Word: aldrich
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With him was Radioman Gene Aldrich, 22, a husky, gabby, self-confident Missouri farm boy, and Ordnanceman Tony Pastula, shy, dreamy, sandy-haired son of Polish immigrants. After CCC camps in the West, they had both joined the Navy to see the world. But with 41-year-old Dixon, whose first hitch began in 1919, the Navy was a business. He took charge as soon as his beloved bomber sank from sight...
...Gentle Thing. After three days of drifting, the three men had talked themselves out. They knew all about every woman any one of them had so much as kissed. They could recite back to Aldrich the names of the three cows on his old man's farm; and they warned him not to describe again how the peach trees looked in the spring. Pastula sang softly until his throat became too parched. Dixon, impatient, worried but cheerfully profane, decided to head for islands in the south. He drew a chart on a piece of canvas. With the salvaged line...
...fifth day the first rain came. Dixon made "the lads" take off their underwear, tear it into strips which soaked up the rain and could be squeezed into an oar pocket. The next morning Aldrich used the pocketknife to spear a fish which "looked something like what we used to call a pumpkin perch. We ate the liver, all the innards and some of the flesh...
With My Crossbow. That night an albatross landed on the raft. Aldrich killed it with the pistol and Dixon, the only one who could swim, dived overboard and retrieved it. The men ate the organs and the entrails, but put the unplucked flesh away to save. In the night it glowed with phosphorescence and Dixon threw it overboard. That was a tough thing to do. But during the night it rained again. "The drawers worked fine," Dixon said. "We all had a good drink...
...seventh day Aldrich slashed out with the pocketknife again, this time gilled a four-foot shark and yanked it aboard. It flopped down on Pastula in the bottom of the raft. He rolled over and pinned it like a wrestler. With their pliers the men ripped the shark open. Dixon remembered reading that sharks stored up vitamins in their liver. They joked about that. The liver was "very tasty," so were two sardines in the shark's stomach which the men said "must have been partly digested because they tasted as if they had been cooked...