DATE: Wednesday, October 8, 1997 TAG: 9710080629 SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A19 EDITION: FINAL TYPE: SPECIAL REPORT: THE CHANGING FACE OF THE NAVY SAILOR SERIES: FUTURE OF THE FLEET SOURCE: BY JACK DORSEY, STAFF WRITER LENGTH: 161 lines
Eighteen years ago, the Navy wasn't the service that Adm. Harry D. Train II had wanted to lead.
That summer of 1979, as Train settled into his job as commander-in-chief of the Atlantic Fleet, the daily message traffic landing on his desk from his ships and shore commands was grim. And it was getting worse.
In four months that year there had been 27 cases of arson on Atlantic Fleet ships alone. In mid-July crewmen aboard the minesweeper Affray, cruising off the Maine coast, discovered sugar in a diesel fuel tank, evidence of a sabotage attempt. The Ku Klux Klan was actively attempting to recruit sailors for membership. Racial tension in the ranks was high.
Ships were old. Spare parts were few. A shortage of sailors plagued the fleet. Recruiting was off. Low pay, eight-month deployments and an unacceptable climate seemed only to get worse.
Few sailors were making a career of the service, especially in the middle enlisted ranks. Adm. Thomas B. Hayward, then the chief of naval operations, called the shortage of nearly 25,000 mid-career petty officers a ``hemorrhage of talent'' that was reducing the readiness of many ships and squadrons.
So critical were manning levels that the commanding officer of the Norfolk-based oiler Canisteo declared his ship unsafe, and refused to put to sea.
Fashionable though it may be to grouse today about the changing Navy - about the effects of having women on ships, about workloads and stress in the wake of a years-long drawdown, about management doublespeak and Generation X recruits - the sailor of 1997, Train said, is much-improved over his counterpart of a generation ago.
How the Navy's men and women further metamorphose, amid leaps in technology, the military's evolving mission and a fast-changing world, remains to be seen. But the recent past holds the key to understanding how great any coming change might be.
Train, a Navy veteran of 33 years who is past president and current treasurer of Future of Hampton Roads Inc. - and who serves on a number of public, private and military-related boards and foundations - recalls old days that were anything but good.
There was, for instance, the message that Rear Adm. Carl J. Christoph, then commander of Amphibious Group Two and responsible for about 20 ships, fired off to his ship commanders the same summer. ``Your daily messages to me,'' he wrote, ``. . . read like a police blotter reflecting crimes of a big city precinct.''
Christoph cited a group assault on an officer of the deck, diplomacy-damaging misconduct ashore overseas ``and individuals openly avowing allegiance to organizations espousing racism and anti-Navy terrorism,'' and questioned whether his skippers might be at fault.
``These events, coupled with our failure to bring our people up to Navy standards of smartness and military courtesy . . . would indicate to some observers a breakdown in our leadership,'' Christoph wrote. ``We must reverse this now.''
Train remembers his incredulity on reading that message.
He also remembers the day he summoned a Navy Investigative Service agent to his office, ordering daily reports and weekly meetings on the crime scene in the fleet.
At one such meeting, the agent told Train that a retired chief petty officer who served on the Navy's first nuclear-powered submarine, Nautilus, was busily recruiting Navy personnel in Hampton Roads for the KKK.
``He said they uncovered a recruitment campaign and that the KKK had applied for a parade permit in Norfolk on a Saturday a week later,'' Train recalled. ``He said we could possibly have active-duty Navy personnel, in uniform, parading for the KKK.
``That same day I called all the C.O.s in the Atlantic Fleet - up and down the coast, on ships and shore units - to meet at the theater on the Norfolk Naval Base.''
Train went into the theater building ``with the judge advocate weeping and wailing and pulling on my coattails, saying what I was about to do was illegal.''
He opened the meeting by relating his news about the KKK. Then he got down to business: ``You are not going to permit your people to join the KKK,'' he told his captains and commanders. ``You are not going to permit your people to participate in that parade. And if you do, I will have you relieved within the week.''
``Now,'' he said from the stage, ``anyone in this theater have any problem with me giving you that order?' ''
Two minutes passed. No one said a word. The problem went away.
``It was a short blip on the screen,'' Train said, ``but the type of thing in those days you really had to address head-on.''
Even with such flash fires under control, the Navy's leadership remained unhappy with the caliber of sailors the service attracted. Not that it had to worry about keeping all of them.
``The Navy had the highest desertion rate of all the services,'' Train said. ``That didn't make me proud.''
Unauthorized absences reached 37,151 in fiscal year 1979, averaging more than 3,000 a month. With 529,200 people in the Navy, that meant that more than 7 percent were deserting. It was a trend the Navy had seen rise for nearly six years, beginning in 1974, to top any figure since World War II.
``Drug usage was exceptionally bad,'' Train continued. ``The Navy was one of the worst offenders.''
When the Navy began cracking down on drug abuse in 1980 it estimated that one in three of its members abused drugs - a rate that, thanks to the service's zero-tolerance policy, has dropped to about 2 percent today.
And minor vexations abounded. Rear Adm. Joseph Frick, who commanded the Norfolk Naval Base complex in those days, found himself having to discipline one officer who saluted him while remaining seated at a bus stop, one hand in his pocket.
Rear Adm. Clinton W. Taylor, who then headed the Norfolk-based Fleet Training Command, grew so irritated by the general lack of spit and polish around him that he sent word to his people to shape up. Taylor banned civilian clothes for young sailors attending Navy apprentice schools, outlawed alcohol in all barracks that housed students, tightened haircut regulations, enforced salutes for officers.
He even ordered parades, complete with bands, held every Friday to polish up the ranks.
Part of the problem might have lain with a sociological experiment undertaken years before by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
His ``Project 100,000'' required the armed forces to recruit and enlist Americans with low I.Q. scores, people who couldn't pass military entrance exams and were otherwise unemployable. McNamara believed, Train said, that the military and its disciplined structure might not only keep these recruits off the streets, but might make them useful citizens.
In place from 1967 to 1971, the relaxation of standards enabled about 360,000 previously unqualified people to don the uniforms of sailors, soldiers and airmen.
But unanticipated by everyone, Train said, was that in addition to being mentally challenged, ``these people were thugs and crooks.''
Some who became sailors decided they didn't have to show up for work. Some showed no inclination to honor their commitment to serve. Many were drug abusers.
``Marijuana distribution was not only a disturbing disciplinary problem,'' Train recalled, ``but it was potentially destroying the brains of these people who didn't have much of a brain to start with.''
Some of Train's Army colleagues found themselves threatened by near-revolt in the ranks during the late '70s. Some who are now four-star generals were battalion commanders at the time, he said.
``They told me recently their company commanders had to wear sidearms in the barracks,'' Train said, ``and station sergeants on top of the roofs with shotguns to maintain law and order.''
Even squared-away sailors found the times tough.
The carrier Nimitz, then based in Norfolk, was deployed to the Indian Ocean for eight months, five days, during which it made one port call. It was relieved by the Norfolk-based carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower, which spent eight months and seven days deployed - again, with a single port visit. Smaller ships accompanying the carriers spent a similar time deployed.
Bad as that was, submarine operations were worse. The attack submarine fleet was spending 70 percent of its time deployed in an operational tempo that was ``absolutely unacceptable,'' Train said.
``We were running their wheels off.''
Such were the conditions Train found during his first two years at the Atlantic Fleet's helm.
It might have been coincidence, but as the Reagan Administration's decision to ``rearm America'' and pour money into the defense industry took hold, some of those problems began to disappear, or at least get the attention they deserved, Train said.
``Things really started to improve after I left,'' he said.
Two years of pay increases brought a 14-percent raise to most in uniform. Shipbuilding and ship repair took off, and the fleet's resulting new hardware represented a leap in quality. Readiness improved, along with recruiting and retention.
By 1982, the military had halted its downward trajectory.
The good old days were over.
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