The Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, chief. It was comin’ back, from the island of Tinian to Leyte, just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. The vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen feet. Do you know how you know that when you’re in the water, chief? You tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Huh huh. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, the sharks come cruisin’ so we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know it’s kinda like ol’ squares in battle like a, you see on a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo. The idea was, the shark comes to the nearest man, and that man, he’d start poundin’ and hollerin’ and screamin’, and sometimes the shark would go away.
Sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that shark looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. Then, you hear that terrible high pitch screamin’ and the ocean turns red, and spite of all the poundin’ and the hollerin’ they all come in and rip you to pieces.
Y’know by the end of that first dawn, we lost a hundred men! I don’t know how many sharks, maybe a thousand! They averaged six an hour. On Thursday morning I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player, boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep and reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up and down in the water, just like a top, upended. He’d been bitten in half below the waist. Noon on the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us. He’s a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper, anyway, he saw us and come in low. And three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and starts to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened? Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, and the sharks took the rest, on June 29, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.
