Destroyers were the first to herald our entrance into the war.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Our duty was to try and find the Japanese fleet. We never did find the Japanese fleet and I am awfully glad, because they had attacked us there with six carriers, three battleships, 10 or 15 cruisers, and about 20 destroyers.
Destroyers did not have chaplains because they were too small.
We got orders to strike the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. We had a task force with the Enterprise. We had two or three cruisers and probably eight or 10 destroyers.
They were heading out to the middle of the bay - the Gulf - that's another thing that became kind of standard practice, we didn't hurry the destroyers around the beach any more, when it got dark, we'd take 'em out thirty or forty miles out in the middle of the Tonkin Gulf.
We were very fortunate that the carriers weren't in the harbor.
I did not want 'Battleship' to be perceived as an American war film. I wanted to do everything I could to make the film accessible to a global audience. It felt like bringing an alien component to the film would help take the American jingoism out of it.
But I felt it necessary to be part of the war effort and I enlisted in the Navy to be a flyer.
President Johnson put destroyers in harm's way in the Tonkin Gulf not only once, but several times, with the, with a lot of his people hoping that it would lead to a confrontation and claiming that it had. And could have resulted in the lost of many lives in the course of it.
War drags human beings from their tasks of building and improving, and pushes them en masse into the category of destroyers and killers.
I was standing on the deck of the USS Blue, a destroyer. We were all alone out there at this buoy, tied up.