Tom Fike still chuckles a little when he talks about his days aboard the USS Silverbell during World War II.
Fike was a net tender, a sailor who installed metal nets around the U.S. coastlines to keep out submarines and torpedoes.
"We didn't have time to think about [fear]," said Fike, 91. "We had lots of responsibility, but good training and a good ship."
Fike was one of about 30 veterans and widows who came to Chattanooga from all over the country Thursday for the All Navy Net Tender/Net Layer Reunion. They gathered to remember their time aboard the ships and the buddies they've lost since then.
They boarded the Delta Queen riverboat, a Chattanooga landmark that served as a net tender in San Francisco Bay from 1941 to 1945, and stood silently as a bugle played taps and the "Navy Hymn."
The group meets every year at a different location special to the net tenders, spokesman Leroy Jones said.
Net-tender boats were 150 feet from bow to stern and had a large apparatus on the front end used to drop the nets, Fike said.
"We got razzed a good deal about their appearance," Fike said. "We bonded. We became very well acquainted. There was some discipline, but our men worked well together, and there was real camaraderie."
Still, the group is dwindling as more members die each year.
Joan Patrick, 81, cried silently as she tossed a wreath into the Tennessee River to memorialize her late husband, Reginald, who served as a net tender at the Pacific island of Saipan during World War II and died Oct. 13, 2009.
When the wreath hit the water, her husband and 10 other sailors who died in recent years were "committed to the sea" in a long-time Navy tradition that symbolized a burial at sea, Jones said.
Patrick said she felt she had to come to the reunion to honor her husband.
"He didn't say too much when he came home from war," Patrick said. "He was just happy to be home."