Ron, thanks for that post. My dad, who passed away in January, was a machinist on a support ship in the South Pacific for most of the war. He, too, never saw combat but it was a tough existence and he nearly drowned during a typhoon. He never talked much about his service, and my brother and I never really showed much interest in it. Fortunately, in his later years I woke up and we had a number of good conversations about his Navy days. He was a voracious reader and enjoyed all of the WWII books by Brokaw, Steven Ambrose, et al.