Saint, Sinner, Sailor
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About the Book
Saint, Sinner, Sailor is about a young boy from the south who joined the navy in search of adventure and to see the world.
After four years, author Virgil C. Odom re-enlisted and was sent to the Philippines, where he fell in love with a beautiful young Filipino woman, a marriage with whom was planned but aborted after Odom's transfer to Kodiak, Alaska.
After leaving Alaska, and having had duty aboard the destroyers U.S.S. Halsey Powell,U.S.S. Colahan, and on the U.S.S. Berkeley, he finally made it 'close' to the Philippines -- Vietnam, about 600 miles away. Assigned to River Patrol 541 near the Rung Sat Special Zone, he witnessed war and death, leaving the conflict with a permanent scar on his memory.
After a close call with a Navy psychiatrist, Odom was almost on the streets before turning his life around and completing his career in the Navy.
Saint, Sinner, Sailor is neither 'all war' nor fiction. It is about the amazing, real life of an American sailor.
About the Author
Virgil C. Odom was born in 1936 and raised in the south on a sharecropper's farm. At 18, he moved to Houston, Texas where he worked with his uncle assembling automobile batteries at the Globe-Union Battery Plant. Odom enlisted in the US Navy, and had a remarkable 20-year career.
The Wackenhut Security Group employed Chief Odom at University Hospital as a part-time employee during his two years before retiring from the Navy.
After retirement, Odom moved to a small town 10 miles north of the Georgia-Florida border and settled down to take up woodworking as a hobby. He built the small house he lives in today with the help of his grandson, Matthew Dillon Boone. Odom currently enjoys photography, assembling small picture albums, and trying to contact his many Navy friends from the past 47+ years.
Chief Odom still wishes to return to the Philippines and search for his many friends he left behind.