Kim1 Simon Kim Mrs.

Hinkle 6th Period Language Arts 5/5/10 Ship in Peril People burning, people hopeless, people dying, and people you havent probably met in your entire life. You see the suffering and you ask yourself, how and why did this have to happen to us. When is help going to come and pick up us in this dreaded, cold, oiled filled ocean. This is the vision of what happen to the men of the USS Indianapolis battleship. In the novel Left for Dead the theme is that one mans life at sea could change his life forever. Hunter Scott was an ordinary kid trying to get a history fair project idea. He was watching the movie Jaws and he asked his dad what Captain Quint was talking about. Hunter was wondering what was the USS Indianapolis was. His dad told him to research it and see what you could find. Turns out it was a battleship that got destroyed by a torpedo in WW2. Hunter tries to find more information, so he puts an ad on a newspaper article about how he wanted information about the USS Indianapolis. A person named Maurice Glenn Bell contacted him and told him to meet him at his place in Moble, Alabama. Mr. Bell gave Hunter plenty amount of information. He told his story about how he served on the ship and he gave him the remaining survivors list. This greatly helped Hunter because he would contact those survivors and try to get more information. There was one other thing that Mr. Bell told him, it was about the USS Indianapoliss Captain McVay. He was courtmaterialized because it was said that he didnt give the orders to abandon ship and he didnt zigzag once he saw the torpedoes fire one radar. This made Hunter Scott find more

Kim2 about this person. He wanted to try to find a way to clear Captain McVays name. Hunter was now on mission, not just to complete the history project, but also to restore the USS Indianapoliss honor. Captain McVay was a good captain. He led the USS Indianapolis into two invasions in Iwo Jima. He was successful; the ship shot all of the kamikazes down before it hit its target. However in July 30,1945, at precisely 11:54, Captain Mochitsura Hashimoto shot six torpedoes at the USS Indianapolis. At 12:02, the Indianapolis sunk. When it was sinking, Captain McVay sent SOS messages to three different areas and had sent an order to abandon ship. Once the sailors got into the ocean a lot of them started to panic. Sailors were covered with oil and all were very tired. Sharks and hallucinations caused more deaths. However there were people that helped some sailors. People like Cozell Lee Smith and Morgan Moseley decided that they would not die in vain and saved other sailors from sharks and drowning. Everyone though was very tired, sticky, and scared. It p