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 high-handed captain called Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter, a roster of rebellious junior officers respectively named Hardy, Generous and Belmonte, 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 Cong 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 off-duty 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 “pompom 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-l rifle when he felt that they were not responding swiftly enough to his heave-to orders.

During one amphibious operation off Nam Quan, Arnheiter—whose orders were to stay well at sea and cut off any Viet Cong “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 Vance 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.”