For Honor We Stand (36 page)

“Wernerrrrrrr,” Max interrupted in a warning tone.

“What the hell was
that
?” asked DeCosta.

“The beginning of the wrong damn tale,” said Max.  “Not that old Geoffrey Chaucer wouldn’t have understood the kind of human frailty that we’re talking about here, but, I do need you to get to the point, Lieutenant.”

“Aye, sir.”  He went on, but not before throwing a victorious glance at Sahin.  “As you will recall, one of Captain Oscar’s most important problems was his overemphasis on the cosmetic aspects of maintaining the ship at the expense of the substantive, shiny missiles with poorly aligned targeting sensors and all that.  Of course, as we live in an imperfect universe, things still broke, and, as we are in the navy, maintenance required by the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Fleet Maintenance had to be performed and reported as having been performed.  The problem was that Captain Oscar allocated fewer and fewer man hours to these tasks while still expecting them to get done.  Further, as his people started to fall behind, he thought it would be a good idea to require a separate daily written report listing all of the maintenance tasks assigned and not completed for that day.  He then started penalizing the person responsible for any uncompleted task, putting them on report, restricting to quarters, cutting off beer/wine/liquor rations, and so forth.  So, the pressure was on to find ways to get the maintenance and repair tasks done more quickly.

“As near as we can tell, it was Davis who did it first, about three months after the ship was put into commission.  He was running behind and had just swapped out a coolant flow regulator module interface for the thermal stealth system and it was time to input the new SIN when his watch ended.  And, the moment end of watch came up, there was Captain Oscar pinging the whole maintenance staff on their percoms to close out their work orders at that moment because he was going to lock them out of the system in thirty seconds.  Any order completed after that moment would be late and the tardy soul would be hauled up in front of the next Captain’s Mast for Dereliction of Duty.  Can you imagine anything more idiotic? 

“Well, you can see the kind of bind Davis was in.  He just hit the ENTER key and hoped for the best.  He hoped to be able to get back into the system on his next watch and enter the correct number then, and he tried, but Captain Oscar had put lockouts on the system to prevent cheating on work order completion.  In order to correct the number, he would have had to go through the whole Data Entry Error Correction Request procedure which, in addition to the thick slice of PITA bread you all know
that
to be, would have resulted in immediate discovery and probably being thrown in the Brig for the initial error.  Oscar was extremely unforgiving of even minor transgressions, a practice which, as you know, tends to backfire when people create big mistakes trying to cover up the trivial ones. 

“Nothing untoward happened as a result and then, a few days later when Davis and Sonthaya were replacing a string of twelve internal temperature sensors that came out of a bad batch from the manufacturer, they were running behind and in danger of not completing the work order before end of watch.  The sensors were out of SIN number order, so they would have had to manually input hundreds of digits in just a minute or two.  The only way they could finish on time was to hit the ENTER key.  Davis more or less gave Sonthaya permission, and they both did it for ten of the twelve units for which the SINs were wrong.  Having learned the practice from Davis, Sonthaya taught it to Pennoyer, who taught it to Neff, who taught it to Volks who taught it to Woodson, and so on.  At first, they did it only when they were in a bind, but as time went on they used the technique to speed things up in general so that they had some hope of getting a reasonable amount of maintenance and repair accomplished in the shrunken time allotted to those tasks by Oscar.  The result was that, by the time the computer threw the first flag and Neff was sent out to check the errant unit, everyone was in on the practice, except for Cho and Balduzzi, who refused to follow along but agreed not to tell.  In any event, by the time Neff was sent out to check the unit, he couldn’t report the component as having been mis-entered without implicating himself and almost all of his mates.”

The doctor was nodding.  “A familiar pattern, to be sure.  It is one of the oldest tales in the world.  As much as people tell you that a slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy, it turns out that some slopes are slippery doesn’t it?  I suppose that the
ad hoc
adjustments to the computer’s internal model of the ship happened in much the same way.  By the time errors of a magnitude that manifest at the systemic level started to show up the men involved were presented with a choice of either confessing to having ‘gundecked’ hundreds and hundreds of entries and dozens of error investigations, resulting in General Court Martials for all, or of attempting to perpetuate the cover up with more lies and deceptions.”

“
Genau, mein doktor
,” said Kraft.  “Lies and deceptions at which, I might add, our conspirators were becoming progressively more and more adept and which were causing their consciences less and less unease.  These things become easier over time,
nicht wahr
?  Is that not human nature?  The conscience is like a pebble in one’s shoe.  It causes pain at first, but if one walks on it enough, the foot develops a callous.”

“And our friends walked the entire distance to Canterbury, telling ever more fanciful tales all the way.  You see, as time went on,” Brown continued, “the lies and deceptions were required to become ever more elaborate and skillful.  The errors in the system became cumulative.  Some cancelled each other out, more or less, but some added to each other and some created errors greater than the sum of their parts as, for example, one part’s phase characteristics are incorrect while another in series with the first has incorrect polarization.  That combination can then cause a third component, the entry for which is correct and which is in perfect working order to start throwing amplitude spikes.  The
third
error is the one the computer detects and that the conspirators would try to cover up, thereby adding yet another level of inaccuracy.  The errors were nearly impossible to conceal, much less actually correct, and were starting to become apparent to me about six hours before we had that problem with the compression drive that brought all of this to a head.”

“So, as we say in my profession, we know the etiology of the disease,” said the doctor.  “But what about the prognosis and the treatment?”

“As far as the ship is concerned, my lads have made a good start,” said Brown.  “We’ve got correct SIN values input for most of the compression drive, fire control, point defense, and other critical systems.  The key barrier to fixing this problem all along wasn’t the difficulty in inputting corrected values, it was that doing so required admitting that they had been entered incorrectly in the first place.  How can you repair a problem without admitting that the problem is there?  This is one place where accountability and quality control worked against us.  In any event, we’re getting five balls when we run congruence checks on those systems now.  Of course, that leaves many thousands of other corrections to make, but I’m confident that we can run and fight without any serious troubles.  But, as to what to do with these men, I’ve not a clue.  I am very much of two minds.”

“There is something to be said for the accuracy of that statement,” Sahin said, “from an anatomical and neuropsychological point of view.  Since the brain is divided into two hemispheres, each of which is essentially an independent brain capable of autonomous reasoning and control of the body—people have lived and functioned adequately with only half a brain, you know—with the two hemispheres connected only by the
corpus callosum
, it is certainly possible that each hemisphere of the brain has independently reasoned its way to a different conclusion, both of them reporting their findings to the cerebral cortex of the dominant hem . . . .”

“Doctor, the human brain’s bilateral nature is a subject for another time,” Max interrupted with gentle patience.  “For now, each of us needs to devote both hemispheres to the more pressing issue of what to do with these men.  They’ve committed several serious offenses against naval regulations, engaged in a protracted and elaborate course of deception, and endangered their shipmates and this vessel’s important missions in the process.  From the looks of what I saw in Engineering recently, if we didn’t have such good people in that department, we would have been in some deep and serious shit.”

“I know one thing that we need to consider here,” said Brown.  “If we count Cho and Balduzzi—who are also implicated to a lesser degree—essentially my entire general maintenance crew from all three watches is involved.  An entire subsection.  Of course, the general maintenance people are the least skilled of all the maintenance subsections.  I can pull people from the more specialized maintenance teams—after all, every one of them started in GM—but that will make all my other teams shorthanded and will still leave GM shorthanded because I need most of that group correcting SINs for several more days.”

“I would not be comfortable doing with these what we did with the fellows involved in the sabotage incident back in January.”  Kraft looked worried.  “Having my Marines guard maintenance people as they burrow through the interstices of the ship is not a good idea.  For one thing, there are a lot of those spaces into which my men, who are larger than average, simply will not fit, especially with the equipment they carry on duty.  For another, if a Marine is deep inside some conduit somewhere that is a four minute crawl to the nearest access hatch, he cannot respond quickly if he is needed elsewhere.”

“If I leave them at large, I wouldn’t put guards on them.  This situation is different from that of the saboteurs,” Max said.  “Those guys actively set out to harm the ship and we had to protect ourselves from possible future attempts.  These crewman, while what they did was morally on the same level and presents an equivalent danger to the ship in its way, wasn’t done with intent to damage.  I’m not worried that they are going to do anything harmful.”

Kraft spoke up.  “While not disagreeing with your assessment of the risk posed by these men, I think it is important to point out that, just because they did not actively seek to cause damage they are still guilty of the crime of Criminal Damage to a Warship in a War Zone.”

“But, but,” the doctor sputtered, “how can they possibly be guilty of criminal damage to a warship when creating damage was not their intent?”

“They may not have ‘intended’ the damage in the normal meaning of that word, but their state of mind still meets the standard for ‘criminal intent’ under the Uniform Code of Military Justice,” Kraft answered.  Only general criminal intent is required, and under the Code, ‘General criminal intent is present whenever there is specific intent, and also when the circumstances indicate that the offender, in the ordinary course of human experience, must have adverted to the prescribed criminal consequences as reasonably certain to result from his act or failure to act.’ 

“They knew that damage to the ship was a possible consequence of their actions, and still they went ahead and did nothing to prevent the damage.  It is akin to throwing a hand grenade into a room for the purpose of killing the ship’s cat but that one knows to be full of men.  The offender’s specific intent is to kill the cat but, as he reasonably could have expected men to die from his actions, he had general criminal intent to kill them and is criminally responsible for their deaths.”    

“That’s all very interesting, but that’s also for the Court Martial.  My immediate problem,” Max reminded the group, “is what to do with these men between now and when we get back to the task force.  You all know my priorities by now.  Number one is the mission.  Number two is the good of this ship and the men and boys aboard her.  Number three is everything else.  Thoughts?  XO, let’s start with you.  You haven’t had much to say this morning.  A good Captain listens to the advice of his XO.”

“Yes, sir, but the other half of that aphorism is ‘and a good XO has advice worth listening to.’  I’m not sure I have anything profound to contribute here,” said DeCosta.

Max leaned back in his chair and smiled warmly.  “XO, you’re still growing into the role.  So am I for that matter.  But, I’ve spent years stationed in CICs where I’ve watched half a dozen skippers do their jobs.  And, for more than a year, I had the privilege of getting to watch one of the all time greats, Commodore Middleton, work the Big Chair.  You were in a tactical Back Room, and didn’t get to watch your XO do his job.  If you spend a lot of time in CIC of a warship, you’ll see that XOs, COs, even Commodores and Admirals, aren’t demigods.  We are just human beings with a job to do:  ordinary instruments being called upon to make extraordinary music because we are what’s at hand.  No one can find a Stradivarius or a Guarneri, so the symphony today is being played with a Robichaux and a DeCosta and a Brown and a Kraft.  Admiral Halsey, right up there with “Blood and Guts” Patton, “the Fighting Czar” Litvinoff, and “Killer Kate” Phillips in our pantheon of heroes, said, ‘There aren't any great men.  There are just great challenges that ordinary men like you and me are forced by circumstances to meet.’  You and me and old Blood and Guts and Bull Halsey and Killer Kate are all made of the same clay.  We eat and drink and sweat and crap and worry and wonder whether we are doing the right thing.  We all do our best to do the job that’s handed to us.  And that means that when I ask for your advice, I’m not asking for the kind of brilliant deployment plans that came from Gerhardt Hammerschmidt or for the kind of genius-level tactical insight that comes from Admiral Litvinoff.  I just want your opinion, whatever it is.  Your thoughts, ordinary or brilliant.  What your gut is telling you.  What your heart is telling you.  What you would do if you were in my shoes.  What you would absolutely never do if you were in my shoes.  Anything that comes to mind.  Very few things said in these meetings are brilliant.  Unless, of course,
I
say them.”  A few restrained chuckles.  “All I expect at this point is honesty, conscientiousness, and sincerity.  I will not require brilliance of you . . . for a few more weeks, at least.”