Word: reuben
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Gunner's Mate Walter Sorensen of the Reuben James sat down and scrawled what was perhaps to be his last letter...
From there the Reuben James picked up a convoy and worked up toward where it was chilly. Walter Sorensen did not know where she was bound: some of the guys said probably Russia; others said no, just Iceland again...
They put him on the Reuben James. She was one of the old four-stacker crack-erboxes that were finished too late for the other war; she was two years older than he, and shrewish in a choppy sea. But he got to like her, learned to refer to her as Rube and developed a heap of respect for the commanding officer, Lieut. Commander Heywood L. Edwards. That name Heywood did not mean a thing: it was better to call him Tex and pay heed to his calm voice: he was six feet two and used to be an Olympic...
Walter Sorensen heard the story of the original Reuben James. They said he was born in Delaware in the big year, 1776. He went to sea just like anybody and got to be a bosun's mate. In the fighting against the pirates of Tripoli in 1804, he did his big deed. There was a fierce hand-to-hand fight one day. James's boss, Captain Stephen Decatur, was knocked down by a Tripolitan. Another pirate lifted his scimitar to kill the Captain. James dived and took the blow on the back of the head. Captain Decatur said...
Walter and the others on Rube had been plenty sore when people claimed there never was any such hero as Reuben James. That was when they named destroyer 607 (laid down at San Francisco last July) Daniel Frazier. Some scholar had dug into the books and found that the Rube James yarn was a phony; that the name of the hero who saved Stephen Decatur was really Daniel Frazier, and that was why the Department called 607 the Daniel Frazier. The boys on Rube refused to believe...