I remember his “unless otherwise directed” memos, which he would send to his commander after he had already left for a mission and was incommunicado.
I think he was actually a comedian at heart, or at least that’s how he ended up. Both times I met him, literally everything he said or gestured to me or others was full of humor. And it was good.
One of my favorite (likely fictional) stories in one of his books was the time they had to go through extraordinary measures to place a tracking device on a submarine docked in the enemy harbor. After the hell he went through just to get there, he thought to himself, hey I actually have enough C4 on me just to sink the damn thing right here, wouldn’t that be better than just tracking it, when it might do some damage to us while simply being tracked?
You can guess the hell that broke loose after that , both there, and when he got back to headquarters.
UNODIR is a Navy tradition. It is (or was) the thing that differentiated Naval Officers from other officers.