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The Truth They Tried to Bury. One Man Refused to Let It Sink.

On June 8, 1967, Phillip Tourney was a twenty-year-old sailor aboard the USS Liberty — a United States Navy intelligence ship operating in international waters off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula. What happened next would alter the course of his life for the next six decades.

Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats attacked the Liberty for nearly two hours. 34 Americans were killed. At least 171 were wounded. Rescue aircraft launched from the USS Saratoga were recalled — twice — on orders from Washington. The surviving crew was left alone in the Mediterranean, bleeding and burning, while their own government decided what story the world would hear. The story they chose: mistaken identity.

Phil Tourney has spent nearly sixty years refusing to accept that answer.

STAY AFLOAT is the memoir of a man who survived one of the most controversial and deliberately buried events in American military history — and then spent a lifetime fighting to make sure his thirty-four fallen brothers would not be forgotten.

This is not just a war story. It is a story about:

• What it costs to tell the truth when powerful institutions have decided the truth is inconvenient
• The weight of survival — the guilt, the anger, the decades of silence, and what it takes to carry thirty-four names in your heart every single day
• Brotherhood — forged in fire on the deck of a burning ship, and sustained across a lifetime
• Family — told honestly, through the voices of Phil’s own children, who grew up in the shadow of a ship that never left their home
• Faith — found not in a moment of triumph, but in the quiet exhaustion of a man who had nothing left to carry it alone
• Persistence — thirty years of letters to presidents, senators, and anyone who would read past the first line, and the moment one letter finally cracked the wall

In October 2024, Phil wrote a letter to Candace Owens. She listened. Their conversation was watched by more than ten million people worldwide — and for the first time in nearly six decades, most Americans learned that the USS Liberty had ever been attacked at all.

“I’ve never heard of this.” “How did I not know about this?” “Why weren’t we ever taught this?”

That reaction — shock, not outrage — told Phil everything. The American people had never been given the chance to decide what they believed. This book gives them that chance.

STAY AFLOAT: From That Day to Today includes:

• Phil’s firsthand account of the attack — the napalm, the torpedoes, the life rafts that were shot from the water
• The sworn declaration of Navy JAG officer Captain Ward Boston, who stated the official investigation was ordered to reach a predetermined conclusion
• The voices of Phil’s children — in their own words — describing what it was like to grow up inside a story the world refused to hear
• Decades of correspondence with presidents, senators, and members of Congress — preserved, documented, and reproduced in full
• The story of how one letter to one woman changed everything

“The Liberty went down in every way but one. And I’ve been trying to stay afloat ever since.”
— Phil Tourney, USS Liberty Survivor, U.S. Navy Veteran

If you believe the American people deserve the truth — all of it — this book belongs on your shelf.