[Rockin Robbins]

GWXers have been worked over by the escorts from hell. Brits are the best. They draw that circle of maximum battery range and work it until little pieces of mangled submariner float to the surface. They do not quit. They do not miss. You must beat them. The bottom of the Atlantik is littered with the corpses of good U-Boat Kapitans who never lived long enough to see a single target, much less damage or sink one, whose sunken hulks still hold all the torpedoes they left port with.

The laughter of the GWXer is a haunted, bitter laughter born of meeting death on its own terms and having survived....last time. It is the acid laughter of those who consider themselves already dead, scoffing at the pessimism of those in the Pacific who can rightly expect to survive. A GWXer dreams of confronting those as "difficult" as the Japanese, but knows that his fate is of a nature vastly more grim.

The GWXer knows that 90% of his buddies will never feel the land beneath their feet again. His present desparate situation is his badge of manhood. All others are somehow lesser beings. He expects that somehow he will find a way to be in that 10% who return to Lorient just one more time. That is as far ahead as he dares to contemplate. For him, this war will never end. He laughs a knowing, haunted, wise and doomed laugh from hell itself.