Selected for Oak Ridge

Tom: I don’t know why, but I finally decided one thing. When I was in Pensacola and had the one year to go, I had about seven months then, about four or five months before I could get out. Then the war broke out and three and a half years later I came out. But while I knew it was going to be a long time, so I decided I’d like to at least come out with an officer’s rank, so I went to OCS.

I don’t know how it happened, I mean why, but I had done a lot of work that was similar to what they wanted at Oak Ridge, and I don’t know who told the story or what, but about five, six hundred soldiers at Camp Richard, Maryland, and that was an overseas pool. When you graduated from there you went overseas somewhere. So everybody wanted to go to Europe instead of the Far East. So when they posted it the next day, I went in there looking for my name to see where I was going to, and I didn’t see it, but then down in the corner there were seventeen names pulled out, and my name was on there.

But I didn’t know what it was, I just knew it was something different. But a Captain had come to interview me about a job, and he asked me several questions and I said “well, where will this be?” He said — everything I asked, he said “I can’t tell you that.”

A summary of the whole thing: I said “well, let me say this, Captain Brown: you know what you want, and I’ve told you everything I know. If what I know and what you know about me fits whatever you want, I’ll just do it.” That’s as far as I knew, and then I got orders to report to Knoxville, Tennessee, not knowing what it was, or anything, then they took me to Oak Ridge and that’s the way I got in.