The Launching

Clay Berkeley, one of the Navy's youngest master chiefs, is a staunch bachelor who yearns for sea duty while serving as a recruiting supervisor in West Virginia. Clay despises the pressure imposed on recruiters to obtain goal. His skepticism of mandated recruiting techniques and struggles to shield his sailors ignite battles with his commodore and chief recruiter. Having reached the desired pinnacle of his career, he fears little, except marriage. Clay is marginally satisfied with his lot despite situations that would cause most leaders to don sackcloth and ashes and gnash teeth, or check into a locked room with soft, pink walls. His life is made interesting by a couple of foes; drinking buddies with whom to exchange sea stories; an abundance of women; an oversexed English bulldog and a peculiar Persian cat. Clay's world is drastically altered when he gives an interview to a college paper edited by a shy, much younger woman of old fashioned values. What she does to Clay's lifestyle and lady friends during their sail to formation steaming -- and the sly, intelligent means by which she does it --would generate whoops of laughter in a chief master-at-arms with thirty years of naval service.