Laguna Beach : Retired Captain’s Essay Wins Naval Institute Writing Contest

When Daniel Appleton was 9 and living in New York, he saw Navy ships on the Hudson River give a searchlight display. Right then and there, he said, he wanted to be in the Navy.

Today, Appleton lives in Laguna Beach. Now 66, he retired from the Navy in 1970, after a 30-year career as an officer that spanned three wars and nearly a dozen ships. During that time, he went from a young ensign assigned to a battleship to a captain in charge of a squadron of destroyers.

Although he has been away from active duty for more than a decade, Appleton and the Navy never really parted company. He recently took first prize in an essay contest sponsored by the United States Naval Institute.

His winning essay, “Endgame,” uses a fictional setting to examine Soviet naval strategy.

“It’s a sort of scenario based on a Soviet admiral who defects,” Appleton said, explaining how the fictional defector tells a group of Western leaders how the Soviets could cripple the United States by disrupting commerce at sea.

The 4,000-word composition, to be published in this month’s edition of the Naval Institute’s monthly journal, Proceedings, is Appleton’s second winner. In 1983, he took first place for an essay on shipboard training, something that has become a passion with him.

Appleton earned a doctorate in administration from UC Irvine in 1978, and volunteers much of his time to the Navy’s Pacific Fleet training command in San Diego.

A survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Appleton said that if war should break out between the Soviet Union and the United States, “the first battle will very likely come in peacetime, just like Pearl Harbor.” Because of this, he hopes the training and management techniques he tries to pass on to the Navy will help sailors to do their jobs better “under conditions of extreme violence.”

So far, Appleton has visited more than a dozen ships, sometimes embarking on short cruises to visit with and observe sailors as they train.

With two prize-winning essays and several shorter articles under his belt, Appleton is ready to tackle a slightly bigger project. “I want to do a good book and get it published,” he said.