Catching up with...
Walt Kesler Perhaps the most promising young submarine officer in the Navy, Walt Kesler left that for the Episcopal ministry—and Holderness School.
Vehicles of the spirit
A
S A BOY,
WALT KESLER read voraciously, and he
particularly liked books about submarine war-
fare during World War II. This included Edward L. Beach’s Run Silent, Run Deep, a story about American sub Captain E.J.
Richardson’s duel with Tateo Nakame, a brilliant Japanese
sub hunter. In the end, the U.S.S. Eel sinks Nakame’s flag-
In 1963 Walt was the Naval Academy’s top student. He joined the best from the other military academies in being honored by President Kennedy just weeks before the assassination. Walt is the second from the left.
ship. Richardson then sights Nakame and his officers in a lifeboat, and on the verge of rescue. Richardson pilots the Eel into the lifeboat. It’s a thrilling, but also vaguely troubling, conclusion. Beach had been a sub commander himself during the war, and he knew how to capture the moral ambiguities of warfare. He knew how to capture as well the adrenaline charge of men and fantastic machines tested to their limits. “I grew up thinking I would really like to drive a submarine,” says the school’s former chaplain. Which is exactly what he set about preparing to do. He grew up at and attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where his father—over a forty-year career there—taught German and served as a dean and then vice-principal. The whole family was active in Exeter’s Episcopal Christ Church (where current chaplain Rich Weymouth ’70 would serve as a curate in the 1980s), though Walt’s father, when he was a boy, had had a very practical reason for gravitating to the Episcopalians. “That was the one church that paid its choir boys,” laughs Walt. “Twenty-five cents each Sunday, an extra twenty-five if he sang a solo.” But Walt wanted to drive submarines, and in 1960, at the height of the Cold War, he earned an appointment to the US Naval Academy. There he posted the highest academic record in the history of the academy, and was its Brigade Commander in his senior year. His subsequent rise through the ranks was, well, meteoric. He served first aboard the Polaris-class ballistic missile submarine Thomas Jefferson, and then the Sturgeon-class attack submarine Guittaro. Then he became the youngest executive officer (second in command) in the Navy aboard the attack sub Pollack. So there he was at the helm of a machine much more fantastic than Edward L. Beach’s fictional Eel. These nuclear-powered vessels were bigger and more comfortable
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Holderness School Today