The Shark Mutiny

for three years now, and I have never known such outrage. There are a lot of very furious guys in the U.S. Navy right now. Most of ’em think Dan Headley should be given the Medal of Honor.”

“Holy shit,” groaned the CNO.

By midday on July 26, the fertilizer was clogging the bilge pumps. The Navy Department in Washington was under siege from the media. The San Diego base switchboard was jammed by phone calls from newspapers and television. All lines to the command office of the SEALs in both Coronado and Virginia were occupied by journalists, researchers and columnists.

And the questions were all the same…What really happened out there in the Bay of Bengal?…And why is the hero of the operation being court-martialed by his own Navy?…Where is Lt. Commander Headley?…Can we speak with him?…If not, why not?…Do the SEALs agree Lt. Commander Headley should be court-martialed?…What has he actually done to deserve this?

Photographers were camped in groups at the main gates to the base. They were massed outside the Pentagon, outside the base at Coronado and at Little Creek, Virginia. By late afternoon, infuriated by the lack of cooperation of the U.S. Navy, they swung their attention to the White House, demanding a statement either from the National Security Adviser, the Defense Secretary or the Commander-in-Chief himself, the President of the United States.

In the opinion of both Arnold Morgan and Admiral Alan Dixon, there was absolutely nothing to be gained by saying one word to any of them. “No comment” would send them into a frenzy. “We are unable to confirm anything at this time” would drive them mad. “All matters such as these are highly classified, and in the interests of national security we will say nothing.” That last one would have been a red cape to a fighting bull.

What national security? Are you saying the SEALs attacked that Burmese island? How many of them died? Why are members of the crew saying Lt. Commander Headley rescued the survivors? What’s he done wrong? If he mutinied, why did he mutiny? Did the CO blow it or something?

To hold a press conference, or even to issue a press statement, would be to open the floodgates. Better to let them get on with it, block all calls at the switchboard, or the automatic answering machines, and let the cards fall where they may.

Where they fell was all over the place. In the following three days, right up until the last editions of the Sunday tabloids were on the presses, it was as if no other story in the entire country mattered. The inaccessibility of the Navy bases and the personnel involved seemed only to fan the forest fire of leaked knowledge. There was even a posse of photographers outside the locked wrought-iron gates of Bart Hunter’s farm in Lexington, Kentucky, trying to catch a glimpse of the SEAL leader’s father. Local journalists even managed to interview Bobby Headley, Dan’s father, when he mistakenly answered the telephone late one evening.

But the Navy said nothing. And the media slowly pieced it all together in various forms. The general scenario put forth was that the SEALs had attacked the Chinese base in some kind of retribution for China’s capture of the island of Taiwan. They had been caught and attacked on the way out, and there had been an altercation between the Commanding Officer of USS Shark and his Executive Officer.

The CO had been overruled by the XO, supported by the majority of the officers on board, and Shark went in to save the SEALs. This mission was accomplished, and now the Navy was charging the Lieutenant Commander who masterminded the rescue with mutiny. It was obvious to everyone that almost every officer and enlisted man in the U.S. Navy was up in arms about this. And almost every commentator in the entire country, newspaper, radio or television, was of the opinion that the Navy, the government and presumably the President, the C-in-C of all the armed forces, had, collectively, gone mad.

The New York Times, with a searing inside “exclusive,” revealed that the entire high command of America’s most elite troops, the Navy SEALs, had threatened to resign en masse if the court- martial proceedings were not called off.

All this was achieved without one single identified source inside the U.S. military. It was as Admiral Morgan had forecast, the outrage. That’s what binds people together, a shared grievance, a communal anger. And there sure was profound anger at this ensuing court-martial of Lt. Commander Dan Headley.

Nonetheless, media or no media, the legal wheels turned relentlessly inside the Navy’s Trial Service Office. The trial Counselor was duly appointed, Lt. Commander David “Locker” Jones, a 46-year-old lawyer from Vermont, who had attended the Naval Academy but left the service for the law after three years in a surface ship. Ten years later he returned after a messy divorce involving a client’s wife. For the past four years he had been an extremely able Naval lawyer, much admired throughout the legal department both on the West Coast and in Washington.

David Jones was a broad-shouldered ex-athlete of medium height and thinning fair hair. He wore the nickname “Locker” with good humor; Davy Jones’s locker being, of course, seamen’s slang for the bottom of the ocean, the final resting place for sunken ships, articles thrown overboard or burials at sea. And Locker Jones was renowned not so much for his thoroughness as for his grasp of the very finest points of law, an ability to cut a swath through evidence and make it irrelevent, a knack for nailing the one salient fact that could make a case swing one way or the other. Lieutenant Commander Headley could hardly have been dealt a more deadly opponent.

The Judge Advocate, who would sit in on the case, ensuring that the significant points of law were followed, was the veteran Atlantic destroyer commander Captain Art Brennan. He was a tall gray-haired former lawyer from Rhode Island, again a man who had joined, left and then rejoined the Navy. He was a traditionalist with a wry sense of humor, and a surprisingly irreverent way of looking at the world. On the face of it, you would put the 54- year-old Captain Brennan in the corner of the wronged CO. But those who knew him better suspected he would keep a careful watch on the rights of Lt. Commander Dan Headley.

The defense counsel was a matter for agreement between the Trial Service Office and the accused officer. And they chose easily the best man available to them — the sardonic, dark-haired Lieutenant Commander Al Surprenant, whose career, thanks to a wealthy father, had gone: Choate School, Harvard Law School, excellent degree, boredom with law, United States Navy, commission, rapid promotion, missile director battle cruiser Gulf War, U.S. Navy lawyer, Norfolk, then San Diego after he married a Hollywood actress.

Lieutenant Commander Surprenant was generally regarded as the one man in the U.S. Navy who could nail Commander Reid, and bring in a “not guilty” verdict for Dan Headley. He would prove thorough in his preparation, single-minded about the innocence of his client and brutal in his treatment of the CO, whom he knew beyond any doubt had left one man to die and had been about to leave another eight to the same fate.

The date of the court-martial was set for Monday, August 13. It would be the first such trial for mutiny in a U.S. Navy warship, ever. It would take place deep inside the San Diego base, in the Trial Service courtroom, which was much like a civilian courtroom, except for the fact that it was all on one level, no raised dais for the men who would sit in judgment on the submarine’s XO.

The panel would consist of five men, three Lieutenant Commanders and one Lieutenant, all serving under the President, an ex-submarine CO, Captain Cale “Boomer” Dunning. This particular officer would bring strong combat experience to the deliberations of his team, and, to those who knew him, a genuine appreciation of the split-second flexibility required in the command of a nuclear ship on a classified mission.

By anyone’s standards, the U.S. Navy was giving Lt. Commander Headley every possible chance of a sympathetic hearing — perhaps more in their own interests than in those of the hero of the Bay of Bengal.

Meanwhile, the media continued to worry the life out of the story. They had no official information, but they were getting a ton of unofficial leaks. It seemed that with each new breakthrough, each new snippet of possible truth, there was a counterattack. One television network came up with an entire career study of Commander Reid, citing his exemplary record. No sooner had this aired than a newspaper came blasting out onto the streets with the story that he had allegedly left a combat SEAL to die.

It went on day after day…WAS THE HORSEMAN FROM KENTUCKY A RECKLESS GAMBLER? DID THE LIEUTENANT COMMANDER OWE THE SEAL CHIEF MONEY? HAD COMMANDER REID LOST HIS NERVE? WAS THERE A FISTFIGHT IN SHARK’S CONTROL ROOM? IS THE U.S. NAVY OUT OF CONTROL?

Day after day, the media bore into the events that surrounded the mutiny. But still the Navy would reveal nothing. Not even the date of the court-martial. And the press seethed with indignation, not because of a potential miscarriage of justice but because this story about the wronged hero had captured the imagination of the American public, and the press were unable to get a serious grip on the facts. Nor would they ever.