In his 2008 book , '' Destroyer Captain : Lessons of a First Command '' , Stavridis wrote : In the early 1920 's , my grandfather , a short , stocky Greek schoolteacher named Dimitrios Stavridis , was expelled from Turkey as part of ' ethnic cleansing ' ( read pogrom ) directed against Greeks living in the remains of the Ottoman Empire . He barely escaped with his life in a small boat crossing the Aegean Sea to Athens and thence to Ellis Island . His brother was not so lucky and was killed by the Turks as part of the violence directed at the Greek minority . A NATO exercise off the coast of modern Turkey was the " most amazing historical irony he could imagine , " and prompted Stavridis to write of his grandfather : " His grandson , who speaks barely a few words of Greek , returns in command of a billion-dollar destroyer to the very city — Smyrna , now called İzmir — from which he sailed in a refugee craft all those years ago . " Stavridis is a 1976 distinguished graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy . He is a career surface warfare officer and served at sea in aircraft carriers , cruisers , and destroyers . After serving with distinction as Operations Officer on the newly commissioned , Stavridis commanded destroyer from 1993 to 1995 , completing deployments to Haiti , Bosnia , and the Persian Gulf . '' Barry '' won the Battenberg Cup as the top ship in the Atlantic Fleet under his command . In 1998 , he commanded Destroyer Squadron 21 and deployed to the Persian Gulf in 1998 , winning the Navy League 's John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational Leadership
against Greeks
Greek genocide
James G. Stavridis