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The Story of a Survivor, Chapter 1This story may contain adult content. |
| Written by Amie Kerlin | |
| Wednesday, 06 August 2008 | |
The Sinking... The older man sits across the booth from me and orders a coffee for himself while I get my papers in order and set my recorder on the center of the table. He is wearing a U.S.S. Indianapolis hat over his graying hair, and he's looking a bit melancholy. After his coffee arrives, he begins to look a little uncomfortable. "You're sure you're ok to talk about this?" I ask. "Yeah, It will be fine once we get started I'm sure" he replies looking a little pained. "Alright then. Let's start at the beginning" I tell him. He clears his throat once, closes his eyes and begins...
******************************************************** I was 19 when I first boarded the Indianapolis in July of ‘45. We had gone to deliver some parts for an A-bomb, called 'little boy' to an island called Tinian. Hush hush stuff. That bomb was eventually dropped on Hiroshima. After that we cruised on back to Guam to get our new orders. That was my first trip at sea and it went pretty unremarkably. We always had the risk of being torpedoed by the Japanese, but I was young and I figured it wouldn't happen to me so soon. Our orders in Guam were to get over to Leyte Gulf and join up with the fellows from the Idaho so that we could get ready for the invasion on Japan. There were 1,196 people on the Indianapolis when we left on July 28th from Guam and had a pretty uneventful first couple of days. At 00:14 on July 30 I was on my way to the deck, I had a bad case of insomnia, when the first torpedo almost knocked me down. So now I started running to my battle station still not clear on if we'd been hit or if we just hit something in the water. It was pure pandemonium on the deck. That first torpedo had taken out the bow completely. While we were all still trying to figure out what the hell had happened, the second torpedo hit us mid-ship where we had some powder stored across from the fuel tank. The explosion that resulted was huge. We all got knocked on our butts, there was an extremely loud cracking sound, and all the lights went out. It was so dark then. This all happened so fast, when I looked toward the bow again all I saw was water, the bow was going down. I realized the ship was still underway so we were just scooping water in. Everywhere I looked, people were screaming and running. The smell of smoke and burnt flesh was overwhelming. I heard someone yelling ‘Abandon Ship' so I ran to grab a life jacket and headed to where the rafts were. By then though, the ship was sinking pretty fast so there was no use looking for one. When I got in the water, I was immediately sucked down from the suction of the big ship going under. I kicked with all I had to the surface and when I thought my lungs were going to burst I finally broke free and I was gasping for air. All around me there were other men swimming and floating along. Many of them were wounded and there were a lot of men burned from the explosion. Some of us tried to care for them as best we could, but there were no supplies. We were out there with nothing but a few rafts and not everybody had life jackets. When we turned to look for the ship it was gone.
To be continued....... Copyright 2008 Amie Kerlin |
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| Last Updated ( Tuesday, 12 August 2008 ) |
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