The Way Home
Heroes Remember
The Way Home
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We ended up on the Louis Pasteur but it wasn't convoy.
We didn't know that. It was a convoy between the Mediterranean
and England. That was interesting. We had two old skippers, old
captains of merchant ships. They would tell us how deep the
water was in the Mediterranean because they'd run from England to
India and they had picked them up in India and we were heading
home. They were retiring. They were old enough to be our dads
and they would tell us what direction we were going, how fast the
ships were going in this convoy. But when we left England we were
on the old Louis Pasteur and it was meant for the south Atlantic
or the Mediterranean and it would bounce around like a cork in a
bathtub. This morning they wouldn't let us out on deck because
you had to walk at a forty-five degree angle when you weren't on
deck and we were five decks out of water. I was, had a commission
by this time so we were up with the so called elite.
We weren't down below. And this young fella, they had, she was a
cruise liner actually and they had boxed out every second piece
of glass and this young fella was looking out and the old girl
would go down and she'd creek and she'd moan and she'd come
back up, and oh what a racket, right. It went down once and it
was just like a knife goin' through butter, there wasn't a sound.
This young officer was standing lookin' out forward and all of a
sudden he just says, "Oh, Oh!" and there was the damnedest crash
and that whole corner came out of that lounge. Five decks out of
water, and he had a gash here. You could see the bone below his
eye and one up here, missed the eye, glass. And there were pieces
of glass, they had a bar, it wasn't open of course, there were
no, then, and pieces of glass were embedded in the deck head
behind. When we got to, we were going to New York. We were two
days out of New York when this happened and when we got to New
York we looked at the bow. It was crinkled a little bit, oh yeah.
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