Construction began in 1949, and on July 27 of that year, Rear Admiral Wilder D. Baker commissioned the Recruit into the Navy. She was designed with all the standard equipment a sailor would encounter on any destroyer escort: lifelines, accommodation ladders, signal halyards, searchlights, the engine order telegraph, and the helm. Below her decks, six classrooms held recruits learning the procedures they would soon perform on real ships. Adjacent barracks housed sailors between their watches aboard the landlocked vessel. She was a teaching tool of remarkable completeness, a ship in every meaningful way except the one that seems most essential.

In March 1967, the Recruit was decommissioned for the strangest of reasons: the Navy's new computerized registry system could not classify her. She fit no category the computers understood. For 15 years she sat unused until 1982, when she was reconditioned and refurbished to resemble an Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate. The upgrade extended her length, and she was recommissioned, returning to training duty under her new designation TFFG-1. The Navy had solved its bureaucratic puzzle by simply reclassifying her, proving that even in the computer age, a good training ship was worth the paperwork.

When Naval Training Center San Diego closed its gates, the Recruit stayed behind. She could not sail away, after all. The former training center transformed into Liberty Station, a mixed-use development, but the ship remained a fixture, included in the Naval Training Center's 2001 listing on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2004, she earned recognition as a California Historical Landmark. While her sister landlocked ships at training centers in Maryland and Florida were dismantled when those bases closed, the Recruit survived, making her one of only two surviving examples of the Navy's unique 'landships.'

For nearly two decades after the base closure, the Recruit sat empty, her paint fading and her future uncertain. Hope arrived in 2014 when the USS Midway Museum partnered with local groups, including the San Diego chapter of E Clampus Vitus, to refurbish the aging vessel. The longtime dream of making her a museum ship finally took shape in 2018 as plans developed to commemorate the training center's hundredth anniversary in 2023. The Seligman Group, known for restoring properties like the Watergate Office Building, acquired and restored the ship inside and out.

In June 2023, the Recruit opened to the public as a museum ship. Interior exhibits feature historical photographs and recorded commentary from past service members who trained aboard her decks. Visitors can now walk the same spaces where generations of recruits learned to be sailors. The ship even earned a moment of pop culture fame, appearing in the opening credits of the 1976 television sitcom CPO Sharkey. Today she stands at Liberty Station as a monument to an unconventional approach to naval training, a ship that proved you do not need to sail to teach sailors what it means to serve at sea.