Word: shipful
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...Japanese aircraft carriers and battleships were idiosyncratic, unique, individually laid down in Yokosuka and Shikoku shipyards and fitted with quirky characteristics. Superstructures set too far aft. Smokestacks emanating from the ship's hull. These were the vessels that captured my imagination. For one thing, these ships were all at the bottom of the Pacific, heroically overwhelmed, it seemed to me, by the sheer numbers of nondescript American ships. And the Tamiya Waterline models, with their jeweler's attention to detail and scholar's obsessive historical accuracy, somehow evoked the mystery of these lost ships. The kits didn't bring...
When I was 20, I lived in Paris in an apartment in the fifth arrondissement. Near my flat was a hobby shop specializing in military miniatures. There was one wall of ship models, and among them were a few Tamiya Waterlines, noticeably more expensive than the English and French kits. I bought one, and every afternoon for about a week I sat at my little typing table and assembled the Fubuki, a Japanese destroyer. It was a tiny little ship, no longer than a pencil and no wider than my thumb. But it was as fine and filigreed...
...marvelously describes scenes and contrasts them with what their inhabitants are up to. “West Africa,” he writes, “is the land where God came to learn to wait. And then wait a little longer.” He describes how a ship of relief supplies for the Liberian civil war has to wait for rice. And then wait for the slings to load the rice, and the man who knows where the slings are, and then the man with the keys to that place. And so on. And then, he cuts...
...mountains and then a white belt. I thought, 'That's odd--I've never seen that before.'" The white haze made the small white hull of the Ehime Maru hard to distinguish. Waddle did not linger, though, since he was eager to impress his guests. He ordered the ship to dive deep and then rocket back up to the surface. In retrospect he concedes he was pushing ahead too quickly. "I didn't give the men the time they needed to do their jobs. I was so confident in my abilities and what I had seen, I was convinced...
This is what recurs in his nightmares--the lack of control. "I am back on the ship, but I am not captain, and there is no captain in command." Some nights he cannot sleep at all, lying awake in a cold sweat, holding his wife Jill...