Perceptions of the war
You know I looked at it as a great life experience and you sort of remember a lot of fun times and things that were going on. We had a great captain, well we changed captain’s part way through, and the new guy was a great guy. He would go over and take the Marines, put a perimeter on the beach, and run all of us from a ship and leave a skeleton crew, anchor it, run in, and have steaks and barbeque, and everyone was allowed one beer, because you carried beer on the ship and they’d bring it all over, and marines had a perimeter and we just sit there and go to a swimming and a surf, then do stuff for two hours and you’d go back to your duties and that was it. You know those things you remember. You go out of the ship and, they carry three hundred marines, and then you would go do an operation and you put three hundred marines on the beach and then you pull away and they go off and do their thing. Now the thing is we’d go back and pick up marines and bring them back, but it’s not like we pick up what we dropped off, in equipment and in men. So it’s like, okay, where are they? Are the just off doing other operations, got divided, are they killed, are they wounded? That’s all I’m saying. You never know, so in your mind you hope for the best. It’s just one of those things. Yes, I was in the warzone, but I was divorced, I didn’t see all the stuff going on over there. We saw it from 2 miles off the shore, one mile off, whatever we operated based on the depths, so the boats had a short run to the beach.