Dan Harrington: He joined the Navy at 17, serving on destroyers and illustrating his time at sea...

In March 1942, the USS Houston sank after being struck by a Japanese torpedo in the Java Sea. Roughly 700 lives were lost.

Shortly after, the U.S. Navy put out a call for volunteers to replace those personnel.

Dan Harrington, then a high school senior, and four classmates decided to answer the call. However, they were still too young to enlist on their own, and only Harrington, then 17, was able to get permission from his mother to join up.

From a file folder, he pulls out a newspaper clipping with a picture of 1,000 men, their hands raised in downtown Houston, getting inducted into the Navy.

“I’m in there somewhere, I think maybe in the back,” he says. “We marched down to Texas Avenue and to the train station. From there we went to San Diego, where we went to bootcamp.”

He would spend the next three years serving mainly in the South Pacific aboard the destroyers USS Stringham and USS Wedderburn.