Introduction

Captain Charlie Hedden:

Hello and thank you for tuning in to this episode of The Air Force Judge Advocate General’s School Podcast. Today, a book review. In this episode, your hosts sit down with the Air University Law Chair, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Gartland, and discuss The Caine Mutiny. The 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Herman Wouk. We’ll discuss this monumental work of World War Two historical fiction and extract its lessons for today on leadership, followership, and the nature of military command. Welcome to Episode 56. Enjoy.

[Band playing a section of the Air Force Song]

About the Author

Major Erin Davis:

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Air Force Judge Advocate General’s School’s Podcast. Today Charlie and I are joined again by Lieutenant Colonel Garland, and we’re going to talk about The Caine Mutiny. We were talking about the book, not the movie, the Pulitzer Prize winning book about World War Two and Willie Keith, who is sent to be a lieutenant on the Caine, which is a minesweeper out in the Pacific.

A little bit first, about the author, Herman Wouk. He was born in 1915 in the Bronx, in New York. He’s a Jewish family. He was at Columbia. Then he had to join the Naval Reserve after Pearl Harbor, and he was stationed in the Pacific on a minesweeper. And he was eventually an exec, as an LT, an XO. So this for him is somewhat autobiographical, although as we’ll talk about later, the main character, Willie Keith, is definitely not an autobiographical character. He said about working on a minesweeper while being in the Navy that he learned a lot about machinery, how men behave under pressure, and about Americans, which I thought was really interesting.

He did actually write his first book on board while he was stationed on the minesweeper. And he died when he was 103 in 2019, only ten days before his 104th birthday. So, yeah, Colonel Garland, tell us a little bit about the book.

About the Book

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Gartland:

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. Thanks, Erin.

So this to me is really a work of art. It’s a bit ironic because one of the characters in the novel, this won’t be my focus today, but Lieutenant Keefer, who is the budding novelist who’s setting out to write the great American novel. And interestingly, in the book, it’s pointed out that there are a bunch of books coming out on World War Two, and this was one of them, although this one didn’t come out until 1951.

That was the first printing and as Erin said, wound up winning the Pulitzer Prize. So obviously well-received. It is as much as a page turner as one could be, in my personal opinion. It’s a tremendous treatise on leadership, on military culture, and on a number of other themes that will be that will be taking up today. And there are at least two movies now, the most famous one with Humphrey Bogart, which on Rotten Tomatoes, has a pretty high approval rating. I just checked right before the podcast has 92% on it. In my opinion, I think falls far, far short of the caliber of the book itself. And that just might be because it is such a well-written book that’s hard for the movie to capture a lot of the characterization and exchanges between the characters who are really so, so well developed, in my opinion.

There’s also another movie that came out with Jeff Daniels, and that’s a way more recent one, I want to say early 2000s. I didn’t really see much on that one, and that’s actually focusing way more on the actual court-martial itself. Not on the integrity of the story, as reflected in the book, where the court-martial is really the last part of the book, as we’ll be talking about later today.

Maj Davis:

And also interesting, the court-martial is not a very large part of the book, and it’s actually one of the more anti-climatic parts of the book, in my opinion.

Lt Col Gartland:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s really the lead up to it where you get to know about these characters and see how they develop over the over the course of the novel. It is almost I think for a legal audience in particular, it might be a bit of a letdown compared to the rest of the novel.

The Court-Martial

Maj Davis:

I agree. I think we’ll talk about the court-martial a little bit, but I know as a JAG, I was, there’s a whole section that just says the court-martial. And I was like, yes, I want to know everything. How did you charge it? [laughter] What is your evidence? And then as I went on to read it, it was only like ten pages. And it was fairly—probably truer to real court than TV court is.

Lt Col Gartland:

Right. Yeah. Great, great point. Maybe that’s. And of course, dealing with dealing with the code that we’re not familiar with because the Navy had this prior to pre UCMJ. Dealing with a specific Navy code. So, yeah, for sure. It’s really the buildup to the novel as we follow the protagonist, Willie Keith, and see the contrast and the two ship captains that are chronicled in the book. We’ll talk about them later. Captain De Vriess and the infamous Captain Queeg.

The Plot

Maj Davis:

So a little bit about the plot since we know that not everybody has read this book and we do advise reading this book. Spoilers ahead. If you were hoping to read it yourself. But basically, The Caine Mutiny is about Willie Keith, who is, kind of, I kind of thought he was a twerp, honestly, when I first started the book.

He’s a young man. He’s in his twenties and he is from a very WASPy New England family. And he sort of swanning around New York City playing piano bars, living on his parent’s money, not really a lot of direction, kind of breaking the hearts of young Italian women all over the city. And he, because it’s World War Two, to avoid the Army draft, he decides to go to the Naval OTS in Manhattan.

And he is definitely not at the outset Navy material. He gets sent out to the West Coast to wait for an assignment and he finds out he’s going to be put on a minesweeper in the Pacific. He was not a particularly impressive OTS grad. He made it barely made it. So it’s not a huge surprise that the Caine is sort of a rust bucket that is not actually even sweeping mines in the Pacific. It’s just sort of out there waiting to be called upon and kind of doing escort duty for other ships, battleships that are actually going out to the mission. And while he is on board the Caine, he runs into a cast of characters that really set his Naval fate. I would say the fate of his Naval career.

So Willie himself, he is someone who, he is not an obvious leader choice. He’s an interesting choice as the protagonist, I think, because he is definitely the kind of person who probably was drafted into World War Two. And he’s the kind of person where on the surface he looked like he had no business actually being in the military, very undisciplined, very lazy. And then I think you could almost call this book sort of a Bildungsroman almost. I think of like a young man who comes into his own—to an extent—I don’t think we can give Willie too much credit [laughter]. But I think he does kind of come into his own over the course of the book. And he’s very influenced by the other people that he’s serving with on the minesweeper. And his Naval experience even affects his personal life.

His personal life does play a big, pretty big role in the book. He is on and off romance with a girl back at home in New York of a different social class. She’s Italian and she’s like the daughter of greengrocers in Brooklyn. And his father is a doctor in Connecticut. That does play a pretty big role in the book, but that’s not really what we’re going to focus on here today, too, too much.

So, Colonel Garland, tell us a little bit—we’re going to start talking a little bit about some of the cast of characters that Willie works with while he’s assigned to the Caine. Can you tell us a little bit about his leadership?

Different Leadership Approaches

Lt Col Gartland:

Sure. So and that’s really one of the most interesting themes of the book to me, because we get a contrast in two radically different approaches to leadership on this minesweeper. When Willie Keith first comes aboard the DMS Caine, he encounters a Captain De Vriess who’s actually a lieutenant commander, captain of the ship, but lieutenant commander by rank of the ship and he doesn’t have, of course Willie is not really in a position to be judging people at this very, very, very young stage.

Capt Hedden:

But that doesn’t stop him. [laughter]

Lt Col Gartland:

But that doesn’t stop him. And I think that’s part of the maturation process, I think that we see of him throughout the book as he starts to reflect back later on De Vriess, because as most people on the ship who experienced De Vriess did reflect back on him once they had to experience Captain Queeg.

But Willie shows up and he doesn’t have a very, for what it’s worth, he doesn’t have a very favorable impression of De Vriess for a couple of reasons. The ship is a bit of a mess. As Erin said earlier, it’s a ship that is not in great shape. It hasn’t really performed any actual mission duty. It’s been steaming around all over the Pacific delivering mail, delivering notices, engaging in training with other ships, but not really performing any duty.

And so the ship’s old. It’s not in great shape, and the personnel on the ship are in much the same state. They are a bit disheveled, don’t really look crisp in their uniforms. And Keith attributes this to poor leadership basically on the part of Captain De Vriess. Now, as we see, and the book doesn’t spend, relatively speaking, much time on De Vriess compared to Queeg, who winds up taking up the bulk of the book.

But we see that De Vriess, notwithstanding some of the unimpressive appearances, really manages to get the mission accomplished. And you get a sense that De Vriess knows what he’s dealing with, both in terms of the ship and in terms of the personnel. He knows, in terms of the personnel that he’s received a lot of outcasts and has to play the cards he’s dealt. And they do respect him, and they do respond to him. And same with the ship. De Vriess is pretty, pretty able when it comes to his seamanship. Technically speaking, he’s proficient. He knows what he’s doing with the boat, and the men also respect him for that.

Nonetheless, as De Vriess as to exit the ship and is replaced by Queeg who Keith has a very different impression actually of Queeg at the beginning. So it’s a nice juxtaposition with degrees, because Keith starts out having very negative opinion of De Vriess that changes over the course of the book. By contrast, he has a very favorable impression of Queeg starting out. And then, of course, as you’ll see in quite a few of the episodes that were that we’re about to detail here, his opinion of Queeg steadily declines.

So Queeg comes aboard the ship with the idea of trying to fix the mess, essentially, at least in his opinion, that De Vriess has left behind. He is a very meticulous, by the book, exceedingly demanding individual and seems to get really caught up in the formality of things, at least at the beginning. The reader is left the impression that this is the case because he’s just trying to fix things. But as it goes on, we see a man who’s obsessed with the details to a point that it almost starts some of the, get some of the crew to thinking that perhaps the captain might not even be mentally stable.

There are a number of incidents that unfold, coming to really a crescendo with the infamous strawberry incident. And I don’t want to I don’t want to take that one away, Erin, from anyone else to describe, because it’s really delicious, a delicious moment in the book. But basically, what happens is, is the captain who’s fond of who’s fond of issuing a lot of rules that he then can’t live by. And so he’s really fond of ice cream and strawberries. They come, I forget, at which port they’re at, but they come into a couple of buckets of fresh strawberries. And after about his, I forget what it was, his fourth.

Maj Davis:

I think it was his fourth bowl.

Lt Col Gartland:

His fourth or fifth bowl of ice cream. This is around midnight or past midnight. And so he notifies down to the kitchen staff that he’d like to have another bowl of ice cream with strawberries. And it turns out that, was it no strawberries left?

Maj Davis:

They were all gone.

Lt Col Gartland:

They were all gone, right? So all the strawberries are gone, and Queeg being the, being the pretty particular person that he is, by his calculations, he summons in all of the officers from the ship to go over how many bowls of ice cream they’ve each had, how many strawberries they would have had. And so by his calculations, there should still be a couple of strawberries remaining.

And then he then embarks on this pretty remarkable quest to try and nail down who has stolen the strawberries. And this unravels pretty dramatically to include body cavity searches of the crew [laughter], searching every last nook and cranny of the ship to see who it is, because his theory is that someone has the key to the fridge where the strawberries were being stored, and he is going to find the person that has that key. And this is really the culminating moment where people see that perhaps the captain is not quite stable.

So what you really see, I guess, to close out this comparison between the two, with Queeg and De Vriess is that De Vriess wasn’t by the book, but he got the job done and he had a good sense of who he was working with. On the other hand, Queeg was incredibly particular about Navy rules and regulations to a fault and was pretty incapable when it came to actually getting the mission accomplished.

And so it leaves the reader wondering, you know, what’s the proper style of leadership? Is it situation dependent? Was De Vriess right? Was he, even though he wasn’t living up to Navy expectations when it came to rules and regs, was he handling the situation correctly based on the circumstances that he’d been dealt? And does he show that there is not one leadership style that fits the bill on every occasion? And so that is clearly one of the overriding themes in the book.

Lieutenant Maryk 

Maj Davis:

Yes, sir. Thank you.

So Charlie, tell us a little bit about some of Lieutenant Keith’s peer coworkers on the ship. I know we have several who make a pretty important dent in the Naval career of Lieutenant Keith. So tell us first a little bit about Lieutenant Maryk.

Capt Hedden:

So Lieutenant Maryk is the exec on the on the ship, and he ends up playing a real principal role as we get closer to the actual climax where the, of the mutiny and the ensuing court-martial. He’s actually the one who is court-martialed. He is the accused at the at the court-martial. I think the theory, the legal theory kind of being that he was charged with mutiny and the others is effectively charged with an accessory to a mutiny and the prosecutorial decision was, hey, if we get this guy for mutiny, then we can press with his accomplices. But if he gets acquitted for mutiny, then there’s ….

Maj Davis:

Nothing to be an accessory to.

Capt Hedden:

There’s nothing to an accessory to. [laughter] So he’s another draftee, you know

Maj Davis:

They’re all reservists.

Capt Hedden:

Right, he is another reservist.

Maj Davis:

Except for Queeg.

Lt Col Gartland:

Who’s an Academy man.

Maj Davis:

He’s an Academy grad.

Lt Col Gartland:

Which is interesting. Although to salvage the Academy here, the author has the individual who relieves Queeg is also an Academy grad.

Maj Davis:

He’s very confident.

Lt Col Gartland:

He’s very competent. [laughter] So for our Academy grads out there, I don’t think it’s a, I don’t think it was intended as a as an “absolute” knock against Academy grads.

Capt Hedden:

No, but it is important what’s throughout the book, the contrast between regular Navy and these reservists, which basically means, you know, they’re just in the Navy for the war right now, right? They just came in to help fight the war. Lots of them are professionals in some way. They’re officers—we’re focusing mostly on the officers.

So, they are well-educated and they’re smart in a lot of ways. But Maryk is a commercial fisherman, so his seamanship is excellent. He knows, you know, exactly what to do with the boat. That becomes, I guess, in debate at one particular point. But that’s Maryk. And he is in— he’s sort of simple. And I don’t I don’t think the author means that, and I don’t mean that in too much of a demeaning way.

But he’s a lot more of a rule follower, straightforward guy. He’s not too worried about what he thinks about what a captain should say. Ironically, up to the actual mutiny itself. He’s the one who is, of them all, the most consistent in not bashing the captain, and not second guessing the captain, and trying not to forcefully, but at least consistently trying to impose that kind of order among his fellow lower ranking officers. So if they’re doing things, making fun of, singing songs about, disparaging songs about Captain Queeg, he either walks away or says something kind of low key, like knock it off, guys. Doesn’t really ever follow up with that. But you can tell he chooses not to involve himself in that sort of, I guess, that low key insubordination.

Lt Col Gartland:

Yeah. He’s really the embodiment of respect. Respect the position, not the man, and this is something that all of the characters come back to. You know, I spent a good bit of time here, Charlie, bashing Queeg a few moments ago. And it is pretty, pretty evident throughout the book that he is NOT a model military officer by any stretch of the imagination.

However, what he does accomplish for the reader, though, and Maryk’s the one who I think really brings this out, is to question whether or not it really should matter from a leadership standpoint. The idea here being that the military factors in that there are going to be not so great leaders at various moments throughout your career, but that shouldn’t lead to a breakdown of the system if you have followers who are doing what they’re supposed to do. And that’s Maryk, who a number of times reproves the rest of the officers for all their disparaging comments about Queeg and really up until the last tries to hold out hope for the system. And that’s an interesting contrast there with I think the other character you’re going to talk about who of course is Keefer complete opposite end of the spectrum.

Lieutenant Keefer

Capt Hedden:

Yeah. So the opposite end of the spectrum and the sort of the devil on the other shoulder here is, is Keefer. And Keefer is by trade or at least in his mind, in his efforts, he’s a writer. So he spends all his spare time and then some writing what he hopes will be the great American novel about World War Two, of probably about his time on a ship in World War Two.

And he scurries off all the time to be, to put his head down and write his novel. That’s what he’s about. It’s way more important to him than any of this stuff. And he ends up leading the charge against Queeg in a rhetorical sense, in a in a real insidious kind of way among the crew. He’s kind of the leader of these sarcastic comments. And he’s really, really quick to say what a, you know, what he thinks about the Navy in general, the ship in particular, this captain in particular. He’s not a very good follower at all. He doesn’t do any more than he’s required. And he’s real opinionated in a negative way about his leadership and drags others down with him—to a real detrimental degree.

So, the other interesting kind of contrast in this book, not just the reserves in the regular, but also the educated, the more traditionally educated and classically educated and the not, right? The fishermen or the military men, they’re kind of framed as, you know, real simple kind of ….

Maj Davis:

Goobery.

Yeah. Like there. So I was going to say too, Keefer has actually published a novel. So he’s a published author; he thinks very highly of himself; and he’s an Ivy graduate. And when Willie Keith first comes aboard, Keefer takes to him right away because he’s a Princeton graduate, and they’re of a similar class and they’re of a similar background.

And I think that really does, there’s this, I think it’s also important that all these guys are reservists because there really is a commentary not being by the author, but using Keefer as the mechanism, there’s a commentary on the more, I guess, blue collar officers like Maryk and Queeg and De Vriess, people who have made this kind of work their careers as opposed to these more like soft hand, white shoe, WASPy, East Coast, Ivy grads.

Lt Col Gartland:

Too good for the military.

Maj Davis:

They’re too good for military, right.

Keefer and Maryk

Capt Hedden:

There’s almost this sense that they’ve condescended to help the military win this war because it got in over its head. Right? [laughter]

So, but that ends up playing, a lot of different roles, but in particular, when it comes to the relationship between Maryk and Keefer, essentially Keefer dropped some hints that he’s no psychologist, but some of the stuff he’s been seeing from Captain Queeg reminds him of some diagnoses he’s heard of in these books that he has read—and in particular, paranoia.

So that gets Maryk, at first pretty much disregards it out of hand. But then things keep happening, like the strawberry incident and some others, and because, I think partially because Maryk is so straightforward, is probably the best way to put it, he sees things from Queeg that also don’t sit right with him. Right? There’s a lack of integrity. There’s a real focus on himself and his reputation, and how he’s treated, and the loyalty to him, and that doesn’t sit right with Maryk either—even if he’s not going to disparage him publicly.

So, he starts looking into this and making a log of these crazy incidents, and ultimately between him and the other officers is convinced that that Queeg is crazy, or at least mentally unfit to captain the ship. And so they read in the regulation that there is a way for them to take the ship from Queeg.

The first part of, that first step that they are supposed to do, is to check with leadership. Right? Hey, if you’ve got a problem with the captain, go to the admiral. But there’s a there’s kind of a real telling incident where they finally get an opportunity to do that and Keefer bails. Chickens out.

Keefer says, “You know what? I’m not going to I’m not going to do this. This is suicide. I’m not going to go tell the admiral that I have a problem with the captain.”

And Maryk says, “Well, I’m not going to be able to say everything that you would be able to say. I’m not equipped to have this conversation by myself. So, you know, I’m out of here, too.”

And that kind of leads us to some of the other stuff that we’re going to talk about.

The Mutiny

Maj Davis:

Right. So before we move on, I want to kind of finish up with the plot because I know we touched a little bit, obviously, based on the name of the book. Clearly, there is a mutiny in this book. I know I was personally, and being not a seaman myself, I was expecting something a little more dramatic and pirate-like [laughter], a little more Captain Jack Sparrow left on an island kind of situation. 

But essentially what happens is the team is on the minesweeper and they are part of an escort. And while they are stopping to refuel as they’re heading off, it turns out, I think to Midway, right, there’s a typhoon. And in the very tense, chaotic moments when the ship is caught in the storm, the kind of, the culminating incident, all of these incidents with Captain Queeg, where he has been a less than stellar leader. I think we can all agree. The men in the wheelhouse with him, Maryk and Keith specifically, determined that he is not guiding the ship, that they would like it to be done. And he does—he’s a little bit of a flail where he kind of seems like he’s panicking. 

And Maryk decides that the time has come. This is going to be a mutiny. And he’s going to, he refers to the Article 186. “This is a mutiny. Sir, I’m going to ask you to walk away.” And the, you know, Stilwell, the guy at the wheel, “you’re going to start listening to me.” And from that moment, they survive the storm. Queeg is not, this is not dramatic, he’s not hauled off in chains and ropes. They politely ask him to take a seat, and he sort of does that.

Lt Col Gartland:

He remains there on the bridge.

Maj Davis:

Yes, he mildly protests. He remains on the bridge. And it’s, if anything, a fairly peaceable mutiny. And afterward, Maryk is court-martialed for the mutiny, like we talked about before. Keith and Stilwell are, also had charges preferred against them. But it all really depends on Maryk who is eventually acquitted with very interesting defense by a reservist JAG who in real life is a pretty hotshot attorney from New York.

Lt Col Gartland:

Another example of reservists stepping in to save the day.

Maj Davis:

Yes.

Capt Hedden:

Yeah. Well-educated, attorney, pilot. [laughter]

Maj Davis:

Yes. Although I would say the real complete contrast to Keefer, in that he has used his intelligence in a way that he wants to serve his country. And he looks down on Keefer and these other guys. He gets Maryk off, but he doesn’t think that’s really the right call. He thinks that Maryk is guilty—which is very interesting.

And also, I think we can have a whole discussion about being a defense attorney [laughter] and that sort of thing, but to kind of keep us moving along. I thought the first thing we could talk about would be the theme of leadership, specifically looking at the executive level for the command, the captain here, Captain Queeg, and then talking a little bit about peer leadership with Maryk and Keefer and Keith and sort of how those themes play out in the book.

So, sir, do you want to start by walking us a little bit through De Vriess and Queeg?

Captain Queeg

Lt Col Gartland:

Yeah, sure. So let’s go ahead and take a Queeg first, because I think he’s the easier of the two to diagnose.

So Queeg seems to fall short in every aspect of leadership that you might put under the leadership umbrella. He’s not technically proficient. He has a really hard time. So, he doesn’t know his actual profession very well. He has a hard time handling the ship. There are a couple instances of that in the book where he winds up crashing into the docks because he can’t quite manage the engines properly when they’re moving in, moving into the docking area. Winds up cutting a cord that connects the ship to a target when they were out towing targets because he’s because he happens to be at that time in the middle of chewing out one of the sailors for something.

So, he’s technically not very good at his job. So, there’s one strike against them. So, I think part of what’s going on here is an examination of well, to what, to be a good leader in the military how proficient do you have to be at your particular line of work? And it’s a good question, because as we know here in the JAG Corps, for the higher you go in leadership, the less you’re actually performing your job function, the less legal work you’re going to do. And of course, you know, you can say this for most of the AFSCs, whether you’re a pilot, whether you’re doctor, engineers, etc., you’re going to be managing people more and performing your job less. So that’s one of the questions that gets raised here.

Another question, aside from technical proficiency, is how you deal with your people and the extent to which you have to model behavior in order to get other people to follow along. And so the story presents us with a number of examples of Queeg not being able to live by the rules that he wants everyone else to so meticulously follow. Probably one of the more illustrative moments is when he’s trying to get some liquor that they had picked up. I think it was at Pearl Harbor because it’s not available back in the States. And he winds up charging a number of his subordinates to get this case of liquor off the ship and onto the boat when they’re about to have shore leave. He puts that obligation on a number of other people after having already disciplined individuals many times for not following rules of arguably far less import. The whole thing winds up getting botched, and poor Willie Keith gets stuck with the bill for the liquor that winds up going to going to the bottom of the bay. And Willie Keith winds up paying this just so that he can preserve the leave that he had been planning.

Maj Davis:

Yes, he gets extorted.

Lt Col Gartland:

He gets extorted by his commander.

Maj Davis:

Queeg extorts him. Yeah,

Lt Col Gartland:

Right.

Maj Davis:

He says, “Oh it’s too bad. Someone’s going to have to stay aboard ship. Now the, you know, this liquor is gone overboard. Give you a lot of paperwork, you know, unless I got reimbursed.”

Lt Col Gartland:

[laughter] Pretty much a worst case scenario when it comes to ….

Maj Davis:

Ethics violation.

Lt Col Gartland:

Ethics, coercion, etc. So there’s that.

And then there’s just the simple, simple ability to know who you’re working with. You know, who are your people, and how well do you know the? And not that De Vriess was necessarily chummy with the crew, but he certainly had his sense of who was working for him, and what he could expect from them in terms of their professionalism and in terms of their competency. And Queeg really treats absolutely everyone the same in this regard, and that he expects a meticulous perfection from all of them, without any variance.

Maj Davis:

Yes, sir. And I think a telling moment is in the handoff when De Vriess is leaving the ship and Queeg comes to take command. De Vriess sits down with Queeg in his office to say, okay. And he starts walking through the officers and giving his opinion about their leadership and their competence. And, you know, he says, “Oh, you know, Keefer is a pretty good guy. Yeah, he’s working on his book, but he gets the job done. You know, Maryk is a, he’s got a head on his shoulders. This guy, Willie Keith, like he’s a little bit of a knock around, but like, I think he’ll shape up with a little bit of discipline.” And Queeg has zero interest in hearing any of this. He doesn’t want the opinions of De Vriess. He’s not thinking about the guys working for him. He’s pretty much just like, give me the keys. And get off my ship.

Lt Col Gartland:

Yeah, you actually raised a great point there that winds up coming full circle because it was De Vriess who predicted that Willie Keith—and so given that we have all sorts of other spoilers in our discussion here—so Willie Keith winds up being the last captain of the ship.

Maj Davis:

Ironically.

Lt Col Gartland:

Which yeah. Which as you see him at the beginning of the book. That’s really just unimaginable. It was certainly unimaginable to Queeg, but De Vriess could see that in him and made and made that prediction. So again, when it comes to being able to judge your people and appreciate their qualities, appreciate their character strengths and their defects, De Vriess was definitely someone who had a far greater sense of judging character.

So, in terms of what I’ve covered so far, we talked about technical proficiency. We talked about understanding your people. We talked about modeling the behavior you expect everyone else to follow. And then finally, indispensable—particularly here in a wartime setting, courage. Well, we don’t really see any examples to the point that the plot had developed any way with De Vriess.

We certainly do see an example of Queeg lacking it. In fact, it’s pretty, the story makes pretty clear that Queeg has a courage problem.

Maj Davis:

Yes.

Lt Col Gartland:

And you arguably could call him a coward. And probably the best illustration of it is when they were having to escort some Marines to an island that was being taken, and as they’re making this zig-zag approach to the shoreline, and a number of people in the crew noticed that every time that the boat shifts position, Queeg moves from the side of the ship that would be facing the battery fire from the shore over to the covered side of the ship, and that he does this repeatedly. So obviously, not very inspiring for the for the sailors on the ship and something that a number of people comment upon.

Maj Davis:

Also the yellow stain incident, which they are escorting another ship to the shore. And they’re kind of the scouting ship, and they’re supposed to drop a marker at the point where it becomes too shallow for the ship to keep going because they’re smaller. So they’re getting closer and closer to the island. And the ship that’s with them starts taking fire. And Willie Keith is the officer on duty. And he and the gunmen, you know, they get their weapons range. And he says, “Sir, you know, we are in range. We can fire when ready.” And Queeg says, “Well hold your fire.” And Willie Keith is like, “What?”

Lt Col Gartland:

Right.

Maj Davis:

And, you know the gunman, you can just see everybody on the ship like turns and looks and like, “What?”

And he says, “Turn around.

Lt Col Gartland:

“Let’s leave.”

Maj Davis:

“Let’s leave”. So they drop the yellow marker where they’re at, which is not where they’re supposed to be. And they like beat feet out of there instead of helping cover the ship that’s with them. Like their buddies are getting fired on, and instead of, they can take out the shooter from the position they’re in, but Queeg has them turn around and he drops that yellow marker, and they start calling it the yellow stain.

Lt Col Gartland:

Wins the moniker Old Yellow Stain.

Maj Davis:

Old Yellow Stain.

Lt Col Gartland:

From that point forward. So again, not only is there the immediate consequence of deserting the other individuals who they were escorting, but then on top of that, it’s really a blight on his character, that Texas reputation, which is already pretty blemished that stage. But further, further degrades his reputation with the crew and then makes followership from them all the more of a challenge.

Peer Leadership

Maj Davis:

Yes.

So, and again as we know, leadership at this point on the ship is deteriorating constantly under Queeg. But as we all know, there’s leadership at multiple levels. And there’s also peer leadership. So we’ll talk a little bit about Maryk and Keefer and Keith, who are the three primary lieutenants here. They’re, you know, Maryk is the XO. And then Keefer and Keith are in alternate positions. They’re sort of constantly being the officer on duty. They’re kind of the highest ranking other two officers on board. There are a couple of ensigns also, but they’re not really mentioned as often. They kind of cycle in and out. And this is like kind of the core crew who’s been on the Caine the longest at this point.

To look at the pure leadership. You know, Charlie mentioned earlier that Keefer is really the one who ends up planting the seed of the mutiny. He doesn’t, he never actually comes out and says anybody should do anything. But he is so definitive in the way he speaks. And he’s so persuasive that Maryk, who is, even though he himself seems to have a lot of intelligence, he’s very swayed by the education and what he, I think, thinks of as the superiority of Keefer.

Lt Col Gartland:

Yes.

Maj Davis:

To buy into this idea.

Lt Col Gartland:

And some infectious cynicism, I would say too. [unintelligible]

Maj Davis:

Yes.

Capt Hedden:

Which is a bit of irony, without taking any more of your thunder, that Keefer ends up being the most persuasive who, meaning he could exert the best leadership on the boat.

Maj Davis:

Yes.

Capt Hedden:

But in the end, he ends up using his powers for evil instead of good.

Maj Davis:

He really does. Because, you know, we have such a lack of trust in Queeg at, you know, toward this point of the book, we have seen so many incidents that have really, you know, just really deteriorated the way that the entire crew thinks about him. But there’s one point where they go on shore leave and it says 25 people don’t show up and would rather take the court-martial than sail with Queeg again.

Lt Col Gartland:

[laughter] Pretty, pretty definitive explanation of just how bad morale had sunk.

Maj Davis:

So at this point, I think we can all agree that peer leadership is probably more important than ever. And Keefer really has, he has no real personal responsibility for the things that he’s saying and the outcome here. So he plans the seed in Maryk’s mind, that Queeg has like a paranoia disorder and he’s a narcissist, and that something must be done—but not by me.

And then Maryk again, he is sort of torn between his loyalty to Queeg and this kind of peer loyalty, I think, because, yes, he will walk away when the others are making fun of Queeg, but he doesn’t really stand up to them. He doesn’t really assert any true order or discipline over them. And I think that because, I think secretly Maryk thinks that Keefer and Keith are better than him. I think because of that class and education disparity, I don’t know if it’s that he necessarily believes that in the front of his mind or if that’s influencing him, or if he thinks that Keefer’s maybe too hard to go up against in a lot of respects because all the other officers are listening to him. And, you know, there’s an incident where one of the ill-fated enlisted sailors who, Queeg just hates him. It’s not totally clear why, he seems to be very sharp and good looking and maybe that’s it. But Queeg has really taken it out for this guy, Stilwell and he denies Stilwell the ability to go on shore leave with everybody else after they’ve been on the minesweeper for months. And Stilwell has his brother send a fake telegram that their mother is ill. Well, it’s never actually proven.

Lt Col Gartland:

Right.

Maj Davis:

[unintelligible] It’s the evidence that he had his brother send this telegram and Keith talks Maryk into letting Stilwell leave, even though they know that this is probably not true. And you know, Maryk has a lot of these moments where he’s torn between the loyalty to the captain and then his relationship with his peers. And I think that’s, I mean, that’s ultimately what gets them to the point that there’s a mutiny, is he’s very influenced by Keefer.

And I do think the biggest piece of this, though, is Lieutenant Keith, our main character, Willie Keith. He is not really the main mechanism driving most of the stuff. And he’s you know, he’s our main character. He’s our main lens. And he’s a fairly unreliable narrator, I would say, because everything is very colored by his perception of the people around him, and what’s going on.

Lt Col Gartland:

Typically reacting …

Maj Davis:

Yes.

Lt Col Gartland:

… to everyone else, which in part makes sense, because he was subordinate to both Maryk as the exec and Keefer at that point.

Maj Davis:

Yes. And I think he’s also pretty, I think he is impressed by Maryk’s officership and his seamanship. And he is, generally speaking in, kind of from his background, in his upbringing, he’s very impressed by Keefer. And he wants to impress Keefer. Even though, as it turns out, he sort of slowly discovers along the way that Keefer talks a big talk about how, you know, the Navy is a genius designed to be run by idiots, and you know, that any monkey could do the job. It turns out Keefer himself was not actually doing the job, and Willie has to do a lot of cleanup for Keefer because it turns out most of Keefer’s duty has been spent writing his novel, Multitudes, Multitudes.

Lt Col Gartland:

He was supposed to be decoding messages.

Maj Davis:

Yes.

Lt Col Gartland:

And in fact, just left them piling up. You know, I was just as I was listening to you talk about that Erin, and I thought that, you know, not only did Keefer put in motion this mutiny mind set, if you will, but then he wasn’t actually there at the moment, that the decision, the incredibly difficult decision, had to be made by Maryk, who was an accomplished seaman, as to whether or not he needed to switch.

So, pretty dramatic moment in the book as the ship looks like it’s about to capsize in the midst of this raging typhoon. Maryk says, “Drive the ship into the storm” Queeg says, “No position the ship to move away from the storm.” Keefer is nowhere to be found on deck at that moment. And then also in the aftermath of everything at the court-martial, also really fails to back up Maryk, who’s on trial at this stage, and doesn’t really provide him the testimony that accurately reflects what Keefer had been advocating for all along.

Capt Hedden:

And again, to add another episode to that. Keefer later on, sort of in an epilogue, there’s a there’s a fire on the ship, and Keefer is one of the first people who jumps overboard thinking that we’re sunk. And then and keep Willie Keith was like, “Well, no, maybe we can save it.” Runs in there. Helps put out the fire. Realizes the ship is sound and ends up helping Keefer back on board. [laughter]

Lt Col Gartland:

And Keefer really, it’s at that stage of the book that it seems like he has his first moment of self-reflection.

Maj Davis:

Yes.

Lt Col Gartland:

To reckon, to think, to really think back, because this is post court-martial. Maryk’s already been acquitted and this is the first opportunity that Keefer really thinks about how he’s conducted himself throughout the book, and now comes to think that after all of these accusations of Queeg being a coward, perhaps he’s one too.

Maj Davis:

Yeah. He even says, “Command is the loneliest, most depressive job in the world,” because he is at the point that this happens, he’s the captain now of the Caine. And he says, “I’ve never understood Queeg better than I do now that I’m the captain of the ship.” And I thought that was only interesting. And really, that moment where he jumps overboard, I think becomes defining for Keefer, because he tells Willie, he’s like, “I’m going to have to live with the fact that I jumped and you didn’t for the rest of my life.”

Lt Col Gartland:

Yeah. I think that this moment, Erin, really reveals the genius of the author here. Because for this entire novel, as a reader, you are pretty convinced that Queeg is an awful commander, awful sailor, awful person, and that he really just has no business being in command of this ship. But then once this incident happens with Keefer and Keefer starts to reflect on how it is that he’s conducted himself, you really start to wonder, notwithstanding all of Queeg’s failings, did the crew fail him, in their loyalty and in their followership?

Maj Davis:

Right. I think too, an important peer leadership moment, I think is the actual point of the mutiny when, yes, Maryk is the one who’s on trial as the main actor, the one who literally took command in the moment. But I think the person who actually decides there’s going to be a mutiny is Willie Keith. Everybody in that room, including Queeg, turns and looks at him and Stilwell, who’s being, he’s driving the ship in that moment, right? It’s this particular cast of characters. It’s Maryk and Keith and Stilwell, Stilwell who hates Queeg. But in that moment, Maryk says, “Do this.” Queeg says, “Don’t do that, do this.” And Stilwell turns and he looks at Willie and he says, “Mr. Keith, what do I do?” And Willie Keith in his trust, I think it’s a simultaneous fear for his life, trust of Maryk’s seamanship, and hatred of Queeg—and that’s probably the biggest piece of all.

Lt Col Gartland:

Which he admits later on.

Maj Davis:

Which he admits. Later on he admit. He says, “Stilwell listen to Maryk. Mr. Maryk is in charge of the ship now.” Right? “He’s the captain now.”

Lt Col Gartland:

This is also a remarkable turn of events, because we now have Willie Keith, who no one’s really been relying on for anything.

Maj Davis:

No. Nothing.

Lt Col Gartland:

Up to this stage. And he’s the one that makes the pivotal decision.

Maj Davis:

He does. And he, it’s funny, because I think it tells you a lot about Willie Keith as a character that later on, he says “That he was impaled by a terrible accident on the spike of military justice.” And not only that’s the flavor of drama of his internal thoughts, but also it was not really a terrible accident that got him to the point that he had charges preferred against him, right? He made an active decision to participate, and aid and abet the mutiny. But there’s a real, you know, for him even still, right up to leading up to the court-martial, even though he’s developed a lot in maturity as a character, he still has a lack of personal responsibility in that moment. And it’s not until the party post court-martial that it’s not actually to celebrate the acquittal.

Lt Col Gartland:

[laughter] Great point.

Maj Davis:

But instead, yes, instead it is actually a celebration of the fact that Keefer has published his book, Multitudes, Multitudes, and he throws himself a congratulatory publication party and invites the others and says, “Oh, I guess it’ll be a double celebration.” And Maryk’s parents are there.

Lt Col Gartland:

Makes for a really awkward party.

Maj Davis:

Yes. And everyone is enjoying their champagne and getting drunk and happy. And the attorney, defense attorney, Greenwald, shows up and he’s a little bit in his cups as well. And he basically, I think, summarizes the whole tension of the book, because up until this point, you’re seeing everything through the lens of Willie Keith and these other lieutenants. You’re on their side. You’re excited and happy that Maryk is acquitted, only to sort of be told off by Greenwald, who says, “Hey, listen, you guys should not have won this. I won this for you because I’m a great attorney, not because you guys were innocent.” And he specifically says to Keefer, “You were the most responsible person in there. You were the one who should have been up there on trial.” And he throws his drink in Keefer’s face.

And I think that brings us to our next topic, which is talking about military culture and the system, because we are led to believe, I think, by the choice of Willie Keith as the protagonist and his experiences. You were led to think a certain way about Queeg, about military leadership, and about the way their ship is being run and the court-martial and the testimony of the court-martial and the party afterward and Greenwald’s speech at the party afterward really, I think, is where Wouk kind of one gives you the one-two, because you realize that actually you haven’t been thinking about this the right way. You let yourself get caught up in the narrative given to you by these lieutenants, and you’ve lost sight of the bigger picture of the war and what the Navy is doing here.

Military Culture

Lt Col Gartland:

Yeah, excellent, excellent lead in there Erin.

So and you made the comment earlier, before and it’s probably one of the most famous passages from this book. It’s toward the beginning. The quote is that “The Navy is a system designed by geniuses for execution by idiots”, and to all of our to all of our Navy brethren out there, I think you can universalize that comment. This happens to be a book about the Navy, but you can say it for the military in general.

And there are a number of, theater of the absurd, so there are just a number of incidents throughout the book. In particular, I think abetted by Keefer’s cynicism. His pretty poisonous cynicism, where you just wonder as to what in the world is going on with this military culture, with the assignment system here—something that we can certainly all identify with—even that right from the get-go at the beginning of the book, when Willie Keith is about to finish his time at OTS, and they’re all speculating over how the assignments process is actually decided. 

And so, you have one person saying, “Well, you list you on your dream sheet, you list the first position that you want, because you want to be honest with them and tell them exactly what it is you want to do.” And then that’s countered by other people who say, “No, no, no, no, no, don’t do that. You don’t want to, because then they’ll then they’ll give you the opposite of what you ask for. So, you want to put down what you least want as your first choice so that you can be assured of getting something that you truly want.” And this is something, of course, that to this day we can all identify with and wonder about from the beginning.

And so incident after incident as it’s compounded in the book, just as you scoff along with the crew at Queeg, you also scoff at the system itself. But then, of course, in those moments toward the end at the court-martial and with Keefer’s jump off the ship, and the pretty remarkable turnaround by the end of the book that you see in Willie Keith who comes on this ship utterly incapable of being really able to assess a person or to technically direct the ship properly in any situation. And yet he finishes off as the last captain of the Caine leading it from Okinawa back to Hawaii in Pearl Harbor and then through the Panama Canal all the way back to the East Coast to be decommissioned.

Yeah, this system, this system that we’ve heard derided by the characters for the entire novel is the one that winds up completely, I mean, bringing up something that you’re going to talk about here in a moment, Erin, bringing Willie Keith into manhood, as it were, and develops him as a military leader. And so just as by the end of the book, you start to question whether you were right about Queeg, you also start to question whether you were right about the system, and whether it really is something that’s designed to accomplish the mission and capably accomplish the mission.

And of course, you know, the crowning irony of it all is that as the book ends with the Caine being decommissioned and the United States has just declared victory in World War Two. So, the system that we’ve scoffed at from the entire book is the system that won the war at the same time.

Maj Davis:

Right. And I think too that the court-martial is a really telling moment because you start getting all this testimony from all these expert witnesses talking about Naval rules and regulations. It turns out that Queeg actually probably made a pretty safe decision when he was ordering Stilwell to not turn into the storm and that the way that Maryk did it was actually riskier. So we were led to believe that Queeg is pretty incompetent. And it turned out that by the book, that’s what the Navy teaches, and he had gone to the Academy and he was a Naval guy. And maybe by experience, you know, Maryk had an idea of what should happen, but that Queeg was actually doing things the way that the Navy felt it should be done.

And I think the big message of the whole thing, right, the way the prosecutor and later on the defense attorney talk to these lieutenants is, “You three idiots think you know better than the Navy.” Right? The Navy chose this guy to be the captain of this ship. It’s a war. Is he the most ideal guy? No.

Lt Col Gartland:

But it doesn’t matter.

Maj Davis:

It doesn’t matter. You know, we set this system in motion. You guys are reservists. You’re coming in. This is, you know, a career Naval officer. And this is a decision made by the Navy. And we know better than you. And everyone can’t just suddenly decide that they know better than the Navy.

Lt Col Gartland:

Right. And that seems to be the point, that everyone thinks that they can be the better captain—until they become the captain.

Maj Davis:

Until they become the captain.

Lt Col Gartland:

So, in the end, the system is at least partially vindicated. I mean, I don’t think that it completely cleans it up because it took quite a few of the foibles and missteps that we see all throughout the novel, starting with that mysterious assignment process that I was just talking about. You’re always left, always left to wonder about how things were designed and why they were designed in that way. But without question, you do come away with this realizing that perhaps there’s a bit more to this system than initially meets the eye.

Capt Hedden:

When I think one of the real beauties of the defense at the court-martial is that it plays on the panel’s faith in the Navy because they’re presented with these facts and they basically are given this choice, either he’s a coward and the Navy got it wrong, or he was crazy enough for this mutiny to be justified.

And God love him, Barney Greenwald gets in there and the way he puts it is he did everything but sing Anchors Away at that jury. And in terms of propping up and you know, kind of really bolstering that faith in the Navy, because they can’t sit there and believe that Captain Queeg was a coward, right? That’s the only alternative essentially is what he tells them. “The alternative is he’s a coward and the Navy got it wrong. Is that really what you want to believe?” And they end up acquitting, essentially communicating that okay, well I guess they saw enough for him to, for this to not have been, you know, not have been illegal.

Maj Davis:

They must acquit the Navy more than they acquit Maryk.

Lt Col Gartland:

Right. And I mean, that’s a fascinating twist, Charlie, that I hadn’t even thought of, because in acquitting Maryk, they’re saying, “Well, the system was a bit fouled up.” And yet by doing that, that’s in a sense, the ultimate vindication of the system. Right. [laughter]

Maj Davis:

Right.

Lt Col Gartland:

It’s like, “Oh, okay, yeah, we recognize this guy was a pretty horrible captain. You made a really difficult decision at that particular time.” Yeah.

Capt Hedden:

I think that, I won’t belabor this, but that goes back in my mind. It could be something you could see in Maryk throughout the way is I’ve got to choose when I see this guy do crazy things, it doesn’t compute. Like, he’s got a lot of, Maryk himself, has a lot of integrity, and he sees this lack of integrity in Queeg, and it can either be just cowardice or some sort of clinical diagnosis. And he ends up going with, okay, this guy is crazy enough for me to take over. Especially in that moment where he’s standing there just clutching a piece of machinery on the bridge and not making any commands or sounds in the middle of it.

Lt Col Gartland:

Yeah, Queeg totally freezes up. And the audience should also know, I mean, we’re of course, in the limited time we have here, leaving out a multitude of incidents that reveal Queeg didn’t be not so stable and probably, in fact it’s right on this edition. I think this is the most recent paperback edition from the early two thousands. Throughout the book Captain Queeg has these steel ball bearings that he constantly rolls about in his hands. And it seems to be kind of one of his one of his crutches, something that he does pretty regularly. And Greenwald on cross-examination of Queeg is able to get him to actually bring out the steel balls and start rotating them in his hands to give the jury an unmistakable visual of what the entire crew had been seeing for all this time. And of course, I think there’s some really powerful symbolism that’s there with those two steel ball bearings as well.

Capt Hedden:

Something, something fortitude. [laughter]

Lt Col Gartland:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s on the front cover of this. It shows Captain Queeg with his back to us and the two ball bearings in his hands.

Cowardice

Capt Hedden:

Yeah. And real quickly, to tag onto that, the other theme of the color yellow and throughout the book, of, you know, kind of meaning cowardice, the yellow ….

Lt Col Gartland:

Yes, nice one.

Capt Hedden:

The yellow stain. I mean, that it’s a little bit on the nose when they sing a song about how cowardly he is and call him Old Yellow Stain. But then at the end, the attorney really just lambasts everybody there and says, “You’re guilty of mutiny, but I got you off because you weren’t the one who should have been on trial. Keefer should have been on trial.” And so he throws this glass of yellow wine ….

Lt Col Gartland:

Right, nice one.

Capt Hedden:

Into Keefer’s ….

Maj Davis:

How English lit of you.

Capt Hedden:

So, then it’s it splashes on Keefer’s face, and the author makes a point of saying, “And some of it splashed over onto Keith”. And I was like, yeah, that’s unmistakable. Anyway, that’s a little meta for our discussion.

Lt Col Gartland:

No, but sheer artistry of Herman Wouk, no?

Capt Hedden:

Right.

Wrap Up

Maj Davis:

So, to wrap it up a little bit, we’ll end where we started with Willie Keith, our protagonist. We talked about this a little bit earlier, but a lot of this book is really about his personal journey and his maturation during the time that he’s in the Navy, which I think is about two years, if I’m not mistaken.

Lt Col Gartland:

Right.

Maj Davis:

So, Willie Keith, again, he starts out he is this piano player living on his parent’s dollar. You know, he dodges the draft by going into the Naval OTS. And then while he is stationed awaiting the Caine to come back to port over in Pearl Harbor, he tries to get himself an assignment of shore leave, essentially hanging out with a local admiral playing the piano for him, which kind of tells you everything that you need to know about the Willie Keith at the beginning of the book.

But by the end of the book, so slowly over the book, you see his maturity, not only, just becoming a better, a more able Naval officer, he seems to be much more confident. He is more competent. You know, he starts learning different tools. He gets Maryk to teach him how to do charting and he learns a lot of proficiency at the job itself. But he also seems to develop more leadership skills as time goes on. He seems to mature a little bit more as a person.

I mentioned a little bit earlier his ill-fated, potentially ill-fated romance with May Wynn who is a local New York City girl that he meets at the piano bar where he works, and his relationship with her also really reflects his maturity. He doesn’t want to break up with her. He thinks that like just being on, you know, on the ship for a few months, well, she’ll forget about him. It’s you know, easier than breaking up with her. He doesn't want to take any responsibility for leading her on. But then, of course, every time he comes home for shore leave, he hooks back up with her. He eventually proposes to her, and then he takes off again before they really resolve any of that. 

And then by the end of the book, when he very symbolically brings home to Bayonne, New Jersey the Caine as the captain, right? His journey has really come full circle, where he left a momma’s boy from Connecticut, he returns a Naval hero.

Lt Col Gartland:

Although picked up by his mom though.

Maj Davis:

Picked up by his mom. [laughter]

Lt Col Gartland:

Which is also coming full circle.

Maj Davis:

I think really the, in addition to the mutiny, I think the key moment for Willie Keith and his development in this book is the incident with the fire on the deck. Essentially, the Caine is hit by a kamikaze pilot. It bursts a big hole into the ship. It starts a huge fire. The captain at the time, Keefer, jumps overboard with his novel in a waterproof bag. [laughter] And Keith is actually the one who stays aboard. He gets the sailors to put out the fire, and he actually kind of throws himself right into the fray.

Lt Col Gartland:

Right.

Maj Davis:

Immediately. And he has this moment of true courage.

Lt Col Gartland:

It’s really kind of pinnacle of leadership too. He’s the one directing all the efforts at the time and pretty seamlessly.

Maj Davis:

It’s I mean, it’s a really awesome moment for him in the book where you really think like, okay, this guy is going to be all right.

Lt Col Gartland:

Yes.

Maj Davis:

Right. This guy is okay. I think he gets a he gets a Bronze Star, if I’m not mistaken.

Lt Col Gartland:

That’s right.

Maj Davis:

Yeah,

Lt Col Gartland:

That’s right.

Maj Davis:

So, you know, he leaves this kind of, you know, this twerp, and he comes, he victoriously rides the rust bucket Caine that could barely make it back to Bayonne, into the New York Harbor with his Bronze Star. And, you know, he kind of, his journey is symbolically over, but also physically over at this point. And he’s back in New York and he’s back to his old life. And now he’s got his post Navy life to look at. But he is definitely a different man than when he left.

Lt Col Gartland:

Yeah, he definitely, the military career aspect ends on a note of triumph for him. Erin was just bringing up that relationship with Maria Menotti or her stage name was May Wynn. We’ve really, just again, the limited time that we have here, had to unfortunately not really do justice to that relationship, which is a pretty large portion of the book. But that also serves to show his maturation over the course of the years that he’s on the ship. And I’ll end on that note actually because you know that relationship is really kind of a tribute to how this book manages to cover everything, in my mind. I mean it’s part love story, it’s part treatise on leadership, and it’s part historical novel on the Navy’s war in the Pacific and World War Two. And a pretty interesting chronicle of day-to-day life on this ship. It’s eminently readable. A real page-turner. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

Capt Hedden:

Thank you for listening to another episode of The Air Force Judge Advocate General’s School Podcast. One of the best ways you can support this publication is by following or subscribing the show and leaving us a rating. You can find this episode, transcription and show notes at www.jagreporter.af.mil/podcasts. We welcome your feedback.

Disclaimer:

Nothing from this show should be construed as legal advice. Please consult an attorney for any legal issues. Nothing in this show is endorsed by the Federal Government, the Air Force, or any of its components. All content and opinions are those of its guests and hosts.

[Band playing ending of the Air Force Song]

Glossary

• AFJAGS: Air Force Judge Advocate General’s School
• AFSC: Air Force Specialty Code 
• DMS:  destroyer minesweeper
• JAG: judge advocate general
• LT: lieutenant
• OTS: Officer Training School
• UCMJ: Uniform Code of Military Justice
• XO: executive officer