13453. Hall, Wesley. The Hooligan Navy: A True Story About the Old Coast Guard. iUniverse.com, Inc. 2001. Soft wraps. The Hooligan Navy is the third book of a trilogy based upon the author’s Navy (WWII) and Coast Guard (post-WWII) experiences. It is the frank and quite often humorous confession of what life was like as a radio operator in the late 1940s aboard a variety of U. S. Coast Guard cutters. Wesley Hall, at the age of 22, joined the Coast Guard in Oklahoma City, near his home, and was sent to Government Island, Alameda, California. From there he went to the CGC Alert, based in Humboldt Bay, Eureka, California. His record was a clean slate, and his future as a radio operator seemed bright. Fate, however, intervened and, incredibly, during the next two years, when his hitch was up, he served aboard five other cutters, including two Indian cutters assigned to Ocean Station Fox (the Chautauqua and the Escanaba); the Taney, another and larger cutter assigned to gather weather information at Station Fox; the Bramble, a buoy tender, assigned to the northern California coast; and the Storis, an icebreaker that took him from Baltimore, Maryland, to Juneau, Alaska. It is the true story of a young man whose first black mark inexorably led to a second and a third, despite his good intentions. This is a humorous book about this young ex-Navy sailor who found out the hard way that the Coast Guard is a very small outfit where the officers all knew each other and shared what they knew about recalcitrant swabs. A must read if you are interested in early times in the military. (M). $46.