Branch: Navy
Duty: Operations specialist
By Emily Wunderlich
In a quiet office tucked away inside the Terrace, Bill Benjamin hands a sepia photo across the desk. In it, a certificate of promotion changes hands between a U.S. Navy officer and a younger version of Benjamin. His white sailor’s uniform is crisp, his expression proud yet determined.
The year is 1974. The U.S. is just a year away from the end of the Vietnam War, and Benjamin has just been promoted to E-4, or Petty Officer Third Class.
“I grew up in the John Wayne era,” he said. “It was like Americans were tough, tough people, you know, guts and glory. You went out and grabbed the bull by the horn and wrestled it down and beat it up.”
For Benjamin, serving his country was just the “natural thing to do.” His father, a sergeant of the U.S. Army in World War II, put Benjamin on delayed enlistment so he would be guaranteed a spot in the Navy upon graduating high school.
“If I was drafted, I would’ve gone that way too,” Benjamin said. “It wouldn’t have made any difference.”
Benjamin served from June 1970 to June 1974. As an operations specialist, his duties included plotting the course for the USS Little Rock — a light-guided missile cruiser commissioned in 1945.
When the radar detected other ships in the area, Benjamin charted them on a plastic board that had concentric circles on it. This provided a 360-degree view of shipping activity around the ship.
“Whether at sea or entering a port, the main concern was to plot a good course to make sure our ship didn’t run into another ship,” he said.
If the radar detected an aircraft that did not emit friendly signals, Benjamin would have to track it as if it were a military plane. Sometimes he would work from the combat information center, other times he got to work on the bridge with the captain.
“I liked it because I was always involved with what was going on right at the moment,” he said. “A job that I could actually do outside of military would’ve been an aircraft controller … I never really pursued that, but that could’ve been an option for me.”
After the Little Rock became the flagship of the 6th Fleet, Benjamin recalls spending much of his time in nicer ports because the admiral was on board.
When the ship landed in Liverpool, “some of my shipmates and myself were excited to see where the Beatles got their start,” Benjamin said.
He also got to see Guantanamo Bay before it was used to retain terrorists and explored several parts of Italy toward the end of his tour of duty.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Benjamin says he wouldn’t have gotten to experience the world had it not been for his time in the Navy.
“If I just tried to go on my own, I just never would’ve done it,” he said. “I haven’t been back since, either.”
The USS Little Rock was decommissioned in 1976, just two years after Benjamin’s enlistment ended. It is now on display at the Buffalo Naval & Military Park in New York, where Benjamin hopes to bring his children and grandchildren one day.
Benjamin tried to re-enlist as an officer after college, but he was 30 years old by the time he’d earned his degree in business administration from California State University in Pennsylvania. The cutoff age for enlistment was 28 at the time.
“We call it a ‘lifer’ if you’re going to be in for 20 years or more,” he said. “I would’ve gone back in and put in 20 more years to the four I’d already served, but it didn’t work out that way.”
Instead, Benjamin worked a variety of retail jobs before becoming a new kind of “lifer” at USF St. Petersburg. Although he was originally drawn to the job’s benefits and five-day work week, he said the campus grew on him because of its “unique” educational environment.
“You know what USF stands for? You stay forever,” he said.
Benjamin came to the university in 1987, where he now oversees the parking and purchasing departments. Even though he says “life has overtaken things” since he retired from the Navy, he attributes his character development and respect for authority to his time in the service.
“It matured me to see things outside of my immediate environment,” he said. “They used to say ‘Shape up or ship out,’ and I definitely shaped up.”
Photo courtesy of Stacy Pearsall (resized for web)
