The sailors’ lips split and cracked. Their tongues swelled until they could barely speak. The sun dried their wet faces, leaving salt caked in their eyes and making their skin peel off in flakes. Crazed with thirst, men drank the ocean water and became first delirious, then psychotic. Knives were drawn, fights broke out over the scrounged rations and more bodies sank to the bottom of the ocean. Sometimes fights broke out over things that didn’t exist—one sailor insisted a ship was on the horizon bringing food, water and girls, while his buddy insisted the Indy was down below, perfectly fine and intact and serving chow right now. They killed each other over hallucinations.

“And we just watched,” Minor said. “About the third day, nobody had anything for anyone but themselves. A buddy slipped under the surface and you thought, Well, there he goes. So long. But the worst was the sharks. They came on the first day and never let up.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“You’d watch them swimming around below you. Waiting. Planning. A buddy would get separated from his group, you’d hear a scream, he’d go under and a few seconds later, his empty life jacket would pop up. The rest of us would paddle over together and retrieve it because… Well, he didn’t need it anymore and it was useful.

“There was another cargo net like ours, maybe fifteen men clinging to it. One minute just floating along and the next, at least ten sharks were attacking. The water was a bloody froth. Hands and limbs getting tossed up and about. It happened so quick. Those men barely let out a yell. Some of them didn’t even put up a fight. And the rest of us watching…we just watched. These were buddies. Good buddies. And we just stared like it was no big deal. Well, there they go. So long.

“By the last day, our little oil slick was more dead than living. Finally a search plane flew over, and we all started yelling and splashing and slapping the water with whatever object we could find. All that weird apathy disappeared in a flash. We were screaming and crying our lungs out. If the plane missed us, I swore I was calling it a day. Lovely party, but it’s time to go. I was done.

“The rescuers started dropping survival craft. The dead were like fucking shoals, you had to barrel your way through corpses to get to the craft. More fights as everyone tried to pile on at once. Then the surface ships showed up and things moved faster. I helped this one sub-lieutenant get in a lifeboat. He’d been hanging next to me the whole ordeal. We kind of pooled our mental resources but by the end, he was in real bad shape, I honestly didn’t think he’d make it. But he did and when he saw me later in the hospital, he said…”