Explanation: Exactly what it sounds like. The man was on a ship that was actively going down and his immediate thought was “Goddamn, it would be a shame if all that ice cream in the ship’s storage went to waste at the bottom of the ocean.”

From Harry’s interview, “So, I rolled off the flight deck onto the next level. There was a big lock on the hatch going into the Gedunk. Now there was a fire axe there, so I took the axe, and it took only one blow to knock off the lock. I went in and took my helmet off, … , and I went behind the counter and loaded my helmet with pineapple ice cream. … Then I went out and I tossed it up to my buddy on the flight deck.” His buddy and others rolled off the flight deck, went into the Gedunk, and got more ice cream. He and his buddies got back up to the deck, and Harry continued, “So, when they came around to muster, everybody was up there eating ice cream.”

Harry would evacuate the Lexington using rope lines. He was wearing a life jacket but took if off because it was difficult to swim. After about 30 minutes swimming he was picked up by the destroyer USS Morris. Again from Harry’s interview, “Someone grabbed me and hauled me up on the deck. I must have laid there for fifteen or twenty minutes … I looked, and I saw these ox-blood shiny shoes and the trouser had a sharp crease in them and this guy says, ‘I know this guy. He is from our neighborhood back in San Antonio.’ He was a marine on the Morris.”

https://www.ww2history.org/war-in-europe/the-wwii-sinking-of-the-uss-lexington-in-the-battle-of-the-coral-sea-and-the-stories-of-survivors/

When you can’t control whether or not you’ll survive, but you can control whether or not you eat ice cream…

Let’s be real, he’s probably the one who fired the torpedo