THIS MEMOIR IS DISTILLED FROM material I have lugged around with me for more than forty years.  While serving in the U.S. Navy, I wrote long letters on a weekly basis to my parents who thankfully saved all of them.  While aboard my ship, the USS Richard B. Anderson, I kept an irregular diary, and collected occasional archival material such the printed “Plan of the Day” given to the crew each day as marching orders of what was expected of them.  Upon discharge from active duty in 1974, I made an outline for the memoir, notes of specific events, and a first draft of my boot camp experience while those events and personalities were still fresh in my mind. 

       My initial motivation for writing this memoir was to convey details of my military experience to my son, nephew, nieces, and their progeny in a way my father, father-in-law, and grandfathers regrettably did not for their offspring and others. The details of our forefathers’ service in military conflicts of the 20th century regrettably are now lost forever. A secondary motivation (mentioned by others in similar memoirs) was to shine a light on the role surface ships of the U.S. Navy played in the closing chapter of the Vietnam War. The military operations of the 1972 Eastern Offensive are largely unknown by United States citizens and even when these events are recorded in annals of the Vietnam War, the role U.S. Navy cruisers and destroyers played in bringing the conflict to an end is largely ignored.  Now that this book is completed, I also hope that Navy veterans and general readers interested in this aspect of the Vietnam War era will find the stories worthwhile and entertaining.