Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfus) - "You were on the Indianapolis?"
Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) - "What happened?"
Quint (Robert Shaw) - "Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into
her side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte.
We'd just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men
went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes.
Didn't see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You
know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin'
from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know, was that our bomb
mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't
even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come
cruisin' by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta
like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old
calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come
to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and
sometimes that shark he go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away.
Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the
thing about a shark is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a
doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn't even seem to be livin'...
'til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah
then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns
red, and despite all your poundin' and your hollerin' those sharks come
in and... they rip you to pieces.
You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don't
know how many sharks there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many
men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday mornin', Chief, I bumped into
a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player.
Boson's mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up.
He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended.
Well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist.
At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he
spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he
spotted us and a few hours later a big ol' fat PBY come down and
started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most
frightened. Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again.
So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the
sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945.