Hi, my name is Steve Mitchell and I served aboard the U.S.S. Joseph Strauss DDG-16 from 1972-75.
I recently completed a novel about a WESTPAC during the Vietnam War entitled “Steve McQueen Would Be Proud.” The book will certainly bring back memories if you served as an enlisted man on the deep blue: navy chow, seabats, Subic, VD lectures, typhoons, Hong Kong, mail call, head detail, pollywogs, Kaoshiung, Shellbacks, inspections, sea details, bargirls... Well, you get the picture. It has a four-star review on the Tin Can Sailors site (http://www.destroyers.org) and a great review on Destroyers On-Line (http://www.destroyersonline.com).
Word of mouth among former sailors has been great.
One former Strauss crewmember said: “Last fall at the reunion in San Diego Dennis told us about this book he had found. He thought it was pretty much right on with our experiences in WestPac. After he read it he sent it to Rod, another RD, in Texas. Rod read it and sent it on to me. I read it (cost me a night's sleep!) and I just sent it on to Jim, an ETR who came on the Strauss just before I got off.”
If you’d like to read a sample chapter, go to http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=12719. The chapter is about our young hero’s first night in Olongapo.
I'm working on another novel, so I’d love to hear your sea stories.
Yours,
Steve Mitchell
Formerly ETR2 on the "Smoky Joe"
congratulations on your Navy novel!
I wrote a sweet little novella about a young sailor experiencing WestPac and being attacked in the Tonkin Gulf by a PT boat squadron from North Viet Nam, just as the Reddy Eddy was in September of 1964. My GQ station was in CIC so i had a good grasp of the situation.
We shot them up pretty well and got away from the quick boats but we never should have been there in the first place -- 7 miles offshore while NVN were rightly claiming a modest 12 mile limit. We provoked an attack that gave an excuse to start the tragic Viet Nam War.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the Tonkin Gulf Incidents and the VVAW Spring Newsletter is featuring Tonkin which makes good reading for Vets, check it out! It's online as well as in print: http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=2616
My DD950 novella called "The Abel Mutiny" is available at Amazon.com for $5 in Kindle version and $3 for some used editions! I changed the ship's number on the cover to DD907, a number that was never assigned by BuShips.
I read Mitchell's naval novel, "Steve McQueen Would Be Proud," with pleasure because it tells it like it was to serve on a destroyer in the WestPac. And he gets into the shipboard politics of lifers and officers always wrestling each other for domination in the small world of a warship. The story really hooks you as you wonder how the first class Radioman is going to skate out of missing the ship's movement in wartime! Just like MY book, you can order it from Amazon.com. Get it, you'll like it!
For a more philosophical and literate story, see my novella "The Abel Mutiny" about destroyermen who rebel against the immoral and illegal war in Viet Nam which cost 58,000 American lives to prove nothing except war is prime stupidity.
http://www.amazon.com/Allen-Meece/e/B004HCF95S
