Vice Admiral Mustin directed US Navy arms control planning, including the START negotiations with the Soviet Union.

A Navy junior, Mustin was born in Bremerton, Washington, on 31 August 1933, as the sixth generation of distinguished naval officers and great-nephew of George Barnett, the 12th Commandant of the Marine Corps.

In the late 1940s, while attending St. Stephen's School in Alexandria, VA, he acquired the nickname Hank, as if to reinforce a rootedness, despite his many moves as a Navy junior.

They would often throw grand cocktail parties at the air station's flag cabin, and Mustin would often find himself in the presence of such Navy notables as Halsey and Nimitz.

Before the Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization Program, which added substantial anti-submarine warfare capability to World War II destroyers, a DDR was a coveted ship, and the Duncan had one of the earliest three-dimensional radars, the SPS-8.

He got an important endorsement from his captain, CDR Pete Smith, and in May 1958 the Bureau of Personnel gave him command of a mine hunter, USS Bunting (MHC-45), homeported in Mayport, Florida.

The relatively tiny Bunting, however, would steam past the much larger ship unseen, below the sight of the Officer of the Deck, and thus the carrier never returned honors.

The next time the Bunting rendered the Saratoga honors, "all six of our sea detail came to attention and hand saluted, and six hundred guys returned it," said Mustin.

When they returned that afternoon, Mustin did not render honors to the carrier, knowing that Admiral Anderson was not onboard and that his father, on the diminutive Bunting, was senior.

Mustin's follow-on sea assignment was chief engineer on the commissioning crew for one of the navy's newest guided-missile destroyers USS Lawrence (DDG-4).

The navy's ship designers claimed that the boilers' automatic combustion controls eliminated the need to man a number of stations, in particular, around the feed pumps.

Recognizing the lack of fire support, Shoup soon became very vocal in his objection to continued construction of the new Leahy-class guided missile Destroyer Leader (DLG).

"[1] The 1962 effort by Mustin and his fellow junior officers predated the introduction of the Navy Tactical Data System (NTDS) in the USS King (DDG-41), a Coontz-class guided-missile Destroyer Leader, and addressed defense against aircraft as opposed to missiles.

[1] In mid-winter 1963, he returned to the Lawrence and deployed to the Mediterranean with the first nuclear-powered surface combatant, USS Bainbridge (CGN-25), then classed as a guided missile frigate.

Just previously, CDR Worth Bagley had relieved Walsh as the skipper, thus beginning a deep friendship dating from the Lawrence that Mustin regarded as "one of the defining professional relationships"[1] of his career.

Mustin preferred orders to remain at sea, possibly to command a destroyer escort, and with Bagley's support, he presented his request personally to the Bureau of Personnel.

He knew the ships extremely well; he was well versed in the dealings with New York Shipbuilding, and he had gained invaluable experience with the missile navy, as Maclane had appreciated.

With the arrival of the King and the early version of the NTDS, Mustin and his fellow officers were able to focus more on tactical development that incorporated the new capabilities.

[1] Mustin thus found himself involved in the genesis of fleet air defense against missiles, the tactical threat that would absorb the rest of his career and the next two decades of Navy development.

Wholly counter to the commander's existing doctrine, his solution, despite record scores, earned the ship penalties during the force competitions at Guantanamo for not following procedure.

She issued a press release touting her success - a move that upset the Atlantic Fleet commander, who regarded the feat as a rather mean achievement.

"[1] Mustin's virtually uninterrupted sea duty made for a very tough time for Lucy, who, left with three young children, was at her wits' end.

The course did require him to write a number of professional papers, one of which was on air defense and caught the attention of the college's president, VADM John T. "Chick" Hayward.

Steeping himself in the country's history, he was influenced by Bernard Fall's 1961 classic Street without Joy: The Bloody Road to Dien Bien Phu, the account of the French army's eight-year war in Indochina.

For the rest of his life he would hold in his mind the image of his "beautiful, young, pregnant wife standing in an empty living room, surrounded by three tiny children.

Joe was in Saigon for two and a half weeks of helicopter training with the Army, en route to the Mekong Delta to command a Seawolf squadron.

[1] In the summer of 1966, when the two cousins arrived in Vietnam, the United States abandoned its bombing campaign against North Vietnamese petroleum, oil, and lubricants.

In May 1966, the new emphasis prompted Operation Game Warden, to augment the river patrol boat force in the Mekong Delta to disrupt and hopefully sever the cross-river supply lines in the Viet Cong's regional stronghold south of Saigon.

To that end, in August, Joe and his air crews from the navy's Helicopter Support Squadron 1 replaced the Army personnel who had been operating in the Delta.

His third-great-grandfather was Commodore Arthur Sinclair IV, who was voted a silver service by Congress for victories over the British in the Battle of the Great Lakes in 1812.