The latest Navy case of an officer behaving badly is a tidal wave of poor leadership. Or is it a mere ripple in the never-ending quest by a senior officer trying to motivate 5,000 young men and women on a six-month cruise aboard a floating airport, where death is always a snapped cable or botched landing away? If you find yourself confused over the videos made by Capt. Owen Honors several years ago as the No. 2 officer aboard the carrier USS Enterprise, don’t feel bad — folks in the Navy are adrift in the same fog.
Capt. Owen Honors / U.S. Navy photo
It boils down to this: when at sea during wartime, real life begins to look like a funhouse mirror where normal rules don’t always apply. A smart officer has got to know how to motivate his or her crew 24/7 and can’t worry about going a little overboard once in awhile. That’s pretty much been the line in the 30 years I’ve been covering the Navy.
But a couple of things have happened in recent years to alter that environment. First of all, the introduction of women into the fleet has changed the mood aboard. Sailors used to be, and many still are, rambunctious and foul-mouthed, and proud of it (of both genders, too). But adding women to the mix has dampened some of that behavior. It hasn’t weakened the ships’ war-fighting abilities, nor turned crews into a bunch of sensitive crybabies. But it has changed things on board.
“Nothing wrong with this video, if you have a drop of salt water in your veins,” a Navy sonar man says on a popular naval blog. “Anyone with an issue over this video needs to spend at least one pre-deployment workup schedule, working 20-22 hour days, and then comment on what’s funny or not. Work like this isn’t like going to meetings and punching a clock after 8 hours a day.”
Others, especially women, seem to disagree. “Most of us won’t say anything when we ARE offended for fear of becoming `the chick who ruined everything,'” one female Navy officer posted on a second blog. “Most of us are likely to walk away, complain to each other or trusted friends about what jerk the XO is and carry on, and likely counting the days until turnover. Silence is a form of assent, and one I’ve outgrown, but junior women are unlikely to be the voice of dissent.”
The advent of instant communications of all kinds — from email to videos — also has shined a spotlight on behavior. It has created a tighter beam on what is allowed. When Capt. Honors made his videos, they weren’t just his — they represented, for good or for ill, the U.S. Navy. Some officers and enlisted argue that punishing Honors for his videotaped hi-jinks is unfair to him. But just as many say that allowing such videos — made with Navy gear by Navy officials while on the Navy payroll — to stand, without official comment, is tantamount to approval, and therefore unfair, to the Navy.