USS EXPERIMENT: Memoir

A 1959 US Naval Academy graduate searches for a perfect wife that is beautiful and can cook. He spends 3 years in the tropics aboard the First Last and Only ship in a discontinued experimental construction program. Key West during the early 1960s was a remote tourist destination populated mostly by personnel assigned to destroyers and submarines. The largest ship in the Destroyer Force tested a new weapon system in waters so shallow that divers had to lie on their backs to inspect the bottom of the ship after 2 groundings. A young officer is assigned duties above his pay-grade. Interactions with senior officers were grist for a Broadway production.