Liberty Station

This guide to Liberty Station in San Diego centers on the USS Recruit, a full-scale warship built of poured concrete on dry land in 1949 and nicknamed by sailors the USS Neversail. It follows the more than fifty thousand recruits a year who trained aboard her below-deck classrooms, learning to stand watch and read a compass without ever leaving solid ground, and the naval logic that decided a landlocked ship was the answer to training sailors before they went to sea. The guide also traces her two decommissionings and the decades she spent rusting at the corner of Harbor and Laning. Stand at her rail and picture the recruits who once braced for a roll of the sea that never came.