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life. Had I gone then, I’d have been one of the first men sent to the South Pacific, where our early losses were horrendous. So I went to work at a construction site and one day she called the office and asked to speak with me. She said, in a strong voice that gave me courage, “You got a card. You have to go.”
    I went home and put on my first-class gunner’s mate uniform. I went to the local recruiting station and was told to report to the First Naval District in New York City. When I arrived, they looked up my name and said, “Oh, yes. You’ve got in-shore patrol over here at 125th Street.”
    Okay—I knew what shore patrol was, but I had no idea what in - shore patrol might be. Walking the docks? Checking for mines or enemy submarines?
    No.
    He said, “They’ve got a boat up at 125th Street that picks up the kids from Columbia University to teach them the rudiments of guns and everything. That’s where they want you.”
    They signed me up and I went aboard ship. It was a converted yacht called the Sylph , donated to the Navy to help in the war against subs on the Atlantic. It belonged to the man who invented the Murphy bed.
    I spent my first night aboard the Sylph in a comfortable bunk in my own cabin. The next morning this guy by the name of Borguignon came to introduce me to the skipper. Everybody called him “Borgi 1” and me “Borgi 2.” We went up and knocked on the skipper’s door. We heard a “Yes, who’s there?”
    I said, “Borgnine, sir, a new first-class gunner’s mate who’s just come aboard.”
    He said, “Just a moment.”
    We heard some fiddling around with the door and finally he said “Okay, come in.” We walked in and the skipper was still in his bunk. He had a hand underneath his pillow and was looking up. It was like we’d caught him with a girlie magazine or something. I gave him my credentials and told him where I came from and what I had been doing.
    He said, “Okay, have Borguignon show you around.”
    As we started to leave he got up on one elbow. I saw his pillow flip over and there was a .45 in his hand. We got the hell out of there in a hurry. I later found out the captain was frightened of a certain character aboard ship, the chief carpenter’s mate. The guy hated the assignment because he stood around doing nothing most of the time, and he didn’t like the skipper, who was always on his tail yelling at him to find something to do. Well, there just wasn’t a lot of repair work or maintenance, so the carpenter got a lot of shore leave. Then he’d come aboard drunk and would yell down through the ventilator, “You son-of-a-bitch dirty bastard! Come up here, I’ll kill you, you no-good bastard.”
    I asked Borgi 1 why the skipper took that. He said the skinny little guy was just afraid of the big carpenter. Period.
    The chief carpenter’s mate kept putting in for a transfer and one day Washington granted his request. So they transferred him to a great big vessel that was going to take stuff over to England, carrying planes and everything. He left happy, knowing he’d be setting sail in less than a week.
    About three days later, the captain himself got orders to leave and guess where he went? To the same ship where the carpenter’s mate had gone! Well, he had no intention of going and that ship sailed without him. It was the last time the ship was ever seen. It got caught in a hundred-mile-an-hour gale off Newfoundland and went down. But that’s not the end of the story. The carpenter was the only one who was not lost at sea. He said he refused to drown because he hated the captain so much and wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
    I lost track of both men after that, though if the carpenter’s still around I’m sure his hate is as rich and deep as it was sixty-seven years ago!
    After that skipper left we had another guy who was a lieutenant junior grade and they gave him command of the USS Sylph . He was a Yale graduate and still pretty much of a frat boy. He