back and land with telephone wire or fencing caught on the underside of the plane. I loved to do acrobatics and when I was up alone, I would do rolls and snaprolls and all the fun stuff.