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A Very Brief Bio
Born a Navy brat in Newport, Rhode Island, December '44, then, after a tumultuous childhood in various locales, joined the US Navy in June of '63.
After boot camp in Great Lakes I reported aboard my first duty station, the guided missile destroyer USS Biddle (DDG-5). Biddle's home port was Norfolk, VA, a place where, in the coming four years, we spent nearly six months, four of those months refitting in the Portsmouth yards. We were a hard steaming work horse, operating in the Atlantic, Caribbean, Mediterranean and North Sea, and excessive marine growth on our ship's bottom was never an issue.
I was assigned to 1st Division, home of the Bosun's Mates, the beginning of my career path. During those years I saw plenty of ocean, many new lands (and people), survived stormy seas, refresher training, underway replenishments, underway watches, in-port watches, raucous liberties in many foreign ports and did a lot of chipping and painting.
Along the way I helped make a little history, as Biddle was name-changed to the USS Claude V. Ricketts and we embarked upon something called the Mixed-Manning Demonstration, where, for a year and a half, foreign nationals made up slightly less than half of our ships officers and crew.
In the summer of '67 I left the ship and the Navy, but in less than two months I was back in uniform, with a story better left untold concerning a wild party, alcohol, charges and a judge that bought my pathetic story of wanting to make the Navy my career.
My second duty station was less impressive than my first; a beat up old WW2 LST, operating in the rivers and deltas of Vietnam, hauling concrete, beer, equipment and more beer to the troops fighting for whatever it was we were fighting for there, I never did get the straight of it. My battle station was mount captain on a twin forty millimeter gun, and for the first time I fired "This Is No Drill" rounds in battle.
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Google Ads are gone, empty space remains, either Ads or none, the money is the same.