To the editor:

Of my 24 years in the Navy, I had top secret clearance for about 10 years. During some two years stationed in the Far East, a portion of top secret messages were State Department related to the Far Eastern countries.

During the next 28 years as a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Kansas, I consulted with Black & Veatch of Kansas City, Mo., with a secret clearance. Most of this work was for the Army. When I left my desk, work went into a security vault — going to the bathroom, lunch or home.

Had I mishandled my trust, I would be in jail — not running for president.

I must be one of those “deplorables: the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic . . . you name it.” As a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (1941), Pearl Harbor survivor (USS Maryland), leader of the last flight of 16 fighter bombers over Tokyo (Aug. 15, 1945, from the USS Randolph), graduate student of the U.S. Naval postgraduate school and California Institute of Technology (1946-49; CIT Graduate Degree of Engineer), and graduate student some 20 years later at University of Arizona and Oklahoma State (18 hours), I must be an uneducated deplorable to prefer Donald Trump for president.