and living with my family in Alliance, Nebraska, I was sitting in the living room one Saturday with my sister Veronica, who was 12 or so, and she asked me what my earliest memory was.
I told Veronica that I remembered, as a baby or a toddler, waking up in a bed to a loud siren. I remembered crying, and many of the other little children in the room were crying in their beds too. Soon, Mom came to my bedside with little Veronica, and picked me up. Then, putting a lifejacket on me, like the one Veronica was wearing, Mom carried me up some stairs, to the deck of the ship.
We three stood at the railing with other women and children, hearing the siren blow and watching lifeboats being lowered into the dark, churning water. Mom said in these exact words, "We might have to go swimming." Looking out at the dark ocean, I thought, in these exact words: *I don't want to.* The ship was rocking and men were shouting as they ran back and forth on the deck.
That was the end of the memory except for a flash of being carried by Mom back down the stairs.
Veronica said all she remembered that may have been from that time was that when we were little, we once got lifejackets put on us, and Mom tied ours to hers.
Mom had come around the corner from the kitchen and had stood listening as I was telling Veronica about my memory. "Who told you about that?" Mom asked me when I was through.
"No one. I remember it," I replied.
"You were a baby!" she said.
"Well," I said, "Dad wasn't with us, Veronica doesn't remember anything about it but maybe the lifejackets, and I don't know who the other people were, so who could have told me? Anyway, Mom, I REMEMBER it."
She gave me a long look and then said quietly, "I did say we might have to go swimming."
She told Veronica and me that it had happened in late 1944 on our journey from India to America aboard a U.S. troop transport ship. Just before dawn one morning, an enemy submarine torpedoed our ship. It missed and was destroyed by a patrolling American submarine.
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