I felt bad for him. I don’t think he wanted me or any of us to feel bad for him. He was the captain.
The Voith Schneider Propellers on our little minehunter had gotten us from Ingleside, Texas to Panama City, Florida as planned. That was a big feat for the USS Pelican. Since being back from Bahrain, that was our crew’s first real venture and port visit. But then, one of the propellers gave out in port. The required repairs were beyond our on-ship sailor-engineers’ expertise. The civilian port engineers and Voith Schneider specialists from Norfolk had to fly in to help us fix it. With that, we ended up stuck in Panama City for well over a week. That wasn’t altogether bad, with the beaches, the bars, and being 23. But, we were only supposed to be there for four days. After that, it was day-to-day. We couldn’t necessarily plan or feel totally at ease. The broken engine made the captain stressed, which in turn made us all stressed. Such was life in the Global War on Terror.
The MWR team (morale, welfare, and recreation) therefore planned a little mandatory fun. “Let’s enjoy ourselves while we’re here and together.” Sailors usually grumble about the mandatory part, but they often end up having fun. We were not a big crew. There were only about 65 of us. The plan was for softball, a cookout, and, as long as you didn’t have duty, beer. We even arranged the watch/duty section to allow the whole crew to rotate through. A number of us started really talking up the softball game. A few took up talking trash. It would be an inter-departmental game. The captain especially talked it up. I wasn’t a very good naval officer, but I was decent at softball. I didn’t have duty, and I was looking forward to it.
When that afternoon arrived and it was time for the big match, we ended up playing only several innings. I don’t recall which team won--Engineering/Ops or Deck/Supply--but whoever it was, I think it was a blowout. Some sloppy fielding spiraled out of control. Once pickup softball becomes a blowout, it’s hard to keep people’s interest. It’s hard to come back. With the heat, the frustration, and the buzzed giggling while running the bases, the game gets sloppy and therefore less interesting. It’s also not like pickup basketball—you typically don’t just reset and play another round. So, most of the crew shifted to football, despite the heat, which then evolved into some playing ultimate frisbee and others just drinking beer. For the record, personally, I wanted to continue playing softball.
The captain arrived later to the rec area than he had anticipated in his base rental Chrysler. He had been caught up on the ship with the engineers and on the phone updating his superiors in Ingleside. He had his own glove, and remarkably, he was wearing softball/baseball pants. I had my own glove too—I traveled with it, even by sea—but baseball pants? They must have made his sea bag packing list, or he just kept them in his stateroom, "condition one," at the ready. They were tight on him but not tighter than baseball pants usually are. He also wore a three-quarters sleeve t-shirt, with white base and black sleeves. When it registered that we were not playing softball, he scrunched his nose up towards his eyes, instinctively. He asked if we wanted to play softball, if the game was still on. Perhaps he thought we had been saving softball as the main event, waiting for his arrival. In hindsight, maybe we should have saved it.
“Yeah sir, we played a couple innings but then everyone wanted to play football,” said QM1 Haynes, flippantly, catching his breath on the sideline with a cigarette, not grasping the severity of this moment, not even looking at the captain. QM1 had not noticed the captain’s nose squeeze towards his eyes again—to block the sun? the rage? the sadness? Even if he did, Haynes probably wouldn’t have cared. I still contend that I cared, for what it's worth.
Was the captain going to order us back onto the softball field? I suppose he could have. Was he going to yell at us? I cringed at the possibility. His voice, by the UCMJ, was legally commanding, but auditorily, it was petulant and grating. Ordering us onto the field would have made for one terrible, awkward game. It would have taken “mandatory fun” to the next level. As part of the MWR team, as a junior officer, I could have suggested, “Hey guys, why don’t we play a couple more innings?” But, that might have been patronizing, and if they agreed, would the captain then have targeted me because they listened to my soft power and not the threat of his hard power? In the end, we did not return to softball.
The captain pretended not to care. He sat down, in his tight softball pants, and took a swig of beer. He did care, though. His prominent Adam’s apple was a tell of his pride swallowed, not for the first or last time.
*
The captain had survived an earlier mutiny. I didn’t think it was actually a mutiny, but as I learned from the XO years later, the captain definitely saw it as one. I had taken a small part in it. After months of the captain bullying around Lieutenant Castro, the chief engineer, the latter started collecting statements against the former of similar incidents against other members of the crew. Castro submitted the letters, unbeknownst to the captain and XO, to the inspector general of the navy. I didn’t have one specific legal complaint, and in hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have partook. He just was an annoying asshole, and I did not like him. One could definitely argue that that was how life was supposed to be in the military--i.e assholes make the system run--and maybe we were just being a bunch of snowflakes.
To have command of a ship as an O-4/Lieutenant Commander was not insignificant. Professionally speaking, the captain was going places. Nautically speaking, the captain was very good, and he knew he was very good. More, bigger commands and higher leadership lay in his future. Psychologically speaking, however, the captain exuded insecurity. He had orders to make that broken minesweeper go. It wasn’t going, that did not help his insecurity, and he took it out on us. Castro’s rebellion had died down, the captain got a slap on the wrist from his superiors, Castro eventually timed out to his next rotation, and life sort of went on on the Pelican. The captain had to swallow his pride during and after the Castro-initiated “command climate” investigations. He could not openly retaliate against any of us mutineers. That would have gotten him in more trouble.
*
Apparently, after the abbreviated softball game, many in the crew kept on drinking, including the captain. That was not necessarily a problem until, according to some sailors, the captain got into his car visibly intoxicated. He drove the 15-mph 1000 yards back to the ship without incident. If he hadn’t been so widely loathed, if he did not have the legal “non-judicial punishment” power to bust sailors for alcohol-related misconduct, no one would have cared. But, especially the guys who had been busted for alcohol—they took note. Petty Officer Wilkes, who several months earlier had been nailed for driving 125 mph drunk down South Padre Island Drive in Corpus, miraculously not killing anyone, saw the captain’s offense as equivalent to his if not worse. The next day, the crew grumbled and murmured to a degree that pressured us junior officers to say something to the captain. What would we say, though? “Sir, you shouldn’t have done that. I wasn’t there to corroborate, but the crew is talking. Can you apologize? We need to restore good faith and leadership…(even though we know they don’t want you to apologize--they just want you gone)”? This task fell to our Ops officer. Ops had only been aboard the Pelican for a couple months. Therefore, his hands were not sullied by Castro’s rebellion. Ops was very competent. He was the golden boy, from southern California, a true believer, “living the dream,” he would proclaim regularly, non-ironically. His eyes glistened when we lowered the American flag at sunset. He had played football at the Naval Academy. He had done Campus Crusade for Christ alternative spring breaks in college, convincing fornicators and underage drinkers not to fornicate and drink. Knowing Ops and those Christ-like thousand-yard-stare eyes, I bet he converted a few. He went to church with his blonde southern California wife on Sundays. He convinced a couple crewmembers to go with them. His jaw, his biceps could crush the glass-reinforced plastic the Pelican was made of, if the nation needed him to. He would likely surpass the captain in naval/maritime acumen some time in the future. Nautically speaking, he was also good. The captain sensed that. Ops worked hard, but things came easy to him, including softball. He didn’t wear the pants or bring his own glove, but he crushed the ball--much farther than I could, for the record (that son of a bitch). I presume he was the student body president and prom king at his high school. Maybe valedictorian, too. And psychologically speaking, unlike the captain, he exuded security. Ops would have to deliver the news, then. Coming from him might devastate the captain, but he was the one with the moral credibility. The rest of us would still have to sit there awkwardly.
“Why do I get the feeling that you all hate me? Like there is a target on my back?” the captain asked. He almost cried, but he didn’t. I looked across the table at Mike, who back in Texas would call the base chaplain regularly asking for the captain to be fired. (The chaplain did not have that authority.) Captains shouldn’t really care whether sailors really hate them or not. At the least, they shouldn’t openly ask that question. Even golden boy Ops was against him now, he likely thought, trying to surpass him already, a couple years ahead of schedule. That must have been the moment, there in the crowded sweaty wardroom--more than softball the day before--when the captain drew his line in the sand and saw that he was alone on his side of the line.
*
The work schedule became much more demanding. Reporting times moved earlier. Departing times shifted later. The drills increased. The verbal thrashings multiplied. The targeted harassment intensified. Zoomed out, however, it seemed more bizarre than harsh: we were this tiny ship tied to the pier in Ingleside, Texas that most of the rest of the navy knew nothing about. We were not the “tip of the spear,” despite what the Squadron’s emblem said. At the same time, the captain would also have his manic days, when he was uncomfortably positive and nice. If I got stuck alone with him or with one other and him at mealtime on those days, I almost wished for him to be a dickhead instead. We were used to dickhead.
When he would have the wardroom over for dinner at his house with his family, it was uncomfortable and a little surreal, especially after the mutiny. We would be eating, laughing, and drinking, but he knew that we essentially tried to get him fired and we knew he knew and resented us. We didn't bring it up, but it was the subtext. Mike, who had called the chaplain during the week to complain about the captain, would be there comparing his concealed-carry pistol to the captain’s at the grill—the both of them all smiles. It was very cordial. Surely, they wouldn’t turn the pistols on each other, in front of the kids, right? Sometimes, I would see the captain and his family at Sunday mass. During the sign of peace, I’d wave across the church to them. At the end of mass, I would try to leave by the side door so as not to get caught in an awkward conversation with them on the way out or get invited to IHOP.
One night, we held a hail-and-farewell for some outgoing and incoming officers and chiefs at this Texas version of Chuck E. Cheese. I sat across from the captain’s wife and made small talk. She seemed like a real person, and that night, he seemed like a real person, too. The times he did not seem like a real person--like when he named his five kids by numbers or expressed pride in missing their births or talked about guns or made a joke about gays--those times actually seemed put on. Like he had to say those things. That night, he appeared at ease, genuine. Some people brought their kids. They played in the arcade and the ball pit. There was small talk, jokes, light drinking. The captain’s wife gently corrected me when I confidently said “Escapade,” playing above, was by Paula Abdul. “Janet Jackson, you mean.” “Yes, of course, Janet Jackson.” She knew. I was grateful for the correction. We would later reference that night as the “last supper.”
The next day on the ship, we heard four bells on the 1MC announcing the arrival of the squadron commander, our captain’s boss. That was unusual, as he didn’t come aboard very often. About twenty minutes later, the officer-of-the-deck called the crew to the fantail. The captain was not present. The squadron commander announced to us that he had just relieved the captain of command. That is, he fired him from the Pelican. Then, he dismissed us back to work.
We didn’t know how to respond. Most of us were in shock. Some of us had been rooting for this day. Mike called Ted, who had transferred months ago and who had been a main target of the captain’s vitriol, to celebrate. Many of us, myself included, weren’t sure what we were rooting for or if we should be rooting at all. In the ensuing weeks, there were unsubstantiated rumors about how the captain left the ship crying, how the base police had to go to his house first and warn his wife and help her clear out all of their guns quickly before he came home and how maybe he was suicidal or homicidal. Other people said they saw him months later sheepishly pushing paper up at the squadron. Presumably, he did not command another ship, but presumably he finished out or is finishing out his time in the navy until retirement. As long as he is content with a nice safety net and family life, he will be fine.
*
Texas has been a second chance for me…. It has been a chance for not only land and riches but also to be a different man and, I hope, a better one. There have been many ideas brought forth in the past few months of what Texas is and what it should become…. We are not all in agreement but I’d like to ask each of you what it is you value so highly that you are willing to fight and possibly die for? We will call that Texas…..If anyone wishes to depart under the white flag of surrender, you may do so now, you have that right…. But, if you wish to stay here with me, in the Alamo, we will sell our lives dearly.
That is William Travis’ dramatized speech in The Alamo (2004). According to legend, Travis took out his sword, drew a line in the sand, and offered the people two choices: surrender or fight to the end. All but one Anglo Texan crossed the line to join Travis. In the ensuing battle, they all died, except that one (I presume?), who survived to spread the word: “Remember the Alamo.” The Texans would remember the Alamo, they would defeat Santa Ana/Mexico at the battle of San Jacinto, and they would win their freedom and independence. Then nine years later, they gladly gave up their independence to join the United States.
The captain—himself from Texas, one typically learned within a minute of meeting him—wished he could have given that speech. That is, if we had a real mission and if the ship worked. He wished he could have inspired us to sell our lives dearly in the name of freedom, to rid the world of the terrorists and the weapons of mass destruction. He had memorized part of Travis’ actual (not fictional) famous letter from the Alamo. He loved Texas. He barked regularly about stereotypical Texas pop culture things: guns of course, high school football and football generally, trucks, ATVs, the Alamo, John Wayne movies about the Alamo, Sam Houston, country music, Davy Crockett, and Shiner Bock.
One time, the captain let it slip that he had been born and spent the first several years of his life in Minnesota, a different Anglo settlement but one without the rough and tough cowboy image. He quickly covered up the slip with an enthusiastic “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast I could,” like the bumper stickers on base read, not ironically. And, we learned that he was from a sprawling cookie-cutter Houston suburb and that he studied engineering and political science at Rice. The latter shouldn’t have precluded him from having authentic Texas pride, but Rice University grads weren’t exactly cattlemen or vigilante-rangers. Often, they became oil execs who fashioned themselves cattlemen or rangers. At some point, as a boy or adolescent, the captain must have consciously taken up that Texas pride. Maybe he decided Texas would be his thing, perhaps after an early adolescent baseball/softball-related heartbreak--getting cut or getting picked last. (I got cut in 9th and 11th grades myself. I know the feeling, and I did not have Texas folklore to comfort me. Ops probably never got cut.) Or, maybe the captain took up the Texas pride every morning before he saw us: “Texas… a chance to be a different man,” as the fictional Travis admitted. My military chain of command on the Pelican not only included our suburban-cowboy captain from Minnesota but also the millionaire-Yale-cheerleader-cowboy George W. Bush at the top. Bush, who saw Afghanistan and Iraq as his “Indian Country” to conquer—“in-country” for short, in military speak—was not originally from Texas either. Nor was his thousand-points-of-light president-father. Nor, for that matter, was William Travis. Nor Sam Houston. Nor Stephen F. Austin. Nor Davy Crockett. Nor James Bowie. Nor most of the Texan patriots.
By all accounts, Santa Ana was a mean son of a bitch, yes. Yes, the Mexican government invited the Anglo settlers into Tejas. But, the freedoms the Texan patriots fought and died for at the Alamo were principally the freedom to have as much land as possible--previously Native American land, of course, before it was Spanish and Mexican--and the freedom to keep slaves to grow cotton and make immense profits. “Manifest destiny.” “Popular sovereignty.” Many of the heroic Texans had run away from debts, taxes, and failing marriages in their home states. They were seeking new lives, “second chances.”
Could they just not have gone? Stayed at home, figured their lives out? Have been content with the expulsion of Native Americans they already completed, trails of tears on the earlier frontiers? Or once the game was up with Santa Ana, couldn't they have agreed to give up their slaves, to pay their taxes, to not die at the Alamo? The tragedy at the Alamo seems very self-imposed--foolish, I dare say--but I understand that the Greek definition of tragedy comprises some self-imposition. Some type of negotiated settlement could have saved lives, but it wouldn’t have been heroic, obviously. They had no choice, we say definitively.
Maybe, those men couldn’t handle the hardship, the boredom, the simplicity of sedentary life. Their homesteads back in their home states, or even just small (un-slaved) plots of land in Texas did not satisfy. Once Texas would become fully settled and enclosed and once life would become mundane again and the daily struggle just to be decent would become hard again, would they want to push further west? Into New Mexico, Arizona, California? Then Hawaii? As far as the Philippines?
Couldn’t the captain have just walked away? Couldn’t he have leveled with us? Or told his boss, “Nahh, man this is silly”? Realize the cards he was dealt were lousy and just have fun with us until our tour was through? A little more Down Periscope, less Caine Mutiny or Crimson Tide? Doing so, of course, would have meant he would stop climbing to the top of the navy, but we the crew could have written him a recommendation letter: “Dear Admiral, you gave him a bum ship. He’s our guy, though. Give him another chance, another ship.” After Castro’s mutiny, could the captain have walked back his vitriol? Reformed his persona? Apologized? Or, was the burden on us mutineers to walk it back, as we had escalated the situation? Or, could he have walked everything back after the hearsay-drunk-driving confrontation? He could have released those tears he was holding back. We could have cried too and all hugged it out as a wardroom. But by then, it was too late. He would have been seen as weak to us, to his peer captains, to the squadron commander, to his wife, or to his kids, if they knew or cared. Would any of us have cared?
*
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” said Blaise Pascal. And, to live humbly in one place, together, Wendell Berry would add. Save us all from frontiersmen--both real and pretend--and the causes they’re for.
*Janet Jackson, "Escapade," Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814, 1989
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