Back in April (“Tobacco Master to the Rescue,” April 30), I told you about retired Marine Corps Col. Rick Brown and how, while aboard the Wasp-class carrier USS Essex in 2004, he had enjoyed smoking pipes with the ship’s chaplain in the “smoker’s pit.” Brown and the chaplain, being the only pipe smokers aboard the ship, had faced a serious crisis when their supply of pipe tobacco began to run low.
I talked with Brown recently, and he told me about another problem he faced early in that deployment. Not long after they had first settled aboard the Essex, all personnel began conducting ship-wide man-overboard drills. After an announcement of “man overboard,” various officers and department heads had eight minutes to account for all their people. Eight minutes, Brown explained, is about how long it takes to rescue a swimming soldier before the ship moves beyond the bend of the horizon.
During one drill, the Marine infantry battalion aboard the Essex was able to account for 100% of its personnel within five minutes. Brown, then a major leading the ship’s Marine logistics section, took 12 minutes to do the same. He was required to report to Essex’s first officer, a giant sailor with muscles that would have made Popeye jealous, to receive a furious reprimand.
The next day’s drill did not go much better. Again, the infantry reported 100% accountability within five minutes. Brown’s logistics section had improved, but only to a still-dismal 11 minutes. Again, the first officer screamed at him.
Later, in the smoker’s pit, Brown vented to the chaplain: “How the heck is the infantry getting accountability so fast?” After all, the infantry was just as spread out over the ship as Brown’s logistics team. Some worked in the kitchen. Others may have helped out in the engine room or in a supply section. It wasn’t as if they were all packed together in the same tight quarters waiting to be counted.
Among the smokers were a few quality assurance, or QA, sailors in charge of running the drills. The chaplain asked them if they ever snatched people up — that is, if they ever hid people during the drills to determine the effect on accountability reports. One of the QA’s agreed to try it during the next drill.
A day later, the alarm sounded. Brown’s logistics team scrambled to locate all of its people, accounting for them in a new record time of seven minutes. But one man was missing. Later, he was reported as having been snatched by a QA.
The infantry reported 100% accountability within its usual five minutes.
And behold, as had been divinely revealed to the chaplain (or as the chaplain had at least suspected), the infantry’s 100% accountability report could not possibly have been accurate, since several of its people had also been snatched by the QA sailors.
It appeared the leadership of that infantry section was conducting accountability checks much in the same way my co-workers and I had once checked department store inventory in the mall — very quickly and with excellent results that only loosely resembled reality.
“Never underestimate the chaplain’s input,” Brown told me with a smile.
After the truth came out, it was an infantry officer’s turn to be chewed out by the ship’s first officer. Brown, while not receiving a full apology, was recognized as having at least taken the drills seriously. His voyage to Iraq was much smoother after that.
