Voyage Two
SS Edwin W. Moore - Page 4
We were gone from the ship for three days. We were drunk most of the time. We could buy a quart of red wine for $.30. We bought a big wicker basket with two handles and filled it with wine bottles for a couple of bucks from this woman. It wasn't half bad either. I remember sitting drinking and watching an old man make a coffin. He was carving a crucifix on the lid.
We wanted to go to Pompeii, so we started walking. We were both in dungarees and peacoats. We lucked out and this Army jeep picked us up, an officer and a soldier. We told them who we were and where we wanted to go. They were friendly and took us all the way to Pompeii. We spent most of the day there walking through the ruins. An old man, a guide who spoke some English, attached himself to us. He tried to explain the history of the ruins to us in broken English. He showed us some really sexual art painted on the walls of this one house. Men and women doing all kinds of explicit things. He said it had been a Roman whore house. Pompeii was impressive and I am glad that I made it there.
We walked all the way back to Naples. On our way a jeep came by and asked directions to some place. I thought that I had just seen a sign to there a ways back so I told this lieutenant to go this way. Well, he went off down this dirt road barreling. We walked on and came to a sign with the name of the place he wanted to get to, and we had given him the wrong directions. Hope nothing bad happened to him from our mistake. I don't know where the road he took went, but we weren't all that far from the German lines.
The countryside was beautiful. The hills were full of olive orchards and fruit trees. I don't know why it surprised
me, but I hadn't expected to see so many fruit trees. Of course there were grape
vines staked up all over. I'm half Italian and I wished that I could have gotten
to Northern Italy because my ancestors had come from Genoa, but I never made it north of Naples.
There were American soldiers everywhere along the roads. Man, they looked beat. We talked to some of them. They were just back from the front for some rest. They were dirty and sitting and laying along side of the roads or in the fields. I guess they had had it pretty rough because quite a few of them said that they
didn't want to go back up there. We heard this one G. I. tell an officer to kiss
his ass. We didn't hear what the officer had said to the soldier to piss him
off. We asked another soldier, wouldn't the guy get in trouble for talking to
an officer like that, but he laughed. He said that the officer didn't want to
mess with that guy. Some of these combat soldiers were pretty rugged.