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42 Chapter 3 Camps P rivate Neibaur served in an infantry company of local Idaho men, M Company, which was part of a larger unit, the 2nd Idaho Infantry Regiment, which consisted of even more men from across Idaho. M Company was commanded initially by Captain Levi E. Lundburg, with company officers, First Lieutenant Henry F. Poole and Second Lieutenant Don C. Wilson. This company appeared to have the standard “table of organization” of an infantry company of the era, yet was below strength because it listed only 140 officers and men. An infantry company of the Regular Army consisted of 250 officers and soldiers commanded by a captain.1 Being a member or soldier of the Idaho National Guard does not make one a soldier in the army, especially in the regular professional army. Until Neibaur was mustered—or, as we say today, mobilized or federalized—on active service, he remained a guardsman, a citizen soldier under the control and authority of the state governor. With the declaration of war, there was a level of confusion faced by national and state officials. It would be months—a year in some cases— before units and soldiers began to arrive in France and actually reach the front. Thomas Neibaur and the Idaho Guard had little to do at first. Without any military training, Thomas boarded a train, the main means of military travel then, to Boise, the state Camps 43 capital. It is unknown but likely that, when he and thousands of other new recruits were processed into the active service, they probably received the most available uniforms, accoutrements , and other equipment on hand. The National Guard did not have available, nor was it often issued, the most modern and serviceable equipment and arms. In fact, the guard was often years behind the Regular Army in obtaining the current weapon systems and equipment. Except for the excursion on the Mexican border in 1916 and 1917, America had not fought in a major conflict since 1898, during the SpanishAmerican War. When World War I was declared, there were 600,000 modern U.S. Model 1903 Springfield (30.06 caliber) rifles on hand. With the expansion to four million soldiers, authorities had to quickly retool factories and also purchase hundreds of thousands of British Lee-Enfields converted to .30 caliber, some of which had been originally manufactured in the United States anyway.2 As with nearly every war, the United States was unprepared for a quick and large military expansion. Quartermaster facilities lacked not only rifles, but nearly every military item: canteens, trousers, ammunition, boots, and socks. It was more than obvious that the United States did not yet have the immediate capability to design and manufacture any of the larger military items needed, such as airplanes, tanks, mortars, and even heavy machine guns. In the hierarchy of equipment and military issue, the National Guard was near the bottom; Idaho, being a distant rural state with little political pull, was probably near the bottom again.3 Young Thomas Neibaur left Boise en route to Spokane, Washington, where he wrote a letter home to his parents in Sugar City. Eventually he would serve for several months in the northern town of Sandpoint, Idaho. “Progressing very rapidly through the school of the soldiers ,” Thomas wrote his parents on April 17 from Spokane. He said there were three hundred soldiers housed in one building, probably a hall or a type of barracks. The installation , camp, or post at Spokane was probably Fort George Wright, built beginning in 1895 and closed in 1965, though he never mentioned a name in his letters. Fort George 44 Place the Headstones Where They Belong Wright may have been serving as a National Guard facility at this time for Washington and other states. It was not one of the dozens of nationwide temporary induction or reception centers established in the summer and fall of 1917 to process hundreds of thousands of draftees and other recruits into the national army. Thomas wrote that the men had access to a ball park, a gymnasium, and a library. They rented a player piano at five cents per week. Thomas loved soldiering and wrote home, “I would not change my position for that of a civilian .” Obviously, the soldier’s life—the order, discipline, and routine—enticed him. It must be said here that training and serving as a guardsman with antiquated equipment and arms was not real soldiering. His comment about the “school of...

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