{"id":5047,"date":"2011-01-04T09:28:54","date_gmt":"2011-01-04T16:28:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5047"},"modified":"2011-01-04T17:09:36","modified_gmt":"2011-01-05T00:09:36","slug":"tailhook-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5047","title":{"rendered":"Tailhook Redux"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The captain of the US Navy carrier Enterprise<\/a> who made raunchy videos and showed them to his sailors? I feel sorry for the guy.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

I knew guys like that in the USAF.\u00a0 Great guys, well liked by everyone, guys with sponsors who saw to their promotion and elevation to command.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But in some cases they didn’t figure that out on their own, and no one told them until it was too late.<\/p>\n

I remember a newly-appointed fighter squadron commander in Alaska who called a meeting of the pilots’ wives.\u00a0 He opened his speech by saying “Thanks for coming, all you split-tails.”\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But this guy thought he was being lovably avuncular.\u00a0 He really did.\u00a0 No one ever told him you couldn’t talk like that, and he hadn’t figured it out on his own.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Now that I think of it, example after example comes to me.\u00a0 Guys who never grew up and eventually damaged their careers; guys who did grow up to become great commanders and leaders.<\/p>\n

I’m coming across as a total sexist here, talking about guys, guys, guys.\u00a0 But in my day there were few women in the military boys’ club, and none at all in the fighter business.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Growing up is hard to do.<\/p>\n

Update (later, same day):<\/strong><\/span><\/em> 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?\u00a0 From this article<\/a>, I learn that as far back as 2007 he was told a superior to quit producing the videos.<\/p>\n

Well, in that case . . . fuck him!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The captain of the US Navy carrier Enterprise who made raunchy videos and showed them to his sailors? I feel sorry for the guy.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,3,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-flying","category-military"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5047"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5059,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5047\/revisions\/5059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}