When WWII broke out, my father — like so many others of his age — wanted to join the armed forces. But he was rejected because of a couple of minor health problems. A few months later, though, the Army realized that they had a big, big need for people with good electronics and communications skills, so they drafted him and sent him to Persia (today's Iran). The U.S. was sending supplies to Russia from Persia, and had a number of military bases in Persia along the supply-line railway.

It was soon discovered that dad was very, very good at fixing broken equipment — and of course the vacuum tube equipment of the era tended to break down a lot. So dad was spending a large part of his time traveling from one base to another fixing all the broken gear. After a year or so, the Army decided to give him his own caboose so that he and his equipment could easily move about from one base to another.

One day, dad's caboose needed to be switched from one train to another, and dad decided to stay in the caboose while it was being switched around. He heard the switch engine approaching. CRASH!! The engine hit the caboose at a good speed, and sent everything in the caboose flying (including dad!).

The remainder of the ride was quite uncomfortable, as the engineer jerked the caboose around as much as he could. When he brought the caboose up to the train it was being switched to, he again rammed with good speed, and everything went flying again.

When everything was stopped, dad climbed down out of the caboose. The engineer saw him and immediately stopped his engine, jumped down and ran up to dad. "Oh, geez, I'm sorry," he said. "I thought there was an officer in there!"