Navy Chief Quotes

Yamamoto sensed a feeling of culmination about the huge success of the first strike, and the same incisive intuition that guided his brilliant moves at the gaming tables told him what the next move on the bridge of Akagi would be. In (Vice Admiral) Nagumo he knew his man. Nagumo had never been committed to the Pearl Harbor mission. He had not been Yamamoto’s choice to command the Striking Force; his assignment was the decision of the Navy Ministry in Tokyo, based on seniority. While the exultation of the officers and sailors on his staff swirled around him, Yamamoto sat quietly. Finally, he fixed a steely gaze on his chief of staff, and in a low, intense voice: “Admiral Nagumo is going to withdraw.

Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation Delivered on December 8, 1941 Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate, and of the House of Representatives: Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack. It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace. The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu. Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation. As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us. Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.

For a time, the word Weltpolitik seemed to capture the mood of the German middle classes and the national-minded quality press. The word resonated because it bundled together so many contemporary aspirations. Weltpolitik meant the quest to expand foreign markets (at a time of declining export growth); it meant escaping from the constraints of the continental alliance system to operate on a broader world arena. It expressed the appetite for genuinely national projects that would help knit together the disparate regions of the German Empire and reflected the almost universal conviction that Germany, a late arrival at the imperial feast, would have to play catch-up if it wished to earn the respect of the other great powers. Yet, while it connoted all these things, Weltpolitik never acquired a stable or precise meaning. Even Bernhard von Bulow, widely credited with establishing Weltpolitik as the guiding principle of German foreign policy, never produced a definitive account of what it was. His contradictory utterances on the subject suggest that it was little more than the old policy of the "free hand" with a larger navy and more menacing mood music. "We are supposed to be pursuing Weltpolitik," the former chief of the General Staff General Alfred von Waldersee noted grumpily in his diary in January 1900. "If only I knew what that was supposed to be.

During discussions in his office, Bradlee frequently picked up an undersize sponge-rubber basketball from the table and tossed it toward a hoop attached by suction cups to the picture window. The gesture was indicative both of the editor's short attention span and of a studied informality. There was an alluring combination of aristocrat and commoner about Bradlee: Boston Brahmin, Harvard, the World War II Navy, press attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, police-beat reporter, news-magazine political reporter and Washington bureau chief of Newsweek. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan...As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense...With confidence in our armed forces - with the unbounded determination of our people - we will gain the inevitable triumph - so help us God." -President F.D. Roosevelt - 8th December 1941

paper, at least, it reported to Adm. Henry Francis Oliver, the Admiralty’s chief of staff, a man so tight-lipped and reticent he could seem almost mute, and this—given the British navy’s predilection for nicknames—ensured that he would be known forever after as “Dummy” Oliver.

The portly Italian chief never talked much. Though he had played the royal baby at the crossing-the-line ceremony, he was the oldest man on the ship at forty-three and had little in common with boys twenty and more years his junior. Serafini was an immigrant from the Old Country whose Navy service dated to World War I. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, he had left a well-paying job in the Philadelphia Navy Yard and reenlisted despite both exceeding the age limit and his status as father of two. Serafini felt that he owed a debt of gratitude to the United States.

(Athenian embassy:) The event (Battle of Salamis) proved undeniably that the fate of Hellas depended on her navy. And the three chief elements of success were contributed by us; namely, the greatest number of ships, the ablest general, the most devoted patriotism. (Book 1 Chapter 74.1)

The Army and Navy Journal labeled the latest raids simply “one more chapter in the old volume,” the result of alternately feeding and fighting the tribes. “We go to them Janus-faced. One of our hands holds the rifle and the other the peace-pipe, and we blaze away with both instruments at the same time. The chief consequence is a great smoke—and there it ends.

The Chief of the Army was there, together with four other generals. There was the Chief of the Navy and the Chief of the Air Force and a sword swallower from Afghanistan, who was the President’s best friend. There was the President’s Chief Financial Advisor, who was standing in the middle of the room trying to balance the budget on top of his head, but it kept falling off.

Churchill, sensitive to class considerations in his conduct of the war, instructed his generals and admirals to be careful in how they governed the armed forces. Early on, he warned the navy to be “particularly careful that class prejudice does not enter into these decisions” about selection of cadets for officer training at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England. “Unless some better reasons are given to me,” he vowed, he would investigate the matter. The navy resisted this direction, so he did as promised and intervened directly. He even met with some of the candidates who had scored well on entrance examinations but had still been rejected. “I have seen the three candidates,” he informed the navy’s top officers. “It is quite true that A has a slightly cockney accent, and that the other two are the sons of a chief petty officer and an engineer in the merchant service. But the whole intention of competitive examination is to open the service to ability, irrespective of class or fortune.” Concluding that an injustice had been done, he ordered that the three be admitted to officer training. This was a lot of effort for someone trying to run a war and stave off invasion.

Stoddert named Joshua Humphreys Chief Naval Constructor of the United States, and authorized him to oversee naval shipbuilding operations throughout the country. But Humphreys’s efforts to impose his authority on shipwrights in other cities met with strong resistance. Different techniques, styles, and designs prevailed in the various seaports, and much of the terminology had evolved into regional dialects that outsiders found unintelligible. To ask a master builder to take direction from another master builder, in another region, was contrary to every tradition of the profession. Humphreys now proposed to bring openness and transparency to an enterprise that had always been shrouded in the medieval secrecy of the craftsmen’s guild. Shipbuilding is a “noble art,” he told a colleague. “I consider it my duty to convey to my brother builders every information in my power.

My parents didn't settle for the lives their parents lived. They stepped out and up, my father lying his way into the Navy when he was too young to enlist, my mother marrying this fugitive from the mills when she was too young for marriage. A smart guy, he took every course the Navy offered, aced them all, becoming the youngest chief warrant officer in the service. After Pearl Harbor the Navy needed line officers fast and my dad was suddenly wearing gold stripes. My mother watched and learned, getting good at the ways of this new world. She dressed beautifully. Our quarters were always handsomely fitted out. She and Dad were gracious, well-spoken. They were far from rich, but there were books and there was music and sometimes conversations about the world. We even listened to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturdays. Still, when I finished high school, their attitudes and the times said that there was little point in further educating a girl. I would take a clerical job until I could find the right junior officer to marry and pursue his career, as helpmeet. If I picked well and worked hard, I might someday be an admiral's wife.

Calm Is Contagious” This is another of Pavel’s favorite quotes. Here is an elaboration from a speech by Rorke Denver, former Navy SEAL commander: “A master chief, the senior enlisted rank in the Navy—who was like a god to us—told us he was giving us an invaluable piece of advice that he’d learned from another master chief during the Vietnam War. He said, ‘This is the best thing you’re ever going to learn in SEAL training.’ We were excited to learn what it was, and he told us that when you’re a leader, people are going to mimic your behavior, at a minimum. . . . It’s a guarantee. So here’s the key piece of advice, this is all he said: ‘Calm is contagious.’” *

When Adolf Hitler heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he slapped his hands together in glee and exclaimed, “Now it is impossible to lose the war. We now have an ally, Japan, who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.” Germany and Japan were threatening the world with massive land armies. But Hitler and Hirohito had never taken the measure of the man in the White House. A former assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt had his own ideas about the shape and size of the military juggernaut he would wield. FDR’s military experts told him that only huge American ground forces could meet the threat. But Roosevelt turned aside their requests to conscript tens of millions of Americans to fight a traditional war. The Dutchman would have no part in the mass WWI-type carnage of American boys on European or Asian killing fields. Billy Mitchell was gone, but Roosevelt remembered his words. Now, as Japan and Germany invested in yesterday, FDR invested in tomorrow. He slashed his military planners’ dreams of a vast 35-million-man force by more than half. He shrunk the dollars available for battle in the first and second dimensions and put his money on the third. When the commander in chief called for the production of four thousand airplanes per month, his advisers wondered if he meant per year. After all, the U.S. had produced only eight hundred airplanes just two years earlier. FDR was quick to correct them. The

In 1804, a delegation of Osage chiefs met with Jefferson at the White House. He told the navy secretary that the Osage, whose warriors typically stood well over six feet tall, were the “finest men we have ever seen.” At the meeting, Jefferson addressed the chiefs as “my children” and said, “It is so long since our forefathers came from beyond the great water, that we have lost the memory of it, and seem to have grown out of this land, as you have done….We are all now of one family.” He went on, “On your return tell your people that I take them all by the hand; that I become their father hereafter, that they shall know our nation only as friends and benefactors.” But within four years Jefferson had compelled the Osage to relinquish their territory between the Arkansas River and the Missouri River. The

Alex is taking notes in a policy lecture when he gets the first text. This bloke looks like you. There's a picture attached, an image of a laptop screen paused on Chief Chirpa from Return of the Jedi: tiny, commanding, adorable, pissed off. This is Henry, by the way. He rolls his eyes, but adds the new contact to his phone: HRH Prince Dickhead. Poop emoji. He's honestly not planning to respond, but a week later he sees a headline on the cover of People - PRINCE HENRY FLIES SOUTH FOR WINTER - complete with a photo of Henry artistically posed on an Australian beach in a pair of sensible yet miniscule navy swim trunks, and he can't stop himself. you have a lot of moles, he texts, along with a snap of the spread. is that a result of the inbreeding? Henry's retort comes two days later by way of a screenshot of a Daily Mail tweet that reads, Is Alex Claremont-Diaz going to be a father? The attached message says, But we were ever so careful, dear, which surprises a big enough laugh out of Alex that Zahra ejects him from her weekly debriefing with him and June.

If the British navy acted in response to every foretold movement of the German fleet, it risked revealing to Germany that its codes had been broken. In a secret internal memorandum, Admiral Oliver wrote that “the risk of compromising the codes ought only to be taken when the result would be worth it.” But what did “worth it” mean? Some of the men within Room 40 contended that much useful information was stockpiled and never used because the Admiralty staff—meaning Dummy Oliver—had an obsessive fear of revealing the Mystery. For the first two years of the war, even the commander in chief of the British fleet, Sir John Jellicoe, was denied direct access to Room 40’s decrypted intercepts, although he would seem to have been the one officer in the fleet most likely to benefit from the intelligence they conveyed. In fact, Jellicoe would not be formally introduced to the secret of Room 40, let alone given regular access to its intelligence, until November 1916, when the Admiralty, sensing bruised feelings, agreed to let him see a daily summary, which he was to burn after reading.

Jack, Jack,’ cried Stephen, running in. ‘I have been sadly remiss. You are promoted, I find. You are a great man – you are virtually an admiral! Give you joy, my dear, with all my heart. The young man in black clothes tells me you are the greatest man on the station, after the Commander-in-chief.’ ‘Why, I am commodore, as most people have the candour to admit,’ said Jack. ‘But I did mention it before, if you recollect. I spoke of my pendant.’ ‘So you did, joy; but perhaps I did not fully apprehend its true significance. I had a cloudy notion that the word commodore and indeed that curious little flag were connected with a ship rather than with a man – I am almost sure that we called the most important ship in the East India fleet, the ship commanded by the excellent Mr Muffit, the commodore. Pray explain this new and splendid rank of yours.’ ‘Stephen, if I tell you, will you attend?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘I have told you a great deal about the Navy before this, and you have not attended. Only yesterday I heard you give Farquhar a very whimsical account of the difference between the halfdeck and the quarterdeck, and to this day I do not believe you know the odds between . . .

The most gloomy German of any consequence in Berlin that Sunday noon after it became known that Britain was in the war was Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, Commander in Chief of the German Navy. For him the war had come four or five years too soon. By 1944–45, the Navy’s Z Plan would have been completed, giving Germany a sizable fleet with which to confront the British. But this was September 3, 1939, and Raeder knew, even if Hitler wouldn’t listen to him, that he had neither the surface ships nor even the submarines to wage effective war against Great Britain. Confiding to his diary, the Admiral wrote: Today the war against France and England broke out, the war which, according to the Fuehrer’s previous assertions, we had no need to expect before 1944. The Fuehrer believed up to the last minute that it could be avoided, even if this meant postponing a final settlement of the Polish question…. As far as the Navy is concerned, obviously it is in no way very adequately equipped for the great struggle with Great Britain… the submarine arm is still much too weak to have any decisive effect on the war. The surface forces, moreover, are so inferior in number and strength to those of the British Fleet that, even at full strength, they can do no more than show that they know how to die gallantly…40 Nevertheless at 9 P.M. on September 3, 1939, at the moment Hitler was departing Berlin, the German Navy struck. Without warning, the submarine U-30 torpedoed and sank the British liner Athenia some two hundred miles west of the Hebrides as it was en route from Liverpool to Montreal with 1,400 passengers, of whom 112, including twenty-eight Americans, lost their lives. World War II had begun.

Navy Seals Stress Relief Tactics (As printed in O Online Magazine, Sept. 8, 2014) Prep for Battle: Instead of wasting energy by catastrophizing about stressful situations, SEALs spend hours in mental dress rehearsals before springing into action, says Lu Lastra, director of mentorship for Naval Special Warfare and a former SEAL command master chief.  He calls it mental loading and says you can practice it, too.  When your boss calls you into her office, take a few minutes first to run through a handful of likely scenarios and envision yourself navigating each one in the best possible way.  The extra prep can ease anxiety and give you the confidence to react calmly to whatever situation arises. Talk Yourself Up: Positive self-talk is quite possibly the most important skill these warriors learn during their 15-month training, says Lastra.  The most successful SEALs may not have the biggest biceps or the fastest mile, but they know how to turn their negative thoughts around.  Lastra recommends coming up with your own mantra to remind yourself that you’ve got the grit and talent to persevere during tough times. Embrace the Suck: “When the weather is foul and nothing is going right, that’s when I think, now we’re getting someplace!” says Lastra, who encourages recruits to power through the times when they’re freezing, exhausted or discouraged.  Why?  Lastra says, “The, suckiest moments are when most people give up; the resilient ones spot a golden opportunity to surpass their competitors.  It’s one thing to be an excellent athlete when the conditions are perfect,” he says.  “But when the circumstances aren’t so favorable, those who have stronger wills are more likely to rise to victory.” Take a Deep Breath: “Meditation and deep breathing help slow the cognitive process and open us up to our more intuitive thoughts,” says retired SEAL commander Mark Divine, who developed SEALFit, a demanding training program for civilians that incorporates yoga, mindfulness and breathing techniques.  He says some of his fellow SEALs became so tuned-in, they were able to sense the presence of nearby roadside bombs.  Who doesn’t want that kind of Jedi mind power?  A good place to start: Practice what the SEALs call 4 x 4 x 4 breathing.  Inhale deeply for four counts, then exhale for four counts and repeat the cycle for four minutes several times a day.  You’re guaranteed to feel calmer on any battleground. Learn to value yourself, which means to fight for your happiness. ---Ayn Rand

The fact is that the estimate of fatalities, in terms of what was calculable at that time—even before the discovery of nuclear winter—was a fantastic underestimate. More than forty years later, Dr. Lynn Eden, a scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, revealed in Whole World on Fire71 the bizarre fact that the war planners of SAC and the Joint Chiefs—throughout the nuclear era to the present day—have deliberately omitted entirely from their estimates of the destructive effects of U.S. or Russian nuclear attacks the effects of fire. They have done so on the questionable grounds that these effects are harder to predict than the effects of blast or fallout, on which their estimates of fatalities are exclusively based, even though, as Eden found, experts including Hal Brode have disputed such conclusions for decades. (A better hypothesis for the tenacious lack of interest is that accounting for fire would reduce the number of USAF warheads and vehicles required to achieve the designated damage levels: which were themselves set high enough to preclude coverage by available Navy submarine-launched missiles.) Yet even in the sixties the firestorms caused by thermonuclear weapons were known to be predictably the largest producers of fatalities in a nuclear war. Given that for almost all strategic nuclear weapons, the damage radius of firestorms would be two to five times the radius destroyed by the blast, a more realistic estimate of the fatalities caused directly by the planned U.S. attacks on the Sino-Soviet bloc, even in 1961, would surely have been double the summary in the graph I held in my hand, for a total death toll of a billion or more: a third of the earth’s population, then three billion. Moreover, what no one would recognize for another twenty-two years were the indirect effects of our planned first strike that gravely threatened the other two thirds of humanity. These effects arose from another neglected consequence of our attacks on cities: smoke. In effect, in ignoring fire the Chiefs and their planners ignored that where there’s fire there’s smoke. But what is dangerous to our survival is not the smoke from ordinary fires, even very large ones—smoke that remained in the lower atmosphere and would soon be rained out—but smoke propelled into the upper atmosphere from the firestorms that our nuclear weapons were sure to create in the cities we targeted. (See chapter 16.) Ferocious updrafts from these multiple firestorms would loft millions of tons of smoke and soot into the stratosphere, where it would not be rained out and would quickly encircle the globe, forming a blanket blocking most sunlight around the earth for a decade or more. This would reduce sunlight and lower temperatures72 worldwide to a point that would eliminate all harvests and starve to death—not all but nearly all—humans (and other animals that depend on vegetation for food). The population of the southern hemisphere—spared nearly all direct effects from nuclear explosions, even from fallout—would be nearly annihilated, as would that of Eurasia (which the Joint Chiefs already foresaw, from direct effects), Africa, and North America. In a sense the Chiefs

Section 2. The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of impeachment. He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments. The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next session.

Nel explained that he’d been finding—and cleaning—semen-and lipstick-stained towels for weeks. I was shocked. If the stains didn’t rinse out, he’d carefully remove them by hand. He was terrified that if he passed them on to other Navy laundry personnel downstairs he’d not only reveal Bill Clinton’s affairs, he’d embarrass the presidency itself. Sure, they might have missed the semen stains—but not the lipstick. A Navy senior chief petty officer was washing those towels by hand: that’s how much Nel cared for protecting the office of the president. Upon seeing the fluid, I instantly thought, “F—ing Monica!” But that lipstick… no. Among White House women, fashion and especially lipstick were like trademarks. This wasn’t Monica’s lipstick. Someone else was entertaining the president late at night. As I testified in the Ken Starr investigation, I believed that this particular lipstick belonged to the current West Wing receptionist. I just knew it. I sighed. But I kept it to myself and didn’t tell Nel or anyone else. I mentally filed that piece of knowledge under “Please forget.

remember: the enemy gets a vote.” “The enemy gets a vote?” the plant manager repeated, questioning what that meant. “Yes. Regardless of how you think an operation is going to unfold,” I answered, “the enemy gets their say as well—and they are going to do something to disrupt it. When something goes wrong—and it eventually does—complex plans add to confusion, which can compound into disaster. Almost no mission ever goes according to plan. There are simply too many variables to deal with. This is where simplicity is key. If the plan is simple enough, everyone understands it, which means each person can rapidly adjust and modify what he or she is doing. If the plan is too complex, the team can’t make rapid adjustments to it, because there is no baseline understanding of it.” “That makes sense,” the chief engineer said. “We

Chester William Nimitz, Sr. was the last surviving officer to serve as a five star admiral in the Unites States Navy, holding the rank of Fleet Admiral. His career started as a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy where he graduated with honors on January 30, 1905. Becoming a submarine officer, Nimitz was responsible of the construction of the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear powered submarine. During World War II he was appointed the Commander in Chief of the Unites States Pacific Fleet known as CinCPa. His promotions led to his becoming the Chief of Naval Operations, a post he held until 1947. The rank of Fleet Admiral in the U.S. Navy is a lifetime appointment, so he never retired and remained on active duty as the special assistant to the Secretary of the Navy for the Western Sea Frontier. He held this position for the rest of his life, with full pay and benefits. In January 1966 Nimitz suffered a severe stroke, complicated by pneumonia. On February 20, 1966, at 80 years of age, he died at his quarters on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Bay. Chester William Nimitz, Sr. was buried with full military honors and lies alongside his wife and some military friends at the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California.

Born John Paul in Arbigland, Scotland on July 6, 1747, he started his seagoing career as an apprentice aboard the sail ship Friendship, commanded by Captain Benson. Paul sailed aboard British merchant ships as well as slave ships and there was even talk that he was even engaged in piracy. Up until now Paul sailed as a watch standing mate, but became the master of the Brig John after the Captain and Chief Mate died of yellow fever. On his second voyage as captain he had one of his seamen flogged so viciously that the man died. This led to his arrest; however he was later released on bail. John Paul skipped bail and left Scotland sailing as Captain on an English ship that had 22 guns, but again ran into trouble when he killed another seaman in a dispute over wages. With this he fled to Fredericksburg, Virginia leaving everything behind. To avoid capture he changed his name by tacking the name Jones onto his given name and joined the American Continental Navy. In December of 1775, now known as John Paul Jones and with the help of some political friends, Jones was commissioned a Lieutenant aboard the 24-gun frigate Alfred. Less than a year later he became the Captain of the Alfred.

Even Admiral Raymond Spruance, Nimitz’s chief of staff and widely considered one of the Navy’s most capacious minds, had taken lumps for what some critics deemed his excessive caution in the Battle of Midway. The experience soured him on second-guessing: “I have always hesitated to sit in judgment of the responsible man on the spot, unless it was obvious to me at the time he was making a grave error in judgment. Even in that case I wanted to hear his side of the matter before I made any final judgment.

AMERICANS -- U.S. NAVY, ABOARD MINESWEEPER USS PELICAN (AM 49), MANILA BAY Alton C. Ingram, Lieutenant. “Todd,” Commanding Officer Frederick J. Holloway, Lt. (jg), Operations Officer. Oliver P. Toliver, III, Lt. (jg) “Ollie,” Gunnery Officer. Bartholomew, Leonard (n), Chief Machinists Mate, “Rocky,” Chief Engineer. Farwell, Luther A., Quartermaster Second Class, Top helmsman. Hampton, Joshua P., Electronics Technician 1st Class, Crew Whittaker, Peter L., Engineman 3rd Class, Crew Forester, Kevin T. Quartermaster 3rd Class, Crew Forester, Brian I., Quartermaster Striker, Crew Yardly, Ronald R., Pharmacist's Mate Second Class “Bones,” Crew. Sunderland, Kermit G. Gunner's Mate 1st Class, Crew. AMERICANS

Article VII. [The governor of this commonwealth for the time being, shall be the commander in chief of the army and navy, and of all the military forces of the state, by sea and land, and shall have full power by himself, or by any commander, or other officer or officers, from time to time, to train, instruct, exercise and govern the militia and navy; and, for the special defence and safety of the commonwealth, to assemble in martial array, and put in warlike posture, the inhabitants thereof, and to lead and conduct them, and with them to encounter, repel, resist, expel and pursue, by force of arms, as well by sea as by land, within or without the limits of this commonwealth, and also to kill, slay and destroy, if necessary, and conquer, by all fitting ways, enterprises, and means whatsoever, all and every such person and persons as shall, at any time hereafter, in a hostile manner, attempt or enterprise the destruction, invasion, detriment, or annoyance of this commonwealth; and to use and exercise, over the army and navy, and over the militia in actual service, the law martial, in time of war or invasion, and also in time of rebellion, declared by the legislature to exist, as occasion shall necessarily require; and to take and surprise by all ways and means whatsoever, all and every such person or persons, with their ships, arms, ammunition and other goods, as shall, in a hostile manner, invade, or attempt the invading, conquering, or annoying this commonwealth; and that the governor be intrusted with all these and other powers, incident to the offices of captain-general and commander in chief, and admiral, to be exercised agreeably to the rules and regulations of the constitution, and the laws of the land, and not otherwise.

Russia selling arms to China, U.S. Navy concerned July 30, 1997 Web posted at: 12:00 P.M. EST (1700 GMT) From Washington chief correspondent Michael Flasetti WASHINGTON (TCN)—As tensions mount in the South China Sea, a confrontation between the Chinese and UN military, led by the U.S. Navy, seems inevitable. Adding to the danger of the situation is the news, reportedly obtained by the CIA, that Russia has been arming China with advanced weapons, among them nuclear attack submarines that may be deployed into the waters surrounding the Spratly Islands. The news that Russia has been selling arms to the Chinese is not new. Over the past two years, China has taken delivery of four Russian Kilo-class diesel submarines, which are considerably less advanced than Russia’s nuclear submarines. However, the possibility that Russia has sold more advanced submarines to the Chinese is of great concern to White House military advisers. A source close to the Joint Chiefs of Staff has disclosed that the Russians have even collaborated with the Chinese on a prototype nuclear attack submarine, and that the submarine may see action in the Spratly conflict. If true, this presents a possible shift in the balance of naval power in the region, and a great concern to the recently downsized U.S. Navy. Russian president Gennadi Zyuganov, himself a conservative Communist like Chinese leader Li Peng, refused to comment on the possibility of advanced weapons sales to China, yet did say that Russia enjoys a balanced trade agreement with China on the sales of certain weapons, including Kilo class submarines. Russia, cash-poor since the breakup of the Soviet Union, clearly depends on submarine sales to China to help fund social and economic projects, as well as the upgrading of its own navy.

Thus FDR, being a shrewd, smart sonofabitch now in his third term as President, knew that despite the cries of the isolationists who wanted Amer ica to have nothing to do with another world war it was only a matter of time before the country would be forced to shed its neutral status. And the best way to be prepared for that moment was to have the finest intelligence he could. And the best way to get that information, to get the facts that he trusted because he trusted the messenger, was to put another shrewd, smart sonofabitch in charge-his pal Wild Bill Donovan. The problem was not that intelligence wasn't being collected. The United States of America had vast organizations actively engaged in it-the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Military Intelligence Division chief among them. The problem was that the intelligence these organizations collected was, in the word of the old-school British spymasters, "coloured." That was to say, the intel tended first to serve to promote the respective branches. If, for example, ONI overstated the number of, say, German submarines, then the Navy brass could use that intelligence to justify its demands for more funds for sailors and ships to hunt down those U-boats. (Which, of course, played to everyone's natural fears as the U-boats were damn effec tive killing machines.) Likewise, if MID stated that it had found significantly more Axis troop amassing toward an Allied border than was previously thought, Army brass could argue that ground and/or air forces needed the money more than did the swabbies. Then there was the turf-fighting FBI. J. Edgar Hoover and Company didn't want any Allied spies snooping around in their backyard. It followed then that if the agencies had their own agendas, they were not prone to share with others the information that they collected. The argument, as might be expected, was that intelligence shared was intelli gence compromised. There was also the interagency fear, unspoken but there, as sure as God made little green apples, that some shared intel would be found to be want ing. If that should happen, it would make the particular agency that had de veloped it look bad. And that, fear of all fears, would result in the reduction of funds, of men, of weapons, et cetera, et cetera. In short, the loss of im portance of the agency in the eyes of the grand political scheme. Thus among the various agencies there continued the endless turf bat tles, the duplications of effort-even the instances, say, of undercover FB agents arresting undercover ONI agents snooping around Washington D.C., and New York City.

The scheme had hardly been given the careful forethought the reporter and his friend assumed, and the dirigible mooring mast would be the folly of follies, perhaps the looniest building scheme since the Tower of Babel. Nobody knew with any degree of certainty whether it would work, and when Smith returned from Washington, where he had discussed the feasibility of the mooring mast with the secretary of the navy and the military’s leading dirigible expert, Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, chief of the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, Smith should have had an inkling that it would not.

Fortunately for Hypo, and the navy, and the United States, Chester Nimitz was not such an admiral. He was briefed each morning at eight o’clock by his fleet intelligence officer, Lieutenant Commander Edwin Layton. Layton also had a standing invitation to walk into Nimitz’s office at any hour of any day if he believed he had important information for the C-in-C. (No one else on the staff, except perhaps the chief of staff, had this privilege.) Hypo provided a daily briefing to Layton, who in turn drew on other sources and briefed Nimitz. Layton and Rochefort had known one another when both men were stationed in Tokyo as language officers in the 1920s. They had shared in the long trial of learning Japanese. They counted one another as friends, and this tended to smooth the contours of their professional partnership, which might otherwise had been complicated by the organizational rivalry between the Fourteenth Naval District (of which Hypo was a part) and the Pacific Fleet staff. Nimitz paid close attention to all the intelligence products that crossed his desk. On his first day as CINCPAC, he told Layton, “I want you to be the Admiral Nagumo of my staff. I want your every thought, every instinct as you believe Admiral Nagumo might have them. You are to see the war, their operations, their aims, from the Japanese viewpoint and keep me advised what you are thinking about, what you are doing, and what purpose, what strategy, motivates your operations. If you can do this, you will give me the kind of information needed to win this war.

The various branches of the US military have special operations forces. These are made up of units of soldiers who have been specially trained to tackle the most risky and dangerous military operations in the world—most of which are never heard about by the general public. Special-ops forces such as the Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, Marine RECONs, and Air Force Special Tactics are comprised of the most elite soldiers in the world. Their training is beyond rigorous, and the qualifications to join such exclusive groups of warriors are extremely high. These elite soldiers make up a small percentage of the total military, but they are the tip of the spear when it comes to critical combat operations. These units usually operate in small numbers, drop behind enemy lines, practice tactics repetitively before executing a given operation, and train for every combat condition they might encounter. But even with an exceptional level of training and expertise, there is one critical component that is absolutely necessary for them to successfully reach their objective: communication. These elite special-ops fighters are part of a larger overarching entity with which they must stay in communication—SOCOM. This acronym stands for Special Operations Command.1 Key to their success from the elite soldier on the field all the way to the commander-in-chief is communication through SOCOM. A unit or soldier on mission in the theater of battle can have the latest weapons and technology, but they cannot access the fuller power and might of the military without the critical link—communications. If a satellite phone goes down or can’t access a signal, this life-or-death communication is broken. Without the ability to call in for air support when being overrun, medical evacuation when someone is injured, or passing on key intelligence information to SOCOM, an operation can be compromised. When communication is absent, things can go south in a hurry. In the realm of special military operations, communication is life.

At the time of Nautilus’s launching back in January, the Caribbean Sea Frontier, an area command with bases in San Juan, Trinidad, Guantánamo, and Aruba-Curaçao, had begun running air-sea patrols in the Gulf of Honduras after the leftist government of Guatemala requested arms from the Soviet bloc in reaction to a U.S. decision to give covert support to an antigovernment “liberation” movement. To protect Honduras from invasion and to monitor and regulate arms shipments into the region in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, which had since 1823 warned European powers against meddling in the Western Hemisphere, the United States airlifted arms to Honduras. On May 20, the first Soviet arms shipment arrived in Guatemala. A few days later, the commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet ordered a contingency evacuation force into the area comprised of an antisubmarine carrier and five amphibious ships with a Marine battalion embarked. On June 18, the United States announced an arms embargo against Guatemala. The crisis ended eleven days later with a U.S.-backed coup that installed a new government under the dictator Carlos Castillo Armas.

Michael Meoli was a Navy SEAL Command Fitness Leader as well as a civilian ACE/ACSM Personal Trainer. He retired in 2013 as a Navy SEAL Operator Chief and Advanced Tactical Practitioner. Until 2018, he was a paramedic and firefighter, serving as a certified tactical paramedic for the San Diego Police Department SWAT team and with San Diego Fire Rescue. Mr. Meoli is an EMT-P, NAEMT-AF, and TP-C.

if there really is no way you can win, you never say it out loud. You assess why, change strategy, adjust tactics, and keep fighting and pushing till either you’ve gotten a better outcome or you’ve died. Either way, you never quit when your country needs you to succeed. As Team 5 was shutting down the workup and loading up its gear, our task unit’s leadership flew to Ramadi to do what we call a predeployment site survey. Lieutenant Commander Thomas went, and so did both of our platoon officers in charge. It was quite an adventure. They were shot at every day. They were hit by IEDs. When they came home, Lieutenant Commander Thomas got us together in the briefing room and laid out the details. The general reaction from the team was, “Get ready, kids. This is gonna be one hell of a ride.” I remember sitting around the team room talking about it. Morgan had a big smile on his face. Elliott Miller, too, all 240 pounds of him, looked happy. Even Mr. Fantastic seemed at peace and relaxed, in that sober, senior chief way. We turned over in our minds the hard realities of the city. Only a couple weeks from now we would be calling Ramadi home. For six or seven months we’d be living in a hornet’s nest, picking up where Team 3 had left off. It was time for us to roll. In late September, Al Qaeda’s barbaric way of dealing with the local population was stirring some of Iraq’s Sunni tribal leaders to come over to our side. (Stuff like punishing cigarette smokers by cutting off their fingers—can you blame locals for wanting those crazies gone?) Standing up for their own people posed a serious risk, but it was easier to justify when you had five thousand American military personnel backing you up. That’ll boost your courage, for sure. We were putting that vise grip on that city, infiltrating it, and setting up shop, block by block, house by house, inch by inch. On September 29, a Team 3 platoon set out on foot from a combat outpost named Eagle’s Nest on the final operation of their six-month deployment. Located in the dangerous Ma’laab district, it wasn’t much more than a perimeter of concrete walls and concertina wire bundling up a block of residential homes. COP Eagle’s

My dive that day would be the first salvage dive inside the sunken hull. An external survey revealed what appeared to be a hole below the mud line on the after port side, presumably made by an unexploded torpedo or bomb. My mission: find the missile and attach a lock on the propeller to prevent it from arming itself and exploding. The submarine base assigned a chief torpedoman to provide technical assistance if we needed help to disarm the torpedo. No salvage work could begin until the missile was rendered safe. This is a simple task for a trained diver. But as it turned out, there was nothing simple about it.

It is little remembered that there was a second Pearl Harbor. Ten hours after being alerted to the first, Japanese planes struck Clark Field in the Philippines, destroying one hundred and two planes, including all but three of General Brereton’s B-17s. He had pleaded with MacArthur to attack Japanese air bases in Formosa. MacArthur replied through his aide, Major General Richard K. Sutherland, that he had been ordered not to make “the first overt act.” What was Pearl Harbor if not an overt act? Brereton demanded. While the debate went on, the Japanese, at first delayed by fog, hit near high noon, finding MacArthur’s planes nearly lined up in rows like the shooting gallery it was. “What the hell!” roared Air Corps chief Hap Arnold when he heard about it. • • • • • At 1458 in Honolulu, Tadeo Fuchikami finally made his delivery of Marshall’s alert to the “Commanding General” at Fort Shafter. It was thrown in a wastebasket without carrying out the request to pass it on to the Navy. “For a while I thought the Day of Infamy had been my fault,” Fuchikami mused many years later. Then I realized I was just one of the sands of time.” The Pearl Harbor attack had left eighteen warships sunk or damaged, including five battleships, and one hundred and eighty-eight planes destroyed. The raid killed two thousand four hundred and three Americans. The Japanese lost twenty-nine planes and fifty-five fliers. Kido butai returned home with three hundred and twenty-four surviving planes.

For a long time, the United States of America focused much of its security concerns on the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean. The recognition of the Pacific Ocean as a vitally important front for war was not high on America’s list of priorities. Only after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor did the strategic significance of Hawaiʻi become a top priority, so much so that the current headquarters for the commander in chief of the US Pacific Command is located in Hawaiʻi, and it is the central base for US Navy, Air Force, and Army operations for the region.

Second Officer Lightoller also served in the Royal Navy during the first war. He returned to White Star after the Armistice and was made Chief Officer of the lumbering Celtic. For a while he had hopes of a transfer to the crack Olympic, but was passed over. He retired from the sea in the early 20’s and tried his hand (not too successfully) at everything from writing columns to raising chickens. But the sea still ran in his blood. He designed and sailed his own yacht Sundowner and had a final taste of peril in 1940. He took Sundowner over to Dunkirk with the great fleet of “little ships,” and rescued 131 British soldiers. At his best in the midst of disaster, he cheerfully wrote his brother-in-law several days later, “We’ve got our tails well up and are going to win no matter when or how.

The role of executive officer (XO) is unique. He can often be the loneliest person on the ship. If something happens to the captain, the “exec” needs to be trained, prepared, and ready to take over. The XO is also the chief morale officer, executor of the captain’s orders, head of discipline, and the meanest “badass” on the ship (when required). The captain has total control and the final say, but the XO must make it all happen and pull everything together the way the captain wants it done while at the same time making the crew do it right. The best XOs eventually become captains. The bad XOs reveal themselves quickly and the navy has a chance to pull them out of line before they become captains and make mistakes that could be fatal to the ship or crew. (Little has changed since 1848.)

The French navy has known periods of great glory, and in its lowest estate has never dishonored the military reputation so dear to the nation, Yet as a maritime State, securely resting upon a broad basis of sea commerce, France, as compared with other historical sea-peoples, has never held more than a respectable position. The chief reason for this, so far as national character goes, is the way in which wealth is sought. As Spain and Portugal sought it by digging gold out of the ground, the temper of the French people leads them to seek it by thrift, economy, hoarding. It is said to be harder to keep than to make a fortune. Possibly; but the adventurous temper, which risks what it has to gain more, has much in common with the adventurous spirit that conquers worlds for commerce. The tendency to save and put aside, to venture timidly and on a small scale, may lead to a general diffusion of wealth on a like small scale, but not to the risks and development of external trade and shipping interests.

US Navy into which young men enlisted during the late 1930s and early 1940s was decidedly white. This had not always been the case. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, African Americans served in a largely integrated American Navy and made up about 25 percent of its enlisted strength. Some thirty thousand African Americans manned Union vessels during the Civil War, with little discrimination as to duties. After segregation was legalized in 1896, African American enlistments declined and black men were increasingly relegated to the galley or engine room. After World War I, African American enlisted personnel declined further as the Navy recruited Filipino stewards for mess duties. By June 1940, African Americans accounted for only 2.3 percent of the Navy’s 170,000 total manpower. The fleet had mostly converted from coal to oil, and the vast majority of African Americans performed mess duties. Black reenlistments in technical specialties were never barred, however, and a few African American gunner’s mates, torpedo men, and machinist mates continued to serve. Amendments to the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 guaranteed the right to enlist regardless of race or color, but in practice, “separate but equal” prejudices consigned most blacks to the Steward’s Branch. Its personnel held ratings up to chief petty officer, but members wore different uniforms and insignia, and even chief stewards never exercised command over rated grades outside the Steward’s Branch. The only measure of equality came when, just as with everyone else aboard ship, African American and Filipino stewards were assigned battle stations. Only then could they stand shoulder to shoulder with their white brothers in arms.13

Rather than return to home ports on the West Coast, American battleships and aircraft carriers, along with escorting cruisers, destroyers, and support ships, stayed in Hawaiian waters, mostly mooring within the confines of Pearl Harbor when not at sea. Former assistant secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, now president of the United States, ordered the move as a show of force to Japan, signaling that America would not condone its further aggression in the western Pacific. The results were not encouraging. Japan did not so much as pause in its drive into China. Almost everyone else, from the commander in chief of the US Fleet, Admiral James O. Richardson, down to the greenest seaman on the Arizona, thought the Hawaiian deployment was a bad idea.

Whatever anxiety crew members on the Arizona and throughout the Pacific Fleet felt about the future would have been heightened had they known that on this same Thanksgiving day, the War and Navy departments in Washington issued what came to be called their “war warning” to all commands: “negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.” At Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, met with Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., the commander of his carrier forces, and Army Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, commander of land forces in Hawaii. Kimmel and Halsey had already organized task forces of cruisers and destroyers around the three aircraft carriers then operating in the Pacific: Lexington (CV-2), Saratoga (CV-3), and Enterprise (CV-6). To guard against a concerted attack or sabotage, they adopted a general protocol that only one carrier task force would be in Pearl Harbor at any one time. At the moment, this meant alternating between Lexington and Enterprise because Saratoga had yet to return to Hawaiian waters after a lengthy overhaul at Bremerton. A similar alternating routine was supposed to be in place among the three battleship divisions. Of the nine battleships in those three-ship divisions, Colorado was currently in Bremerton undergoing its own overhaul. With the war warning in hand, Admiral Kimmel and General Short concerned themselves primarily with the outer boundaries of their commands and not with Hawaii itself. The chief topic they discussed with Halsey was the delivery of aircraft to reinforce garrisons on Wake and Midway islands. Short wanted to deploy Army squadrons of new P-40s, but Halsey quoted an arcane regulation that Army pilots were required to stay within fifteen miles of land and asked what good they would be in protecting an island.

Harvard educated Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who was named Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet in August 1939, came to see naval air power as a great equalizer. At first, he was against waging a war against the United States, knowing her people well. He had the firm belief that Japan was not able to win a war in any ordinary manner. He concluded that Japan must have a new air strategy that would demoralize not only the US Navy, but also the American people. He also believed that by destroying the American fleet that the US government would agree to let Japan rule the Pacific. As part of high command, the Naval Headquarters turned down the plan due to its high danger and risks. Yamamoto argued, stating, “Japan will certainly be beaten if we wage war, force to force. There is nothing we can do but crush their fighting spirit. I will resign from this post if my plan cannot be approved.” The chief of naval operations finally relented saying, “As Yamamoto will go that far, we will have to let him do it.” Japan’s

Potentially the weakest link in the long chain that led to Pearl Harbor was actually one of the strongest. This was the busy eyes of Ensign Yoshikawa, the ostensibly petty bureaucrat in the Honolulu consulate of Consul General Nagao Kita. Presenting himself as a Filipino, he washed dishes at the Pearl Harbor Officers Club listening for scuttlebutt. He played tourist on a glass bottom boat in Kaneohe Bay near the air station where most of the Navy’s PBYs were moored. He flew over the islands as a traveler. As a straight-out spy, he swam along the shore of the harbor itself ducking out of sight from time to time breathing through a reed. He was Yamamoto’s ears and eyes. The Achilles heel to the whole operation was J-19, the consular code he used to send his information back to Tokyo. And Tokyo used to give him his instructions. Rochefort, the code breaker in Hypo at Pearl Harbor, besides being fluent in Japanese could decipher eighty percent of J-19 messages in about twelve hours. The most tell-tale of all was message 83 sent to Honolulu September 24, 1941. It instructed Yoshikawa to divide Pearl Harbor into a grid so vessels moored in each square could be pinpointed. This so-called “bomb plot” message was relayed to Washington by Clipper in undeciphered form. The Pan American plane had been delayed by bad weather so 83 wasn’t decoded and translated until October 9 or 10. Washington had five times as many intercepts piling up for decoding from Manila than Honolulu because Manila was intercepting higher priority Purple. When he saw the decrypt of 83, Colonel Rufus Bratton, head of the Far Eastern Section of Army G-2 or intelligence, was brought up short. Never before had the Japanese asked for the location of ships in harbor. Bratton sent the message on to Brigadier General Leonard T. Gerow, chief of the Army’s War Plans Division with General Marshall and Secretary Stimson marked in.

Too often, the peacetime Navy bred overcautious, unimaginative careerists, officers and chiefs more concerned with promotions and benefits than with their men or their profession.

Lincoln understood the legal and moral complexities of emancipation. He knew that if he included the slave states that remained in the Union, since they had not seceded, the proclamation would reach the proslavery Supreme Court of Roger Taney. Since the Confederate states had seceded from the Union and removed themselves from civil jurisdiction, “the Confederate states were now under the jurisdiction of the president as commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”31 Since under Articles 1 and 3 of the Constitution only Congress, not the Supreme Court, has the power to adjudicate military law, the proclamation as a military order directing the military’s actions in rebellious states was outside of Taney’s jurisdiction. But as a “measure based in military necessity, the Emancipation Proclamation condensed a millennium of moral and legal reasoning into the short text. It contained an entire world of moral considerations between means and ends.

Second. The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect, his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first General and admiral of the Confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies—all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature

It looked like a Navy uniform. The U.S. Public Health Service is an unarmed branch of the U.S. military. One would not describe Alice Austen as a lonely person, or a person incapable of love, for she had many friends, and she had had her lovers, including a man who had wanted to marry her, but there always seemed to be a distance between her and the world. Like many pathologists, she was a loner by temperament, independent minded, curious about how things worked. She was the daughter of a retired chief of police in the town of Ashland, New Hampshire.

In March 1812 the British Caribbean press described how the British squadron based at Jamaica had earlier captured a “Haytian frigate.” In response, the paper reported, “the Haytian chief, Bourgelas” had threatened to kill “all the remaining white inhabitants” in his district of the island unless the Royal Navy returned the frigate.

President of the United States and the Chief of Naval Operations, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s service to this Country and a grateful Navy.” Tears fall uncontrollably as my heart falters. His hand extends and I know I need to take it. I have to . . . but

I was so proud to have been made a lieutenant-commander in the Royal Navy in 2005 (Dad would have approved!), and through the expeditions that I have led in Antarctica, the Himalayas, and the Arctic, we have now raised more than $2.5 million for children’s charities around the world. Those things really matter to me. Especially when you can actually see lives saved. There’s not much tough-guy nonsense going on when I hear those young kids’ stories. It is called perspective. In addition, and somewhat worryingly, I was voted the thirtieth most influential man in America. Hmm. And back home in the UK, I read one morning that I was considered the seventh coolest British man, as well as the most admired person by the middle classes, second only to the Queen. Double hmm. All are very flattering, but they are not very accurate. Ask Shara how cool I am not! They have, though, led to one great thing: becoming Chief Scout and figurehead to twenty-eight million Scouts around the globe. And that has been a really fun journey.

In “Flag Plot,” the naval operations room, Anderson became irritated with McNamara’s specific instructions on how to run the blockade. The admiral told McNamara that the Navy had been conducting blockades since the days of John Paul Jones and suggested that the defense secretary return to his office and let the Navy run the operation. McNamara rose from his chair and retorted that the operation was “not a blockade but a means of communication between Kennedy and Khrushchev,

As a fit and necessary military measure for effecting this object, [preservation of the Union] I, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, do order and declare that on the first day of January in the year of our Lord 1863 all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained shall then, thenceforward and forever, be free.

I thought the submarine environment would be a useful analogy for the space station in a number of ways, and I especially wanted my colleagues to get an up-close look at how the Navy deals with CO2. What we learned on that trip was illuminating: the Navy has their submarines turn on their air scrubbers when the CO2 concentration rises above two millimeters of mercury, even though the scrubbers are noisy and risk giving away the submarine’s location. By comparison, the international agreement on ISS says the CO2 is acceptable up to six millimeters of mercury! The submarine’s chief engineering officer explained to us that the symptoms of high CO2 posed a threat to their work, so keeping that level low was a priority. I felt that NASA should be thinking of it the same way. When I prepared for my first flight on the ISS, I got acquainted with a new carbon dioxide removal system. The lithium hydroxide cartridges were foolproof and reliable, but that system depended on cartridges that were to be thrown away after use—not very practical, since hundreds of cartridges would be required to get through a single six-month mission. So instead we now have a device called the carbon dioxide removal assembly, or CDRA, pronounced “seedra,” and it has become the bane of my existence. There are two of them—one in the U.S. lab and one in Node 3. Each weighs about five hundred pounds and looks something like a car engine. Covered in greenish brown insulation, the Seedra is a collection of electronic boxes, sensors, heaters, valves, fans, and absorbent beds. The absorbent beds use a zeolite crystal to separate the CO2 from the air, after which the lab Seedra dumps the CO2 out into space through a vacuum valve, while the Node 3 Seedra combines oxygen drawn from the CO2 with leftover hydrogen from our oxygen-generating system in a device called Sabatier. The result is water—which we drink—and methane, which is also vented overboard.

As I turned to the chapters dedicated to operations in North Vietnam, the ridiculous gave way to the absurd. I couldn’t discern whether the enemy was the North Vietnamese or the U.S. Navy. The enemy might just as easily have been the State Department or even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They all seemed to have a voice in the ROE, and the tone of the voice was seldom in favor of winning the war, defeating the enemy, or even ensuring the fighter pilot’s chances of survival.

I considered myself a little too old to have a babysitter but the girl who looked after me was playful as well as beautiful! At what age does a boy start noticing the opposite sex? Well, I didn’t mind Tiffany’s attention and always enjoyed when she looked after me! In turn, I could not keep my eyes off of her. In 1949, she married Raymond, who had been a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy during the Second World War. In time, they had a son whom they named after his father. Young Raymond unfortunately was later killed in an auto accident. The lesson I learned from this was that we are all mortal and that terrible things can happen to good people, or more directly, “Shit happens!

After scouting the approaches to the island of Tsugen Shima, one UDT chief petty officer “bawled” out a pair of his swimmers for extending their reconnaissance past the beach. “I was perfectly safe, chief,” the accused responded indignantly. “My buddy was covering me with his knife.