At Pearl Harbor, the explosion of the battleship Arizona blew him clean off his own ship and into a sea covered in burning oil. He swam back through the flames, climbed aboard, and saved his ship. A year later he was killed on the bridge of another. This is Cassin Young. On the morning of December 7, 1941, Cassin Young commanded the USS Vestal, a repair ship moored right alongside the battleship USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. When the Japanese attack came, Young was manning a gun, fighting back, when the Arizona's forward magazine detonated in the catastrophic explosion that killed over a thousand of her crew. The blast was so enormous that it hurled Cassin Young bodily off the Vestal and into the harbor, into water coated with burning oil between the two ships. He should have been finished. Instead, Young swam back through the fire to his own ship, hauled himself aboard, and took charge. The Vestal was ablaze in several places, holed by bombs, and settling. There was even a panicked order given to abandon her. Young countermanded it, reportedly saying they were not giving up the ship yet, and with total coolness he got the burning Vestal underway, moved her away from the doomed Arizona, and deliberately ran her aground to keep her from sinking. He saved his ship and his crew through the worst hour in the history of the US Navy. For that, Cassin Young received the Medal of Honor. And his story carries a poignant thread that ties into another I have told. Promoted to captain, he was given command of the heavy cruiser USS San Francisco. And on the night of November 13, 1942, at the ferocious close range Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, a Japanese battleship's shells swept the bridge of the San Francisco, killing Captain Cassin Young along with Admiral Daniel Callaghan and nearly everyone else there. The man who had survived being blown into the burning water at Pearl Harbor died a year later on the bridge at Guadalcanal, alongside the admiral whose own Medal of Honor came from that same terrible night.