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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



let which is a part of the navy's working 

 costume. 



The decks began to offer sights that 

 were at once absurd and pathetic. One 

 thinks of a seaman as a lively person 

 with thick shoulders and an excellent 

 saddle-colored coat of tan, and spring in 

 his heels ; but these youngsters who tim- 

 idly came out of their civilian husks 

 offered studies in white knobs and bony 

 angles. 



Their elbows were sharp as boat-hooks 

 and their poor little forearms were puny 

 and pale as the stems of clay pipes, and 

 their feet, slender and weak from years 

 in leather boxes, stepped gingerly upon 

 the rivet-studded deck. 



Then the sunburning began. One sun- 

 burns by order in the navy, just as one 

 gets vaccinated or shaved. The first day 

 in the sleeveless singlets produced large 

 blotches of bright and inflammatory red 

 upon their virgin shoulders. By the sec- 

 ond day some had neatly blistered. 



There must be a virtue in sunburn. 

 In another month these anemic, appeal- 

 ing kids had clothed their young skele- 

 tons with fine muscles and were as hard 

 as so many sides of frozen beef. Some 

 had begun to sprout little torpedo beards, 

 too. But that is another story. 



WHAT GUANTANAMO MEANS TO THE 

 ATLANTIC FLEET 



How many know that the United 

 States has a plant of extraordinary value 

 and efficiency at the Bay of Guantana- 

 mo? Or what it means to the Atlantic 

 fleet each year? I did not. I'll con- 

 fess it. 



I had a vague idea that the fleet each 

 winter visited a cactus-bordered beach 

 on which the men walked for health's 

 sake, and that from time to time it went 

 outside for battle practice. 



I knew there were a couple of tiny 

 towns near by — Caimanera and Buco- 

 ron — where rum, roulette, and ruin 

 might be had at a price. But the back- 

 ground to the picture was always bare 

 white sand and cruelly hard sunlight and 

 scrubby bushes, with a restless surf beat- 

 ing at an inhospitable strand. 



That impression was utterly wrong. 



Guantanamo Bay lies at the southern 



