After graduation from the Naval Academy, Berg reported to his first ship, the USS Little Rock (CLG-4), the Flagship for the U.S. Navy Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean home ported in Gaeta, Italy.

At Copy's urging, Lawrence accepted a job teaching Naval personnel stationed on the Little Rock.

When they began sharing Copy's apartment in Gaeta they discovered they had already been surveilled by Naval intelligence for five months.

Their travails up through the Naval hearing were memorialized in Gibson's memoir Get Off My Ship: Ensign Berg v. the US Navy, published by Viking Press in 1978.

[1] In 1978, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that Berg and former Technical Sergeant Leonard P. Matlovich of the Air Force had been unfairly discharged, although it did not reinstate them, as both had sought.

[1] 67 linear feet (161 boxes) of the Copy Berg Papers are held by the New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division.