Publication Date: July 14, 2026
It’s January 1, 1926, 0300 hours aboard USS Idaho (BB 42) anchored in San Pedro Harbor, California. The night is dark, the midwatch duty, from midnight to 4 a.m., is long and lonely. A young ensign, E. V. Dockweiler, the Officer of the Deck, must enter the ship’s deck log, an essential record that contains a chronological record of the ship, information about the ship’s condition, its location, movements, and any significant events surrounding the ship. Deck logs can be mystifying to the untrained eye, a string of compass headings, military acronyms, and maritime jargon.
But Ensign Dockweiler knows what many in his place do not-an obscure US Navy tradition allows him, on the New Year’s midwatch and no other time, to deviate from protocol and apply creative license to the task. He launches into a poetic rendering of the ship’s record, a deck log in rhyming verse. Line after rhyming line, he includes the essential information, then ends with this:
That’s all the dope this morning
Except, just between us two
If the Captain ever sees this log
My gawd what will he do?
THE WATCH STANDS AS WRITTEN: Voices From The Midwatch examines the Cold War era and the spirit of the times-the space race, fear of nuclear annihilation, the communist threat, 1960s counter-culture-through the eyes of young officers serving their country in troubled times.
Ship logs have long been a method of historical documentation. However, the United States Navy, particularly those seamen covering the midwatch (from midnight to 4 a.m.), would often use poetry.
Authors David E. Johnson, Gary M. Guinn, and Kenneth D. Keith provide a sampling of the poems, along with an analysis of not only the individual writers but also the critical events of the era for context in The Watch Stands As Written.
The writers include handy tidbits such as the tradition of the deck log poems expanding during the 1950s to become routine. The end result, though, is far from routine.
Whether the poet stuck to the tried-and-true rhyming convention, each entry provides insight into the individual writer’s personality. That includes weaving humor and frustration into the end result.
The Watch Stands as Written illustrates the creativity used to continue a longstanding naval tradition.
David Johnson is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and a former president of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology and is a fellow of the American Psychological Association. He is the author and editor of numerous books and articles in psychology education. He is co-author of Midwatch in Verse: New Year’s Deck Log Poetry of the United States Navy, 1941–1946 (MacFarland Books), pioneering the study of a little-known naval tradition that reveals the human voice of sailors in peace and wartime. Beyond his academic work, Dave is an avid reader, award-winning home brewer, and a re-creator and researcher of Medieval brewing and the use of missile weapons. He lives in Siloam Springs, Arkansas with his wife Simone.
Gary Guinn lives in the southern edge of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. His work explores the intersection of desire, fear, and judgment in a society yoked to traditional values. An escapee from the university classroom, he has published two novels, co-authored two nonfiction books dealing with the little-known Navy tradition of writing the New Year’s deck log in verse, and has found homes for short stories in a variety of magazines and in collections such as Yonder Mountain: An Ozarks Anthology from University of Arkansas Press. He loves to read, write, and drink beer on the deck with his wife, Mary Ann, and their rescue pup. They are trying to survive life in contemporary America.
Ken Keith is professor emeritus of psychological sciences at the University of San Diego, editor of the Cambridge University Press series Elements of Psychology & Culture, and a board member of the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology. He is author or editor of more than 160 scholarly publications, many of them dealing with cross-cultural psychology. He has been a visiting scholar in Japan, the U.K., and Mexico, and is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Western Psychological Association. He served as president of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology. He is an amateur poet, and enjoys writing on a variety of topics. Keith makes his home, with wife Connie, in Lincoln, Nebraska.
