Ptdeutermann.com
Title
P.T. Deutermann author of suspense novels such as The Cat Dancers, The Firefly, Darkside, Hunting Season, Train Man, Zero Option, Sweepers, Official Priviledge, The Edge of Honor and Scorpion in the Sea
Description
Peter T. Deutermann was born in 1941 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Lieutenant Commander (later Vice Admiral) and Mrs. H.T. Deutermann. The family moved in 1944 to La Jolla, California, where they lived until the end of the Second World War in the Pacific. Between the end of the war and 1959, when Peter entered the Naval Academy, the family lived in various places throughout the United States and also in Argentina. Peter Deutermann attended parochial, public, and Jesuit high schools, graduating from Creighton Prep in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1959. He was commissioned in 1963 at Annapolis into the surface line, where he was ordered to the new destroyer USS Morton (DD-948). He served in Morton for two years, and was onboard for the second Gulf of Tonkin incident in September,1964, which precipitated the first significant aircraft carrier strikes against North Vietnam.
Following his tour in Morton, he was assigned to class 13 of the destroyer department head school in Newport, Rhode Island. Upon graduation he was diverted from the destroyer forces to Coronado, California, to train in the new Swift class gunboats. Upon completion of training, he went to Manila, Philippine Islands, as officer in charge of a mobile training team which trained Philippine navy crews to use Swift boats against the pirates plaguing Manila Bay and the waters off Corregidor. From Manila, he went in-country Vietnam as officer in charge of PCF-39, based at the mouth of the main Mekong river channel that led up to Saigon. After a year there, he was assigned as operations officer in USS Hull (DD-945), which operated intermittently for the next two years off the coasts of North and South Vietnam providing naval gunfire support for Army and marine forces ashore.
In 1968, he married Susan Cornelia Degenhardt, of Gainesville, Florida, and went off to two years at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, where he was awarded a masters degree in public administration and international law. Following graduate school, he returned in 1970 to the Pacific Fleet as operations officer of the guided missile cruiser Jouett (CG-29). A month later, the ship went back to Vietnam, serving as the overall air warfare commander in the Gulf of Tonkin and also as a recovery ship for downed navy and air force pilots. During that deployment the ship visited Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, and the Philippines. In 1972, he went to the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, for one year. He was then assigned to the Pentagon for three years, serving on a joint command and control computer integration project.
