Meh. M-E-H: meh.

An enlisted man's 3rd-person autobiography about his experiences during the U.S.S. Newport News (CA-148)'s 1972 cruise off of north Vietnam. Uses dialogue to explain ship operations to the reader, which reads fake. According to my dad, who was an enlisted man on that very same cruise, the author gets certain things wrong about operations outside his own deparment (communications), but not so egregiously as to disrupt the reading (at least not if you don't know any better).

The main thread of character development is the psychological effect the cruise had on him. Nothing new on that is to be found in this book. On the other hand, pretty much the only things you ever hear about the Navy's role in Vietnam are air ops, river ops, or the Tonkin incident, so this book actually points up blue-water sailors' active participation in daily combat.

The biggest problems stem from the author's writerly inexperience/immaturity. He doesn't quite carry off the sophisti-ma-cated tone he attempts; you see $5 words used incorrectly, or completely misspelled (e.g., "troth" for "trough"). It's not disruptive, it just makes you (OK, me) wish he'd just told the story straight. Then there're the sexcapades during liberty at overseas ports, which read like bad soft-core porn (although I'd rather read his efforts at that than Jean Auel's).

My biggest disappointments were the relatively superficial attention that the two biggest events of the cruise received. Granted, they happened late in the cruise, and a big part of his story is the detachment he grew to feel as his battle fatigue grew; so maybe he describes them with as much effect as they had on him at the time. And this is his story first, after all, and the ship's and the Navy's second. ( )