A Rough Voyage at Sea

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.