My Kiddie Cruise

My Kiddie Cruise is a coming-of-age adventure. Tales of the author's journey to manhood have been told and retold to generations of offspring. Now in print for the whole world to see, we receive a glimpse of the humorous side of a very dangerous world. Set against a cold war background, we travel from basic training to a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam in the South China Sea.

My Kiddie Cruise is a coming-of -age adventure. The author, eager to see the world, joins the Navy and leaves home the day after graduation from high school. The story takes us on a train to Great Lakes Naval Base, where our hero hopes to toughen up and become a man. Instead, he becomes a cigarette smoking company clerk. On his way to guided missile school, he is stationed temporarily at Annapolis, Maryland serving his country by running the bowling alley. He finally arrives at guided missile school, only to contend with the distractions of Spring Break a few miles away. With training completed our adventurer is at long last assigned to a destroyer in the Pacific. Changing ships in the middle, he spends most of 1963 at sea, with a few humorous nights on the town. My Kiddie Cruise ends the day the Vietnam war officially started.

Bill Van Vlack is a storyteller, regaling family, friends and coworkers with anecdotes and short stories for over sixty years. After retiring from the electrical construction industry in 2010, his children convinced him to start writing his stories while he could still remember them all. During the next decade, Bill wrote over three hundred stories and shared them on social media. This is his first compilation. Bill lives in Tucson, Arizona with Charla, the love of his life and his biggest fan for forty-seven years.