“At any rate, I joined the Navy when I was 17, went to boot camp at Sampson, New York. Very cold up there. Why I joined the Navy? I have no idea. I had never even seen the ocean before. But I went to boot camp."

“We arrived in Scotland in the Firth of Clyde, and we docked about ten miles south of Glasgow within sight of Brown Shipbuilding, which was where the Queen Elizabeth was built in the first place. There were 15,000 men aboard, which was the most that…

"Now we had the skipper on the bridge, the helmsman below him, and the engine room below him, and the radar man. And the fifth man fired the rockets, and that dubious distinction was mine. I got to do the firing. Well, somehow in some sort of…