From the interview with John M. Border of Fresno, CA conducted by phone by Oran DeBois on May 11, 2004 from the Fort Worden History Center.. Mr. Border served at Fort Worden with the US Army Second Engineer Special Brigade 287th Signal Company in 1948. Here he describes coming to the Fort:

“I remember I was overwhelmed from looking at that post, just to see those beautiful white barracks and Puget Sound out there. It reminded me of Monterey Bay. But the buildings were what really impressed me. …The Fort was absolutely wonderful. The old gun emplacements, that’s where we did our training. We had the radios, the units up there, the radio repair and the radio operators set up their stuff up on top of the hill. We’d hike up there every morning and train. We’d set up teletypes and the radio people would set up their facilities.

The company commander was Morgan Evans. The first day I was assigned there I walked into the company commander’s office and he said,’We’ll take you up to your barracks and get you bunked out and everything.’ The company clerk took me to the upstairs of this big huge barracks building. I walked in and heard a loud bang. Two guys were going at it, I mean knuckle drill, bare knuckles. For some reason, they didn’t like each other; other than that, everybody in the company was just–you couldn’t ask for a nicer bunch of people. They had all reenlisted like me and most of them were five or six years in the Army.”