From the moment he started his six-week odyssey, the main characteristic that impressed him was the pride of the men -pride in themselves and in their ships. To photograph the U.S. Navy for this week's cover story, TIME'S Dirck Halstead traveled from Norfolk, Va., to Pensacola, Fla., San Diego, Calif., Pearl Harbor and be yond. Everywhere he went he found officers and men eager to demonstrate what their ships could do.

Somewhere off Pearl Harbor, the crew of the high-speed Pegasus put their ship through its paces so that Halstead, hovering in a helicopter, could get a glimpse of the Navy of the future. To photograph one of the new Spruance destroyers, Halstead was hoisted up a 150-ft. mast by crane and perched on a 16-in.-wide platform. To capture the magnitude of the Lexington, he was taken in a small boat across the bow of the mighty ship so that he could shoot up at the great gray mass, a view akin to the cover painting by Artist Nicholas Gaetano.

The assignment was far from Halstead's first encounter with the U.S. military. He covered the arrival of the Marines in Viet Nam in 1965, and he was there to witness their departure a decade later. Early one morning aboard the Lexington, Halstead watched Captain Eugene McDaniel walking his flight deck. McDaniel had been shot down during the Viet Nam War and spent six years in a prison camp, but not only was he still in the Navy, he was still flying while serving as the skipper of the Lexington. "There was a ghostly fog rolling in," recalls Halstead, "and there was McDaniel all alone with his ship. It was a very moving scene. YOU could feel his devotion to duty. This is what military service is all about."

Pentagon Correspondent Bruce Nelan, who filed thousands of words for the story written by Associate Editor Burton Pines, got a quite different impression of the mood of the Navy when he attended a high-ranking strategy forum at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Says Nelan: "The atmosphere was awash in gloom and doom. The admirals could not understand why America's seapower was, as they saw it, being cut back to the danger point. They were puzzled as much as angry, feeling misunderstood and ill-used."

In this week's cover story, TIME takes a searching look at both the enduring pride and the reasons for the Navy's worries.

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