When the United States entered World War II and instituted the draft, the fate of the country was largely put in the hands of sailors and soldiers with little experience, some still teenagers.

There simply wasn't time to train each and every new soldier and sailor in every aspect of what they might encounter. On-the-job training had never meant so much to so many.

So, when the USS James E. Craig, a destroyer escort ship, sailed into a hurricane on Jan. 30, 1944, many of the sailors were mindful of the three destroyers that had sunk in a hurricane a month before.

"The crew had no particular preparation for heavy weather," Lt. Courtney Arthur wrote in a booklet about the encounter. "Most of them were 18 or 19 years old and had never been to sea."

Al Dzurinda of Sharon was one of those kids.

"When we got into the storm, no one knew what to do," said Dzurinda, now of Hermitage, who was a torpedoman, 20 mm antiaircraft gun gunner, helmsman and whaleboat coxswain on the Craig. "We didn't know how to fight these waves."

The officers were reading the book "The American Practical Navigator" as the storm was raging, he said.

Dzurinda, 79, contributed recollections and illustrations to Arthur's booklet, "USS James E. Craig's First Hurricane," which was essentially published for the remaining crewmates.

Although the ship survived other hurricanes and tropical storms, the first one was the scariest because the crew was so green.

Green in more ways than one.

"I got so damn seasick I wanted to lay down and die," Dzurinda said in one of his illustrations, showing the ship pitched up a steep wave in 100 mph winds and 50-foot-high seas.

Dzurinda, a former freelance artist, was in the aft berthing compartment.

"We were holding onto the bunk chains for a while, and then we got torn loose from them," he wrote. "No one stood in one spot for over 20 seconds, most of us were seasick and were throwing up vomit and buckling up in our insides."

"The huge waves were ponying the ship's sides like a huge drum beat. Then the ship's bow would rise up in the air and dive down into a deep chasm and it felt as though the ship would split in half."

Dzurinda's memories seem to be stronger than many as his recollections are among the most vivid of the shipmates quoted in the booklet, which also included press reports, excerpts from the official Navy "war diary," deck log entries and other archival material.

"I can never forget the sounds of the wild wind that blew through the guy line cables, the halyards and the mast with its radar and radio antennas, a very weird sound," Dzurinda said.

One of his illustrations depicts the eye of the storm.

"The sea inside the eye was a sick color of light green, flat like a mirror, the sky was a bright yellowish white," he said. "It was awful quiet and it was very eerie and an unexplainable awesome feeling."

Even as the storm subsided, it packed a punch. The ship rode "rollers" of waves that left the ship at precarious angles. "Lord -- your sea is so big and my craft is so small," Dzurinda said in an illustration.

A second booklet details what the sailors more likely were to have been expecting, an aerial torpedo attack.

It was Thanksgiving 1944, and the Craig was off the Philippine Island of Mindanao, escorting a supply convoy.

Radar had shown Japanese airplanes were within close proximity of the ship and its crew of about 225 all day. But at 6:23 p.m., the captain decided they were too close for comfort and shifted the ship's position on a defensive course.

The ship's guns blasted as four "Jills" -- single-engine torpedo planes -- started torpedo runs.

"Guess who is coming to dinner to-nite?" Dzurinda said in one of his illustrations for "Aerial Torpedo Attack on USS James E. Craig DE 201."

Dzurinda, who calls himself "an old deep-water sailor," was strapped into his 20 mm gun seat when he saw the planes drop their torpedoes, which the sailors called "fish."

"The plane I was shooting at was so close I could see the pilot's face," Dzurinda said. "I thought the closest of the three torpedoes was going to hit me right under my gun bucket so I started to pray. I said, 'Our Father which art in heaven.' That's all I said as I did not see nor hear an explosion."

One and maybe three torpedoes went under the ship, and another swam by within feet. The planes did not shoot -- possibly, as a fuel conservation measure, they didn't carry gunners -- but the Craig sunk one of the six attackers with antiaircraft fire.

"We sent this bastard to hell," Dzurinda said of a drawing that showed the smoking Japanese plane crashing into the Pacific Ocean, the culmination of the three-minute attack.

Dzurinda's drawings are part of a 25-year project to document his war experiences. He draws on legal-sized envelopes, posting them in albums.

"This is my hobby," said Dzurinda, who speaks in high schools and made wood carvings of his shipmates. "My kids were grown up and married and I needed a hobby."