Henry H. Abernathy Jr

School of Hard Knots: a Citizen Sailor Goes to Sea Henry H. Abernathy Jr

As a citizen sailor of the late 1960's I spent three eventful years aboard a US Navy destroyer, the USS Furse (DD-882) including intensive operations in Vietnam as well as in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in over 150,000 Nautical miles at sea. Those three years stand out as the most intense and formative of my adult life. Among the events I witnessed were running aground, colliding with another ship, being hit by enemy fire, and a murder on board. But many everyday challenges and events loom equally large for what they taught me about myself and about human nature in our tightly packed and tight-knit shipboard community. Letters written home almost every day along with declassified logs from the ship provide a window into life aboard a Navy destroyer. Re-entry to civilian life at the height of the Vietnam war illuminates these turbulent times as well as what citizen soldiers/sailors faced in that era.