My grandpa was a very lucky man. Back in World War 2 he signed up with all his brothers to fight in the war. Grandpa joined the navy and wanted to fight the Japanese in response to Pearl Harbor. Where his brothers were sent to Australia, England and other parts of the world, my grandpa spent the entire war guarding the Panama Canal Zone. He was a carpenter in civilian life, so he was put in the Seabees when he joined. Since the US thought the Japanese were going to invade the Canal up until the end of the war we had a large military force stationed there. Not as glamorous as Normandy or Iwo Jima, but somebody had to do it.

   Two years after the war my grandpa got a job at the Texas City docks as a carpenter. It was a good job for a war veteran, he loved working with wood. I remember him always tinkering and modifying everything in his house. There was nothing in his house that wasn't made better with a few more nails. He met my grandmother shortly after the war, her first husband had died of lung cancer years before. My grandma loved to cook, and it actually saved his life.

   My grandma decided one day to go all out and cook my grandpa a full breakfast one day. My grandpa had a bad day at work the previous day and needed cheering up. He decided to eat up and go in a little late, he was in with the foreman and had a little pull it seemed. He was supposed to be at work at 9am that day, but he was almost an hour late. This was a very good thing because at 9:16 on April 19, 1947 Texas City reached a million degrees Fahrenheit.

   My grandpa was actually driving into work when the USS Grandcamp exploded. The Grandcamp was a ship being offloaded at Texas City, it was filled with ammonium nitrate. That's the same chemical Tim McVeigh used at Oklahoma City. To compare, McVeigh used 2 1/2 tons of ammonium nitrate in his bomb. The Grandcamp had over 1,000 tons of the fertilizer. The blast knocked people over in Galveston, blew planes out of the sky, and the shockwave registered on Richter scales in Denver. The blast pushed my grandpa's car over several lanes when it hit.

   My grandpa sped forward to see what had happened at his job. The blast had destroyed the docks and vaporized massive portions of the city. The ship's anchor landed a mile and a half away from the blast. My grandpa was not allowed to help when he arrived, another ship was about to explode. When he finally was allowed to enter the scene he found a good part of his company was gone. Many of his coworkers were dead, some of them actually went to watch the firefighters work at the Grandcamp. When my grandpa found some of his company, one of them looked shocked.

   "Henry, you're dead!"

   It was payday and they found an arm next to my grandpa's paycheck. They assumed it was his, they didn't know where he was when the blast hit. The area was slick with oil and fires were everywhere. They later would identify the arm belonging to the paymaster, the blast took his arm off and by sheer luck it landed on my grandpa's paycheck, the only paycheck he was carrying to survive the blast. My grandpa got lucky that day.

   I realized later how he lucky was. He was the only one to get paid that day.