THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, May 21, 1996 TAG: 9605210368
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EVAN THOMAS, COPYRIGHT 1996, NEWSWEEK
LENGTH: Long : 159 lines
In the grief, anger and bewilderment that have consumed the Navy community since the suicide last week of Adm. Jeremy ``Mike'' Boorda, chief of naval operations, Newsweek magazine has been at the center of the storm. This and an accompanying story are excerpted from this week's issue.Command, the saying goes, is lonely, and it can be lonelier still for a naval officer.
Navy lore says a captain in battle always goes down with his ship; in modern practice, that means the captain is always held responsible, whether he is truly to blame or not.
A desktop command in peacetime can be just as demanding and isolating.
As the Navy's top officer, Jeremy ``Mike'' Boorda had to contend with scandals over sexual harassment, cheating at the Naval Academy, and the too-frequent crashes of the Navy's premier fighter, the F-14.
Boorda was to blame for none of these upheavals. But in the long tradition of his service, he took responsibility.
His pride was a source of his immense drive and strength. Somehow, tragically, it may also have been the source of his undoing.
He apparently could not tolerate the idea that his own example might dishonor the service that had been his life since he was 16.
For a number of years, Boorda had worn a combat decoration, a ``V'' for valor, on two of his medals.
Recently, he had stopped wearing the insignia.
A senior Navy official had told Newsweek that Boorda's own aides advised the admiral that he was ineligible to wear the combat ``V.''
The magazine had reached no conclusions, and it wanted to learn more before deciding whether to write or print any story.
To many civilians, it seems incredible that anyone would kill himself over bits of ribbon and tin. But medals count in the military; they are a road map to a man's career. Decorations for combat mean the most; getting shot at in earnest is still the truest test of a soldier or sailor's worth, even if it is an increasingly rare experience for a warship seaman. The Navy's last major surface action was in 1945.
Still, suicides are never simple matters, and we may never know why Boorda took his own life. Usually, a self-inflicted death is the culmination of long brooding, not a sudden decision. But if Boorda was depressed, he did not show it.
His story is of a driven and sensitive man trying to cope with terrible pressures - from his fellow officers, from politicians, the press, and most of all from himself.
As a young lieutenant, Boorda was sent to Vietnam aboard the destroyer Craig in the spring of 1965.
But the North Vietnamese had no blue-water navy to challenge the Americans. As weapons officer, Boorda did help demonstrate to some visiting South Vietnamese army officers how the ship's 5-inch guns could lob shells at Viet Cong positions in the jungle.
But there are no reports that the fire was ever returned. Boorda won a Navy Achievement Medal, a minor award that sailors say is routinely handed out for ``showing up.'' He won the somewhat more important Navy Commendation Medal on a short tour in Vietnam in 1972-73 as executive officer of the frigate Brooke. According to the ship's history, the ship never got to join in the naval bombardment of Vietnam. Neither of Boorda's medal citations authorized him to wear the combat ``V.''
An officer on the way up in the modern Navy needs to ``punch his ticket.'' And Boorda methodically punched his, serving in a variety of staff and command jobs. At some point in the 1980s, he began wearing the ``V''s on his medal ribbons. (In a 1977 photo, he is not wearing them; in a 1986 picture, he is.)
Boorda lacked an Annapolis ring, a symbol so important that non-Naval Academy graduates often complain about the exclusivity of the ``ringknockers'' among the top admirals.
It was Boorda's political skills that won him the Navy's top job. When Adm. Frank Kelso had to step down as chief of naval operations because he had attended the notorious 1991 Tailhook convention in Las Vegas, the Navy needed someone who could lift low morale and restore public confidence in the scandal-rocked sea service.
But some Academy men resented this upstart four-star admiral who had risen from the enlisted ranks. Naval aviators regarded Boorda with suspicion, alleging that he was too willing to sacrifice good men to appease the politically correct.
He was accused of caving in to political pressure in the summer of 1994 when he gave up a fight to name Adm. Stanley Arthur to head the U.S. Pacific Command. Arthur had been accused of failing to support a sexual-harassment claim by a female pilot against her flight instructors. Boorda later regretted not going to bat for Arthur.
But Boorda's regret wasn't good enough for Jim Webb. The much-decorated Marine, Vietnam combat veteran and former Navy secretary viewed Boorda as a bureaucrat.
Webb likes to play the role of the Navy's conscience, telling Annapolis midshipmen - and anyone else who will listen - ``where principle is involved, be deaf to expediency!''
At a speech last month at the Naval Academy, Webb harshly criticized Boorda, not by name but by clear implication. When Arthur's name had been withdrawn, ``Who fought this? Who expressed their outrage?'' demanded Webb. ``Some are guilty of the ultimate disloyalty,'' he continued. ``To save or advance their careers, they abandoned the very ideals of their profession in order to curry favor with politicians.''
Boorda was said to be deeply wounded.
It was Webb's passion for purity that led, indirectly, to the controversy over Boorda's medals. As Navy secretary in the late 1980s, Webb made it his business to check the photographs of officers up for promotion to flag rank against their medal citations.
(His concern wasn't the awards, Webb said in an interview Monday, but the order in which some flag officers were wearing them. Military regulations establish an ``order of precedence'' for the display of medals; Webb said he found some officers were displaying theirs in ways ``any petty officer'' would know was wrong.
``I never questioned anybody's ribbons,'' Webb declared.)
The message trickled down through the bureaucracy, and soon lower-level officials in personnel were scrutinizing the ``fruit salad'' on the chests of senior officers.
Boorda's ``V''s immediately attracted attention. His staff was first notified in 1987. But none of Boorda's aides had the heart to confront him - that is, until he became CNO. About a year ago, Newsweek has learned, Boorda's personal lawyer, Capt. Tom Connelly, told Boorda that he had to take off the ``V''s.
(Boorda apparently kept the matter secret from people outside his immediate office, however. Rear Adm. Kendell Pease, who as the service's senior spokesman met with Boorda almost daily and advised him closely about media inquiries, insists he was unaware of questions about the medals until the morning before Boorda's death.
(Pease and his staff have a reputation among journalists for pushing openness in the Navy and carefully handling sensitive inquiries. Pease has emphatically denied claims by the National Security News Service that he tried to steer it away from a medals story a year ago.
(But Jeffrey Moag, a reporter for the news service, says Pease called to say there was ``no story'' when it began filing Freedom of Information Act requests for copies of the medal citations of top Navy officers. Pease's own medal records were among those the news service reviewed.)
After finding the apparent discrepancies in Boorda's records, Roger Charles, a former Marine colonel who is now a correspondent for the National Security News Service, approached retired Col. David Hackworth, Newsweek's contributing editor for military affairs.
It was Hackworth who had originally scheduled an appointment to see Boorda last week - an appointment Boorda never kept.
Cameras caught President Clinton's shocked reaction when he was handed the news of Boorda's death. Last month Boorda told the Naval Academy midshipmen, ``You won't hear me lamenting reporting about the Navy. It may be painful, but it is also helpful. Sometimes, it makes you go look, and quite often you come across things that need to be worked on.''
Boorda continued, ``If you fall into the trap of not looking into problems and feeling sorry for yourself because your problems are getting reported, you don't get better. I'm not going to fall into that trap.''
But he did, and the sailors he served so well can only mourn him. MEMO: Virginian-Pilot Washington correspondent Dale Eisman also contributed to
this report.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT/File photo
Adm. Jeremy ``Mike'' Boorda was not to blame for any of the Navy's
upheavals, but in the long tradition of his service, he took the
responsibility.
KEYWORDS: U.S. NAVY SUICIDE U.S. CHIEF OF NAVAL
OPERATIONS by CNB