I was standing on the deck of the USS Blue, a destroyer. We were all alone out there at this buoy, tied up.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.
We managed to get underway, and I don't know to this day why we didn't get struck or take a torpedo, but we didn't. We got outside of the exit of the harbor and we started dropping depth charges.
My grandpa was in the Navy, but it wasn't something that was expected or planned for me to do.
We were very fortunate that the carriers weren't in the harbor.
I was only a gun captain on the battleship Alabama for 34 months. People have called me a hero for that, but I'll tell you this - heroes don't come home. Survivors come home.
In the Marines, I was stunned, absolutely stunned, at everything around me, at what the world looked like.
I slept just floating in the middle of the flight deck, the upper deck of the space shuttle.
Destroyers were the first to herald our entrance into the war.
I was commanding officer of a supersonic fighter squadron, F-8 Crusaders.
I was a grunt, walking around in the jungle of Vietnam, trying not to find the enemy. Because I am so big, they were going to give me either a heavy radio or a huge machine gun to carry. I carried a radio.