Volume 40, Number 15 · September 23, 1993
Uncle Sam Doesn't Want You!
By Robert Stone
Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the US Military, Vietnam to the Persian Gulf
by Randy Shilts
St. Martin's Press, 784 pp., $27.95
In 1956 I was eighteen years old and a Seaman First Class in the United States Navy. I had joined during the summer of 1955 at seventeen and been sent to the Navy's Radio School at Norfolk. Later that year I was assigned to the class of ship known as an AKA or attack transport. In those grainy old wire photos of the Normandy invasion or Okinawa, AKAs are always visible offshore. They have the classic single stack and superstructure outline of cargo ships but with large A-frames fore and aft. Amphibious landing craft are stacked and secured over their cargo hatches. The ship that features in Thomas Heggen's novel Mr. Roberts was an AK, a noncombatant cousin of the AKA.
Review, 6612 words
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