Until I met Murray Frazee, I didn’t know starboard from aft. My entire nautical experience up to that time had been a few weekend crabbing and fishing trips with my Uncle Dick and Aunt Shirley. Mr. Frazee lived on top of a hill on a large estate he called the Dolphin House. He was the father of some of my schoolmates, so I spent quite a bit of time there, and I always wondered about the fish on the mailbox. What I learned later was that it was a dolphin (the fish, not Flipper), the symbol of the U.S. Navy submarine service. I also found out that Mr. Frazee was retired Captain Frazee, who in the thick of World War II in the Pacific had helped define the essence of a submariner.

He had been the first executive officer on the USS Tang, under the command of the legendary Richard O’Kane. With him, Captain Frazee had participated in some of the most daring and devastating patrols of the war, ones that sent more Japanese tonnage to the ocean floor than any others. Fortunately for him—and, ultimately, for me—he was not on the Tang’s last patrol. Having taken part in more operations than anyone in the service at that time, he’d been sent to San Francisco for a few weeks before he took command of his own submarine. When he returned to Pearl Harbor, he heard that the Tang had been sunk by one of her own torpedoes; only 9 of the 87-man crew had survived.

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