Who was Charles P. Cecil, anyway? Perhaps Crowley knows, because Cecil's bio is certainly written somewhere. Flesh and blood, certainly, probably died young, never knowing that his name would be used, and often abused, by a group of men now joined in a fellowship that the Cecil web-site commemorates. In my mind, Charles P. Cecil is nothing but the name of a destroyer on which I spent three long and hard years--most often in far- away places. Believe me, I have always had mixed emotions about the Cecil and my tour of duty on board--bitter-sweet memories that once were more bitter than sweet, but, with the passage of time, they have mellowed considerably.

     I sometimes wonder where I would be today had not somebody in BuPers picked my name off a list and ordered me to duty on the Cecil? Likewise, what would my life have been had the powers that were not decided to move the Cecil from the Pacific to the Atlantic, with home port in Newport, Rhode Island, where, 49-plus years ago, I met and married my wife, Margaret. Only in old age does one ponder such imponderables.

     Born and raised on a farm in Oklahoma, I took typing in high school, and this would shape my destiny. By Pearl Harbor, I was working as a clerk-typist in Washington, D.C. Soon after that eventful date, I enlisted in the Navy and became a Yeoman third class, on the spot. The next day, I began working at the Navy Department, then alongside the Reflection Pool. A year later with another stripe, I went to Norfolk and an outfit being formed to go to the South Pacific for island administration. During those two or three months, I took a fleet-wide test, and soon thereafter transferred to the V-12 Program (officer training) at the University of Richmond, VA. After a year at Richmond, I had the choice of becoming a 90-day wonder (OCS) or transferring to a degree-commission program (NROTC) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I chose the latter. I became an ensign in 1946 (after the war had ended) and joined the fleet at a time when everybody was getting out and going home. All ships were badly undermanned by both officers and crew. I went first to the USS Columbia, which was at Hunters Point (San Francisco), and I was on board for a WestPac cruise. I had not been with the ship a year, when one day out of the blue, I was ordered to the staff of ComNavWesPac, then on ship tied up to a pier in Tsingtao, China, where we had a division of marines in support of Chiang Kai-shek.

     This strange odyssey in China (mine not Chiang's) lasted for about a year. one of five or six ensigns assigned as cryptographers who stood watches around the clock, we had little contact with enlisted personnel and no command authority over any. The code room became our primary professional responsibility. When not on watch, we slept, played bridge, or we went ashore to play tennis or golf, or to swim at the officers beach, and often to drink at the O'Club, where we danced occasionally with somebody's wife.

     There were numerous U.S. Navy ships in the outer harbor all the time, but we seldom saw any of those people, except maybe in passing at the officers club. Since we (the ensigns) were never assigned to shore patrol, we saw none of the town-side of life, although as we rode (usually in jeeps) from the club to the flagship, we saw plenty of U.S. sailors and marines. As background for something I will write about later, I can say in all honesty that I never slept one night in Tsingtao out of my assigned bunk on the ship, and to my recollection no other ensign companion did so either

     All this time the Chinese civil war was going on in hills around the city, and we could hear the gunfire day night. Thousands upon thousands of refugees crowded into Tsingtao. We experienced mayhem on the road to the airport, where some one of us went every day to escort the mail or to ride herd over transferring U.S. service personnel. One of the better aspects of this duty involved a cruise around in WesPac, during which we crossed the Equator. The most memorable port was Hong Kong, where Ensign Graham was photographed in front of a shop where he bought a piece of luggage that would serve him for years. The picture must have been taken by a Chinese clerk and the little boy, a prop.

     As always happens in the Navy, sometimes sooner than one would expect or want, a message found its way to my commanding officer, and I had orders to the USS Charles P. Cecil, then also in the Western Pacific.

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