President John F. Kennedy, a naval officer in World War II, once told a friend how a Navy chief would describe a broken down jeep: “This fucking fucker is all fucked up!”
The phrase “curse like a sailor” has a basis in fact. Sailors do curse.
But it appears that Navy Captain Holly Graf took the tradition a bit too far. As TIME reports [1], Captain Graf cursed and abused her officers and crew, which led to her being relieved of the command of her ship.
I served on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War and I never heard the ship’s captain or any senior officer curse or insult another officer or enlisted sailor in a public setting. Cursing was an everday part of our language, and some officers and chiefs cursed their men, but excessive cursing and manhandling a subordinate were not considered management tools.
Today we have women serving on Navy ships and so I suspect that cursing has been curtailed. In the case of Captain Graf, the Navy’s Inspector General’s report [2] details the actions of a poor officer and poor commanding officer, in my view.
During my time as a Defense Department civilian I served as an investigating officer and I wrote reports concerning misconduct and other offenses. Having read portions of the Inspector General’s report, I believe that Captain Graf deserved to be relieved of her command, and perhaps she should not have been given the command of the ship in the first place.
I’m glad to see that political correctness did not shield Captain Graf simply because she was a woman. She was a poor commanding officer who happened to be a woman. One of the best officers I worked for was a female Air Force Colonel and several of the worst officers I worked for were men.
Commanding officers should be judged on their performance and not be given a pass due to their race or gender, and it appears that Captain Graf was judged solely on her performance.
A Navy Captain of a ship at sea is a powerful position, but the power is not absolute, as we see from the case of Captain Graf.
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Latest posts by Paul Davis (Posts [6])
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