these hurry-up training programs for young officers of the line. We then
 were going to go to various kinds of ships and you got your choice of
 ship, depending on whether you had done pretty well in school. I had my
 choice and chose a destroyer. I thought that would be what I would really
 like to do. If I had to be in service I felt I would like to be in the
 navy, and I would enjoy a small ship. So I was assigned to a destroyer
 that was not quite finished. It was being built, so I went to Norfolk
 from Columbia which is where the midshipman school was, the University of
 Columbia. I went down to Norfolk to await the ship, and while we were
 there we had additional training--fire training and all sorts of things.
 One type of training was judo training, and in that I suffered a kind of
 accident. I banged heads with another person, which began a difficult
 period for me. Unconsciousness initially, and then some related problems,
 which caused me to wind up in the hospital, and then later, in the
 National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, a beautiful enormous
 place. It was new when I went there, and even though I was a midshipman,
 I was an officer, and had a big room all to myself. I was there for
 several months and was operated on. I had a minor kind of little brain
 operation by a person named Captain Craig. He was a captain in the navy
 and the head neurosurgeon of the Mayo Clinic of Rochester, Minnesota. He
 performed surgery to see if they could find what was causing problems with
 my vision and migrain headaches and that sort of thing. They told me
 after this exploratory operation that they had not accomplished anything,
 that they were disappointed. As a result of that, the wheels ground kind
 of slowly, but I was subsequently discharged. I mention this because we
 come full circle in 1980. That is the thing for which I was operated on
 just after I retired. And then they did find, indeed, did I tell you this
 last time?

D: Just a little bit of it. Go ahead.

R: They found a malformation of blood vessels in my brain--right back here in
 what they call the left orbital section. I think it was an improper
 connection of the veins and arteries in such a fashion that the strong
 pulse of the artery tended at times to crack through the weaker tissue of
 the vein and cause bleeds, as they are now called. This caused the
 migraine and eye trouble, and sometimes black outs. Well, they had partly
 diagnosed this in the navy. The skilled neurosurgeons of that time were
 on the right track, but they did not have the marvelous diagnostic things
 that they have today. A surgeon who lives about three good wood shoots
 over this way, a friend of mine named Ron Mauldin, who has better
 equipment, a scanner and all, was able to accurately identify this. He
 operated on me for seventeen and a half hours. Four surgeons using
 microscopic techniques, were able rotationally with great skill, to remove
 that. I have got some little lumps here. I accused Mauldin of not
 replacing his divots. He is a golfer too. I also told him after I was
 partly recovered that I was reminded of a remark by Harvey Cushing, who I
 think is the most famous of all neurosurgeons. He said, "Never pull on
 anything. You just do not dare pull on anything in the brain because you
 pull a little bit here and you pull a little bit there and the first thing
 you know, you are pulling on the soul." He was jesting, but only partly.
 This is apparently a standard gag in brain surgery. So I told Mauldin
 later that I thought he must have pulled on my three wood wire because I
 was not able to hit my fairway woods after I got around to playing golf
 again. But in any event, I am talking too much. The point is that the


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