My Kiddie Cruise

The years before the Vietnam War were tense times. The President faced the Russians in Cuba and then he was assassinated. We were not sure where the country was going, but we knew it wasn't good. This is the sometimes-humorous account of one young sailor's adventures.

The United States was escalating its involvement in Vietnam and Cuba was receiving aid from the USSR. The United States government was very nervous. Our military was quietly increasing its manpower. I was seventeen, about to graduate from Glen Cove High School and eager to see the world. Between World War Two and Vietnam the U.S. Navy had an Early Enlistment Program that allowed young men, seventeen years old, to enlist with parental permission and be separated from active duty on their twenty first birthday. My father signed the papers, and I joined the Navy under the Early Enlistment Program. Regular Navy sailors called us Kiddie Cruisers.

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.