After fifty years the dates and faces have lost their distinction, but the horror never gives way. The older I get, the more it bothers me. I can still hear the screams of the injured and dying.Cozell Smith, 1994The sailor finds himself swimming in the open ocean, wondering in shock how it came to this so suddenly. It’s just past midnight. He’d been sleeping above deck, because it was too hot below and it smelled of sweat and bad breath and dirty laundry. He woke up at eleven-thirty, half an hour before his turn to stand watch. He went to the mess hall, grabbed a cup of coffee from the fifty-gallon urn and took his coffee topside. A quarter moon appeared briefly in a break in the clouds, high overhead. Now it’s dark. He looks up, straining to see the moon. There’s no light. The last light he saw was his ship on fire, flames, smoke, mixed with the horrible sounds of men screaming.“I can’t swim!” the man hanging on to him shouts.The sailor wonders how they could let a man who can’t swim join the navy.
