THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 19, 1996 TAG: 9605190078
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL E. RUANE, KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: ANNAPOLIS, MD. LENGTH: Long : 184 lines
Fred Wilmot spent his last day at the Naval Academy a ``ghost'' in green fatigues - clutching his cap and his checklist, and seeking to avoid anyone he might know.
Gone were his dreams of a naval career and the graduation he had wanted so badly. Lost was his chance to toss his hat in triumph with the rest of the class of '96. And bitter was the thought that he had let down his father and grandfather, who had attended the academy before him.
Forty miles away in Washington, as the 21-year-old disgraced midshipman settled his affairs Thursday, the top officer in the Navy, Adm. Jeremy ``Mike'' Boorda, also bade the service goodbye, taking a gun and killing himself with a bullet to the chest.
These two men - one at the bottom, the other at the pinnacle of the Navy hierarchy - were both troubled, and both left the beleaguered Navy forever.
Their paths might have crossed next Friday. Boorda, 57, had he lived, was scheduled to swear in this year's academy graduating class. And until he was arrested on drug charges last fall, Wilmot was to be among them.
Instead, the two leave an institution more unsettled than at any time since the dark, early days of World War II - now deeply polarized between tradition and reform, loyalty and truth, and a ship seeking to right itself in a strange storm it has never seen before.
By Friday, when the academy's graduation festivities conclude, Mike Boorda will be in his grave, shamed to death by hints that he wore Navy decorations he hadn't earned. And Fred Wilmot, the third generation of his family to attend the academy, will be back home in Las Vegas, booted from the Navy after seven weeks in the brig.
Their tragedies - Boorda's already widely known; Wilmot's untold until now - reflect the turbulence their service has endured.
And the difficulties it still faces.
Clad in black combat boots and low-key jungle fatigues, Wilmot was released from the brig at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., at 7 a.m. Thursday, about seven hours before Boorda's death.
Wilmot was one of five Naval Academy midshipmen who had been court-martialed and jailed, and among almost two dozen others who were implicated in the worst drug scandal in academy history.
The drug case, which involved marijuana and the hallucinogen LSD, was only one of a string of troubles that rocked the school this academic year.
It was followed by accusations that midshipmen were involved in a car-theft ring, had engaged in sexual harassment, were guilty of child molestation and had broken into a girl's house in Annapolis.
And amid all that came publication of an academy teacher's essay bitterly criticizing the school as an ethically corrupt institution with a ``culture of hypocrisy.''
The difficulties at the academy reflected larger problems in the Navy, where a succession of crises - ethical and other - hammered the service's confidence, beginning with the Tailhook sexual misconduct scandal in the early 1990s.
Boorda and other leaders wondered what was going on and struggled to find answers. As he and the Navy worked to tighten standards of conduct, bitter divisions arose within the institution.
Boorda gradually found himself a focal point of emotional reaction to reform - both loved and hated as he ended some officers' careers and ordered a Navy-wide stand-down to reflect on gender issues.
At the academy, there was a stand-down, too, and a clampdown. The school vowed to screen applicants more carefully and to conduct a massive attitude survey of all 4,000 students.
Most observers blamed society: Young people were different these days, influenced by broken families, the media, violence and the times. And it was from society that the academy drew its students.
``It is not an excuse,'' said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., an academy graduate and a member of its advisory board, ``but it is true that young men and women coming to the service academies today come from a very different environment from when I was there.''
But after the misconduct, the files of all the offending students were carefully re-examined for clues. The result was surprising.
``There was nothing in their records that would have disqualified them,'' said Adm. Charles R. Larson, the school superintendent. ``We took a profile of these young people and they were right at the class average. . . . They're a profile all the way across the class.''
So where did they go wrong?
And, especially, how could someone like Wilmot go wrong?
Freddy,'' as his mother calls him, seemed destined for the Naval Academy since the day he was born in the hospital at the U.S. Navy Air Station at Whidbey Island, Wash., on July 11, 1974.
His father, Fred Sr., now 58, was a Navy pilot then stationed at the base.
The elder Wilmot had graduated from the academy in 1961, and had gone on to be test pilot of the EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare jet. He had also served a combat tour in the sky off Vietnam, and earned the combat ``V'' medal for valor - two of which Boorda wore, and were the focus of the questions that apparently led to his suicide.
Fred Jr.'s paternal grandfather, Lt. Cmdr. Francis E. Wilmot - who died the year Fred was born - had attended the academy during World War I, but to his lifelong regret had resigned to resume Navy duty during World War II.
On Christmas in 1984, Fred, then 10, was given the ceremonial, engraved sword his grandfather had carried as a midshipman two generations before. It was a ``monumental event,'' Fred would recall.
Even so, his parents said they were not sure if the academy was what they wanted for Fred. ``I wanted him to go because he wanted to go,'' his mother, Vicki, 52, said in a recent telephone interview. ``I didn't want him to go because his father and grandfather went.''
His father said: ``I was supportive, but I was never pushing toward it. I wanted him to be the one that wanted it.''
Did he? ``I think I was pretty much bred to come to the Naval Academy,'' young Wilmot said in an interview. ``When you grow up around it, you're kind of steered in the direction, I guess.''
Wilmot did well in high school. He starred at lacrosse, was named a member of the National Honor Society and became an Eagle Scout. In the summer of 1992, he headed off to Annapolis for his freshman, or plebe, year - a traditional year of stress and pressure for newcomers.
``He acclimated pretty well,'' his father said. He had been in a high school junior ROTC program his father ran, so ``he knew how to march and Navy organization and that sort of thing. He enjoyed it as much as you can enjoy it.''
But he also broke rules - influenced, his father said, by upperclassmen. During one unauthorized ``reconnaissance'' outside the academy walls - on which the young midshipman was invited by upperclassmen - the group narrowly avoided being picked up by police.
``I was shocked,'' his father said.
In addition, Wilmot had academic problems. He failed calculus and fell behind in other subjects. He spent several terms at summer school trying to catch up. ``I struggled like hell,'' he said.
But he told his parents he was happy, and was determined to graduate.
At the start of his senior year, though, his dorm room was changed and he fell in with a circle of students who were interested in drugs. Though he said he had never used drugs before Annapolis, he admitted at his court-martial that he had used LSD two or three times while there.
He also admitted contributing about $30 to a kitty that was being assembled by midshipmen to make a purchase of 200 doses of LSD, and he attended a meeting to set up the deal. The midshipmen didn't know that the arrangement was part of a sting set up by Navy investigators to root out drug use at the academy.
On Oct. 15, two midshipmen were arrested in the sting while buying two sheets of white paper bearing harmless Bart Simpson decals. Wilmot and others were soon implicated.
A day or two later, Wilmot telephoned his father and mother separately so he could tell each one the bad news personally. ``Mom,'' he said he told his mother, ``I'm getting kicked out of school.'' Then he explained.
``Freddy,'' she said she lamented, ``how could you do this to yourself?''
``She grilled me for about an hour,'' he said. ``It wasn't a really good conversation. I wound up hanging up on her.''
But how, indeed, could he have done this? ``Lack of moral fiber - at the time,'' he responded in the interview. ``Or lack of character judgment. Just a bad call. People make mistakes.''
On Feb. 23 Wilmot was court-martialed at the Washington Navy Yard, where three months later Boorda would take his life.
Wilmot pleaded guilty to conspiracy, to attempting to possess LSD and to using LSD. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail, but the term was reduced to 60 days because he agreed to cooperate with investigators.
He also forfeited all pay and allowances, was dismissed from the academy and was required to repay the cost of his education - about $80,000, Navy officials said.
His father, who once served as a drug policy enforcement officer in the Navy, was hurt and torn.
``I can see both sides of it,'' he said. ``Since it's my son, I would have liked to have seen them do something other than toss him out and give him jail time. I really didn't think jail time was necessary.''
All the same: ``I know what the rules are. . . . Here he had looked forward to a career. Now, it's all down the tubes.''
Boorda knew the rules, too. And he knew how precisely they had been enforced. Suicide notes he left suggest he knew he had made a mistake, like many others in the Navy. But few, he feared, would ever understand his.
That Boorda, the reformer, would ethically fail - at least in his own mind - was a stunning blow to a Navy torn by the cross-currents of reform. And now, its 400,000 men and women must find a new course and a new leader.
On Thursday - just as Boorda was racing in his car from the Pentagon to his quarters, and his death, at the Washington Navy Yard - Fred Wilmot was walking the academy yard, wrapping up his affairs and trying not to be noticed.
``I definitely felt like I disgraced my family, and everybody who ever went here,'' he said as he paused briefly in cavernous Dalhgren Hall, surrounded by memorials to long-dead naval heroes.
``I feel like a ghost walking around here,'' he said.
``Because I really am.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Fred Wilmot Sr.
Fred Wilmot Jr.
Francis E. Wilmot
KEYWORDS: U.S. NAVY SCANDALS by CNB