NINETY-DAY WONDER: How The Navy Would Have Been Better Off Without Me - Stephen Davenport Audiobook

Written by Stephen Davenport
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Grab your life preservers, sailors! Ensign Davenport is on the bridge!In 1953, shortly after the end of the Korean War, while the draft was still on, Stephen Davenport became a ninety-Day Wonder, the derisive term for junior officers in the Naval Reserve after only ninety days of training.All on dry land!On his final navigation exam in Reserve Officers Candidate School, he landed a fictional destroyer somewhere in the Sierra Mountains. Hoping the officer who would grade the exam had a lively sense of humor and very bad judgement, Davenport wrote at the bottom This vessel is amphibious. Nevertheless, he received his commission and was assigned as First Division Officer aboard The USS Vermilion of the amphibious fleet. The First Division was manned by deckhands skilled at maneuvering huge booms to lift landing crafts into the water thirty feet below the main deck and driving the landing crafts through surf, often dangerously high, to land on beaches. Davenport gave orders to do this work that he himself had no idea how to do. He confesses to asserting his unearned authority over people who were more qualified than he even if they had been “dead drunk, on drugs, sound asleep and deathly ill all at once.”Once when he was the Officer of the Deck, conning the ship from the bridge, all the men in the First Division put on their life jackets.Davenport’s memoir has its serious side too. His keen observer’s eye reveals what life was like aboard ship in peacetime when a significant portion of the crew were reservists, eagerly waiting for the day their hitch would end.That same observer’s eye, focused on Vermilion’s commanding officer, Captain Oliver G. Kirk, a decorated World War Two hero, provides a mini thesis on inspiring leadership .Officers and enlisted men did their very best because they wanted to emulate Captain Kirk, and because they knew he cared more for them than for his own career.Often funny, sometimes scary, as when Davenport almost caused a collision at sea, Ninety-Day Wonder is a riveting account of lessons learned aboard shop by an inexperienced officer among far more experienced sailors.