Article February 18, 2013 ISSUE

'Mightier than the noise of many waters'

Fernand Feig

As a young man, I impressed people by reciting all 16 sections of the 91st Psalm from memory. Little did I know that these verses would sustain me when I faced a version of “the terror by night” in my own life.

I served in the United States Navy during the Second World War, and was at one point a crewman on a wooden-hulled sub chaser, the smallest ship to cross the Pacific Ocean under its own power during the war.

At midnight one night, I was called to go on duty in the engine room during a violent storm. We were traveling from the central Philippine Islands to Brunei Bay, Borneo. Because our route would take us past enemy-held islands, we could use no lights or our radio; and our gyro and magnetic compasses were rotating wildly in the storm. Adding to the danger, we were in a part of the ocean that had been mined by every country involved in that war.