My Log: A Naval Officer's Memoir of WW2 Service in the South Pacific

As an officer on the USS LCI (R) 331 during World War II, Pat Sheeran saw eleven major naval operations, including the historic Battle of Leyte Gulf. It was a dramatic departure from his days as a history major at Cincinnati's Xavier University, when he didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was.

After leaving the South Pacific, Pat worked out his naval service in Boston, where he wrote this memoir, drawing on his letters home and to Peggy, the girl he met while in naval training at Notre Dame in Indiana and whom he married almost as soon as he landed back on United States soil.

In My Log, Pat describes his attempts to join the Navy, his training, and his service - the hurry-up-and-wait, often mysterious nature of naval operations, the camaraderie of the crew living in tight quarters for months, light-hearted leaves, and intense battle scenes - oceans mined with explosives and kamikaze planes overhead. Pat shares copies of letters home, including one to his father seeking advice about the event he should not return home alive - while at the same time reassuring those home that there was little likelihood of that happening even as Japanese planes circled overhead.

Like most members of the well-named Greatest Generation, Pat rarely discussed his service in the war after he completed My Log. In civilian life, he managed a Coca-Cola Bottling plant in New Jersey and, after his and Peg's three children were grown, a Pepsi-Cola plant in his native Ohio. He enjoyed his family, was an award-winning salesman, an active member of his church and in civic life, celebrated Christmas like nobody else, and romanced Peggy throughout their marriage.

Pat passed away in 1993, six years after Peg succumbed to lung cancer. They rest together in Arlington National Cemetery.