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Barry answered hesitantly at first, as most people do when someone asks questions of them about their past, particularly if that someone is a total stranger. He said he could not be sure of exact dates though he thought he might have been on duty that night. We began by asking if he remembered a flotilla of ships, six or seven, being anchored offshore during this period, in sight of both Government Point and Cape Roseway. No, he did not remember anything like that, although that might have been due to heavy fog that was frequently present. When asked if he would remember foghorns blowing on the ships if there was fog, he replied that he would probably have taken no notice of them. We pressed him further, asking if anything out of the ordinary had happened, maybe something he considered not related. lighthouse." "Commandos?" This caught us completely off-guard. "What do you mean, they took over the lighthouse?" Barry really had our attention now. The story as he told it came out in little snippets, as he recalled events that had unfolded over a period of about three days. recalled. It was about ten minutes to midnight on the night in question. Barry Crowell, as the junior lighthouse keeper at Cape Roseway, was pulling the graveyard shift that evening. He was on his way from his living accommodations to the lighthouse on McNutt Island. In a few moments he would relieve Brenton Reynolds, the light keeper on the backshift. He in turn would be relieved at 8:00 A.M. by Harry Van Buskirk, the third keeper of the light. The night was cool and foggy, with clear patches. He could hear breakers crashing against the rocky shore periodically, indicating a heavy swell was running that night, no doubt being influenced by the tides and the currents. When he was only a hundred feet or so from the lighthouse, Barry met Brenton on his way home. They stood and talked for a moment. Quite suddenly and without warning lights exploded above them, one, two, three of them, yellow-orange in color and ringed in haloes from the fog. Near darkness was turned to daylight. At first he was stunned, perplexed, and a little fearful until he recognized them as flares drifting downward on parachutes, sputtering and dripping residue as they neared the ground. The whole area was drenched in an eerie orange mantle of flickering light and shadow. These were followed by several more. Barry's next impulse was to lower his gaze and seek out the source of the flares, his thoughts turning to a possible craft or vessel in distress. He scanned the nearby sea and the rocky shoreline and was presently rewarded with the scene of a rubber Zodiac boat being paddled ashore and in some distress. Barry remembers heading for the shore with Brenton and thinking that whoever these boatmen were, they had picked the worst possible piece of coast on which to make a landfall. He was in time to see the Zodiac spill most of its human cargo into the heavy seas when its bow came in contact with the rocky "Well" - he hesitated - "there was that night when the commandos came ashore and took over the After we had most of the details, we were able to piece together what had happened. This is what he