General Haig, may we have a word please?

This USS Greeneville story just won’t go away. As if a fatal collision at sea isn’t bad enough, we’re all drowning in a sea of diplomatic grandstanding and, even worse, a feeding frenzy of journalists who think a submarine tender is the guy who makes your sandwich at that fast food joint.

As for Saipan, our name is most commonly associated with the zenith of the U.S. Navy’s accomplishments in WWII.

More recent events aren’t so flattering to the brainchild of John Paul Jones. That’s not so surprising, given that a large military on a peacetime standing produces lifers and bureaucrats, not leaders and warriors. Sure, war time has produced some appalling morons, and peacetime has certainly produced some excellent sailors. Still, the entropy of bureaucracy is undeniable.

Whether or not this has anything to do with the Greeneville directly is a mere point of conjecture. Still, the submarine’s accident, on the wake of the USS Cole getting slammed by two rag tag dingies in a dingy, shows that the Navy’s reputation has suffered some tarnishing since it was the world’s most butt-kicking organization during the Big One, on our fair shores, no less.

Problems with reputation are blood in the water for the media, and the news waters have been churned by biting conjecture as well as the usual breed of stupidity emanating from a global pool of typewriter bound office boys who wouldn’t have made it five minutes in anybody’s boot camp.

Military affairs are so foreign to most journalists that you wonder how they can have the audacity to mouth off about such matters. And so, the world’s population, which knows nothing about submarines, has it all explained to them, by folks who know nothing about submarines. What good can possibly come from all that?

And we have to admit that the average American submariner is far more competent, tougher, and smarter than the average person is in general. For all the egregious weirdness we hear about the accident, I figure that the officers and men deserve the collective benefit of the doubt. Rumor and hearsay are conduct unbecoming of any decent journalist in this matter.

Sez me, then, that the Navy should just shut up and quietly get on with its investigation. The only people competent to judge the actions of submariners are–surprise–submariners. The rest of us haven’t a clue.

If the Navy can’t muster the backbone to face up to this situation with some degree of dignity, then perhaps we can ask General Al Haig to lend a hand. At least he’s not some mealy mouthed, namby pamby bureaucrat, like certain Navy admirals have proven to be in the wake of the Greeneville event. So please, General Haig, or somebody, anybody, help the Navy reclaim its lost glory, because I am bloody well fed up with this circus.

Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. “Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com”