The Edge of Honor (87 page)

The drug infestation in USS John Bell Hood is also based on actual conditions in the late sixties aboard too many fleet units. Many writers have described or commented on drug use in Vietnam by Army and, to a lesser extent, Marine units. But the Navy also had a serious drug problem, with as many as thirty to forty percent of a crew indulging at least occasionally in marijuana or hashish at sea or in port. Unlike John Bell Hood, most ships had a vigorous antidrug program going, with harsh punishments and discharges meted out to habitual offenders. But while official Navy policy was crystal clear with regard to drug use, it was also true that there were political risks associated with being too successful in the execution of a ship’s drug program. There were serious shortages of enlisted personnel in all the critical ratings aboard ship (such as boiler-tenders, fire control and electronics technicians, and radarmen), and the decision to discharge a man for using drugs often meant that the ship might not see a replacement for up to half a year.

Captains were evaluated, among other things, on the success of their reenlistment programs, and a drug discharge counted against the ship’s retention program statistically.

A pattern of drug discharges could often provoke not-so-subtle inquiries through the chain of command as to the general competence of the captain and his command to hold things together in the face of Navy-wide personnel shortages.

The Navy anally came to grips with its drug problem after a serious accident aboard an aircraft carrier in the seventies, when several men were cut to pieces on the flight deck by a snapped arresting wire and an on-deck crash. Post-incident autopsies revealed that a startling percentage of the bodies contained traces of tetra-hydra cannabinol (THE), the narcotic element of marijuana and hashish. The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), disheartened with these findings, took the extraordinary and politically courageous decision to impose mandatory urinalysis on the entire Navy, with everyone, from himself on down to the most junior recruit, eligible for random, surprise selection by his or her command to proceed to the head to provide a urine sample. No one was exempt, and I can remember, as a commanding officer and later as a commodore of destroyers, getting the knock on the door, there to find the corpsman with the sample bottle, test kit, and appropriate paperwork.

Whatever slight damage was done to the dignity of senior officers, the imposition of mandatory, random, surprise urinalysis screening broke the back of the Navy’s drug problem in one year. Today the incidence of drug use in the Navy at large is minuscule, thanks primarily to the random-urinalysis drug-screening program, which is still very much in place, and which, this author fervently hopes, never goes away.

P. T. Deutermann (Captain, USN, Retired)

served several years in the Vietnam War, in operations that form the background of The Edge of Honor. He later commanded a guided missile destroyer in the Atlantic fleet and a destroyer squadron in the Pacific.

He retired as a captain in 1989, and in 1992 published Scorpion in the Sea, his first novel. He lives with his wife in Milledgeville, Georgia, where he is at work on his next novel.