Description
Mr. Thorsen describes the storms experienced at sea, the seasickness of sailors, and the many men wishing they could die.
Carl “Herman” Thorsen
Mr. Thorsen was born in 1926 in a small town northwest of Innisfail, Alberta. He grew up in a family with two brothers and five sisters. His father was a farmer and bricklayer. During the Second World War, Mr. Thorsen was not able to participate in the war effort because he was needed on his family’s large farm. In his early 1950s, while still working on the farm and with a seismic company in Alberta, he felt guilty about not taking part in the Second World War and decided to enlist for the Korean War. He enlisted at Currie Barracks, received training and was shipped overseas. After serving in the Korean War, Mr. Thorsen returned to Alberta and raised a family.
Transcript
Then we moved up to Maryang and we had some conditioning and training there. See, we’d been twenty three days on board the ship on the water. It took that long to get over there. Well, first night out we hit the storms and that thing did everything but turn upside down. Yes, it was just big enough to go down and .... there was 1,600 men on board; 1,400 were sick. There’s a lot of them wishing they could die. I was one of the 200 that weren’t, but we had to clean up after the others and that was hard on the stomach. But one time, the ship got rocking so bad that everybody was in for their lunch and tables went crossways in the ship, it rocked so bad. We hadn’t got in yet and every tray went off the ship, off the table, it rocked up so high. And there was three big garbage cans with slop in them, about that big, plumb full. They tipped over. So all they could do was empty out the whole mess hall, clean everything up, and start over again.