A COMPANY OF MEN

About the Book

 The year was 1943; World War II was at a climactic midpoint. High School graduate Ralph Warman, eager to join the war effort is finally accepted by the Merchant Marine where his bad vision and underage is overlooked by the desperate short handed service. The story opens as the youth walks along a pier in Charleston , SC to join the crew of an old cargo ship.

After a boy’s school and training with youthful peers, Ralph presupposed a camp-like atmosphere aboard ship. How wrong he was! From his first shaky climb up the swaying inclined gangway  to his signing off as a newly promoted deck sailor two months later, his naivete is continuously shattered by undreamed of and unimaginable  reality. A product of middle European immigrant  parents, his firmly established moral and ethical upbringing is challenged, questioned, and sometimes modified as events and people impinge on his new awareness.

Aboard ship, both coming and going, Ralph learns new skills, becomes a deck sailor, is nearly washed overboard in a storm , and is almost killed by a deranged shipmate. Among other seamen he finds loyalty, compassion, unflagging courage, and code of ethics and behavior  that is effective, however strange to him. This  introspection, his compromises and acceptances of reality,becomes the keystone of his maturation to manhood.

Ashore, Dakar, in French  Colonial West Africa, opens an entirely new world, with new rules, for the virgin youth. After following his shipmates from bar to bar, then to an almost  unbelievable sex show, Ralph finally blunders his way through his first prostitute. During daytime free hours he spends a lot of time in the native market and makes friends, and sleeps one night with a native woman shop owner who has become attracted to him.

Both the zenith and nadir of Ralph’s stay in Dakar however, is reached when he meets and falls in love with the beautiful daughter of the Commandant of the French Foreign Legion unit stationed there. The affair is short lived and innocent. It ends two days later when the girl and her father  are trapped by local natives in an uprising and are killed. Ralph no longer goes ashore in Dakar.

At the story’s end, back in Port of New York, as Ralph walks down the gangway to go home, he really now understands seamen and the reality and dangers of their lives; he feels proud and strong that he has been accepted and respected as one of  “A Company of Men”.

About the Author

Sailor... Soldier... Scientist... Teacher... Businessman... and in between, sometime writer. That sort of sums it up; not quite a Renaissance man, but a full flavored individual. He Joined the Merchant Marine at 16 and learned what the 'Company Of Men' was about in challenging the sea and Normandy during World War Two. Then a stint in the Army learning massive coordination and organization, and the meaning of infinite wisdom when the Army assigned an ex merchant marine expert sailor to a Graphic Arts, section,promoted him to Corporal, and left him managing a small military museum for two years. The next thirty five or forty years were devoted to Science and Teaching. Columbia University and Union Graduate School provided a Bs., Ms.(Cand) and Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography. Did research, wrote and presented some forty research papers and taught all through my career at all levels from High School to Graduate School