. . . the captain would demonstrate once again that if you make a hoax look and sound plausible enough, a lot of people will believe you. You must know how to play upon fears and prejudices, to exploit motives and limitations. Arnheiter was adept at this. The captain took naturally to fraud because his mind had difficulty distinguishing reality from delusion and right from wrong. The deliberate lie blurred into the unconscious fantasy.
—Neil Sheehan, The Arnheiter Affair
The Maritime Strategy had given the Navy a new lease on life. Morale was soaring. Recruitment was up and personnel were reenlisting in droves . . . naval officers in the fleet began to feel proud again, as if they were in a Navy filled with the spirit of Bull Halsey.
—Gregory Vistica, Fall From Glory
Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter commanded the USS Vance (DE-387) from 22 December 1965 to 31 March 1966. The Vance, a destroyer escort with long years of service in the Pacific, was rescued from oblivion by dint of the Vietnam War. Instead of being stricken and reduced to molten metal, the World War II and Cold War stalwart—“the watchdog of the Pacific”—was kept afloat on look-out duty, assigned to Market Time patrol off the coast of South Vietnam.
Market Time, a close-in blockade of the coastline, was designed to interdict the waterborne routes of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. While the Brown Water Navy established a beachhead upriver, taking the brunt of Navy casualties, and the Blue Water Navy raided the North Vietnamese coast from its permanent gyre at Yankee Station, Operation Sea Dragon, the blue-brown fleet of Market Time cutters and escorts, did yeoman service inspecting commerce the 1,200-mile length of the dragon-shaped littoral.
Ferreting out supplies meant for the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army was a decidedly unheroic job. Malodorous fishermen were caught up in the dragnet, catch and release, and the sampans that plied these waters had been there for millennia. Gunrunning was a non-lethal activity. A day in the life of a Market Time vessel was one routine inspection after the next—no firefights, no derring-do, no melodrama in the least. Tedium was the real foe. Those looking for a Navy Cross or Silver Star were advised to go upriver, where the guns that slipped through the blockade could be found in the hands of the ambush pros.
Market Time was a comparative siesta. Pacific. Until, that is, the Vance showed up under the command of Lieutenant Commander Arnheiter, hellbent for action at 15 knots (top speed), blasting Hellcats Reveille over the waters and showing it meant business, the Special Fire Team hunkered behind sandbags on the weather deck, the mini swift-boat, sixteen feet of shark’s teeth lethality, boldly showing the colors, the whaleboat (sans shark teeth) likewise armed with a 30 caliber machine gun and an outsized Old Glory. Spoiling for a fight, bring it on, the new squared-away Vance reentered Vietnamese waters a testament to the bravado of the pistolero who thought nothing of blasting away at sea snakes from the bridge wing, the photo-op (“Mister Merkle to the bridge, provide”) ever ready to capture the brave captain in martial profile.
Marcus Time
The 99 days of Marcus Time read like a fever dream in a Saigon safe house. Or something the ace Navy propagandist and fiction writer Aleksandr I. Zhdanov (he was responsible for Shadow of Peril, the original Red October, about a Soviet submarine commander who defects after penetrating New York harbor) lifted whole cloth from the pages of The Caine Mutiny. A marplot let loose on the high seas. Except the ship’s log shows that the imperious one did take command of the Vance at Pearl, and after a purloin of the O Club silver at Guam brought the ship to Vietnam, where he promptly established its reputation as the laughingstock of the Pacific. Shooting at sand berms and almost colliding with a cliff face were among the many exploits that brought the Vance to the mirthful attention of the destroyer captains whose fire-support missions were interrupted while the Vance—unbidden but eager to contribute—came up on their bows, fouling the fire control azimuth. This was no laughing matter though for those stuck aboard with “Mad Marcus,” as the other logbook documenting his folie de grandeur called him.
Arnheiter, who had been rescued by Vietnam from oblivion and given a command after all despite Bureau of Naval Personnel misgivings, was determined to make the most of his opportunity, which for him meant valor under fire and a Silver Star at least. He would show those who had given him abysmal fitness reports. He would take the Vance upriver so to speak, damn the torpor of Market Time procedure and protocol. There was a war out there and he was going to be in the thick of it, even if meant he had to bend the rules of engagement to buffo and beyond.
He bent the rules so much—even putting himself up for that Silver Star—as to expedite his downfall. The reprimands came tout l’azimuth. The Vietnamese flat-out refused to assist the Vance. Morale aboard ship was abysmal enough to have wives complaining to Congressmen. After a chaplain’s report and the Silver Star counterfeit (the recommendation most certainly did not come from the Executive Officer and the Operations Officer), the squadron commander had had enough. Arnheiter was summarily relieved, and a consequent six-day hearing at Subic concluded that “he had exercised bad judgment and lack of integrity in so many important matters.”
Vainglorious to the bitter end, Arnheiter did not give up the ship without a four-year fight. That the “Vance Mutiny” was responsible for his ignominy was gospel truth, so help him, Lord Nelson (his role model), and he convinced a lot of senior officers of conservative bent that he was done in by a “Berkeley campus type of Vietnik/beatnik.” “They wanted to physically thwart me from seeking out and destroying the enemy,” he claimed. “They were afraid for their own damn skins.”
His combatant mission now was to have a Board of Inquiry clear his name and restore his command, and for court martials of the mutineers and those senior officers conspiring to cover-up the mutiny. A figure eight of perfidy. The war Arnheiter sought so avidly turned out to be the one with the Navy itself, and he waged it with words, words, words, cranked out in the same building the Caen Mutiny trial scenes were filmed, so many as to make the Vance as notorious as the Caen itself.
The Arnheiter Affair
The Arnheiter Affair, Neil Sheehan’s book about the intrepid voyage of the Vance and the verbal firefight that ensued after Arnheiter was relieved, is a minor classic, arguably the best book about the Navy in Vietnam. Before the John Paul Vann of A Bright Shining Lie, there was the Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter of a bright shining press release. Sheehan, then a Pentagon reporter for the New York Times, first encountered the cashiered wordsmith on Capitol Hill at an informal hearing chaired by a backbencher and featuring two days of lambasting the Navy Department. Leading the parade of brass on his behalf was the captain-designate of the USS New Jersey (BB-62), the Navy’s showcase battleship, pulled out of retirement and being readied for Vietnam. What the august captain said that day raised the ire of the Chief of Naval Operations. Lamenting the affront to Naval Tradition, the captain managed to fall on his sword, for he too was summarily relieved of his prize command.
Sheehan, who started out sympathetic to the Arnheiter cause, soon reversed course the closer he got to the emollient naval officer. He had seen his gung-ho type in gong-show Vietnam. Still, the story fascinated him, and the more he delved, the more he knew he had lucked into a story that tested the structural integrity of the Navy.
In 1968, Sheehan published his findings in the longest piece in the Times Magazine history, and he brought out his book in 1971 to considerable acclaim. Which, of course, was met with a libel suit. Arnheiter, who never got that Board Of Inquiry—let alone a court martial of the Vance Mutiny—had to make do with a fusillade of civil suits, all dismissed save the one which stopped the presses of the book.
The story could be said to have begun again in 1995, when Gregory Vistica published Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy, an account of the fever dream that was the Reagan Navy. Vistica, an investigative reporter in the Sheehan mold, had made the Navy his beat while at the San Diego Union-Tribune, and what he saw of the Sea Service gave him mal-de-mer.
Officers in the mold of Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter were posing for photo-ops in full pomp-and-circumstance regalia, their bellicose rhetoric—the offensive outrance, bastion-busting in the Barents Sea—speeding them up the O Club pecking-order, package check mandatory, to command of a robocruiser and the good life on Admiral Row, stewards to polish the silver service, medals all around for the zealous warfighters. Marcus Time was back, bigger and better than ever. He knew he would stand tall again the day he was relieved: “I’ve been in fights before . . . and I’ve always won them by making sure everything was wired in advance. I’ll win this one too. You watch.”
The Navy too suffered an institutional breakdown during the Vietnam War, but the full extent of the damage—Admiral Elmo Zumwalt performing heroic damage-control in the 70s—was not apparent until the 1980s and the second coming of Victory At Sea. The breakout from Vietnam Syndrome—from the morale-sucking gyre at Yankee Station—meant the 600 ships of the Reagan Navy could do 31 knots, Hellcats Reveille all right, hellbent for action, meaning business, fifteen carrier groups taking it to the Soviet Union. The New Jersey was back in action. So too was the fighting spirit of Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter. Too bad he had to review his Fleet from afar, in mufti.
Fever Dreams
Package-check revisionism has become gospel in the sea service. According to the authorized version, the Reagan Navy almost single-handedly forced the Soviet Union to cry Uncle Sam. Thanks to the inspired leadership of its visionary SecNav, no guts no glory, the Navy rallied from its post-Vietnam identity crisis to stand tall again, to go on the offensive armed with a grand strategy of hell or high water. Invest the home waters of the USSR, back it into a corner. The Hollywood ending to the Cold War owes much to the force majeure of the Maritime Strategy. The investment in the Reagan Navy paid huge dividends. It unnerved the Soviets and ushered them into the dustbin of history.
The triumphant saga of the Reagan Navy is the gold standard of false narratives. The nuclear-powered reenactment of Victory At Sea was a sideshow at best when it came to ending the Cold War. Good thing Reagan did an about-face, went dovish when he did, and met Gorbachev more than halfway. Bellicosity was suddenly out of official favor. Nancy Reagan and George Schultz saw to that. In fact, the Fleet could not get past Cap Weinberger, who dispatched the TR wanna-be and scuttled the Six Hundred Ship fleet. Bastion-busting reversed course this side of the GIUK Gap and came home to roost. Goodbye Strategic Homeporting as well.
The United States was desperate for a victory in the 80s and the Reagan Navy delivered one, created out of bold lies and half-truths and delusions of grandeur—never mind that the Fleet was reeling from one scandal and debacle to the next. That was Sea Service reality, cover it up, but the triumphant saga showcased gung-ho histrionics, swords and swagger, pomp and ceremony. The photo ops Navy. Top Gun showboating. A Navy out of the Arnheiter playbook. He may as well have penned the Maritime Strategy himself.
Lessons and Legacy
From Vietnam Syndrome to Arnheiter Syndrome in one swashbuckling leap of groupthink, a lot of people bought the bellicose fiction in the 1980s and a lot of people swear by it to this day. Indeed, it comes in handy as a cudgel to flog America’s Navy as too woke (“Berkeley type . . . beatnik”) and too timorous (“afraid for their own damn skins”). As the semi-official memory of the US Navy in the 1980s—the ultimate sea story—it also functions as a 21st century how-to manual, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) being precisely the Imax threat the Soviet Navy was made out to be. Jumping the gun.
If only. If only. If only we had six hundred ships and war fighters like Ace Lyons we could take care of business in the South China Sea. Taiwan would not be in danger. The PLAN would think twice about taking on the U.S. Navy.
If only that memory were not a fantasy. The fever dream that was the Reagan Navy lives on as a tribute to itself. Look how tough and focused we were. The Soviet Navy never stood more formidable than in the optics of naval war planners. By contrast, America’s Navy never looks more forlorn. Not focused and not tough. Social justice warriors have no place in the Fleet. The raft of grievances vetted by Task Force One has undermined cohesion and discipline. If only the Reagan Navy was back in all its squared-away glory, showing the PLAN who commands the seas.
Corruption made and unmade the Reagan Navy. Gregory Vistica’s book cites chapter and verse. Neil Sheehan’s book gives us a case study of a war fighter before his time. That both books should be anathema to the Navy—Sheehan’s remains on the index of forbidden books—is hardly surprising. Vistica delivers a mortal blow to sacred memory while Sheehan anticipates the folie de grandeur of the Reagan Navy.
Two together can see the Big Picture, to paraphrase Homer. Neil Sheehan and Gregory Vistica have taken the measure of the Sea Service in these essential books, which read in tandem tell the story of the Navy in Vietnam. And—come full circle—tell the story about the FON Fleet of today. Both books remain on active duty, for as the ongoing saga of Fat Leonard teaches us, it ain’t over till the fat man sings.
