In 1986 a bunch of my Marine buddies were swimming down at Navy Beach in Subic Bay Philippines. We used to swim out to a dock and guys in ski boats would pick us up and take us skiing. There was a female Sgt there that day, I didn't personally know her but she was in my unit. She didn't want to get in the water but her buddies kept at her to swim out to the dock and go for a boat ride. She was about neck deep when she started to scream. Screaming like I never heard. She came bolting out of the water and there was something at first looked like seaweed around her leg. A Filipino guy came running screaming "DON'T TOUCH IT...SEA WASP". She is grabbing at it a these guys retrain her as they pry it all loose from her legs, someone called an ambulance, the welts on her skin were already horrific, she looked like she had been wrapped with red hot barbed wire. In under two minutes, her eyes were rolled back and she was gasping for breath. The Filipino guy told us as the ambulance drove away, it was a Malaysian Sea Wasp (box jellyfish) and she would probably not survive. He explained the venom attacks the heart muscle and she is in cardiac arrest. He said they kill more people in the ocean than anything else.

Six months later I'm outside our hangar and I see her get out of a car. She's very thin, she's wearing shorts and the scars are not much different than what I saw at the beach. She looked like she had been tortured with molten barbed wire. It was four months before she was strong enough to be moved back to the states. Her heart was permanently damaged and she was going out on a medical discharge. It sounded like she faced the possibility of congestive heart failure. I have always wondered how she made out. It always bothered me a lot, she didn't want to get in the water. We had all swam right there a hundred times. What were the chances?