Blue-Water Sailor

the long version

Don Sheppard is one of the few who have risen through the navy holding every rank and rate from seaman recruit to commander. A thirty-year naval career - from an eighteen-year old enlistee to destroyer commander - gives Sheppard a valuable insight into the ways of ships, the men who sail them, and what it takes to become an elective leader. The adventure sweeps from Sheppard's enlisted days as an aircrewman, where he relives the terror of a pilot trying for the thirteenth time to land aboard a frozen-decked carrier in a North Atlantic storm, to fighting modern-day pirates off the Formosa Strait. The author describes a harrowing incident where he became the chief engineer and his struggle to wrest control of the engineering plant away from the grizzled chief machinist mate who considered it his private domain. His story ranges from chasing a Soviet submarine at 40 knots to his own brief but action-packed service aboard a submarine. Sheppard's shipboard odyssey culminates in Hong Kong Harbor in 1960 with a massive typhoon nearly leveling the city, as his ship remains on station to fight it alone.