Sub Standard: The U.S. and its Military Are Global Drunken Fratboys

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.'"

Fly in the Ointment

President Bush ordered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to review the Navy's policy on civilian ride-alongs. NTSB investigators are interviewing civilian passengers. Enterprising trial attorneys are surely introducing the dead boys' relatives to the marvels of American tort law. And courts-martial remain a possibility for the officers.

It's unlikely they'll achieve much if previous hotdogging horrors are any precedent. The killing of 20 European vacationers in February 1998 by Marine pilot Richard Ashby and his navigator Capt. Joseph Schweitzer?who cut a gondola cable while "flat-hatting" their EA-6B Prowler through a mountain valley near Cavalese, Italy?resulted only in a six-month sentence for destroying evidence. A court-martial acquitted Ashby on involuntary manslaughter (and dropped such charges against Schweitzer) in a proceeding that made the O.J. Simpson acquittal look Solomonic by comparison.

Capt. William L. Raney, who was flying with Capt. Ashby during the tragedy, said he believed they might have hit a bird. Yeah, sure. The birds that fly in the Alps aren't exactly storks or emus. They don't make much of a bump when you're zooming at 621 mph. The mammoth gondola, by contrast, was roughly at eye level when they dislodged it and sent it plummeting to the valley floor. Then Raney came up with another version: "I believe Capt. Schweitzer said, 'We might have hit a cable.' He said he hoped nobody on the ground was hurt because he thought he saw flashes." But we know it took the gondola eight seconds to hit the ground. Even in free fall, a cable, or wire, or whatever innocuous body the pilots claim they thought they hit would have taken five seconds to fall, and would have been a mile and a half behind them by the time it made its "flash."

Then-Defense Secretary William Cohen went before the Senate Armed Services Committee and tried to claim the pilot had been "apparently unaware that he had struck a cable or injured anyone." But Ashby and Schweitzer sure didn't behave like people who thought they'd hit a bird. As soon as they landed, they had the presence of mind to remove the flight video from its machine and destroy it.

At that point, it was Ashby's word against the prosecutors'. He claimed that he hadn't been informed the lowest he was allowed to fly was 2000 feet; he'd thought the limit was 1000 feet. (The gondola was 370 feet off the ground at the point where Ashby hit it, prompting the embittered parish priest of Cavalese to remark that "if the plane hadn't been too low, the gondola must have been flying too high.") Then Ashby testified that the cable hadn't been shown on his flight maps. (Why should it be? Neither was the sewage system.) And, finally, he claimed that his altimeter had failed (presumably having been eaten by his dog), an assertion that Germany's ZDF Television soon demolished.

Like the Calavese incident, the Greeneville crash has a certain small-town America feel to it. We'll hear a lot in the next few weeks about how gifted our fighting men are, and how hard they work to get to the top of their profession. No doubt that's true.

But these rotten incidents put one in mind of the captain of the college football team who inconveniently runs someone over three days before the big game. The coach and the local sheriff, digging as far into jurisprudence as they're capable, assert that, alongside the law, there's another criterion to be considered, the fine-upstanding-man criterion. "This is a fine, upstanding man," they say. "Good student, too...I mean, he'd never..."

Really, under the circumstances, to render justice would just be so...illogical!