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pg.17

For the first part of the trip I kept to myself, trying to maintain the pleasure of aloneness. I read a good deal, one of the books completed during my ocean cruise being The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglass. During the day the decks are quite crowded and an oddity was that once a man picked a spot for himself it was, it seemed, by tacit consent, his. Every day he would return to the same spot and no one tried to infringe on the territory of another man. For my daily reading spot I found a vast two-square foot area between a stantion and a coil of wire hawser about amidships and settled down for what I hoped would be a day of quiet reading. For the remainder of the trip each time I would look up from my book I would see the same unvarying activities and the same faces. A bit to my right about seven or eight men would be crouching around the fringes of a brown GI blanket shooting craps; over the entire trip a fortune changed hands several times. The only one who consistantly came out ahead, as the seasoned, saddened veteran crap shooters know so well, was the "house",the owner of the blanket. And to my left, near the rail, sat two men who played cribbage for thirty days.

Toward the end of the trip I fell into the habit of playing pinochle with Soskin, Bessa, Katzahek,and Adamitis.

It was about this time that we learned that our destination was Iwo Jima, that February 19th was D day and 0900 was H hour. We were shown a very detailed map of