Neptunus Lex

In a quarter century of naval service I’ve never known anyone who was court martialed. Never have I been called to serve on one. In command, I never felt the need to convene a court martial, although such was in my power - all the sundry offenses brought before me were in the nature of military-style misdemeanors, and courts martial are generally reserved for very grievous offenses, felony equivalents that for whatever reason were not referred to civilian jurisdiction.

We do not do courts martial so very often in the US military.

Which might be a mistake.

Our predecessor service will court martial an officer pretty much at the drop of a hat. Run your ship aground? Court martial. Crash a jet? See you in the dock. Wasn’t your fault? Good - It will all be there in the legal record, for all the world to see. You will have clearly delineated rights: You may question your accuser, assail his (or her) motives, and independently examine evidence. There are due process protections, and evidentiary custody rules. You’ll have a fully empowered attorney by your side. There will be a formal review process, to ensure your rights were protected. The UCMJ is a branch of federal law, and court martial decisions may be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. Which is maybe why we so rarely convene them.

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No, we over here are much more likely to take a disciplinary problem to non-judicial punishment, NJP - much lower on the scale of military justice than any of the various courts martial. The accused has rights, but not so very many. Once he has been read his rights, such as they are, and has agreed to participate in the process - at sea he does not even have the privilege of refusal - he is committed to the end result, whatever that might be. There are no rules of evidence. Witnesses may not be questioned or impeached. No one stands by the side of the accused, and is on his side - his division officer and his chief will be there to speak either for him or against him as his performance has merited, but ultimately these individuals work for the commanding officer himself, the man convening what we in the Navy call Captain’s Mast, and in the Marine Corps is referred to as Office Hours.

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This CO that convened the Mast will be the same man will decide upon the guilt or innocence of the accused, and is the same man who will decide upon his punishment. Having been found guilty, the accused will have the right to appeal to higher authority, but such appeals are almost inevitably fruitless. It is an administrative, rather than judicial process, and as such the penalties are less severe, although in my service a man can still be sentenced to three days bread and water in the brig, demotion, extra duties, “extra military instruction,” loss of pay and restriction of liberty.

Which is why I think that so much of the criticsm of the Black/Whisenant issue is so misguided. Because the Academy has another tacit mission apart from that explicitly quoted in the linked post - Survival: In order to continue “preparing midshipmen morally, mentally and physically,” the Academy must itself continue unhampered and unhindered. The institution believes in itself.

Letting an issue such as LT Black’s boorishness - never mind the institutional response to his boorishness - become the topic of Congressional conversation is strategically unwise. Even if that conversation does not actually threaten the institution’s survival - and let us be clear, the enemies of the several service academies and their theoretical “elitism” and “miltarism” are both powerful and numerous - it will at least make it difficult to complete the assigned mission.

LT Black made an egregious error in judgement, but that error is his alone - he owns it. On the other hand, a decision to “let bygones be bygones” would take the ownership of his malfeasance and transfer it to the Academy. This would allow his behavior to be imputed to the institution and, by extension, the officer corps and naval service in its entirety. That decision might be critically examined by forces inimicable to the institution’s survival, not to mention those unsupportive of the naval mission.

A lesser UCMJ process such as NJP would manage the not inconsiderable tasks of being both more dangerous to LT Black’s prospects while also opening up the motivation of all participants - Black, Whisenant, the Admiral, the officer corps, the Navy - to unwelcome, even tendentious scrutiny. No matter what is decided, partisans on every side will have the grass with which to make their sectarian hay.
Black’s misdeeds, as trivial as they might seem are now a matter of open discourse, but very little else is besides - everywhere is whisper and unhealthy innuendo. Let us have our court martial, let us swear in all witnesses, question their motives and examine all evidence.

Let us shine the light.

This is probably not going to be a popular opinion among the military men of my, em…

Vintage.

But I’m frankly not at all surprised at the crucifixion court martial of LT Bryan Black, who found it somehow necessary to not only tell a female midshipman that battleships made him feel a little funny in the drawers, but also attribute a different potential reaction to herself.

She took offense, he apologized, end of story.

Except that it wasn’t. Someone else took offense too, another officer who worked with Black. Was there bad blood between them? Who can tell.

Did he, through “conduct unbecoming an officer” open himself up to whatever else followed? Most certainly.

Because potty humor isn’t what we’re paying him for. We’re paying him to mentor his charges and execute the Naval Academy’s mission:

To develop midshipmen morally, mentally and physically and to imbue them with the highest ideals of duty, honor and loyalty in order to provide graduates who are dedicated to a career of naval service and have potential for future development in mind and character to assume the highest responsibilities of command, citizenship and government.

Don’t see leadership by sexual innuendo anywhere inside there. Potty humor? Some can make it work, with others it is unfunny, with all of us it’s a risk, calculated or otherwise.

I’m not saying that had I been the Supe I’d have made the same call myself. What I’m saying is that the lieutenant put himself in a position of vulnerability by boorish behavior to a junior. He wouldn’t have said what he said to a female admiral, because he would have had to know that there would be consequences. In saying what he said to a subordinate midshipman, he tried to take advantage of his statutory position. And he also took a high risk/low return professional gamble. I qualify that as stupid. Was it criminally stupid?

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Guess we’ll see.

“We don’t hang men for stealing horses. We hang men so that horses might not be stolen.”
- Edward Halifax

Got a nice email from occasional reader Todd:

 

Sir,

Just wanted to drop you a line to let you know that I enjoy your blog - it’s my ‘window’ back into the active Navy, even though I was not a brownshoe - I was active duty from 1984-1993, Naval Security Group, got out as a CTR2. A ’spook’ as they say…

I still miss much about the Navy to this day, and am grateful for what it did for me. The details aren’t important, but the things that a young man should learn from a father if he has one (responsibility, attention to detail, accountability) I learned instead from several senior petty officers and Chiefs. It has served me well in life - I am a better husband and father than I would have been, and I will pass those lessons on to my daughters as they get older.

I guess I have just been wanting to say ‘thanks’ to the Navy for quite some time, and didn’t know how else to do it. Hope you didn’t mind.

V/R

Todd

Don’t mind a bit, Todd. Thanks for writing.

Sent forward by occasional reader Sandi, and too wonderful not to carry:

Dear Terrorists,

I am a Navy Aviator. I was born and raised in a small town in New England. I come from a family of five. I was raised in a middle class home and taught my values by my mother and father.

My dad worked a series of jobs in finance and my mom took care of us kids. We were not an overly religious family but attended church most Sundays. It was a nice small Episcopal Church. I have a brother and sister and I am the youngest in my family. I was the first in many generations to attend college.

I have flown naval aircraft for 16 years. For me the flying was never a lifelong dream or a “calling,” it just happened. I needed a job and I liked the challenge. I continue to do it today because I feel it is important to give back to a nation which has given so much to me. I do it because, although I will never be rich, my family will be comfortable. I do it because many of my friends have left for the airlines and someone has to do it.

My government has spent millions to train me to fly these multi-million dollar aircraft. I make about 70,000 dollars a year and after 20 years will be offered a pension.

I like baseball but think the players make too much money. I am in awe of firemen and policemen and what they do each day for my community, and like teachers, they just don’t get paid enough.

I respect my elders and always use sir or ma’am when addressing a stranger. I’m not sure about kids these days but I think that’s normal for every generation.

I tell you all this because when I come for you, I want you to know me. I won’t be hiding behind a woman or a child. I won’t be disguised or pretending to be something I am not. I will be in a U.S. issue flight suit. I will be wearing standard US issue flight gear, and I will be flying a navy aircraft clearly marked as a US warplane. I wish we could meet up close in a small room where I could wrap my hands around your throat and slowly squeeze the life out of you, but unfortunately, you’re hiding in a hole in the ground, so we will have to do this a different way.

I want you to know also that I am very good at what I do. I can put a 2,000 lb weapon through a window from 10,000 feet up. I generally only fly at night, so you may want to start sleeping during the day. I am not eager to die for my country but I am willing to sacrifice my life to protect it from animals like you.

I will do everything in my power to ensure no civilians are hurt as I take aim at you. My countrymen are a forgiving bunch. Many are already forgetting what you did on Sept 11th. But I will not forget.

I am coming. I hope you know me a little bit better, see you soon…sleep tight.
Signed,

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A U.S. Navy Pilot

Yeah. I’d fly with that man.

From a new reader, and man I served with, back in the day. Back on the worst day ever:

Lex, if you will allow the late addition to this thread. I remember Terry, he was my first boss. I remember him barefoot in the ready room, and I remember him coming to my aid when another aviator was stashing material I signed for. Sadly, I never got a hop with him.

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I remember that day very well. I remember that CNATRA was in town, the sky was full of pilots under instruction. That was also the day the Cubans reclaimed their “borrowed” MiG-23BN, which is why all the national news crews were in town to cover it, and why your A-4 was onthe news the next day, since it was all they could get a picture of.

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I remember the Petty Officer of the Watch staring at the red crash phone, and my reaching over the duty desk to get it from him. I remember that two of our pilots saw it from a catamaran nearby, and after hauling it in, never sailed in the catamaran again. Four more of our pilots were in Homestead, and unable to return while the field was inop.

I doubt you remember telling me on the radio that you couldn’t raise anyone on Tower, and were down to 300 pounds and were going to Key West International. And when you came back, you found me trying to piece together the OPREP in the Ready Room, and took over, professional through and through.

As CDO that weekend, I watched W.K. (ed: our squadron CO) break down in tears, thinking no one saw him, when removing Terry’s picture from the display in the hallway. Days later, at the Memorial Service, I remember Bugs (ed: a twenty-year lieutenant commander, and wonderful guy) telling me, “I thought I was going to make it. I thought I was going to make twenty years and not lose a single squadron mate.”

Thank you for letting me add a few words for Terry

Ah, you’re welcome. Thanks for filling in the holes in my memory.

It was a bad day. I think that I may have mentioned it before: It’s not all beer and skittles, in the fleet.

Miramar it was, and back in the 90’s too, what with your humble scribe being an adversary pilot but recently arrived from the purgatorial southern swamps of Naval Air Station Key West, Florida, from whence liberated, like Prometheus unchained from a demanding flight schedule, bound as he had been like any galley slave and forced to fly two - sometimes three! - air combat flights in a day, alack, and alas and if your heart wasn’t made of brass, wicked thing that you are, then perhaps you would have felt more sorry for him.

“Go west, young man!” the operations officer had said, meaning TOPGUN when he said it, and the adversary course to be more particular, challenging though it was to fragile egos and given in judiciously and repeatedly applied thumps by the world’s finest fighter pilots, themselves accustomed to treading the hallowed halls of the Prestigious Navy Fighter Weapons School with the heavy step of Praetorian guards. The School itself was not unlike Valhalla to a man of a certain age, never mind the repeated getting of your ass kicked by your betters.

So your scribe and a brother of another mother paired themselves up in a two-seat F-16N and did as they were asked, desired and required, pre-flighting, manning up and tearing the sky apart in a vertical departure before rolling her over on a westerly heading out over the Gulf of Florida and towards Barksdale, Louisiana, that being a short stop on account of all the damn gas we’d burned just getting out of home, profligate wastrels that we were with our vertical departure, and no stewards of the national bounty. At all.

There were few places in the world to rival Key West for a young pilot, burdened as he might be with the flying of not one, nor even two, but three kinds of fighter aircraft on any given day, and doing nothing but the fighting of them, so as to make him extraordinarily wise, not to say preternaturally wicked in the art and science of gunning his opponent, given anything like an equal chance, if that was the best chance that offered. Except of course at The School, in sunny Sandy Eggo, where the cream of the crop busied themselves like knights of the round table in the pursuit of such intramural excellence as could maybe only be otherwise had in one of Plato’s forms, while taking it upon themselves in the intervening periods to absentmindedly punish the occasional external pretender to the throne such as your scribe and any of his cohort as a matter of dreary course. Shaolin monks they were, and their aerial kung foo was very strong, and we mere apprentices, a-trying of our mettle against the flower of American youth, equipped with g-suits, harnesses and superabundant attitude.

Oh, they were good gentle reader, the TOPGUN instructors, and professional too, so that when they would afterwards describe to you what a chunder-head you had been to reverse when defensive (which you should never, ever do, what in God’s name were you thinking?) only to watch them fall savagely upon your soon-to-be-odiferous corpse with glad abandon and something very nearly approaching carnal glee, it somehow came out sounding in the debrief not like you had simply been an idiot (although you self-evidently had been), but only that you had learned so very much that day, and wasn’t that a good thing, selah. Because you were so damn grateful for it. Weren’t you?

You were.

And in such a manner is abuse enabled and perpetuated.

But all was not pushing rocks up hills, nor even being chained to them at Naval Air Station Miramar in the 1990’s. There was also, as it turned out, an officer’s club, which had, in the days, weeks and months immediately subsequent to the movie “Top Gun” (which they didn’t even spell it right, it being written as one word, all caps, which anyone could have known just for asking) had become quite the venue for all kinds of predatory beasts attempting to determine exactly what the Other was constructed of, and how long it might last when put to the test.

At least that’s what I was told by others, seizing the moral high ground and satisfying myself for the most part by the staying in my room at the end of the fly day, and the reading of Gideon’s while conscientiously eschewing any pleasures of the flesh that might have offered themselves up, whenever I wasn’t doing charity work at one of the local orphanages. Chiefly on account of my oak-like constitution and iron will. I’d point out that my next-door neighbor was not nearly so abstemious, entertaining guests, sometimes quite tumultuous and cacophonous guests, until all hours of the early morning, which I couldn’t help but hearing, the walls between the rooms being so very thin and what with my ear pressed up against them.

Be that as it may, it came to pass one night that your correspondent and his brother found themselves at the club one night partaking of such pleasures as could be had without entirely jeopardizing their actual lives, should they ever go back home, until the wee hours of the morning, notwithstanding the fact that they had an early go the next day. Which couldn’t have been, based on the rules, any earlier than 12 hours after their last taste of an alcoholic beverage. Because that was the rule.

But just as it is always after noon somewhere in the world, so is it also 12 hour or more from take-off time, depending on how you look at it. There were many heroic acts that evening that I will not bore you with, not being central to the tale, which would nevertheless be preserved in song if that sort of thing was still considered fashionable, but anyway.

Sufficient to the day the evil thereof, and then some, and it came to pass that the next day as we took off out of NAS Miramar and pooted our way out to the Yuma Tactical Air Combat Systems range to the east that your humble scribe thought it better to ride in the trunk, rather than to lead from the front, at least until the first flight had ended, and maybe its debrief too, and only then might he feel a little more human than he currently did. Up, up into the burning blue, and leveled off at 25,000 in a high tech fighter, your narrator felt quite frankly a little weary, not to say jaded.

A big clamshell canopy had the TF-16N, and the day was hot and bright, so it served your correspondent’s leisure to loosen his O2 mask, let it fall from his sweating face and rest his weary eyes, a little, that being thought the best thing for it, really. Taken as a whole, his friend up front didn’t seem to mind his absence on the intercom, asking of him “What are you doing?” and “What’s the plan now?”, etc. But the TOPGUN IP who joined up on the right wing at angels 25 prior to the first push was alarmed and dismayed to see your scribe apparently passed out hypoxic and unconscious in the back seat of a multi-million dollar fighter, just prior to joining the fray. This worthy was y-clept “Stump,” on account of his exceptional vertical stature and physical dimensions, and he wasted no time communicating to the nose gunner that there was apparently a dead man in the back seat, and perhaps something ought to be done about it.

The nose gunner wasn’t convinced that I was dead, and cleared Stump out for to give the jet a violent shake, and see if that could revive my spirits. Which of course it did, and damn near brought up breakfast too. Having stirred to greet the dawn with a gimlet eye, I was dismayed to see the Stumpster come back close aboard and give me a questioning “thumbs up”? Was I OK? Would I live?

In an inconsidered moment (himself being a Marine major, and a TOPGUN IP, and your scribe a mere snot-nosed Navy lieutenant, not to mention a student, and the distinction between the two being thought critically important) I raised and returned a finger of my own, not corresponding to that opposable digit which is the pride of our species.

And for this crime I paid, gentle reader.

And I learned about Gideon’s from that, so I did.

Then you’re going to love Somalia. No central government since 1991.

And pirates. Lots and lots of pirates.

I hate pirates.

In this, I am not alone:

The guided missile destroyer USS Winston S Churchill went in pursuit of a suspect vessel after receiving a report of piracy, the navy said.

When other efforts failed, the Churchill fired warning shots to bring the boat to a halt.

The Churchill shadowed the suspect vessel, and tried to make contact over the radio, before resorting on Saturday to “aggressive manoeuvring in an attempt to stop the vessel”.

When this failed, “Churchill fired warning shots. The vessel cut speed and went dead in the water,” the statements said.

Later an unspecified number of sailors were taken off the vessel and a quantity of small arms was recovered, the navy said.

Piracy, including hijackings and hostage-taking, has become common off anarchic Somalia, where there has been no effective central government since 1991.

Nice job, fellas. For, you know: Black shoes.

Unless you’ve been to sea:

You’ve never heard the prolonged blast, and the 1MC call of “Underway. Shift colors,” and knew that it meant you wouldn’t be seeing those you love again for at least six months, if ever.

You’ve never stood on the very point of the bow of a destroyer in the Caribean, where the sea is clearer than it has any right to be, with the rays of the aching sun slashing down through the water like spears from heaven and seen the sonar dome there thirty feet below the waterline as the cut line brusquely shoulders the waves aside.

You’ve never seen the flying fish playing in the bow wave, nor seen them leaping from the water as though electrified when the active sonar sings its questing, lilting song, asking of the submarine, “Are you there? Where are you?”

You’ve never opened your mouth the better to stop your ears while a Tomcat sat in tension on a waist cat in full blower, screaming to be released, and felt more than heard the sound of it vibrating your ribs, shaking your very organs and knowing that of all the things a man might be made for, this could certainly not be one of them.
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You’ve never sat on a bollard right aft, on the helo deck, as a distant sun went down across an infinite sea, and just for a fleeting moment, grasped your part in the bigger picture.

You’ve never stood on the flight deck in a steaming sun and saluted a ship that went to the bottom sixty years ago, and saluted those she took down with her.

You’ve never seen how blue the ocean can be south of the line, on the way to Australia, and never felt the need to just get there.

You’ve never trembled with anticipation as the carrier neared the pier, the deployment done, and tried to find your own family, and hoped that it would be OK. You’ve never felt the shiver that came with that final blast on the ship’s whistle, “Moored. Shift colors.”

And I feel a bit sorry for you, for never having felt these things.

Mad Mikey is a Navy vet, protest warrior and all-around hell of a good guy, living here in San Diego. Along with his work and family, he’s going to school at UCSD while dealing with dialysis.

And now, he’s suffered a stroke. Joanie has the story. Smash has more, and offers a way to help.

It’d be nice if you could maybe do a little something for him, and his family. Any way this goes, it’s going to be a hard road.

With homework to do (Marketing) and nothing really much more to talk about.

Except that Cora in Norfolk is a damn fine restaraunt, and I won beaucoup plaudits for the recommending of it, unearned even as they were, the idea coming as it did from the fecund loins of the Salamander.

I had the crab cakes, and they said not a word, so far as I could tell. I never gave them a chance, really.

Blackfive points out that a Marine is set to take over a US Navy air wing, at sea. Invites other views and gets some.

If you were going to do it, something like this, well then Smash Yurovich is the man to do it with. All else is commentary.

More later. After class. Friday, innit?

Feh.