Terry Nardone was born in Rochester, New York, home of the Eastman Kodak Company. Photography was all the rage, all the time. He enlisted in the US Navy the day after his eighteenth birthday in 1971. He hope to bcome a Photographer's Mate. He became heavily involved with the Vietnam Veterans of America and lobbied extensively for Veterans issues. In 1993 he and his wife Michelle, along with his two sons, Corey and Chris moved to Hammondsport, New York, a small village on Keuka Lake in the Southern Tier of New York State.
Terry Nardone's Tin Can Treason presents a "tell all" about life aboard a United States Navy destroyer and the dynamics of relations between crewmen. Worried about the draft and an infantry assignment, Nardone enlisted in the Navy the day after his eighteenth birthday in 1971. Despite getting his dream sheet fulfilled, he ended up on a ship that went to war. "Are we men or boys?" Nardone asks several times while thinking through his Vietnam War experience aboard the USS Bordelon (DD881). As part of his treatment for PTSD and guided by "a diary of events," he recreates his shipboard life in the voice of his younger self in a quest to understand the trauma he still feels nearly fifty years later. Fear and depression played significant roles in the lives of men on the Bordelon during her round trip from Charleston, South Carolina, to the South China Sea between October 1972 and April 1973. Nardone describes attempts to sabotage the ship as proof that the crew hated the war and wanted no part of it. Off the coast of Vietnam, the Bordelon primarily provided naval gunfire support for ground forces and took part in Operation Linebacker. Except for one engagement when he went topside, Nardone spent his combat time in the below-deck duty of setting fuses and passing artillery shells. His contempt for the war peaked when the Bordelon bombarded and "killed about eighteen [friendly] marines," he says. He felt an equally tragic loss when he saw a close friend "cut right in half by the steam" from a ruptured 600-PSI line. In combat, tasks that stressed the ship's structure "make the old beast feel like she is going to disintegrate," Nardone says, and the crew twice retreated to Subic Bay for repairs. Nardone talks about the boredom of sailing long distances and says a few crewmen likened it to a prison sentence. He holds back nothing in describing stops that developed into orgies of drinking booze, smoking dope, and finding whores or girlfriends in port after port. A confessed self-abuser, Nardone nevertheless questioned his behavior, wondering if he "would still have nightmares and problems if [he] did not get stoned." Frequently in trouble with the ship's captain, Nardone once spent three days in the brig on bread and water. The book's title is deceptive: "Treason" is not clearly defined by Nardone and might be viewed from multiple perspectives. Suspected of the most flagrant crimes, the ship's captain was relieved of his command, confined to quarters, and arrested upon returning to the United States. You could call this a coming-of-age story except that Nardone was a world-wise young man who exerted significant influence on his shipmates. He makes an airtight case for the strength of friendships and confidences that develop among workers in physically restricted surroundings, such as the hundred men on a destroyer. Reviewing something like a memoir a week for the past year and a half, I have read few accounts of the Vietnam War written by sailors. Until now, the most memorable book about the navy was Brown Water Runs Red by Bob Andretta, which mainly covers action on South Vietnamese rivers. Tin Can Treason differs by telling more about people and the ship rather than the action, and yet Nardone clearly spells out the impact that the war had on everyone and everything. He closes his book with a "History of the USS Bordelon," from its 1945 commissioning to its 1977 sinking as a target. - Henry Zeybel, Lt. Col. USAF (Retired) This review originally appeared in the Vietnam Veterans of America "Books in Review II" (vvabooks.wordpress.com).
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