Same Ship, Same Crew, Three Different Outcomes: Part II
A note before we start: the officers in this story are real. Their names are not. I’ve changed them to protect their privacy, not to soften what happened. (A note on pronouns: this was still the all-male combat fleet.)
Between the time we left Saint Thomas, USVI, due to the emergency tasking, and made it back to Little Creek on the way to Norway, something on Boulder had changed. Same rust. Same half-strength crew, augmented by selected reservists (SELRES). What was different was Commander Alder.
I heard before he arrived that he was highly respected in the small, tight-knit TAR community, Training and Administration of Reserves, full-time active-duty USNR officers who train and administer the Naval Reserve. Everything I heard was positive, and when he arrived, he didn’t disappoint. There was just something in how he interacted with people.
With Alder, what he did differently is less dramatic than people expect. He didn’t give speeches or pound his chest. He didn’t tell us we were the greatest crew in the world. He didn’t relieve anyone in his first weeks, not even the officer many perceived was a problem. He connected with people, as a captain to his crew, on a more personal level. He genuinely wanted their input, their judgment, and then he actually trusted the judgment he’d asked for.
Within weeks of Alder taking over, I perceived a noticeable change in the crew’s collective spirit. This is my perception, not a fact everyone aboard would necessarily share, but people seemed to have a renewed sense of purpose, one that came from within. I know I did. Alder had a way of bringing out the best in people, in themselves, and that’s a real difference.
That’s the difference between competent and inspired, and I watched it happen in real time, on the same slightly less rusted hull that had been competent, busy, and solid under Reyes, but never once inspired. I would have followed Alder to hell and back.
An Atlantic crossing by ship is an experience at any time, but this one to Norway was different. I loved being at sea, especially the midwatch, looking up at the stars, watching for whales and dolphins. One night, a six-foot loggerhead turtle passed sixty feet below me, lit up by the full moon.
We reached Norway in time for the August 31 start of Exercise Teamwork ’88, NATO’s biennial three-week exercise defending Norway against a Soviet maritime threat. Part of the exercise’s purpose was to force US commanders to reconsider tactics in live scenarios, not simulated ones.
It was an exciting time for me, a Soviet Bear bomber buzzing our formation, F-14s dropping out of the sky to intercept, both sides testing each other in a Cold War that stayed cold. This was what being part of something truly significant felt like.
We were at full ship’s complement between our crew, SELRES, and Marines. We were operating at an incredibly high level of proficiency. Word was, we’d been selected for the emergency tasking because we were the squadron’s most qualified LST at amphibious operations. Going from one of the worst ships in the Navy to the one they trusted with that assignment was not lost on any of us.
The exercises themselves were real, not simulated. Full operations, day after day, off the Norwegian coast. When one particularly intense stretch finally wrapped, we were supposed to rest. Some of our sister ships went to anchor. We were ordered to keep steaming in standard station-keeping ovals overnight. Two weeks into a three-week exercise, one week to go before heading home. Routine stuff.
Then we ran aground, on a pinnacle northeast of Frøya island, just after midnight during the midwatch, on 13 September 1988, at the peak of a spring tide’s high water. In laymen’s terms, we were up the creek without the proverbial paddle. Running aground was bad, really bad, doing it at extreme high tide was even worse. Eight hundred and eighty gallons of diesel spilled into the Norwegian Sea. A U.S. Navy salvage ship, the Grapple, tried to pull us free and failed. We spent the next 48 hours fighting to keep her afloat and get her off that rock as the tides rose and fell two meters, about 6.5 to 7 feet. Those were the longest 48 hours of my life. Two Norwegian tugs finally freed us where the Grapple couldn’t.
What actually happened
This is the part people get wrong the moment they hear “the ship ran aground” and assume it’s a story about a bad captain. It isn’t.
I was on duty as the CICWO, the Combat Information Center Watch Officer, when it happened. My boss was the officer of the deck on the bridge. The navigation officer had stood the evening watch before us. My boss and I came on fifteen minutes early, as was standard, to relieve the watch, him to the bridge, me to CIC.
What circulated through the ship afterward, from people who’d actually been on the bridge that night, was that the same held-over navigation officer from Reyes’s era, the one many had quietly known was a problem, had used a sister ship at anchor as a navigational reference point instead of the charted fixed positions the job actually required, sometime during the evening watch, before turning the deck over at midnight. I never read the official report confirming any of that. This is what I heard, not what I personally witnessed.
Whatever the exact mechanism, the deeper failure was structural, not just personal, and it happened twice. For four hours, the navigation officer held both roles, officer of the deck and navigation officer, on a task with zero tolerance for a bad call. Nobody was checking him. Then, at the midnight watch turnover, my boss inherited that plot and, from what I could piece together, apparently trusted it without verifying it himself. I never got the chance to ask him what happened from his side, not with everything else going on in the chaos that followed.
Here’s the part that makes this more than a story about bad luck. Alder had already seen it coming. After a month and a half of direct observation, he’d concluded the navigation officer wasn’t fit for duty, and decided he was going to relieve him of all responsibilities the following morning. How do I know this? Because I was there when, in a moment of exhaustion, as we were fighting to keep Boulder afloat, Alder sighed and said “I was going to relieve him in the morning.”
“I was going to relieve him in the morning.”
Alder’s verification had been correct. He’d just waited one day too long, too late to act on it.
The Navy’s accountability doctrine doesn’t much care about that distinction. Correct but late isn’t meaningfully different from wrong the whole time, not when you’re the commanding officer. He owns everything that happens on the ship, full stop, regardless of who was actually at fault, and regardless of how close he’d come to preventing it.
Commander Alder was relieved of command one week after we reached drydock.
My boss, the operations department head, a well-respected officer, carried a permanent mark in his service jacket from the investigation for the rest of his career, for trusting a fix he hadn’t verified himself, twenty minutes into a watch that had just become his.
There’s one more cost to this that goes beyond Alder’s career. Rumor had it that up until the moment we ran aground, we were a shoo-in for the prestigious Arleigh Burke Fleet Trophy, awarded annually to the one ship in the Atlantic Fleet and one in the Pacific Fleet that showed the greatest improvement in battle efficiency that year. Two captains had taken us from one of the worst ships in the Navy to that. All of it, gone, the moment we hit that pinnacle. One person’s single point of failure, and one night of delay, cost the entire crew something we’d actually earned through months’ long continuous and consistent hard work.
After the grounding
Divers aboard the two Norwegian tugs that freed us helped patch the hull, balsa wood driven into the worst of the tears to slow the leaking. After the divers patched us up, we headed into the Norwegian fjords, which were sheltered from heavy weather. The rest of our transit while in Norway was via the fjords. A Norwegian liaison officer joined us as we were navigating in Norway’s inner waterways.
We offloaded our weapons at Trondheimsfjord, Norway’s version of Norfolk. At one point, the liaison officer asked me what was going to happen to our captain. When I told him Commander Alder would be relieved, he was shocked. This makes no sense, he said. Your ship is the first US ship since World War II to navigate Norwegian fjords. Your captain and crew have more experience navigating the Norwegian fjords than any other US ship in decades. This makes no sense. I explained to him the Navy’s philosophy of accountability: when something happens to the ship, the captain is relieved.
And then he told me something that’s stuck with me ever since. In the Norwegian Navy, a commanding officer wouldn’t have been relieved for what had just happened to us, not for something that came down to bad luck and someone else’s failure, not with the experience we had gained and with the investigation still pending. The only Norwegian commanding officer he knew of who’d ever been relieved wasn’t relieved for running his ship aground, he was relieved for running it up onto a farmer’s field and killing a prize heifer. You can’t make this up.
What that Norwegian officer shared stuck with me. Two navies, watching the same event, drawing two completely different conclusions about where accountability actually belongs. Which one is the better approach? I’m not sure to this day. I do know the Navy and our crew lost an incredible captain and leader due to events that were put in play well before he took command.
We reached the shipyard at Haakonsvern, near Bergen, on 21 September 1988, eight days after the grounding. Commander Alder’s formal relief by Commander Voss came a week later, on the 28th, exactly two months to the day from when he’d assumed command from Reyes on July 28th, in Rosie Roads.
Commander Voss was about to introduce us to an entirely new leadership philosophy. One I wasn’t prepared for.
