U.S. NAVY Mark Hammond Mark Hammond gave himself over to the sea after the eighth grade. “I was a lobsterman,” says Hammond, 87. But in addition to being a seaman, he was also a Seabee, in the 91st division of the U.S. Naval Construction Battalion. Born in South Gouldsboro on Oct. 29, 1917, Hammond comes from a long tradition of lobstering. His father, uncle and cousins were all lobstermen. But when the country entered WWII, all the Hammond boys signed up — Ira in the Army and Arthur and John “Junior” in the Navy. “I didn’t want to get drafted, and I was about to get drafted,” he said. Mark hoped to get a “better deal” by not being dragged in unwillingly. “I joined around 1943,” he said. “Was in for two years and a half.” Hammond was married to an Ellsworth American staff writer, Clara, when he joined the war effort. “She didn’t like it too well,” he said of his absence. Hammond went to basic training in Davidsfield, R.I, and boot camp in Virginia. After being sent to California, he was shipped to Australia to work in the supply field. In New Guinea, he worked on irrigation. In the Philippines, he worked the night shift doing maintenance on the generators. When he got a chance to work on boats, it was as a boatswain. And when there was no boat work to be done, he handled and unloaded cargo as a stevedore in the shipyard warehouses. “I didn’t think much of that.” He spent his days building roads, barracks, hospitals and runways — “what needed to be built, any kind of work,” he said. “It wasn’t all pleasure, I’ll tell you that.” After all, of the things that brought a soldier pleasure at home, there were few that could be brought to war. But Hammond managed to satisfy his love of lobstering halfway around the world. While dredging for crawfish in New Guinea, he said he was approached about building lobster traps. “I said, ‘Where are you going to get lobster over here?’ I said ‘You can’t catch them in sand, but you can in the coral reefs.’” And if he could construct a runway, he could certainly construct a trap. “‘What am I going to build them with?’” he asked himself. “‘Oh, well, I’ll find something.’” He whittled needles out of small sticks to knit heads and bait bags.  “They said, ‘And you have to tend them’ — the hardest thing!” he said. “I had fun. I had a hard time, too.” Though he wasn’t in combat, he saw enemy forces in an unlikely spot: the lunch line. The Japanese tried to sneak a free meal unobserved. They “got right in the chow hall,” he said. Hammond guesses they must have just been hungry. Desperately so. “They caught one of them. They didn’t have nothing to fight with. I don’t know where they come from — a boat, or by land.” Hammond did a bit of poking around himself while overseas, with two men from the chow hall and his friend, Tom. “We went to a wedding of one of the tribes,” he said. “Weren’t supposed to go; they said it was a long way. We took off, went on a boat, had to go right up into the mountains." The natives had their own farmland in the mountains, he said. “It was beautiful when you got in there. “We never got caught; at roll call, we had somebody answering for us.” The time in the service, he said, was brightened by inventing humorous poems about commanding officers and meeting famous admirals. But the words and the names tend to escape him these days. After the war, Hammond did occasional stints working in a tannery in Hancock, as well as on bridges and roads in the area. But he focused his attention picking up where he’d left off, returning to lobstering and fishing with his brother, Arthur. He remained married for “60 odd years,” until Clara’s death. They had three children; a daughter, Joyce, who died before Hammond went in the service, and two boys, Harold and Frank. Harold had two daughters and two sons, and Frank had one girl. In addition, Hammond has three great-grandsons. For a long while, he did keep in touch with other veterans, and a lot of them visited Maine to see him. Though he said he thinks the country has “made a lot of improvements” since then, he’s not pleased with the current situation in Iraq. “I don’t believe in this war,” he said. “I think it’s an awful thing. “They keep on over there,” he warned, “and they’ll be back.” Of his work as a Seabee 60 years ago, he said, “It was awful then. It was a lot harder then.” Given the choice of any other kind of work, in any other place in the world, Hammond is loyal to his first love. Only a problem maintaining balance on boats in his mid-80s could finally keep him from lobstering. “There’s quite a lot of difference between a lobsterman and Seabee,” he said. “I’d rather be out lobstering.”  — Ashley O’Dell