McKee scours sailors' diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral interviews to uncover the lives and secret thoughts of British men of the lower deck. From working-class childhoods to the hardships of finding civilian employment after leaving the navy, the former sailors speak with candor about the naval life. Illustrations.

SAILOR MAN is an examination of the combat service of James Preston Nunnally, an underage enlistee aboard the USS Fuller in the Pacific Theater during WWII. Popularly known as the "Queen of Attack Transports," the Fuller received a wartime high nine battle stars for participation in that number of invasions. Nunnally was a crew member for seven of those actions (Bougainville, Saipan, Tinian, Peleliu, the Philipinnes-twice, and Okinawa). It is primarily based on letters Nunnally wrote to his son four decades after the events occurred in an attempt to explain why he had abandoned his son and digressed into a life of alcoholism. In addition to Nunnally's letters, other documents are used, such as a semi-official accounts of the Fuller's actions written in 1945, and interviews with Nunnally's son and sister.

In the title story of Sailor Men, Maki is best friends with Kana, but he never thought of him in any other way. Until one night, Kana dresses up in a sailor uniform to entertain everyone. Suddenly, Maki finds he has feelings that he doesn't quite know what to do with. And Maki's just one of several young men falling in love and lust in the hot romances told within Sailor Men.

When gays had to be closeted, ships were the only places where homosexual men could not only be out but also camp. And on some liners to the sun and the New World, queens and butches had a ball. They sashayed and minced their way across the world's oceans. Never before has the story been told of the masses. These are the thousands of queer seafarers, mainly stewards, who sometimes even outnumbered the straight men in the catering departments of ships that were household names and the pride of the British fleet. Hello Sailor! uniquely shows what it was like to be queer at sea at a time when land meant straightness.

"It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for, or a love that consumes you. To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman... Things like her lulls and storms, or her caprice... are all obvious." The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea tells the tale of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call "objectivity." When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.

The New York Times bestselling memoir of survival and heroism at Pearl Harbor “An unforgettable story of unfathomable courage.” —Reader’s Digest In this, the first memoir by a USS Arizona sailor, Donald Stratton delivers an inspiring and unforgettable eyewitness account of the Pearl Harbor attack and his remarkable return to the fight. At 8:10 a.m. on December 7, 1941, Seaman First Class Donald Stratton was consumed by an inferno. A million pounds of explosives had detonated beneath his battle station aboard the USS Arizona, barely fifteen minutes into Japan’s surprise attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor. Near death and burned across two thirds of his body, Don, a nineteen-year-old Nebraskan who had been steeled by the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, summoned the will to haul himself hand over hand across a rope tethered to a neighboring vessel. Forty-five feet below, the harbor’s flaming, oil-slick water boiled with enemy bullets; all around him the world tore itself apart. In this extraordinary, never-before-told eyewitness account of the Pearl Harbor attack—the only memoir ever written by a survivor of the USS Arizona—ninety-four-year-old veteran Donald Stratton finally shares his unforgettable personal tale of bravery and survival on December 7, 1941, his harrowing recovery, and his inspiring determination to return to the fight. Don and four other sailors made it safely across the same line that morning, a small miracle on a day that claimed the lives of 1,177 of their Arizona shipmates—approximately half the American fatalaties at Pearl Harbor. Sent to military hospitals for a year, Don refused doctors’ advice to amputate his limbs and battled to relearn how to walk. The U.S. Navy gave him a medical discharge, believing he would never again be fit for service, but Don had unfinished business. In June 1944, he sailed back into the teeth of the Pacific War on a destroyer, destined for combat in the crucial battles of Leyte Gulf, Luzon, and Okinawa, thus earning the distinction of having been present for the opening shots and the final major battle of America’s Second World War. As the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack approaches, Don, a great-grandfather of five and one of six living survivors of the Arizona, offers an unprecedentedly intimate reflection on the tragedy that drew America into the greatest armed conflict in history. All the Gallant Men is a book for the ages, one of the most remarkable—and remarkably inspiring—memoirs of any kind to appear in recent years. *Library Journal

EYES UNDER THE WATER When Steve Waterman left home in 1964, he was looking for the most exciting job the U.S. Navy had to offer. So Waterman became an underwater photographer, joining an elite group that numbered only fifteen men in the entire navy--men always on call for unusual and interesting assignments. Yet it was the time Waterman spent in Vietnam with Underwater Demolition Team 13 that deserves special respect. Existing in a state of adrenaline driven alertness, UDT-13 men carried out their harrowing missions. Stealthily, silently, they crept through Vietnam's waterways, never knowing if the next bend in the river concealed VC patiently waiting to spring a fiery, murderous ambush. Employing the wit and unvarnished honesty that got him into trouble more than once during his thirteen years in the navy, Waterman unfolds a compelling tale of an ordinary sailor who chose to serve his country during one of the most controversial, challenging times in its history.