The launch nosed
into the wind, the cold spray came over the bow and
made us turn back and take a last look at the old
Augie Maru, the cruiser Augusta on which we'd been
sweating it out, waiting for just this moment.
Yes, it was what we
had been wanting for a long time. So what the devil
was that wee, small tug of affection we felt at
leaving that big hunk of iron? You have me, mate; I
don't know. It must have been something that happens
to everyone who goes to sea.
That was some ship
for brass hats, wasn't it, mate? Captains and kings
and Presidents all over the place half the time, it
seemed. Nice trip, that last one we took, to carry President Truman to Antwerp and the Potsdam
Conference. He was a good guy all right.
Instead of staying
up forward, sitting in those wicker chairs beneath
the awnings they had rigged up next, to the
eight-inch turret, he'd be back on the well deck
wearing a white sailor hat and shooting the breeze
with the seaman when he had time.
It brought back a
sort of old times the day the President had the King
of England aboard in Plymouth. Last time we had seen
the King was in Portsmouth up the channel a way. That
was the year before, a few days before the invasion,
and the ship was really loaded with brass then. It
got so a man could hardly carry on his work without
stumbling over a few generals and admirals.
But to you and me,
mate, I guess there are other more ordinary things
than Presidents and kings and short, hard spells of
action that will make our time difficult to forget.
There was the clean
fresh wind topside, the sun that glitters and dazzles
your eyes on the water, the throbbing of engines
below, the creak and sway of rigging and masts.
There was the
raging headache of seasickness, the awful lurch
between a pitch and a roll in rough weather. There
was the chow the army boys envied us. Why didn't we
feel well off? Appetite does funny things in a
steam-sweating mess hall below decks.
There were the
general quarters alarm that used to roll us out at 4
or 5 a.m. every day submarine alerts, the sudden
shocks of destroyers' depth charges against the hull,
sounding and feeling below as if we'd hit something.
There was the endless authority of the loud-speaker,
and the shrill bosun's pipe that, by tradition, had
to accompany it.
Baths came out of
buckets - showers were only for chiefs and officers
aboard the old Augie. In the Mediterranean were white
uniforms to be eternally scrubbed of grease and dirt.
Cleaning, scouring, scraping, painting; gunners,
tenderly oiling their charges against the salt air -
that was our life ordinarily.
Then, too, there
was the hot, close air of compartments battened down
for battle condition. The days on end at general
quarters in the invasion. Tense, red-eyed and haggard
men going off watch and wait in line for a plate of
beans. Endless nights of vigilance, of look-outs
above, and of watchers below with eyes glued to the
thin green jittery lines of electronic scope
indicators, while the steel band of heavy battle
phones made a crease in your skull with the hours
that passed.
Maybe you'll
remember too your first night aboard when you stepped
outside and lit a cigarette; how the deck watch
growled at your forgetting you were in a war. And the
first time you heard the man overboard alarm and saw
how easy it was to lose sight of a man in the water
when the ship was making twenty knots. And remember
the lad that slipped over in the heavy tideway at
Normandy, and another lost in the gray rolling waters
of Hampton Roads?
Those things aren't
easy to forget. Somebody said it'll seem in the years
to come like a small slice out of your life..I guess
that's what it was, mate, if it wasn't your whole
life.
*Robert Morrison
served as Chief Radio Technician aboard the cruiser
Augusta during the war and saw duty in both the
Atlantic and Mediterranean waters. He recently
received his discharge.
(Condensed and
published by arrangement with the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch)
