This is the Life and Death Story of a famous ship, a very special ship that endured almost to the point of invincibility… until one dark night its luck ran out… or maybe it was only some diabolical twist of fate… long overdue? What better way to relate this Helena Story than from the inside as seen through the eyes of its crew-members; rather than following the usual stereotyped path of massaged battle reports based on after the fact access to analytically reconstructed data (even including that of the enemy)? Why not a first-hand narrative, a subjective one as viewed by a junior-officer reporting aboard his first ship: strangely…by coincidence, the very same ship his twin brother, as a plank-owner, had placed in commission only a short two years before Pearl Harbor? Why not a full accounting? …beyond that "living-hell" of night encounters; of battles fought at point-blank range: in eerie, acrid smoke-filled darkness… sporadically interrupted by the blinding glare of searchlights and bursting star-shells… billowing flashes of gunfire… exploding torpedoes, burning ships… those intermittent cries of distress and garbled transmissions… the scene beyond mere confusion and rampant disorder… as friend and foe alike become entangled in a single encircling mass! Yes… tell about the story of ships in the night, off Guadalcanal, patrolling the "Slot", intercepting the "Tokyo Express". And make it a story of feeling, of emotion; of life aboard ship; of shore-leave in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia during WW II… of the almost countless humorous daily incidents, personalities, and wartime vigils beneath distant southern stars.

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