Steve, God bless your dad. That generation was truly the greatest.
My dad's poor eyesight kept him from enlisting in the Navy. He spent the war years working at the Charles Town Navy Shipyard as a Class A machinest. He didn't talk about it much and I only recall one conversation when he told me proudly that he balanced the propellers on the aircraft carrier USS Lexington. In that same conversation he told me of the ships that had been torpedoed and had come to the shipyard for repairs. He cried when he described the horrible damage to these ships and having to clean out body parts in compartments that had taken hits and or were flooded.
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