After my stay at home I took the train from Rochester to San Francisco and it was a trip that I'll never forgot. There was a girl with three kids under the age of 5 and she was traveling from Boston to San Diego to be with her husband, a sergeant stationed in California. We had a Pullman car and their berth was opposite mine. The kids spent most of the time crying or running in the aisle. There was a sailor sitting with me and we tried to help entertain them as best we could. After three days and nights with all that noise you can bet I was glad to arrive in California! I took a taxi out to the base at Santa Rosa and the whole camp had. disappeared. The barracks were empty and all my gear was gone. It was real spooky and I didn't know if they'd gone overseas or what. I hunted around and found a caretaker who told me they had moved to Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco. I called a taxi again and made it to Oakland just before my leave was up. While I had been gone, two of the guys had had to bail out of their P-39s due to engine trouble. Al Johnson was one of them and he landed in a lake. The next time I flew I spent the whole time listening to the engine for fear that it would quit. I kept hearing things that weren't there, but those planes were all old and anything could happen to them. The lst weeks of our training here at Oakland were formation, gunnery, dive bombing, and simulated aerial attacks. We began to lose some of the pilots now. One took off over the Bay and the plane exploded. We figured there was gasoline in the cockpit and he must have lit a cigarette as he was always doing that (against regulations). When we flew low formation and came to any body of water, I always went up a lot higher than the rest and then dropped down again into formation. I wanted to make sure that I could glide to land if the engine quit. I hated water as I didn't know how to swim. Some of us had cameras and would fly close to each other and take pictures. I took a lot of pictures when I first entered the Army and don't know why I didn't take any all through my flying. I did take a lot while in England. Oakland was just across the bay from San Francisco and I used to take the "A" train across the bridge to see Lettie. This was the "A" train that the song was written about and it was the best way to get to San Francisco in a hurry.