September 1966, my uncle Byron Quivey Jr. took while on deployment in Viet Nam:

The Santa Ana High School graduate of 1963 (just before the Kennedy assassination) joined the Navy at 17 with his father’s signature, and the Navy Reserve beforehand, giving him the chance to take preparatory classes in different subjects like nuclear power and how to be a machinist’s mate aboard ship.

“I joined partly for the honor and partly for the opportunities the Navy and the Reserves offered,” he explained. “I’ve always stayed busy; I believe the Lord gave us only so much time and I don’t think that time should be wasted. Dad was in the Army Air Corps during World War II along with several of my uncles. Our family military history goes all the way back to Revolutionary times.”

When Byron got his military orders for active duty while still in California, he was flown to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, then to the Philippines where he was assigned to the destroyer called the USS O’Bannon (DD450). That was some ship, the O’Bannon. Launched during World War II, it became the most decorated ship of the war, with none of its crew ever getting a Purple Heart. It’s nicknames included “The Lucky O” and “The fighting Lady.” In 1965, after taking part in the John Wayne movie “In Harm’s Way” (1965), the famous ship headed to Vietnam with Quivey on board where she became a “plane guard” for the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk--“while the carrier’s jets struck targets in South and North Vietnam to lesson Communist ability to wage war in the South,” says Wikipedia.

“We went up the Saigon River, too,” Quivey explained. “I didn’t know ships that large could do that but we were one of only two to go that far upriver—about 22 miles. I never knew what we were shooting at; the targets were eight or more miles away. I was a machinist’s mate and I was the ‘water king;’ we made potable water from salt water using an evaporator.”

In 1967, Quivey and the O’Bannon were sent back to Vietnam after training for the Gemini 11 space flight recovery team. After reaching the DMZ, the ship helped to rescue the crew of an American plane that had been hit and managed to crash just offshore, the Wikipedia account says. “An enemy battery started firing on us,” Byron said. “I saw the bombs hitting the water all around us, but they never hit the ship.”

After completing his second tour of duty in Vietnam, Byron was transferred to the USS Frontier (AD 25), a destroyer tender. (In size, the war ships go from battleship—the largest—to heavy cruiser, then light cruiser, then destroyer, then destroyer escort, Quivey explained.) He already had made a decision to stay in the Navy. “I liked the structure and the organization of the service,” he said. “I liked working with the machinists and I liked being at sea.” After the service, Byron found his second love—law enforcement. (A third vocation would be teaching, more about that coming up.) He got a degree from UCLA in law enforcement and worked his way up to investigator with the Santa Ana Police Department, staying with his hometown outfit for 16 years, up to the late 1980s.

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MM Byron Walter Quivey