TIME, DECEMBER 1, 1967
THE NAVY
The Arnheiter Incident
From Herman Melville's
Captain Vere (who hanged Billy Budd) to Herman Wouk's
Captain Queeg (who rolled ball bearings during the Caine
mutiny), naval literature has teemed with tales of
rumbustious skippers and mutinous crewmen. Of late, the
U.S. Navy has pitched and rolled to a real-life story
that has all the elements of legend: a destroyer in
war-torn waters, a highanded captain called Marcus
Aurelius Arnheiter, a roster of rebellious junior
officers respectively named Hardy, Generous and Belonte,
·and a precipitate change of command that reverberated
clear to the Secretary of the:Navy -- thereby threatening
the careers of some of the service's brightest brass.
When Lieut. Commander Arnheiter took command of the
U.S.S. Vance in Pearl Harbor shortly before Christmas
1965, he found the aging radar-picket destroyer
"literally crawling with cockroaches," her
bridge and ladders mottled with "coffee
spillage," her forecastle the scene of frequent
fistfights in which nonrated men "routinely
intimidated, threatened and physically struck" their
superior petty officers.
Turns on the Bollard. The
officers themselves--mostly reservists eager to return to
civilian life--were "living in extreme
messiness," and they barely deigned to say
"Aye, aye, sir." Though the Vance had won an E
for engineering excellence and performed commendably on
lonely, months-long patrols in the northern Pacific, she
seemed a slack ship to Arnheiter's eye, and only "a
taut ship is a happy ship." Arnheiter was up-taut
himself: a Naval Academy "ring-knocker" he was
passed over once for lieutenant and at 40 was one of the
oldest Annapolis men of his rank with command
responsibility. Aware that he would be heading for Viet
Nam six days later, Arnheiter took a few more turns on
the bollard.
He "promulgated"
Elbert Hubbard's "A Message to Garcia" to the
crew, instituted daily inspections, held a series of
"all hands aft" services, where he quoted from
Admiral Farragut and Stonewall Jackson. Since the Vance
would be involved in Operation Market Time, the Navy's
screening of Vietnamese coastal junk and sampan traffic
for Viet Gong infiltrators, Arnheiter also insisted on a
refresher course in small arms, ordered the purchase of a
$950 speedboat from the ship's recreation fund. Though
the 20-knot boat was supposedly to be used primarily for
offduty water skiing and swimming parties, he had it
mounted with a .30-cal. machine gun for patrol work,
since it was much faster than the Vance's motor
whaleboat.
"Marcus Mad Log."
Along with the Vance's twelve other officers, Lieut. R.
S. Hardy Jr., the executive officer, wasted no love on
the new skipper; he felt that Arnheiter was too zealous.
Operations Officer William T. Generous, a bespectacled
lieutenant who had undergone psychiatric treatment before
Arnheiter's accession, resented the fantail services; a
Catholic, he considered them a Protestant imposition, and
at Hardy's suggestion wrote a letter of complaint to a
Catholic chaplain. Gunnery Officer Luis G. Belmonte,
another lieutenant, took umbrage when Arnheiter asked him
to wade fully clothed into the water off Waikiki to shoot
a picture of the skipper and his visiting wife in an
outrigger. Belmonte began keeping a "Marcus Mad
Log" of Arnheiter's actions and came up with 34
separate complaints.
Etiquette & Close Support.
In the log he noted that Arnheiter once drank spiked
eggnog aboard, and kept a pitcher of brandy in the
officers' mess to pour over his peaches and ice cream --
a blatant violation of nonalcoholic Navy Regulations. At
a ship's party in Guam, the skipper ordered Generous to
sit cross-legged at his feet, and had another officer
roll up his trouser legs and act as a "pom-pom
girl." He also ordered his officers to give
impromptu speeches at dinner on cultural subjects (sample
theme: "Opera-Box Etiquette in Milano'?. But it was
Arnheiter's gung-ho tactics in combat off Viet Nam that
really upset the junior officers.
So eager was Arnheiter to
remain "on the line" in the South China Sea
that he filed false spare-parts reports, claiming to have
fewer aboard than he did so that he would not have to
share them with other destroyers, and thus risk having to
go back to port to replenish. That, too, violated Navy
Regs. On patrol duty, he was combative to a fault. In
hopes of locating Communist shore batteries, Arnheiter
sent the speedboat close inshore to draw their fire,
meanwhile bringing the Vance and her 3-in. guns into the
largely uncharted shoal waters off the coast to strike
when the Reds revealed themselves. Several times, he
fired his pistol at "sea snakes" near junks
that his men were inspecting; often he fired warning
shots across Vietnamese bows with his own M-1 rifle when
he felt that they were not responding swiftly enough to
his heaveto orders.
During one amphibious operation
off Nam Quan, Arnheiter - whose orders were to stay well
at sea and cut off any Viet Gong
"ex-filtration" by boat --commanded his
officers to file false position reports and then took the
Vance in close some 20 times to bombard the shore. On
another occasion,
Arnheiter brought the Vance
within 250 yds. of the beach to blast a Buddhist pagoda
that he suspected of being a Communist automatic-weapons
position-and, according to the junior officers, avoided
grounding only because Exec Hardy "relieved the
skipper at the conn" and wheeled the ship to safety.
Eroded Authority. Word of
Arnheiter's aberrations quickly reached higher
headquarters--most likely via the chapLain corps. Three
months after he assumed command, the Vnnce was ordered to
Manila for refitting and Arnheiter was summarily
relieved. After a subsequent hearing, at which the
"Mad Log" was rewritten into 38 pages of
anti-Arnheiter testimony, Vice Admiral B. J. Semmes Jr.,
chief of naval personnel, declared Arnheiter guilty of
"a gross lack of judgment and inability to lead
people." Arnheiter now holds a minor post in San
Francisco; Hardy, 32, is a lieutenant commander in Key
West, Fla.; Generous, 27, is studying for a Ph.D. at
Stanford in U.S. diplomacy; Belmonte, 26, is in the San
Francisco stock market.
There it might have ended, save
for Arnheiter's barrage of letters to the Navy Department
demanding a rehearing (the file is nearly three feet
deep), and the powerful endorsement of his cause this
month by Captain Richard G. Alexander, 45, a hot-shot
line officer who will take command of the U.S.S. New
Jersey when it comes out of mothballs next year to become
the world's only operating battleship (TIME, June 9). It
was Alexander who recommended Arnheiter for command in
the first place, after they had worked together in
Washington.
Warning that Arnheiter's relief
at the hands of junior officers would erode authority
throughout the service, Alexander brought his complaint
directly to Navy Secretary Paul Ignatius. "Mr.
Secretary," the four-striper argued in his
statement, "what all of your officers will demand to
know is just how in hell this could happen in the United
States Navy."
Ignatius agreed to re-examine
the case, but last week concluded that there was "no
valid reason for altering the decision." Marcus
Aurelius Arnheiter, 42, was thus finished as a career
officer. Alexander, Semmes and the other senior officers
involved in the case on both sides may also find their
careers in jeopardy. If there is anything the Navy
abhors, after mutiny, it is bad publicity. "We all
have a little of the Captain Queeg in us," admitted
one officer. "But Arnheiter had more than his
share."
This article was sent to me by Brian Spooner
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