Sub Standard
By Christopher Caldwell
Aside from the occasional bombing of Iraq, George W. Bush says, the United States can no longer serve as the world’s policeman. Nope. We’ve got a new role: as the world’s drunken fratboy. The ramming of the Japanese fishing boat Ehime Maru by the U.S. nuclear attack sub Greeneville, during a joyride sponsored for 16 people, most of them donors to the USS Missouri Memorial Association, killed five men and four boys. The U.S. response since the Feb. 9 collision has been to lie, lie, lie, and, when caught, to mutter a peeved: "Dude! Lighten up!"
That civilians were not only present on the sub but actually in the control room wasn’t revealed until days after the collision. At a news briefing on Feb. 13, Lt. Cmdr. Conrad Chun admitted, "There were two civilians at two separate watch stations, under the very close supervision of a qualified watch stander." Well, who was steering, then? journalists asked. Which watch stations? Chun wasn’t telling. He insisted, however, that no civilians had been at the helm or done anything involved with the mission.
Two days later, in the wake of an NBC interview given by one of the guests, the Pentagon admitted that two of the civilians had been...well...kind of...steering the sub. But the military insisted that there was "no evidence that the presence of civilians at the controls contributed to the collision." In fact, it was taking pains to ensure that no such troubling evidence would emerge. A week after the incident, John Hammerschmidt, who heads the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation, admitted that he had not been provided with any of the audio and video recordings from the cruise. The Navy had not even told him if there were any.
The last thing the Pentagon was going to do was release the names of the foundation donors–oil-and-gas executives, golf entrepreneurs and their wives, to judge from the information that trickled out–who were on the sub. The private rationale behind the stonewalling sounds pretty obvious: The military equivalent of jock-sniffers, these folks might not exactly be "Republican donors," but they’re donors, and they’re almost certainly Republicans. It began to look like the Lincoln bedroom fundraising scandals–or like it would if the Lincoln bedroom were nuclear-powered, top-secret, 360 feet long and equipped with Tomahawk and Harpoon missiles and torpedoes. Or, put differently, like a Lincoln bedroom sleepover at which nine people got murdered. The public rationale, according to The New York Times, was that "the civilians had not surrendered their rights to privacy by stepping onto the submarine."
(Run that by me again? If you drive your own Toyota, bought for 750 bucks, into a neighbor’s hedge, your name gets in the paper. But if you drive the world’s most sophisticated aquatic killing machine, for which taxpayers have paid literally billions, with sufficient speed and force to shatter a 190-foot steel trawler, we’re not allowed to know who you are?)
The Navy says it invites politicians, journalists and businessmen on board to "build support for the force," as one news account puts it. Sorry, isn’t that Congress’ job? Why, in a country with a civilian-controlled military, should some naval cowboy get to use federal property as a lobbying backdrop? Not that this practice is limited to the armed forces. State lotteries today routinely use a big chunk of their budgets on advertising to get the poor hooked on state lotteries. And many federal government social service agencies are merely taxpayer-sponsored outposts of the Democratic Party.
The best picture of what happened was given by the sad-sack civvie ride-along Todd Thoman, who had met NBC’s Matt Lauer while working in a New York clothing store. For days, Thoman’s instinct for self-preservation battled his desire to get on television, until self-preservation lost, and in no time at all he was explaining to Lauer how Lt. Cmdr. Scott Waddle "brought the periscope down and we proceeded with the maneuver."
The "maneuver"! Tell me another. It was an amusement park ride. If you’ve ever pushed a foam kickboard down to the bottom of a pool and let it go to see how far out of the water it will spring, you understand the appeal of the "emergency surfacing drill" they carried out, which works on the same mechanics, except with a 6900-ton nuclear sub. It’s meant to simulate the direst thing that can happen to a sub–a breach that causes it to take on water–but, as long it’s just pretend, boy is it fun. You float down to near the ocean floor, lose all your ballast and then, blastoff!
The crew of the Ehime Maru, which was two nautical miles away from the ample, 56-square-mile area in which such drills are permitted, must have been surprised when the functional equivalent of a rocket sped into their hull. Since the sub’s navigation instruments make it impossible to drift out of the training range by accident, one wonders whether it was a desire to avoid the disapproving gaze of commanding officers that led the crew of the Greeneville to choose the open seas for their show-off patrol.
You don’t have to be an apologist for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or deny that the Missouri is a moving memorial to it, to recognize that the Memorial Association itself is a glorified golf club, except for its dedication to the proposition that Japan Sucks. The Japanese must not have been entirely thrilled, either, that the fatcats had been booked onto the tour by retired Adm. Richard Macke, who was cashiered five years ago for saying of the American sailor and two Marines who kidnapped and raped a 12-year-old Japanese girl on Okinawa: "For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a ‘girl.’"
[Full text: http://www.nypress.com/content.cfm?content_id=3695&now=02/20/2001&content_section=1]
Carl _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com