I've Seen Greatness: A riveting, first-person account of the miraculous survival of crew members from the USS Indianapolis, as witnessed by one of the rescuers. (World War II).

As a young lieutenant, Adrian Marks piloted an amphibious patrol plane that investigated the discovery of survivors from the USS Indianapolis. Knowing that time was running out, he disobeyed standing orders never to land his craft in the open sea and was able to pick up 56 survivors. The following is an abridged version of a speech Marks delivered to Indianapolis survivors at a reunion observing the 40th anniversary of their rescue.

I met you 40 years ago. I met you on a sparkling, sun-swept afternoon of horror. I have known you through a balmy tropic night of fear. I will never forget you.

I suppose that through the years which have so swiftly run, at least ten thousand times I have recalled some portion of the day when our fates were crossed. But the memories which surface in my retrospection are not of horror, not of blackness, not of fear. I think of little things. Of things as small as honor, courage and as simple honesty. Things so small -- and yet so great -- that they form the cornerstone of our society.

Some of my reflections have been so astonishing as to make me think miracles.

Sometimes we say that we are living in a world of miracles. Things beyond the wildest imagination of our forefathers are now everyday experiences. We sit in our living rooms and watch events occurring half a world away. We bounce our messages off artificial moons that hang stationary in the sky. The computer that sits alongside my desk is a never-ending source of astounding revelations to me. These miracles I have learned to accept, and even to understand.

But there is a miracle that is beyond all of my power of understanding. It is the miracle that you are here today, and not with your shipmates at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

What were the chances that you would be found? They were so minute as to be unbelievable. I flew many air-sea rescue missions, and I flew training missions where I searched for men who were deliberately placed out in the water to test various survival techniques. It was axiomatic that you could never find a lone man floating in the ocean. You were simply out there, unknown and unmissed, floating in a dull gray life jacket which blended into the color of the water.

A man's head is about six inches wide and nine inches tall. If a pilot is flying a search mission, such as Wilbur Gwinn was flying at ten thousand feet, looking down at an angle of 30 degrees, what will he see? He will be looking down an angle at the water about four miles ahead. The span of his vision will be about five miles. He will see 20 square miles at a glance.

How apparent will be the head of this man floating in the water? It will be about the diameter of the cross section of a human hair seen endwise across the room. It will be lost among the countless waves and whitecaps of the ocean. He simply won't be seen.

And, even if the pilot knew that somewhere out there a man was swimming, how could he search?

What were the chances that Wilbur Gwinn would fly a course that would take him directly over you? What were the chances that his radio antenna would break while he was out on this mission? What were the chances that he would open his bomb bay doors and look straight down momentarily?

And what were the chances that he would look down on one of you? You didn't have a chance in a million.

I know that most of you prayed a lot; and I know that some of you feel that it made a difference.

Wilbur Gwinn is a wonderful man and a fine pilot. He never said that he heard a voice speak to him; but was there an unseen hand upon his shoulder? Did he find you by pure chance? The odds against it are one in a million -- nay, one in a billion. But somehow he was chosen as the instrument to overcome these impossible, astronomical odds.

Any sensible person knows that no one can swim for four and a half days; and yet you did. For 40 years I have reflected upon the blind courage and the unbelievable greatness of spirit that I saw when each survivor was brought aboard my airplane, and I have been compelled by the evidence of my own eyes to believe in miracles.

When we landed we realized that we couldn't rescue everyone. We would have to make heartbreaking decisions. We would have to pick and choose among the survivors.

From the air, we noticed that most of them were clustered into groups of 10 or more men, clinging together. But outside these groups were many isolated swimmers, floating in their life jackets. Most of them were seemingly alive, but some were obviously already dead, including those whom we had seen being molested by sharks.

I decided that the men in groups stood the best chance of survival. They could look after one another, could splash and scare away the sharks, and could lend one another moral support and encouragement. But the single swimmers had no one else to turn to, and without the support of comrades, were the most likely to succumb to the despair of the night. Of course, I had no idea that you had been in the water for four and a half days! I therefore decided that we would concentrate on picking up the single swimmers, and the groups would have to wait for other rescue.

We have all heard how, on occasions of great emergency or crisis, individuals have sometimes summoned up almost superhuman strength. It happened on our airplane.

My navigator, Ensign Morgan Hensley, wasn't a particularly big man, but he had been an amateur wrestler in high school and college, and he was very well-muscled. After we landed, my co-pilot and I taxied the airplane and Morgan was in charge of fishing survivors out of the water and bringing them aboard. We would taxi toward a survivor and then the loading party would throw him a life ring attached to a line, and when he grabbed the ring, they would haul him aboard.

One of the survivors slipped out of his life jacket when we threw him the ring, and then he missed grabbing the ring! We were closing rapidly on him, but it was obvious that if we missed him on the first pass, he would never have the strength to survive while we came about for a second try. Morgan was standing in the port blister, and as the man passed under it, he reached down, grabbed the man under the armpits and then straightened up in one movement, lifting the man out of the water and pitching him over his head into the airplane. If you would like to duplicate this maneuver, try standing on a rather high chair, then reach down and grab someone lying on the floor beneath you, and try lifting them up.

Morgan said later that he didn't know where he got the strength to do it. I don't know either, but then, I don't know where men got the strength to swim for four and a half days.

When I landed my airplane, you had been swimming for 87 hours. Our airplane carried four water breakers containing four and one half gallons of fresh water each. Before the day ended, we were to take aboard so many men that this supply would figure only a little more than a quart each. As each exhausted survivor was hauled aboard, he was given half a cup of water. Then in three or four minutes, when his stomach had settled, he received half a cup more.

Doubtless, the first men rescued received a somewhat larger share of our supply than those rescued later, but after the first two drinks, they usually collapsed into a deep sleep, from which they only fitfully awakened to cry of thirst.

As the afternoon wore on, the hull of the old PBY was filled to capacity. There were two men in each bunk. We tried to sit them on the floor but they collapsed to lie two and three deep in every compartment of the airplane. It became absolutely impossible to walk through the airplane, and still each few

minutes another desperately exhausted and ill survivor was being brought on board.

Finally, I shut off the engines and we started hauling men out on the wing. They were too exhausted to help themselves, and trying to balance ourselves on the bobbing airplane and pass these badly burned and helpless men up to the wing was a difficult, and sometimes dreadfully painful maneuver but there wasn't any place else to put them. The wing, while broad enough, had a decided slant toward the stern, so that it was necessary that each man be secured with a piece of parachute shroud line to prevent him from sliding off.

Darkness comes quickly in the tropics; and with the night we streamed a sea anchor from the bow and drifted. I had hoped to use our landing lights and an Aldis lamp as a searchlight to continue our search for survivors, but we quickly found that plan to be impractical.

An inventory disclosed that there was still some water left in one of the water breakers in the radio compartment. This water was passed up in a kettle, and someone groped his way through the darkness down the wings, giving each man half a cup. There never was very much water in the kettle because it trickled slowly from the spigot, and we didn't want to risk spilling a drop as we crawled along the wing of the pitching airplane. So, after four or five men had received their water ration, we crawled back to return the empty kettle and receive another with a few cups of water sloshing around in the bottom. Then we crawled back out on the wing and tried to determine where we had left off.

And, as we passed these exhausted and dehydrated survivors, voice after voice in the darkness would say, "I've had mine," and that way we could find where we had left off, and go on down the wing with our ration of water. Fortunately the water lasted until we had delivered two rations down each wing, and although the men were still burning of thirst, no one ever took or asked an extra ration.

I get a warm glow of satisfaction whenever I think of this incident. Conduct like that is not indoctrinated through military training. It is learned at an early age -- in Sunday School and in a home where honesty is a way of life.

In an operation where so many things went wrong, where so many people didn't get the word, and where many of those who did get it failed to appreciate the situation, the perception of Lt. Cdr. W. Graham Claytor in command of the Doyle was a shining exception. As he steamed through the gathering dusk, still more than a hundred miles away, he intercepted the radio conversation between me and the Ventura search plane. He knew that there may be enemy submarines ahead, because I had warned him of them, and he didn't know what sort of situation he was heading into; but he had the perception to know that somewhere up ahead men were clinging to life with their last ounce of strength and that with darkness came cold, loneliness and despair.

It is in the hours of darkness that most men give up the fight, and he felt that if there was something that he could do to give these men hope, to let them know that help was on its way, maybe they would summon the courage and the strength to hang on a few more hours.

I will never forget how dark were the early hours of that night. There was no moon, and the star-light was obscured by clouds. And, even though we were near the equator, the wind whipped up and it was cold. We had long since dispensed the last drop of water, and scores of badly injured men, stacked three deep in the fuselage and ranged far out on both wings, were softly crying with thirst and with pain. And then, far out on the horizon, there was a light!

No matter the warning of submarines, no matter the unknown dangers of the night, the USS Doyle turned on their big 24-inch searchlight and pointed it straight up to reflect off the bottom of the clouds two thousand feet up in the sky. And it stayed on! For hour after hour it shone as a beacon of hope in the sky. The results on our own plane were electrifying. To the men who cried for water we would say. "Look! See that light! It's a destroyer on its way. There's water and doctors and rescue coming soon!" And men would settle back in hope to gaze upon that lovely light. And out around us, where men were struggling to survive their fifth night in the water, there were scores of you who saw the light and summoned up that one last ounce of strength to last until rescue came.

Turning on that light took courage. It took courage of one man. It took the courage that is the Navy.

I've seen greatness in my time. Not that of some political leader or popular hero, but the greatness of the entire crew of a great ship. And while that crew will always be something very special to me, I know that it was drawn at random from the servicemen of our country.

I have seen the greatness of America.