William Forsyth was born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1948. In 1966, aged seventeen-and-a-half and a junior in high school, he signed his dad’s name and enlisted in the Navy. After boot camp in Great Lakes, he was assigned to the USS Ogden (LSD-5) in San Diego, California, and soon afterwards left on his first cruise to Vietnam as a fireman acting as apprentice electrician’s mate. He describes the ship (“fairly new,” “clean,” “comfortable”), 48 chaotic hours with the USS New Jersey (BB-62) during the 1968 Tet Offensive (“just mind boggling … the destruction”), cooled air (and still 120 degrees in the engine rooms), handling atomic weapons (“so we were told”), and transporting Marines (over and over to the same places). He recalls going up to a signal bridge during a typhoon (“till we were asked to get our asses inside), losing a friend to a softball mishap, and working on an LCM, just to get off the ship. He speaks of the motor shop, the battery locker, and the boat locker. He remembers having to offload the helicopters with the dead (“kind of got to me”), swim call off the back deck, and a New Year’s bottle of Seagram’s 7 hidden in a cake. In Vietnam, Forsyth “grew up quite a bit very quickly.”