Beach relates the many highlights of his career as a submariner that began in World War II with the Battle of Midway and included twelve war patrols in the Pacific. Although he wears ten decorations for gallantry in combat, among them the Navy Cross, his own accomplishments are never the focus of the book. It is instead the Navy as he saw it.

Stateside, Beach was on the personal staff of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Omar Bradley, just in time for the "Revolt of the Admirals" over the B-36 bomber and other controversies. Always an interested and sometimes bemused observer, Beach offers a fascinating look at this and other inner-service rows. As the naval aide to President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1957, he enjoyed a close relationship with that legendary World War II leader and later helped to further Adm.

Hyman Rickover's nuclear power program.

But in addition to his many accomplishments through the years, Beach encountered disappointments, a subject he writes about candidly. Among them are his father's court-martial after the wreck of the Memphis and his own failure to be promoted to admiral. But proof of his continuing devotion to the Navy are found in the concluding chapters of the book, where he makes recommendations for the future of the officer corps and ponders the effect of the submarine on naval warfare.