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Maurice Bell is dead. He carried to his grave the terrifying memories of four days and five nights in the shark-infested waters of the Pacific after two Japanese torpedoes struck his ship, the USS Indianapolis. But not before sharing those memories with the nation via PBS television and with the people of his hometown, Mobile, Ala., via countless speeches before local groups. Bell died Dec. 4 in his Mobile home.

During the closing years of the 20th century, I interviewed several World War II survivors, seizing the opportunity to hear history as it emerged from living memory. Their ranks are being depleted at the rate of more than 900 a day. Of the 16.1 million Americans who served, fewer than 2 million remain.

They are following the long, long trail of the American Expeditionary Force, which provided the decisive margin of victory for the Allies a generation earlier in World War I. The doughboys numbered 4 million at their peak. They have now dwindled to one: Frank Buckles, 108, who lives in Charles Town, W.Va.

The words and music from the 1915 song Buckles and his comrades sang on their way to Europe keep running through my mind:

"There's a long, long trail a-winding.

"Into the land of my dreams ...

"There's a long, long night awaiting

"Until my dreams all come true ..."

The long, long trail has wound through a century of almost-constant warfare and a terrifying Cold War in which nuclear-tipped missiles threatened to send us all into the long, long night.

I still treasure in my personal archives the stories of men and women who walked the perilous trail.

They include Frank Lewis, a toggelier aboard a B-17 that was shot down over Oranienburg, Germany, just before it reached its target. Lewis released all his bombs at once, leaving a crater that remained a mystery to the residents of Oranienburg for 57 years, until German researchers traced him down and got his story. Lewis bailed out and was captured by German soldiers. He and two companions walked away from their lightly guarded prison and into the arms of the advancing Red Army.

They include Elizabeth Kathleen Marguerite Duschat von Englestein, known to her Alabama neighbors as Betty Thompson. Her father, owner of a 4,000-acre estate in eastern Germany, was sharing beer with friends in a local bistro when he let slip an unguarded comment: "Why don't Stalin and Hitler get in one room and shoot it out."

As punishment, the Nazis sent his 14-year-old daughter to a camp that served as a "holding tank" for prisoners destined for the death camps. While there, she befriended Rosie, the daughter of a Jewish woman who asked her to take care of the child if anything happened to her. The mother died soon afterwards. Betty remembered the arrival of liberating American troops, who were African Americans.

"Are they going to eat us?" asked Rosie, who had been subjected to Nazi racist propaganda.

"No," Betty assured her. "They have friendly eyes."

The men with friendly eyes brought them warm clothes and opened their field kitchen to the starving prisoners. Betty later married Bill Thompson, a Philco engineer sent to Germany in the postwar years, and they settled in Mobile. She delivered Rosie to the Red Cross, along with the address of relatives in Switzerland. Rosie was reunited with her relatives, owners of a Swiss watch factory.

There are many other stories the veterans of that awful conflict can tell you. Find one of them and listen, before the trail is lost in the long, long night.

I interviewed Maurice Bell at his home in Mobile. He was aboard the USS Indianapolis when it made its run from Hunter's Point on San Francisco Bay to the island of Tinian in the Northern Marianas. Its cargo consisted of components for the atomic bomb that was to be dropped on the residents of Hiroshima, Japan, from the B-29 Enola Gay .

The Indianapolis sailed on toward the Philippines, its crew secure in the knowledge that Japanese air power had been demolished and the threat of submarine warfare had all but passed.

But one submarine found the vessel, and Bell lived the next 64 years with the screams of shipmates being devoured by sharks running through his memory. Those who escaped the sharks had to battle for their sanity. Some saw visions of a tropic shore with beautiful maidens beckoning to them, and they swam away from the group of survivors, never to return. Others believed that just a few feet below the salty surface of the Pacific lay fresh water, and they dived toward it -- to their deaths.

Years later, Bell attended a reunion of Indianapolis survivors in the city of Indianapolis. Among those in attendance were Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, and a Japanese woman who politely asked whether the men would be offended by her presence.

She was the granddaughter of Lt. Cmdr. Mochitsura Hashimoto, skipper of the Japanese submarine that sank the Indianapolis. Maurice Bell took an instant liking to her, and she to him.

He held no grudges against her grandfather.

"He was serving his country, and I was serving mine," he told me.

That's the trouble with war. It causes good people to do awful things to other good people.

Write to Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625. E-mail: Swampscum2@aol.com