GONE ASIATIC by Gordon W. Martin These are the personal memoirs of an eighteen year old, the seventh of seven brothers who joined the military from an ex-Mennonite family. He joined the navy, gained an electronics education, and matured over a four and one half year navy tour. During service school in San Diego, he practiced and paraded on a precision navy drill-team throughout southern California. He describes his experiences as a Fire Control Technician for three and a half years on the destroyer tender USS Prairie AD15, including two WestPac cruises, temporary duty stripping a mothballed cruiser USS Manchester CL83 at Vallejo, California's Mare Island Naval Shipyard, his mess-cook duty as a boot on remote, beautiful San Nicolas Island off the coast of California. He narrates his three day hitchhiking journey across the US, USS Prairie's collision with a Japanese freighter in Tokyo bay, sailors on liberty in Olongapo, Yokosuka, Hong Kong, Okinawa, Tsoying, Kaohsiung, San Francisco, San Diego. He relates the SEATO Operation Pony Express and the Prairie travel to Jesselton, British North Borneo, now Indonesia. He describes almost drowning in Subic Bay, diving with the USS Prairie divers. He became a Mess-Decks-Master-At-Arms on the Prairie and carried out these duties at Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard mess-hall. He tells of hitchhiking around California and travels to Tijuana and Rosaria Beach. The book provides a picture of typical young sailors and their antics, foolishness, loneliness, frustrations, and good times on board ship, in military cities, and on navy bases. A vignette is told of the WestPac widows, the lonely women who wait at home while their sailor husbands are overseas. He speaks of the girls left behind at home, and the attempts to hang on to relationships and keep alive the dimming past. He describes encounters with Japanese divers on a wild, dangerous liberty in Yokosuka. The book relates the experiences of his older brothers during World War II, a kamikaze hit, the one-in-a-million chance meeting of his two brothers on ships at Saipan in 1945. He informs of another brother's grim struggle as an infantryman on Luzon, and his life-altering post-traumatic-syndrome outcome, called "shell-shock" or "thousand-yard-stare." There are insights of Cold War tension and concerns about nuclear war of the fifties and sixties, including the "war stories" of his buddy, a nuclear weaponsman on board the aircraft carrier USS Midway, and a fire set by a sailor trying to blow up the Midway, with catastrophic possibilities of starting a nuclear war.
About the Author: The author was born in northern Ohio in 1938 in a ten-children Mennonite family, and joined the US Navy when he was eighteen. He grew up in the country and spent early years laboring on farms. He worked as a brick-mason, machinist apprentice, and after Navy schools, worked on shipboard radar and fire-control systems, traveling throughout the Pacific, spending three and one half years on the USS Prairie, an American Navy destroyer tender. After the Navy, Gordon Martin received an engineering degree from DeVry University in 1972. His wife and he spent fourteen months in Tunisia on Hospital Ship Hope in 1969. He lived in Columbus, Ohio, Lewisburg, West Virginia, and is now in western North Carolina, where, at this writing, twice retired, he teaches mathematics and electronics at a community college. His wife and he have two children. He plays guitar and violin, has written technical manuals, electronic magazine articles, short stories, scientific journal papers, and has published one poetry book. He holds one patent, and has held various engineering and management positions. He taught chemistry, computer languages, physics, mathematics, and electronics engineering technology courses since 1989. He received the Creative Writing Award for Poetry at the community college where he taught, two years in a row.