Preston Katt has a hard life growing up in a small town. A grade school nun winds up being the closest thing to family he knows. When he is old enough, he enlists in the US Navy, and is assigned to a destroyer based in Pearl Harbor. He arrives just before December 7, 1941. The ship becomes the family he never had and takes him through a number of the major battles in the Pacific, most fighting the Japanese, but one fighting a typhoon.