It's been more than half a century since we rode the boats and here we are- older, fatter, grayer or balder, and hopefully wiser- telling sea stories on the Baltimore waterfront. Whatever- those plywood jockey days of the first half of the Nineteen Forties represented, for most of us, some of the defining moments of our lives.

     When we received our orders to Melville we felt that being selected for duty with the Mosquito Fleet was like a coronation; we were so proud. We had bought one of those silver tie clips even before we reported. However, when we first strolled down the hill toward Narragansett Bay and saw those deadly looking boats nestled in the lagoon some of us wondered just what we had gotten ourselves into by volunteering.

     We started out not knowing a heat exchanger from an auxiliary generator or a lazarette from a flux gate or a vee drive from a butterfly muffler. But we learned quickly at the hands of those salty Ron Four boat captains who never missed a chance to tell us how rugged life was "out in the area" or criticize our boat handling and station keeping. They spent most of their time drinking coffee in the chart room and arguing with the equally-salty Instructors about the relative merits of the Elco over the Higgins or vice versa.

     We regularly made Torpedo runs on the Vineyard Haven light ship, patrolled outside the anti-submarine nets, ran missions to Block Island, and practiced boat handling at that decrepit dock in Fall River. We learned what made a Torpedo run, field stripped a 50 caliber, passed aircraft and ship recognition but, if truth be told, most of us never became proficient in blinker.

     Our nights and weekends were spent at the Newport Casino officers' club or the Skoll Room of the Viking with that IITYWYBMAD slogan over the bar. For a change of pace we would go to Providence to admire those waitresses in the transparent skirts at the Bacchante Room of the Biltmore or go sailing at the Bristol Yacht Club.

     Then suddenly one day- unless we were lucky enough to draw new construction at Bayonne or New Orleans- we found ourselves actually "out in the area" in the Channel or the Med, the Aleutians, the Southwest Pacific or the Philippines or elsewhere. We spent our tours of duty nursemaiding LCI's and LST'S, laying water-hugging smoke for invasions, sinking barges, fighting E-boats, strafing beaches, ferrying admirals and correspondents, scouting up rivers, dodging Kamikazes, dropping off coast watchers or guerrillas behind enemy lines, evacuating wounded, gathering local intelligence, fishing downed pilots out of the water, drawing shore battery fire for the fly boys- in other words everything except that for which the boats had been designed.

     Who would trade the memory of returning from a successful patrol under a fuschia and magenta dawn sky with a broom tied to the radar mast and the engines whining and the boat skimming over a sea as smooth as glass. She was up on her step because the Chief Motor Mac conned the Exec by saying "lets wind 'em up and burn out the carbon."

     Remember that sense of pride when that grease- stained guy riding the center engine stuck his head out of the engine room to shout that "that was great Skipper, you docked her with only two shifts."