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Show ROB RT RL OMPTO J 7,2 04 w d get our tails chewed out if we mi sed one of them and th Arab cam in and t I stuff. So unbeknownst to our officers, we decided, ' Okay we ll treat these guys lik w know how, to make them behave." So if we caught them, we marched them over to the mole, which is a big concrete dock. If they had stolen something, we just booted them off between the mole and the side of the ship. If he got to the end of the ship, which was held by mooring lines and rocking back and forth against the mole, if he was able to swim to the end of the ship, he knew never to come back. If he wasn't able to swim to the end of the ship (before it crushed him), he never came back either. We didn't give them any free trial like Saddam Hussein (laughs). Ornery, weren't we? We were having fun. Anyway, North Africa was our staging area. We made, I think, three trips across the Atlantic hauling stuff over there. Then the last one, we were getting ready to land in Salerno, Italy, which was a bad one. Before that, though, on my eighteenth birthday, we landed at Gela, Sicily. We'd pulled in getting ready to line ships up for disembarking or taking stuff ashore. We got turned in the surf. The waves were coming in to the beach like they do. Anyway, those ships were sitting there with boats hoisted up in the air. We were swinging them over to drop them down. Well, we happened to get so the harmonics of the waves got us going like this (rolling and rocking back and forth badly) with about four or five of those big steel boats hanging from the mast, which was doing this to the ship [demonstrates]. That got a little wild. Then we had a couple of air raids at the same time. Anyway, we got the boats snubbed down and overboard and into the water without capsizing. BEC: Did you come close though? 15 |
