A Gunner Aboard the "yankee": From the Diary of Number Five of the After Port Gun (russell Doubleday): The Yarn of the Cruise and Fights of the Naval Reserves in the Spanish-American War

Here is a raw, unvarnished diary from the Spanish-American War, written by a man who was simply Number Five of the After Port Gun. Russell Doubleday was not a naval officer or a seasoned mariner. He was a reservist, a civilian abruptly thrust into the machinery of war aboard the auxiliary cruiser Yankee, and his journal captures what that transformation actually felt like. We feel the cramped quarters, the endless drills, the mind-numbing boredom punctuated by terror when the guns finally speak. Doubleday writes with the irrepressible energy of a young man who signed up for adventure and got far more than he bargained for. The book follows the Yankee's cruise through the war, from the heady days of mobilization when green sailors from every background gathered on the deck, through the tensions of blockade duty, to the moment when an ordinary kid from Ohio or Iowa loads shells beside men he barely knows and discovers what he's made of. It is not polished war literature. It is something more valuable: an unfiltered voice from 1898, recording how ordinary people become soldiers, and how the sea turns boys into men.