Memoir · USS Ouellet, 1972
Grand Opening
From Ohio to the Gunline, A Navy Memoir
He joined the Navy hoping to avoid Vietnam. Two years later, his ship was trading fire with North Vietnamese shore batteries.
In the fall of 1969, college student Eric Qualkenbush lost his student deferment and faced the very real prospect of being drafted into the Army. Military service ran deep in his family, but Vietnam was a war he had no desire to fight. So he made what seemed like a sensible choice: he enlisted in the United States Navy.
The recruiter even suggested he might spend his enlistment aboard a submarine.
Things did not quite work out that way.
Grand Opening: From Ohio to the Gunline follows Qualkenbush from a small Ohio town to Navy boot camp at Great Lakes, radar and electronic-warfare training, marriage to his high-school sweetheart Kathy, and assignment as a plankowner aboard the newly commissioned destroyer escort USS Ouellet (DE-1077).
After Ouellet joined the Pacific Fleet, Hawaii became home. Eric and Kathy began married life with little money, a temperamental Volkswagen, and eventually a new baby. Then, in January 1972, Ouellet departed Pearl Harbor for WESTPAC—and the Vietnam War.
Working as a Radarman in the ship’s Combat Information Center, Qualkenbush experienced the war from behind radar scopes and over tactical radio circuits. Ouellet served as plane guard for an aircraft carrier, supported search-and-rescue operations in the Gulf of Tonkin, and joined the Gunline off North Vietnam, where her five-inch gun fired thousands of rounds in support of forces ashore. North Vietnamese shore batteries sometimes fired back.
The book’s title comes from Ouellet’s tactical call sign. Over the radio in CIC came the words Qualkenbush would never forget:
“Grand Opening, Grand Opening, fire mission.”
But Grand Opening is not simply a combat memoir. It is also the story of ordinary sailors—the watches, friendships, liberty ports, bad food, good humor, care packages from home, popcorn in CIC, and the long wait for mail. And it is the story of a young wife raising their infant daughter thousands of miles from family while her husband was at sea.
Written more than half a century later for his children, grandchildren, and the generations that will follow, Grand Opening is a firsthand account of what it was like to be young, newly married, and serving aboard an American warship during the final years of the Vietnam War.
It is a story about the Navy, about war, about growing up—and about how a young man who joined the Navy to avoid Vietnam ended up on the Gunline.
