Book Review: Tales from My Sea Bag

There's a good chance that anyone in the Navy could fill a book of short stories with their own personal sea stories, no matter what their rating was. That's pretty much the greatest thing about joining the Navy: you get multiple lifetimes of experiences crammed into such a short amount of time.

Of course, slots on aircraft carriers and submarines are limited, and sailors couldn't talk much about those experiences anyway. Author Luis Sung was stationed aboard the Amphibious Transport Dock USS Trenton (LPD 14) between 1980 and 1984. He chronicles his adventures of being deployed with his shipmates and their U.S. Marine Corps passengers and the challenges of being at sea.

Sung spent some of his early life in Florida but says his childhood really started when his family relocated to Honolulu, Hawaii, in the 1970s. It wouldn't last. The family eventually moved back to Florida, where Sung spent most of his life – when he wasn't in the Navy, of course. 

He joined the U.S. Navy after graduating from high school, serving for the next 20 years. He retired in 2003, but the stories from his time in service (especially aboard the Trenton) stayed with him. He ventured into the civilian corporate world after leaving the Navy, but in 2018, he finally answered the voice in the back of his head to write down the experiences he gathered as a young sailor. 

Those experiences make up the short stories in his book, "Tales from My Sea Bag," a 300-page work of art that Sung curated by carrying around a notebook and writing down whatever memories came to him. With contributions from his shipmates, "Tales From My Sea Bag" offers a rare look into the lives of everyday sailors aboard a U.S. Naval vessel. As Sung himself says, "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll walk alongside the author on the decks of the USS Trenton."

"Tales from My Sea Bag" is available in paperback through Luis Sung's own website, NavyWriter680.com, for just $16.99.