Ernie:. Ernest Borgnine

      No sooner had I gotten home than we got a telephone call from a neighbor who asked if we were listening to the radio. We weren’t, and he said, “Turn it on, quick!”

      We heard that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. I thought of my crewmates, my ship, my country. I remember thinking, “Oh, my God, what am I going to do?”

      I went and got out my uniform and my mother said, “No, no, please. Don’t go. Wait till they call you.”

      I said, “Mom, I’ve got to go!”

      She said, “No! I want you to wait until they call you.”

      Well, she probably saved my life. Had I gone then, I’d have been one of the first men sent to the South Pacific, where our early losses were horrendous. So I went to work at a construction site and one day she called the office and asked to speak with me. She said, in a strong voice that gave me courage, “You got a card. You have to go.”

      I went home and put on my first-class gunner’s mate uniform. I went to the local recruiting station and was told to report to the First Naval District in New York City. When I arrived, they looked up my name and said, “Oh, yes. You’ve got in-shore patrol over here at 125th Street.”

      Okay—I knew what shore patrol was, but I had no idea what in-shore patrol might be. Walking the docks? Checking for mines or enemy submarines?

      No.

      He said, “They’ve got a boat up at 125th Street that picks up the kids from Columbia University to teach them the rudiments of guns and everything. That’s where they want you.”

      They signed me up and I went aboard ship. It was a converted yacht called the Sylph, donated to the Navy to help in the war against subs on the Atlantic. It belonged to the man who invented the Murphy bed.

      I spent my first night aboard the Sylph in a comfortable bunk in my own cabin. The next morning this guy by the name of Borguignon came to introduce me to the skipper. Everybody called him “Borgi 1” and me “Borgi 2.” We went up and knocked on the skipper’s door. We heard a “Yes, who’s there?”

      I said, “Borgnine, sir, a new first-class gunner’s mate who’s just come aboard.”

      He said, “Just a moment.”

      We heard some fiddling around with the door and finally he said “Okay, come in.” We walked in and the skipper was still in his bunk. He had a hand underneath his pillow and was looking up. It was like we’d caught him with a girlie magazine or something. I gave him my credentials and told him where I came from and what I had been doing.

      He said, “Okay, have Borguignon show you around.”

      As we started to leave he got up on one elbow. I saw his pillow flip over and there was a .45 in his hand. We got the hell out of there in a hurry. I later found out the captain was frightened of a certain character aboard ship, the chief carpenter’s mate. The guy hated the assignment because he stood around doing nothing most of the time, and he didn’t like the skipper, who was always on his tail yelling at him to find something to do. Well, there just wasn’t a lot of repair work or maintenance, so the carpenter got a lot of shore leave. Then he’d come aboard drunk and would yell down through the ventilator, “You son-of-a-bitch dirty bastard! Come up here, I’ll kill you, you no-good bastard.”

      I asked Borgi 1 why the skipper took that. He said the skinny little guy was just afraid of the big carpenter. Period.

      The chief carpenter’s mate kept putting in for a transfer and one day Washington granted his request. So they transferred him to a great big vessel that was going to take stuff over to England, carrying planes and everything. He left happy, knowing he’d be setting sail in less than a week.

      About three days later, the captain himself got orders to leave and guess where he went? To the same ship where the carpenter’s mate had gone! Well, he had no intention of going and that ship sailed without him. It was the last time the ship was ever seen. It got caught in a hundred-mile-an-hour gale off Newfoundland and went down. But that’s not the end of the story. The carpenter was the only one who was not lost at sea. He said he refused to drown because he hated the captain so much and wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

      I lost track of both men after that, though if the carpenter’s still around I’m sure his hate is as rich and deep as it was sixty-seven years ago!

      After that skipper left we had another guy who was a lieutenant junior grade and they gave him command of the USS Sylph. He was a Yale graduate and still pretty much of a frat boy. He got along great with the kids from Columbia.

      Throughout the war I found myself hopscotching up and down the East Coast from Rhode Island to Florida on a variety of assignments. One day I was sitting on the john—in my private john, naturally—and there was a knock on the door.

      The seaman said, “Guess what?”

      “What?” I asked, annoyed. Couldn’t this wait?

      “They just dropped a bomb on Japan that was the equivalent to about twenty tons of TNT. It wiped out everything as far as the eye could see.”

      I said to myself “What a stupid thing? How can one bomb possibly do all that?”

      Well, we turned on the radio and there it was. The United States had dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, on the city of Hiroshima. The writing was on the wall. We were all quite exuberant about it.

      Three days later President Truman gave the order to drop a second bomb, this time on Nagasaki.

      Those two bombs undoubtedly saved the lives of millions on both sides. The Japanese were not afraid. I mean, they were still fighting valiantly and we had barely scratched their homeland. And now it was over. No more of our boys, or theirs, no more mothers’ sons, had to die. That’s why I consider to this day that President Truman was one of the most wonderful presidents we’ve had since Lincoln.

      Delighted as I was, I now had to face something I hadn’t had to deal with for nearly ten years:

      “Okay, kid. You’re twenty-eight. What do you do with the rest of your life?”