This is the account of an eighteen year old boy who joined the Navy in 1957, the seventh of seven brothers who joined the military from an ex-Mennonite family. He gained an electronics education and matured over a four and one half year navy tour. During service school in San Diego, he practiced and paraded on a precision, navy drill-team throughout southern California. He describes his experiences as a Fire Control Technician for three and a half years on the destroyer tender USS Prairie AD15, including two WestPac cruises, temporary duty stripping a mothballed cruiser USS Manchester CL83 at Vallejo, California's Mare Island Naval Shipyard, his mess-cook duty as a boot on remote, beautiful San Nicolas Island off the coast of California.
He narrates his three day hitchhiking journey across the US, USS Prairie's collision with a Japanese freighter in Tokyo bay, sailors on liberty in Olongapo, Yokosuka, Hong Kong, Okinawa, Tsoying, Kaohsiung, San Francisco, and San Diego. He relates the SEATO Operation Pony Express and the Prairie travel to Jesselton, British North Borneo, now Indonesia, on the cusp of the Vietnam War. He describes almost drowning in Subic Bay, diving with the USS Prairie divers. He became a Mess-Decks-Master-At-Arms on the Prairie and carried out these duties at Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard mess-hall. He tells of hitchhiking around California and travels to Tijuana and Rosarita Beach. The book provides a picture of typical young sailors and their antics, foolishness, loneliness, frustrations, and good times on board ship, in military cities, and on navy bases.
A vignette is told of the WestPac widows, the lonely women who wait at home while their sailor husbands are overseas. He speaks of the girls left behind at home, and the attempts to hang on to relationships and keep alive the dimming past. He describes encounters with Japanese divers on a wild, dangerous liberty in Yokosuka.
The phrase “gone Asiatic," and this book's title, is a well-known term to most military men who spent time in Japan and other Far East countries, and conjures the true image of the American sailors, marines, air force, or army men who became, or almost became, expatriates, falling in love with, and marrying Japanese, Filipino, and other Asian women and spending their lives in the Far East. One needs only travel to Subic Bay, Philippines or Yokosuka, Japan and inquire around to find thousands of these men.
The book relates the experiences of his older brothers during World War II, a kamikaze hit, the one-in-a-million chance meeting of his two brothers on ships at Saipan in 1945. He informs of another brother's grim struggle as an infantryman on Luzon, and his life-altering post-traumatic-syndrome outcome, called "shell-shock" or "thousand-yard-stare."
There are insights of Cold War tension and concerns about nuclear war of the fifties and sixties,including the "war stories" of his buddy, a nuclear weaponsman on board the aircraft carrier USS Midway, and a fire set by a sailor trying to blow up the Midway, with catastrophic possibilities of starting a nuclear war.
He narrates his three day hitchhiking journey across the US, USS Prairie's collision with a Japanese freighter in Tokyo bay, sailors on liberty in Olongapo, Yokosuka, Hong Kong, Okinawa, Tsoying, Kaohsiung, San Francisco, and San Diego. He relates the SEATO Operation Pony Express and the Prairie travel to Jesselton, British North Borneo, now Indonesia, on the cusp of the Vietnam War. He describes almost drowning in Subic Bay, diving with the USS Prairie divers. He became a Mess-Decks-Master-At-Arms on the Prairie and carried out these duties at Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard mess-hall. He tells of hitchhiking around California and travels to Tijuana and Rosarita Beach. The book provides a picture of typical young sailors and their antics, foolishness, loneliness, frustrations, and good times on board ship, in military cities, and on navy bases.
A vignette is told of the WestPac widows, the lonely women who wait at home while their sailor husbands are overseas. He speaks of the girls left behind at home, and the attempts to hang on to relationships and keep alive the dimming past. He describes encounters with Japanese divers on a wild, dangerous liberty in Yokosuka.
The phrase “gone Asiatic," and this book's title, is a well-known term to most military men who spent time in Japan and other Far East countries, and conjures the true image of the American sailors, marines, air force, or army men who became, or almost became, expatriates, falling in love with, and marrying Japanese, Filipino, and other Asian women and spending their lives in the Far East. One needs only travel to Subic Bay, Philippines or Yokosuka, Japan and inquire around to find thousands of these men.
The book relates the experiences of his older brothers during World War II, a kamikaze hit, the one-in-a-million chance meeting of his two brothers on ships at Saipan in 1945. He informs of another brother's grim struggle as an infantryman on Luzon, and his life-altering post-traumatic-syndrome outcome, called "shell-shock" or "thousand-yard-stare."
There are insights of Cold War tension and concerns about nuclear war of the fifties and sixties,including the "war stories" of his buddy, a nuclear weaponsman on board the aircraft carrier USS Midway, and a fire set by a sailor trying to blow up the Midway, with catastrophic possibilities of starting a nuclear war.
