What I learned

I enlisted in the US Navy the day after graduation from high school and was sent to San Diego for basic training. Wasn't quite what I expected.

We had an alcoholic company officer who ran the company by day and six members of a Los Angeles motorcycle gang who enlisted on the Navy's "buddy" plan apparently as an option to doing jail. The gang took control of the barracks at night. When our company turned into a disaster in battalion competitions the motorcycle gang started beating up recruits which were officially logged in at sick bay as "slipped in the shower".

Out of concern for serious or fatal injuries (I was only a squad leader) I addressed the roughly 100 recruits one night and suggested that we had to put a stop to the beatings. They all agreed fearing they might be next. I was elected spokesman. When I confronted Carter, the gang leader, I suddenly realized that my fellow recruits had formed a circle around us. The "we" against "them" turned into a "me" against "him". I weighed in at 145 with some golden gloves experience. Carter was a 200 pound muscle builder.

When I faced him and said the beatings had to stop I got a boisterous "fuck you" in response. The next 5 minutes or so was the bloodiest street fight of my career. When my fellow recruits finally pulled me off of him with blood flowing freely onto their freshly hand washed whites I reiterated that the beatings had to stop. I got another "fuck you". Two of his gang members picked him off the floor and I hit him so hard that I knocked him over a table. I remember looking over the table at him on the floor and asking him if the beatings were going to stop. That time he said "yes, the beatings would stop."

I was selected in boot camp for appointment to the US Naval Academy and went on to set one of the best varsity boxing records in the history of the US Naval Academy up to the time of my summary dismissal.

The lesson learned was that the majority were more than happy to let somebody else take the risk and do the dirty work to protect their butts. But then these were recruits in the earliest stages of their military careers.

The Naval Academy and the courts were a repeat of that lesson. Although everybody in the chain of command involved in my summary dismissal who graduated from the Academy knew with absolute certainty that I was being summarily dismissed for political reasons, nobody was willing to risk their careers to speak out. In contrast, those classmates who had left the service spoke out freely in affidavit form, ignored by courts that had their own political agendas.

The lesson learned is that the men (no women at that time) who would not hesitate to put their lives on the line in mortal combat would cower at the prospect of being labeled as disloyal and ruining their careers in the face of flagrant corruption.

And now with more government software on my computer than Microsoft (a mild exaggeration) I am concerned with (1) the politics of supporting the commission of unethical and incompetent officers who lead our enlisted men into combat, and (2) the continued commitment of limited resources to cover up a government crime spree.