THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, May 18, 1996 TAG: 9605180276
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE AND DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITERS
LENGTH: Long : 157 lines
How can it be that the nation's top Navy officer killed himself over two tiny, bronze V-shaped pins he used to wear on his uniform?
From the Pentagon to the smallest ship and most obscure base in the Navy, that question perplexed sailors and airmen Friday as thousands of them groped for understanding of Thursday's suicide of Adm. Jeremy ``Mike'' Boorda.
Boorda, the chief of naval operations, once wore the pins that are sold for less than a dollar at most military exchanges on two of his 16 military decorations. The ``V'' stands for valor in combat.
Thursday, just before he was to face questions from journalists about whether he was entitled to wear the pins, Boorda, 56, went home and fatally shot himself in the chest.
D.C. police and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service continued their investigation of the shooting Friday, releasing no new details. Navy spokesmen said Boorda would be buried Sunday in Arlington National Cemetery after a private funeral; a public memorial service is set for 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at Washington National Cathedral.
Two suicide notes Boorda left behind suggested he was driven to take his life by fear that the reputation of the Navy, already battered by a series of scandals, would be further harmed by the disclosures about his medals.
Neither message was released Friday, but Navy and law enforcement sources said that one of the notes was addressed to Boorda's wife and family and that the other apparently was intended for sailors and the public at large. Both notes were dated May 15, raising the possibility that Boorda may have planned the shooting well in advance.
In the message to sailors, Boorda acknowledged making a mistake in wearing the ``V'' pins, the sources said. He had wrongly thought he was entitled to them, he said, but worried that some in the media and the Navy would never see his action as an honest mistake.
And in any event, the question persists: Why is it such a big deal?
``He didn't have to do it, he didn't need to do it,'' said naval historian Norman Polmar, who first worked with Boorda in the mid-1980s when both were aides to senior admirals. ``He had already made it.''
Questions about Boorda's decorations were first raised by the National Security News Service, a nonprofit group that provides news organizations with investigative leads. More than a year ago, retired Marine Lt. Col. Roger Charles, a correspondent with the service, filed Freedom of Information Act requests for records concerning the military decorations of Boorda and other top Pentagon officials.
The news service had tipped off Newsweek and ABC News about the Boorda decorations. Boorda was to have met Thursday afternoon with the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek.
``To civilians it's going to be unfathomable'' that the ``V'' pins could pose a problem, Charles said. ``But within the military, this is a big deal. Once the story ran, I can't imagine how he could face the other service chiefs.''
Others were willing to give Boorda the benefit of the doubt.
``It would not be a very big deal'' to anyone familiar with the way things were done in the military at the time, said retired Vice Adm. John J. Shanahan. Boorda's fellow service chiefs all had Vietnam-era experience, he said.
According to longstanding military regulations, the bronze ``V'' pin, formally known as a Combat Distinguishing Device, can be worn on the Navy Achievement Medal and the Navy Commendation Medal. Boorda was awarded both for his duty off the coast of Vietnam.
But the regulations say that ``in all cases'' the pin ``may only be worn if specifically authorized in the citation.'' Copies of Boorda's citations released Thursday by the Navy contain no such authorization.
Shanahan, director of the Center for Defense Information, a defense think tank based in Washington, said the combat ``V'' often was worn without specific authorization by soldiers and sailors during the Vietnam War. ``A lot of people were innocently interpreting the word `combat' '' in the wording of their medal citations to mean that they could add the ``V'' pin to their medals, he said.
Retired Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., chief of naval operations in the early 1970s, told a Washington TV station that he routinely told sailors who participated in operations off Vietnam that they could add the ``V'' to medals won at the time.
He may have spoken directly to Boorda about the pin, Zumwalt told the station; he said they spoke several times during the war when Zumwalt visited ships.
Later, on CNN's ``Larry King Live,'' Zumwalt was sharply critical of Newsweek for pursuing the story, calling it ``a trumped-up effort to get a news story, and it had its tragic consequences.''
Wearing the decorations ``could have been an honest mistake on the part of Adm. Boorda,'' agreed Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. The former Vietnam prisoner of war, interviewed Friday by NBC-TV, said, ``for someone to allege that he somehow deliberately distorted what was a superb record to me is patently unfair.''
Shanahan said that the Navy and its sister services awarded medals more freely during Vietnam than at any time in modern history. He said that because the war was so unpopular at home, many commanders used medals to boost troop morale. In some units, ``they were handing out medals for getting across the street, almost. . . . It became meaningless,'' Shanahan said.
Why might the decorations have been so important? It's all about leadership, said Jeff Moag, Pentagon correspondent for the National Security News Service, which launched the Boorda inquiry.
``Adm. Boorda did a fine job in the things he did during the Vietnam War,'' Moag said, ``but he wasn't in combat where he was actually taking fire.''
Moag said Boorda's ships ``were involved in firing on the Vietnam coast. They did a lot of shelling. . . . But it doesn't merit the `V' because at no time were they at risk. We did a pretty exhaustive search of the ships' logs of those ships for the entire time he was there, looking for any enemy action that was taken against the ships, and we didn't find it.
``The Navy's been kind of troubled lately, and it keeps coming back to leadership. When you've got your top admiral involved in this kind of petty deception, it speaks of a larger problem. The story that you would have seen in Newsweek wouldn't have been about an admiral cheating on his medals. It's a symptom of a greater ill.''
Moag conceded that combat citations were passed out freely in the Vietnam era. ``There are people that have the legitimate combat `V' citation that probably did less in Vietnam than Boorda did,'' he said. ``The irony of this is that a man took his life over something that really is so arbitrary.''
Navy officials said Boorda stopped wearing the ``V'' pins about a year ago after his aides had received a Freedom of Information Act request for the citations.
Boorda apparently did not discuss the change at the time with anyone outside his immediate staff. Rear Adm. Kendell Pease, who met with Boorda around noon Thursday to discuss the Newsweek inquiry, said he was unaware of any question about Boorda's medals until that morning.
Navy Secretary John H. Dalton said he first heard of questions about Boorda's medals when he went to D.C. General Hospital after the shooting. Dalton said Boorda was upbeat during a long meeting Wednesday with him and Marine Commandant Gen. Charles Krulak as they reviewed the service's program for the rest of the year. ``He was strong, he was happy, he was Mike Boorda,'' Dalton said. The meeting went so well that as it ended, ``the CNO and the commandant gave each other a high-five,'' he added.
In the corridors outside Boorda's office on Friday, aides and co-workers hugged and consoled one another, their expressionless faces conveying their shock. Chaplains and counselors prayed and visited with some of the staff.
Delivering an Armed Forces Day speech at Andrews Air Force Base, Defense Secretary William J. Perry sought to boost Navy morale by recalling Boorda's energy and spirit about the service.
``Nobody - nobody - had more pride in his sailors,'' Perry said. ``The hallmark of Mike's remarkable Navy career was a heartfelt recognition that no ship, no battle group is better than the people who sail with it. He knew we cannot send our ships on extended overseas deployments without also having sophisticated and well-trained people with good morale.
``Today, we have such people.'' MEMO: The Washington Post and The Associated Press contributed to this
report. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Adm. Boorda
Photo
ASSOCIATED PRESS file
Jeremy ``Mike'' Boorda, as a seaman apprentice. Boorda, known as ``a
sailor's sailor,'' rose through the enlisted ranks, to Officer
Candidate School, to the Navy's top position, chief of naval
operations - always proud of the Navy.
KEYWORDS: U.S. NAVY SUICIDE ADM. JEREMY ``MIKE'' BOORDA by CNB