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it easy, and picked out his favorite seat at the club.
He had been at leisure for two weeks when he got a letter from the Army. Men holding maritime certificates were gravely needed for the Army's relief boats. Would he please call and discuss the matter? That was on a Tuesday. By the following Friday he had taken physical and mental examinations, had signed a sheaf of papers, and was on his way to Chicago.
The relief ships, most of them, are built in the Chicago area. They are sailed down the Mississippi, through the Panama Canal, and into the Pacific-westward.
Aside from the ketch, the mate's experience of the deep and salty had been gained from the promenade decks of ocean liners, Europe-bound. The new ship pitched and rolled, standing now on its beam ends and now on the seat of its stern, and to him the bridge was a place of total mystery.
"But that's all right," said the captain from the end of the table. "He's making me a good mate. He's a sailorman at heart, and that's the main thing. He can take anything the sea or the Jap gunners can give out with. I hope I'm that good when I'm his age."
The second mate was a retired Army major who also had found his amusement on pleasure boats. The first mate had sailed around Cape Cod for years as paid captain of a private yacht.
Three men of the deck and engine crews had sailed blue water before. One of them was a weathered fellow carrying a limited master's certificate. He would be signed on soon as a mate. The rest were novice hands. There were a few ex-garage mechanics in the engine room, and on the deck was a young fellow who, halfway through Yale Medical School, had decided he couldn't stay out of the war any longer. He had wanted to go to sea. The Navy had turned him down; so he'd joined the Army's navy. Another member of the deck crew was the son of a colonel in the Marine Corps.

THE chief engineer had retired from the sea eight years before, after a solid lifetime of it. He had been living in California, and every morning he went with his two daughters to work in one of California's warplane plants. He was making better money than the sea had ever paid him - until the day he wandered down by the docks and met an old friend. "What the hell are you doing here, landlocked?" the friend said. "You  belong out there at sea, where there's not enough fellows with your experience to go around."
Four days later he was in command of an engine room again, cursing everything about it, in the fashion of chief engineers. He could not get over his annoyance with himself for shipping out again. The worst annoyance of all came when three Jap planes caught sight of his ship early one morning and circled for the attack. Bells rang, whistles blew, and the machine gun on the stern began to chatter as the Army private began to chatter as the Army private tried to point it in three directions at once. But it was the chief engineer's sleeping watch. A seaman burst in to rouse him just as one of the Japs scored a very near miss.
That seamen learned a few new entries for his dictionary of profanity, and chief engineer thereafter became known as the one man who refused to hit the deck for a full-fledged air attack. The fact that Navy planes drove the Japs away did not allay his rancor. "The Navy," he said, "should have prevented the attack in the first place. A man's got to have his sleep, hasn't he, running an eggshell like this?"
Another relief ship captain master of [?] the smaller F boats, was a guest at dinner that day. He and my host were old friends. The F boat man had saved the life of the H boat man years ago when they were both in the Navy.
The H boat captain had run away to join the Navy when he was fifteen, setting his age up a few years. He had run a checkered career-now boatswain's mate 2/c, now broken back to ordinary seaman as punishment for various gaudy adventures and a tendency to tell people where to get off. Finally he had gone into the merchant service and worked his way up to his master's certificate.
The F boat ma had traveled a different road. He had gone from his native New York to Annapolis by way of Presidential appointment. In his second year the complement of midshipmen had been reduced in size, and he had finished his education at the University of California. He was finally commissioned in the Navy, sometimes sailing out on ships but mostly working on construction projects at the various shipyards. One day he went to visit a friend aboard a ship anchored in San Pedro harbor, and as the two stood leaning over the rail they saw, to their amazement, that a submarine tied up a hundred yards away was slowly sinking-with her deck hatches wide open.

The man who later was to command the little F boat went overboard. He swam to the submarine and, singlehanded, closed the hatches-the last one when he was up to his waist in water and still standing on the sub's deck. The people below were saved, and one of them was our host on this in Pearl Harbor.
That episode accounted for the blue-and-white ribbon of the Navy Cross which the F boat man wore on his breast. Last year he was injured aboard a Navy ship and was given an honorable medical discharge. He promptly joined the Army's navy. If he is not already conning his ship down among the countless islands, he soon will be, for the relief ships do not say tied up in the base harbors very long. Too much work for them to be doing.
Practically all of these ships' officers have wives and children in pleasant homes back on the mainland. To only a few of them is the pay really important, and these men could make more money doing something else. Pay in the merchant marine, for example, is higher. Virtually all of the younger men of the crew could make more money in war plants back home, and many of them have excellent educations.
Ask them why they shipped out on their small, unglamorous craft, for hard work and little glory, to sail through rugged seas with a minimum of modern navigational equipment, and the answers would sound stereotyped if they were not so obviously sincere: "we like the adventure." "We couldn't sit back there and let the war pass us up." And some of them will say, a little self-consciously, perhaps, "Maybe I'm just patriotic."
So the next time you read that we have taken another island and are clearing its anchorage for the use of our own vessels, you may picture the little gray relief ships weaving their way in and out of the treacherous channels and doing any sort of job suggested to them. The Army's navy doesn't take the place of the Navy's- not by any means. But its boat are useful little fellows to have around, with their strong engines and with their 4-F crews willing to take on anything from towing a disabled ship or a loaded barge to helping in the salvage of a sunken vessel or a bomber that has crashed into the sea- and willing to sail in any sea and any weather in their bouncing eggshells.
THE END 

JUST BETWEEN OURSELVES
"Having written an autobiography at the ripe old age of seventeen, what else can I say?" asks H. Vernor Dixon, whose No Imagination is in this issue, and whose phiz heads our column. However, you must know that he is a product of California and that he was "victimized" (to use his word) into talking singing, dancing, elocution and violin lessons. Then he went to art school- "a bad idea, but what lovely models." Vaudeville was his next stop, where he enjoyed himself. And when that variety of show business died, he got married. "Wasn't that good timing?" he smiles. Anyhow, he managed to eat and write a novel, which "got no closer to the best-seller list than an Einstein treatise on the curvature of light and space." But he refused to divorce himself from the typewriter.

With Treasure Express and Silver Stampede, Neill C. Wilson hit the best-seller list. How does one learn to write? Well, one of Neill's job was staff editor of the Associated Press at San Francisco, at which every midnight he had to boil down the news of the whole world into 166 words and send it by wireless to Honolulu's papers. He was some climber, too. His record is that of the second man to climb all fourteen of the Pacific Coast's 14,000-foot mountain peaks. Incidentally, he was one of the pioneer skiers of the Far West. To give you an idea of his speed, he once toured Europe with his family, doing eleven countries in seven mad weeks!

From the hot seat of a dive bomber, Fred Hampson, who wrote Boyington, Lost Ace, covered the action at Bougainville, and topped this by going in with our forces in Hollandia. He's from Winlock, Washington, where he cut his journalistic teeth on a small-town newspaper. And what teeth he cut!
THE EDITORS.