What is a Cruise Book?
A Cruise Book is a pictorial history documenting the daily life and voyages of a U.S. Navy ship’s crew. Often compared to college yearbooks, most cruise books are an informal chronicle of a single deployment or voyage of a military vessel, and are produced during times of both peace and war. Created by the crew for the crew, these traditional, yet unofficial, cruise books are usually paid for by the individual crew members, with some of the publication costs supplemented by the ship’s Morale Welfare and Recreation Funds. Cruise books capture the crew’s most personal memories of combat action, shipmates lost, missions accomplished and ports visited, all the while documenting the day-to-day life of a sailor afloat. They also serve to answer a loved one’s inevitable question, “What did you do while you were so long away from home?” For the Naval Veteran, cruise books bring back those memories of life at sea, the faces of long forgotten shipmates and those unique adventures in foreign land
