Camp Mackall contained several large APRs, or All-Purpose Recreational halls, which became locations with fond memories for the 11th Airborne Division's troopers. Dances, musical performances, dinners and more were held in them. You can also see Chapel No. 2 just to the APR's right, and it is of note that Sunday church attendance was mandatory for the 511th PIR troopers.
On Friday evenings, the stage filled with the 511th PIR’s eighteen-piece orchestra under WO Robert M. Bergland, along with vocalist Joe Sartori, which meant one very important thing: the “Victory Girls” were coming.
On weekends the Special Service Dance Partner unit gathered young women from all over Hamlet, Greensboro, Southern Pines, Pinehurst, and Rockingham to attend the dances. After their parents gave stern lectures about their patriotic duty to attend (complete with warnings about being too “patriotic” with the servicemen), the girls loaded onto trucks bound for the APR. Dressed in long gowns, the girls were whisked inside and hardly had a chance to sit down before the dance ended at eleven o’clock and they boarded the trucks for home.
As MAJ Edward M. Flanagan of the 457th PFAB exclaimed, "God bless the Southern belles who came to dance with us in the APRs of Mackall!"
The boys of the 511th PIR enjoyed Camp Mackall's superior facilities when not out on several-day bivouacs or long marches. Out of 12,000 volunteers, only 2,176 remained, having passed (i.e. survived) Colonel Orin Haugen's strict acceptance guidelines. At Mackall the soldiers practiced field problems and got to know the other units in their mother organization, the 11th Airborne Division under Major-General Joseph May Swing.