October 30, 1917

This day may not seem important to many but to me, a nineteen year old infantryman named Charles Jefferson, this day will be a milestone forever etched in my mind. This was not the day of my baptism, or wedding or anything like that, but rather the day I enlisted in the United States Army so that I could go and end the Great War. This war has lasted long enough and the Tommies need our help. I know that I will be able to help end this because I have the desire and passion to end the war while having an adventure. My life as a civilian has been as boring and uneventful as any would dare to endure. I have no future while living in this small Indiana town. At sixteen years of age I was forced to leave school and work in the mine after my father became too ill to work. So for the last three years, six days a week, from six in the morning to five in the evening I have spent in the dark and horrid coal mines. The air is so hard to breathe from all of the coal, dirt, and blasting taking place to mine all of the coal. I can swear that my lungs have become has black as the very coal that I pick at day after day. And my only day off I must spend at church. All of my school friends have long since graduated and moved on to bigger and better things leaving me to only find friends with the long caverns of the coal mines. If I can escape these mines even for six months I will forever be grateful. Well in a week I will leave for Camp Taylor in Kentucky, and then on to Camp Logan in Texas and on to New York where I will board a ship bound for France. I cannot wait to be out exploring the world and having the greatest adventure a young man could ever dream of.

Sincerely, Charles Jefferson