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In 1972, the U.S. was embroiled in an unpopular war in Vietnam, and the USS Kitty Hawk was headed to the gulf of Tonkin. Its five thousand men, cooped up for the longest at-sea tour of the war rioted - or, as this book suggests, mutinied. Disturbingly, the lines were drawn racially, black against white. By the time order was restored, careers were in tatters. Although the incident became a turning point for race relations in the Navy, this story remained buried within U.S. Navy archives for decades. With action pulled straight from a high seas thriller, Gregory A. Freeman uses eyewitness accounts and a careful and unprecidented examination of the Navy's records to refute the official story of the incident, make a convincing case for the U.S. Navy's first mutiny, and sheds light on this seminal event in American history.