Dont' go jumpin head of yourself, Chief. We thought things were gettin all clean and quiet another time, summer of 58. Cannons stirred the night. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn't see the first fish for about a half-hour. Cat. 18-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know, was that our mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, catfish come cruisin' by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the catfish come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and sometimes that catfish he go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that catfish looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a catfish is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn't even seem to be livin'... 'til he eats ya whole, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah, then you hear that echoin gulp. Sometimes it's messy, river turns red. You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don't know how many catfish there were, maybe a thousand... maybe 1. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday mornin', Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Portsmouth. Billiard player. He was bobbin in the water, half-asleep, barely holdin on to himself. I reached out to shake him. But he was gone. Disappeared, pulled under, never to resurface. A whisker slapped me in the face. At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Bastard here. Anyway, he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol' fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin' for my turn. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the catfish took the rest, June the 29th, 1958. Anyway, that river ain't clean.