It's Your Duty

Book excerpt: It’s Your Duty is a memoir about Gary A. Goeschel’s early naval experience showing he lived the sailor’s life at sea with astounding responsibility encountering danger and adventure. The book summons up stories, revealing an image into an inexperienced sailor’s development, and presents his reflections. Stories about his association with the men he served that forged him into the man he became. WWII experienced leaders gave lessons and guidance, used mean talks, and provided the consequences for the author not meeting requirements, for him, that resulted in embarrassments and painful incidents. The stories also include what a sailor wouldn’t disclose in letters home. Not telling family and friends he could have died when confronting violent seas, nor disclose more threatening dangers. A sailor wouldn’t describe his drunken conditions and the mischief he made. The stories embrace the enlisted sailor’s point of view, a depiction deficient in most naval histories.