Frank J.

Frank P. Orban was born on February 23, 1925, in Indiana, and left home at eighteen with little more than he could carry, setting out to make his own way rather than return to anything behind him. He enlisted in the United States Navy and, still not yet twenty, rose to serve as personal coxswain to Admiral William F. "Bull" Halsey, Commander of the Third Fleet — the sailor entrusted with driving the Admiral's launch and gig, running fleet-landing traffic, and keeping his boat squared away through some of the most consequential months of the Pacific war. He served aboard the battleship USS New Jersey during the fleet operations of late 1944 and early 1945, standing close to the machinery of high command while remaining, by his own steady reckoning, an ordinary enlisted man doing an honest job cleanly. After Halsey lowered his flag and the staff shifted ashore, Orban spent the spring of 1945 on shore duty at Pearl Harbor, weathering the news of Roosevelt's death, the end of the war in Europe, and the long bloody grind of Okinawa, before moving forward with the flag staff to the USS Missouri — the ship on whose deck the war would finally end. Warm, plainspoken, and quietly ambitious, he carried through it all a modest, forward-looking hope: not to go back to what he'd left, but to build something of his own — a place with a door that was his, and someone in it worth coming home to. His wartime diary, Life Behind the Wheel, preserves that voice — sincere, observant, and faithful to what one young man could see of an enormous war from behind the wheel of a small boat.