USS Epperson, a 2425-ton Gearing class destroyer built at Kearny, New Jersey, was launched in December 1945 but was laid up incomplete. In January 1948 she was reclassified as an Escort Destroyer (DDE-719). After conversion work at Bath, Maine, she was placed in commission in March 1949 and began more than a year of training and antisubmarine exercises in East Coast waters. Epperson was transferred to the Pacific in August 1950, to be based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, her home port for the next twenty-three years. In 1951 and 1952-1953 she made two Korean War combat deployments, during which she carried out shore bombardment, patrol and antisubmarine missions.

During the rest of the 1950s and the early 1960s Epperson regularly steamed across the Pacific for tours of duty with the Seventh Fleet, sometimes visiting Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific on her return voyages. In 1954 she participated in Operation "Castle", a series of nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands, and in 1961-1963 she helped recover manned and unmanned spacecraft that had orbited the Globe as parts of the Mercury and Discoverer programs. Her designation reverted to DD-719 in June 1962.

Epperson was extensively modernized at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in 1964 under the Fleet Modernization and Rehabilitation ("FRAM"). Emerging in FRAM I configuration, she was now fitted with an antisubmarine rocket launcher (ASROC) and a small hangar and flight deck for drone helicopters, as well as a largely new superstructure. The destroyer soon resumed her pattern of nearly annual deployments to the Western Pacific. In seven cruises from September 1965 to April 1973 Epperson was frequently engaged in combat operations off Vietnam, involving naval gunfire support work, plus search and rescue duties and service screening the aircraft carriers and cruisers that were constantly on station in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Shortly after the end of her 1972-1973 Far Eastern cruise, Epperson's home port was changed to Seattle, Washington, where she served as a Naval Reserve Training ship until decommissioned at the beginning of December 1975. Epperson was sold to Pakistan in April 1977 and renamed Taimur. Following two decades of service as a unit of Pakistan's Navy, the nearly fifty-year old destroyer was stricken in 1998.