My Dad was a helmsman on Texaco tankers during WWII. For him, a country boy from West Virginia, those were days of excitement but not fear. Everything from hitchhiking to New York to be sure he got a berth, watching the ball drop in Times Square in 1944, to wrapping his legs around the steering post to keep from getting washed overboard during a hurricane, to navigating "torpedo alley" off the USA coast was grand adventure. He still doesn't have a sense of the peril he was in. When asked about any sense of peril, he shrugs and says, "When you are 17 or 18 years old, you think you are invincible. I was never scared. I thought bad things happened to other people, but never to me."
He only started talking about his maritime experiences about 15 years ago. He talks about that time of his life with considerable nostalgia. He grew up near the Ohio River and talks about how, after the war, he would listen to the whistles of the barges at night, and think maybe he wanted to go back into the Merchant Marines, or at least work the river barges that plied the Kanawha, Ohio and Mississippi.
He might have done it, too, if he hadn't met and become smitten by Mom. (63 years later, he is just as smitten!)