A while back, I told you about my friend David Pingenot, who, in the late 1960s, left his small Iowa farm town seeking a wider view of the world by enlisting in the Navy. I talked to him again recently, and he laughed even before he started telling me this story. He told me, “This is one of the highlights of my Navy career.”

When he was a junior enlisted sailor, he was stationed on Grand Turk Island, about 140 miles north of the Dominican Republic. The Navy facility there had about 100 enlisted men and 15 officers operating a then-classified Sound Surveillance System using passive sonar to track Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic.