The captain of the US Navy carrier Enterprise who made raunchy videos and showed them to his sailors? I feel sorry for the guy. Oh, he did a dumbass thing and totally deserves to lose his command, but I’ll bet that until the shit hit the fan he had no idea he was doing anything wrong. In fact, I’ll bet that up to this point in his career, he’d been richly rewarded for being just the guy he was.
I knew guys like that in the USAF. Great guys, well liked by everyone, guys with sponsors who saw to their promotion and elevation to command. Guys who, you assumed, would figure out on their own that the exuberant behavior they got away with as young officers would have to be put aside as they became leaders, responsible for the lives of others. But in some cases they didn’t figure that out on their own, and no one told them until it was too late.
I remember a newly-appointed fighter squadron commander in Alaska who called a meeting of the pilots’ wives. He opened his speech by saying “Thanks for coming, all you split-tails.” In the boys’ club atmosphere of the fighter squadrons of the early 1980s, this was something a lieutenant or captain might say, but not a lieutenant colonel, and certainly not a commander. But this guy thought he was being lovably avuncular. He really did. No one ever told him you couldn’t talk like that, and he hadn’t figured it out on his own. He earned the wives’ everlasting hatred, lost the respect of the pilots who flew for him, and — after someone reported the incident — blew what to then had been a promising career.
Now that I think of it, example after example comes to me. Guys who never grew up and eventually damaged their careers; guys who did grow up to become great commanders and leaders.
I’m coming across as a total sexist here, talking about guys, guys, guys. But in my day there were few women in the military boys’ club, and none at all in the fighter business. The few women commanders I encountered — mainly, in those days, in logistics, personnel, intelligence, or medicine — could kick any man’s ass in the maturity department, and I’m sure that’s still true today.
Growing up is hard to do.
Update (later, same day): Uh, that thing I said about being sorry for the guy because no one told him to knock that shit off and he obviously wasn’t mature enough to figure it out on his own? From this article, I learn that as far back as 2007 he was told a superior to quit producing the videos.
Well, in that case . . . fuck him!