If You Can't Pay Attention, Take Notes: A Navy Brat Reflects on Bratdom, the First Line of Defense, and Why You Don't Wash the Chief's Coffee Cups

By Shelia Watson

There's an old saying that the difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that a fairy tale starts off with "Once upon a time" and a sea story starts off with "This is no shit."

Here in these pages is a heaping pile of "This is no shit" and it starts with the notion that in the Navy, the cardinal rule is: If you can't pay attention, take notes.

When does this rule apply? In the Navy, all the time: when training for war includes playing pinochle, when you're mistaken for an NIS agent, when Robert Mitchum (yes, that Robert Mitchum) stops by your barracks for a beer or two, when advancing in the Navy is one damn thing after another.

The fun frolic through the sea stories of a Navy "lifer" (seen partly through the eyes of his Navy brat daughter) includes a series of adventures and misadventures when he commandeers an Army jeep in Vietnam, discovers that some side work in New Jersey was mob-related, and commutes to the ship via helicopter.

Hear that? They're piping us aboard. Let's weigh anchor and get the sea stories underway

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0578458195
• ISBN13: 9780578458199
• Release Date: May 2024
• Publisher: Tidal Creek Productions
• Length: 124 Pages
• Weight: 0.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 4.0" x 6.0"