About Hekkova Ships

Hekkova Ships is a structured archive of US Navy ship records — deployments, casualties, yard periods, deck log references, war diaries, and action reports. The records are drawn from the National Archives, the Naval History and Heritage Command, the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, and other public sources. The compilation, structuring, verification, and presentation are the work of Hekkova LLC.

This page is about who is behind that work and why.

The founder

I am a retired United States Navy officer. I served twenty years on active duty and retired at the rank of Commander.

I am building Hekkova Ships because I have stood on both sides of these records.

As a junior officer, I stood Officer of the Deck watches in port and at sea. The deck log entry you read on Hekkova for some Vietnam-era carrier was written by an officer doing what I was doing decades later — recording who came aboard, who departed, what the watch did, what the ship did, and what the captain ordered. I know what goes into a deck log because I authored deck log entries.

I worked alongside quartermasters who maintained the deck log day to day. At the end of every month, the QMs verified the log, made corrections where needed, initialed each correction, and the log went to the Commanding Officer for review and signature before being filed. The corrected, initialed pages you sometimes see in the archive — that is the process I supervised.

I authored a command history report and edited a cruise book on the same ship. I know what is in those documents because I produced them. As Operations Officer at the ship and squadron level, I produced and reviewed operational reports as part of the job — that was the day-to-day work, not a research exercise.

My career took me through unit, squadron, task force, and fleet operational levels. I visited over twenty countries — mostly in the Indo-Pacific — with more than forty different ports of call. I know the ports the deck logs reference. I know the operational areas. I know what it is like to sail through the Philippine Sea and the South China Sea, because I did, repeatedly.

Why this exists

A few years ago, I went to the National Archives to research my grandfather's naval service. I requested deck logs. I requested war diaries. I looked at archival photographs. I worked through the process of getting personnel records.

The process worked, but it was harder than it needed to be. The records exist. They are public. They are catalogued, in their way. But the path from “I want to know what my grandfather did” to “here is what the records show” runs through specialized knowledge that most family members do not have and have no reason to have. They have to learn what a DD-214 is, what an OMPF is, what NPRC is, what NARA is, which records are at which facility, which records are digitized and which are not, what a deck log is and is not, what a command history covers, what a war diary covers, what survived the 1973 fire and what did not.

I am building Hekkova Ships so that the records of a US Navy ship — the ship a veteran served on — can be found, read, and understood by the family without having to first become an amateur archivist. This is what I needed when I started looking for my grandfather, and what I want to make easier for the next family.

What Hekkova Ships is, and is not

Hekkova Ships is a structured, searchable archive of US Navy ship histories, drawn from public-domain federal records and presented with the context needed to understand them. It serves veterans and their families researching service history, naval historians, asbestos-litigation researchers, and authors.

Hekkova Ships is not a memorial site, a genealogy service, a biographical database of individual sailors, or a substitute for the National Personnel Records Center. It catalogs ships and what happened on them. Personnel records are obtained through the federal records system; for that, see the OMPF concierge service, which is a separate offering.

How records are handled

The records I publish were written by people. Many of those people are still alive. Many have surviving family. The records sometimes contain things that the people who appear in them never told their families.

The records themselves are public domain. The National Archives releases Vietnam-era deck logs without name redaction, and any researcher willing to read page by page can find the names that appear in them. What Hekkova Ships adds is structure and searchability.

The platform does not display individual sailor names to the public. Subscribers, who have committed to the research relationship and agreed to the terms of use, see names. Officers in command roles are named at every tier because their command was a public role at the time it occurred. Service numbers from source records are not indexed or stored as searchable data. The structured database is built around ships, deployments, and events rather than personal identifiers. Subscribers viewing source-record imagery see the records as they exist in NARA's holdings.

Anyone with documented standing under our takedown policy can request that a name be removed. Requests are reviewed and decided promptly; redactions, when granted, apply at every tier including subscribers. Contact information for takedown requests is listed on the takedown page.

How records are sourced

Every fact on every Hekkova ship page is drawn from a primary source — a deck log, a war diary, a command history, a NARA record group, a Navy publication. Sources are cited.

Hekkova does not invent facts. Hekkova does not synthesize history. Where the records are silent, Hekkova is silent. Where the records contradict each other, Hekkova notes the contradiction and presents what the records say.

This is not a stylistic choice. It is the entire product.

Contact

For records questions, takedown requests, concierge service, or anything else: support@hekkova.com.

The mailing address and corporate details for Hekkova LLC, a Nevada limited liability company, are listed in the Terms of Service.