elsie item issue 69 - USS Landing Craft Infantry

OK, Shipmates! It’s that time again! Here are
a few more...pull up an easy chair, relax and
get ready for some more LCI yarns. The first
two come from George Weber, who served on
LCI(FF) 370.
About Those Eye Exams
Arthur Chermon LCI(L) 364 wrote about ‘fudging’
on passing the recruitment eye exam.
Here’s my version of that endeavor made on
my part.
I was a senior in high school during the
1942-43 school year. I had heard from many
sources that [1] If your grades were good, [2]
If you had accumulated a reasonable number
of credits [3] If you had less than one semester
left before graduation, and [4] If you were
younger than 18 [whereupon you were required
to register for the draft] - THEN if you volunteered
for the military you would receive your
diploma and be allowed to select which service
you wished to join and which service
school you wished to attend.
Well, I could fill the bill on all those requirements,
by the skin of my teeth. I would be 18
on Jan. 12, 1943. School would be resuming
after Christmas break 5 days before that birthday.
So if I attended four of those five days, I
would have less than a semester left before
graduation. So I planned on driving over to
Terre Haute, Indiana on the 11th of January
[my last day at age 17] and volunteer. But to
make certain that the info I had was true, on
the 10th, at school, I went down and spoke to
the high school principal. Yes, that’s true, he
assured me. Then - to my surprise - he called
a ‘whole school assembly,’ and gave a long
speech praising me for my patriotism. Being a
bookish introvert, I was very embarrassed by
this.
10
More Sea Stories!
Our school, out in the boondocks, had no
health office or school nurse, so I had never
had an eye exam. It being the Great
Depression, I had never seen a doctor - what
you did only if it seemed certain you were
about to die! So I was quite shocked the next
day when I flunked the eye exam, and was
rejected from enlistment.
Fortunately I was left alone for awhile in the
room with the eye chart, and I proceeded to
memorize the middle three lines on it. Then I
drove as fast as I could the 100 miles to
Indianapolis - the nearest other recruiting station
- getting there just 10 minutes before the
stopped beginning physicals at 3 PM. And
they had the same eye chart, so I ‘passed.’
Upon arrival at Great Lakes boot camp, we had
another physical with the same eye chart, so I
passed again.
And here’s George’s second sea story:
Some Inconveniences of an
Increase in One’s Sense of Smell
After having departed from Pearl Harbor
enroute to the invasion of Iwo Jima, we were
never near any land mass other than small
atolls and isolated islands of the Pacific until
the war was over. Being away from any traffic
fumes or industrial odors, we gradually
regained our sense of smell. At first we
became aware of smells that we could smell
all along, like cooking cabbage, which now
became so strong you almost wanted to jump
overboard to avoid it!
Then we became acutely aware of our own
body smells. With no water condensers on our
pipsqueak of a vessel we had to conserve
what water we had in our potable water tanks.
Water was used ONLY for cooking, drinking,