Plebe Summer - Paperback

by Henry John Turowski (Author)

The United States Naval Academy at Annapolis is an institution entrusted with the training and motivation of the future leaders of our military and our nation. Every year more than one thousand new candidates enter Annapolis. They have been selected from more than 12,000 applicants. These are the plebes, and they come from every state in the union and from several foreign nations. They are the best that America's high schools produce, and they are outstanding young men and women. But they bring with them varied family backgrounds, multiple cultural roots, and often extreme differences in outlook and temperament. The duty of the Annapolis system is to indoctrinate the newcomers, and teach them to use these differences in background, personality, and talent to best advantage and in such a way that reflects the highest standards of moral and professional conduct. The Plebe Trilogy tells the fictitious story of Plebe Year - the great crucible that separates the 'candidates' from the midshipmen. Specifically it is the story of one unusual group of first year midshipmen as they progress through Plebe Year in the late 1960s. It was a time when the social turmoil was mostly external, and young men and women were less inhibited by social and political correctness, and when each graduate considered mortality as a direct consequence of their career choice. This novel, the first of the trilogy, develops the concepts of "Plebe Summer'" when the plebe group painfully bonds as a unit through the stressful reality of their new lives.

Author Biography

Hank Turowski grew up in an ethnic neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended Parochial school and Johns Hopkins University before gaining a Congressional appointment to Annapolis. He graduated from the Naval Academy with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and later received a Master's Degree in Management from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and an Italian Language certification form the Army's Language School in Monterey, California. Hank served in combat on a Destroyer, USS Rupertus (DD-851), on a deployment to Vietnam and the Western Pacific. After Vietnam, Hank attended Flight School in Pensacola, Florida. For the next 18 years, he served as a contract and construction manager in the Navy's Civil Engineer Corps, where he moved eight times around the world including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Yorktown, Virginia; Guam, Mariana's Islands; Sigonella, Sicily, and Monterey, Port Hueneme, and San Diego, California. Following Naval service, Hank worked for 3 years in Saudi Arabia, after which he moved to Washington State to do 4 years of Environmental Management. In 2000 Hank started a Project Management Corporation and also worked in a variety of technical jobs in the Pacific Northwest, Los Angeles, California, and Anchorage, Alaska. Later he returned to Annapolis for a job as a world-wide Master Planner. Recently he returned to Saudi Arabia to build an open pit gold mine at an extremely remote facility. On his last contract assignment he moved to the tiny island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to act as facility manager then as General Manager for the largest Base Operations contract in the world. He finally retired to Florida to write full time in 2015. Hank wrote his "Plebe" and "Infidels" novels while working in Saudi Arabia. Plebe was published in 1997 and has been continuously in print ever since. In the last six years, Hank has written 3 books of Short Stories and several Screen Plays. His newest novels "The Jihad", "Harb", and "The Angel of Mercy" are continuations of the Infidels novel. His novel "Second Genesis" is a Sci-Fi story with a different twist.