For a short time Friday, the old salts were no longer at the Doubletree Hotel. Instead, it was November 1944, and they were fighting the Japanese in the Philippines' Leyte Gulf.
"I was the youngest guy on the ship," said Ervin K. Vernon of Kirkland, Wash.Vernon was among those in Salt Lake City for the reunion of the crew of the USS Claxton, a destroyer that played a vital part in the World War II sea battles in the Pacific.
"And a darned good one," said Ralph Albertz of Green Bay, Wis., about Vernon. "He was on my crew."
"I was born in 1924," Vernon continued.
Charles Schmidt of Valley Forge, Pa., chimed in: "I was born in '25."
Soon the conversation shifted to the operations when the Claxton was hit by two kamikaze planes and showered with debris from a third. Vernon gestured in the air as he described one of the Japanese fighters coming in.
"We got what we call an indirect hit" that time, he said. As the plane plunged in, the Claxton zigzagged and her gunners blasted away. The aircraft veered down, clipping the tops off the heads of two crewman.
Then the plane hit the gulf close beside the ship, and its 500-pound bomb exploded, blowing a hole in the Claxton.
Below decks, three compartments were flooded. As repair crewmen fought to save the ship, they were forced to back out because of the rising water, which reached neck deep.
"We put the pumps down there," said Ross C. Miller of Clintonwood, Va. Then they patched up the hole on the ship's side, stringing a cable over the bow and other lines to hold mattresses in place and to kept the sea out.
"We were pretty close" to sinking, said Walter Borden of Tiverton, R.I.
Richard Lemke of Rosemont, Ill., remembered that when a kamikaze hit, he was down inside a gun mount. "I was the guy that saw the flash."
"Two men ahead of me were knocked down," he said. They were killed by the impact.
"This guy (Albertz) was back of me. He dropped a 5-inch shell down my back."
"It went down his back and hit my toe," Albertz said. The toe was later amputated.
"I didn't know I was hit (by shrapnel) until I was topside," Lemke continued. "I got shrapnel in my throat a quarter-inch from my jugular vein, in my chest, in my shoulder."
In a day or two, an operation removed the metal from Lemke's throat.
Albertz found a way to one-up his shipmate. "They pulled shrapnel out of me for two months," he said with a laugh.
After the Claxton was heavily damaged by a suicide plane that killed or wounded 28 men, "we were a sitting duck," Vernon said. "The fleet dispatched the Abner Read to protect us."
The Claxton was hit in the morning, and in the afternoon another wave of kamikazes swung over the ships. A kamikaze plane slammed into the Abner Read, hitting it right between the stacks. "Then it started exploding - gasoline and the bomb on the suicide plane," said Vernon.
Although damaged itself, and in danger from the exploding fuel and ammunition from the Abner Read, the Claxton pulled close to the stricken ship.
"We went alongside. The Claxton was 2 feet next to the Abner Read," Vernon said. "We pulled off as many crew as we could get off the ship. Then we had to pull back."
Then the Abner Read blew up and sank.
Albertz volunteered to go in a motorized whaleboat to help pick up stricken men who were struggling in the water. The Claxton's crewmen were yelling for men who could swim to approach their destroyer, while the smaller boats were saving as many as possible.
"They had patched me up," Albertz said. "I went down and we picked up these men, and they started howling." Horribly burned and injured, the men in the water were screaming.
The first man Albertz reached had lost most of his arm, and "his bone was sticking out."
Then the veterans, wearing their "VICTORY IN WORLD WAR II" caps, began talking about their former squadron commander, Admiral Arleigh A. Burke. They expressed immense pride in Burke, who is 98 years old.
Burke's tactics of "smash and run" earned him the nickname "31 Knot Burke" - in honor of the destroyers' great speed.
"He was considered as one like John Paul Jones," Lemke said. "He had a kind of mystique about him . . . We loved the guy, and we would go with him all the way into Japan."
The mention of Japan brought displeasure among the veterans with the stiff economic competition offered by the Far East nation.
"I think it's time the people wake up and buy a little more American goods," Borden said.
One mentioned example was Japanese cars. "I won't buy one," said Borden, while others murmured their agreement.
Vernon said: "The American automobile manufacturers were asleep. The U.S. built them (Japanese industries) up and . . . they're jammin' it down on us now."