Being an American ship, the food was wonderful and I had no seasickness to spoil my appetite. The meal just alternated between steak, chicken and turkey. After each meal we took oranges, apples, or bananas up on deck and ate them while laying in the sunshine. Although there were only about 200 of us, one meal we ate 75 jars of peanut butter. The seas were quite calm the first few days out, so we spent most of the time on deck to avoid the dark and unpleasant below decks area. There were ships all around us and I could count twenty plus destroyers for escort as there were still German subs operating.
At about the middle of the Atlantic we ran into very stormy weather with high seas. When you were an deck it sometimes looked as though our ship was alone and the other ships would come up from behind the swells only to disappear again. While laying in the hammocks trying to sleep at night we would hang on to keep from falling out. The bow, where I was, would come way up out of the water, shudder quite violently, then fall to hit the water hard. The force was so hard that it gradually broke all the light bulbs in the ceiling. This weather was probably normal for the Navy, but airmen were not used to it and worried about what might happen. After a few days like this the weather improved for the remainder of the trip home.
When we emerged from the storm there were only about one third of the ships left in the convoy and we wondered what had happened to all the rest. We later learned that they had turned off for other ports. The guys from the South were heading for southern ports and those of us from the Northeast were going to New Jersey ports. As we neared the U.S. the seas were much calmer and for a couple of days we enjoyed sitting on deck and watching the porpoises swim around the ship. We landed in New Jersey and were taken to Camp Dix from which we had departed a year and a half before. It was late May and we were looking forward to being home by Memorial Day.
When we arrived at Camp Dix the first thing we did was go single file through a room for a medical checkup. A doctor was standing there and asked "how do you feel?" I said 'Okay' and he said "Next". That was the extent of the medical checkup we got and of course no one complained about anything because all they wanted to do was to get home again. We were afraid that if we told of any problems they would put us in the hospital and keep us for weeks. We didn't want that to happen......even John Brady with the ruptured appendix went through the line quickly.