The Canoe Club Legacy
The Matt Douglas Series of Novels from Author, Bill Bandy
Matt Douglas Ensign, USN
Kirkwood, Missouri. St. Ignatius, class of '83; the Naval Academy, commissioned spring 1987.
He reports to Coronado in August 1987 at twenty-two, having never stood a real watch, never held a division, never done one day of anything in this man's Navy but four years of Annapolis. He is academically fast, physically honest, and constitutionally unable to quit. An All-American water polo player at the Academy, with all "the right stuff" — and he kind of knows it. The Trident is just one more rung on a tall ladder.
The Main Characters
Elizabeth Bates College Student
Manchester, Missouri. Parkway South, class of '85 — the west side of Interstate 270.
College of the Hills, in Branson: a school that charges no tuition but expects its students to work campus jobs fifteen to twenty hours a week so they can graduate debt free. She meets Matt on Mission Beach in August 1987 — his last "easy" weekend, and the last one her heart belongs to her alone. She has flown eighteen hundred miles to teach orphans in Mexico. She has also flown that far to meet, "by chance," a boy she grew up five miles from and never once crossed paths with. They shared the same geography. Their lives were a universe apart.
Adam Rice Ensign, USN
Fort Collins, Colorado. The Naval Academy, class of '87.
The quiet one — a stillness that is a nature rather than a discipline, which the BUD/S instructors spend six months trying to disprove. All-American miler and two-miler at the Academy. The most naturally gifted of the four: brains, athleticism, stoic determination, and no apparent vices or weaknesses of character. If anyone here is going to make admiral, Adam is the odds-on favorite.
Fredo Fernandez Ensign, USN
South Philadelphia. The Naval Academy, class of '87.
He drives the blue Ambassador across the country alone in three days to have wheels in San Diego, and explains that fact to anyone who asks and several who haven't. Deadpan, relentless, the running commentary of the group and the one holding the camera. The least athletically gifted of them, and the one who has climbed farthest on grit alone. He has the mind of a philosopher and the heart of a poet. And the fire that drives him is the same fire that could consume him.
Vic Rizzardo Ensign, USN
Upstate New York. The Naval Academy, class of '87. — four years on the wrestling mat at Annapolis. Black belt at sixteen, cauliflower ear, bear paws for hands, and the toughest body the other three ever measured themselves against. Grinds through everything on pure refusal, including the pool comp tank. He is the life and the personality of the group. Loyal to the very end. Physically the envy of every man in the class — but there are cracks in the granite.
Four Naval Academy graduates report to Coronado in the summer of 1987. Not all four will still be standing when the bell stops ringing.
The Canoe Club is the story of the year that made an officer — told in the language the pipeline actually uses, at the pace it actually moves, with the boredom and the paperwork and the friendships left in.
They call them the Canoe Club — the Academy men who arrive at BUD/S with fresh commissions and learn inside a week that a trainee is a trainee, sir or no sir.
The Pacific does not care about any of that. Neither does the brass bell at the edge of the grinder, with the helmets already lined up in the sand beneath it.
