John Archibald Bole Jr. was born in Elmhurst, Queens, in March 1906. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1928 and volunteered for the submarine service - in those years, an ambitious young officer's way to stand apart. He took command of the USS Amberjack when she commissioned in July 1942. Two offensive patrols in the Solomon Islands later, Amberjack sailed from Brisbane in January 1943 to hunt Japanese shipping around Rabaul. She sank a freighter on 4 February. Ten days later, she went silent. Japanese records would eventually suggest Amberjack was probably destroyed in an attack on 16 February 1943. Bole received the Navy Cross posthumously, citation in the file, body never recovered. The Navy does this often - takes the name of a man the sea kept and gives it to a new hull. It is less memorial than promise.

By the time Bole was commissioned in March 1945, the Pacific War had a foregone conclusion but still plenty of dying to do. She arrived off Okinawa on 29 June, just as ground fighting there was ending. The kamikazes, though, were not. For six weeks she stood picket duty - the loneliest, most dangerous station in the fleet, placed between Japan's incoming aircraft and the vulnerable carriers they were trying to reach. When Japan accepted surrender terms on 15 August, Bole shifted to minesweeping the East China and Yellow Seas, then to covering troop landings at Inchon, then to accepting the Japanese surrender of Saishu To, a small island south of the Korean Peninsula. In February 1946, off Qingdao, she pulled thirteen survivors from a sinking Chinese merchant vessel - her first documented rescue, not her last.

On 11 April 1951, Bole anchored three miles off Swatow on the coast of mainland China. General Douglas MacArthur had ordered her there. The orders were, in MacArthur's understanding, to provoke a Chinese response that might justify wider war. Bole was, in the words of the ship's own historians, a sitting duck. Chinese armed junks circled the destroyer. The provocation did not come. Before anything escalated, President Truman relieved MacArthur of command, and Bole's orders changed. She pulled away from the Chinese coast. It is a strange footnote to a destroyer's career - nearly the flashpoint of a second Asian war, saved by a civilian firing of her five-star theater commander.

Through seven Korean deployments, Formosa Patrols, antisubmarine exercises off Okinawa, and a stint as air-sea rescue ship for President Eisenhower's 1960 Pacific flight, Bole became something like a regular at the busiest intersections of the Cold War. In 1961 she underwent Fleet-Rehabilitation-and-Modernization, emerging with new gear and a lengthened career. The Cuban Missile Crisis caught her at sea on alert. By the late 1960s she was cycling through Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin, her 5-inch guns pouring naval gunfire support into the Cua Viet River mouth, her crew rotating through plane guard duty for carrier after carrier - Enterprise, Kitty Hawk, Yorktown, Ranger, Shangri-La. In June 1968, a monkey named Ensign Chiko joined the crew in Singapore and sailed with them into the war zone. No record remains of Chiko's eventual fate.

Bole was decommissioned at San Diego on 6 October 1970 at 1003 hours - the Navy records the minute, because the Navy is like that. She was struck in 1974 and transferred to Taiwan, where she was cannibalized for spare parts to keep her sister ships running. One battle star from World War II, seven from Korea. The Gold A for excellence in anti-submarine warfare - the fitting award, given her namesake. John A. Bole went to the bottom off Rabaul in 1943 and never came home. The ship that carried his name spent a generation returning to the western Pacific on his behalf, then went to Taiwan to become parts for other ships still in the work.