Posted on 05/08/2004 9:12:13 PM PDT by CWOJackson
The London Sunday Times, May 19, 1996
LAST POST FOR A HAUNTED 'HERO'
IT WAS probably the loneliest journey of his life. Admiral Jeremy "Mike" Boorda, the four-star chief of American naval operations, left his sandwiches untouched on his huge, mahogany desk, picked up his hat and ordered his driver to take him to his home in the Washington naval yard.
Moments earlier he had heard the news that he had been expecting for a year. Rear Admiral Kendall Pease, the navy information chief, told him that two reporters from Newsweek magazine would be arriving in two hours to question him about medals he had been wearing for the past 20 years. The reporters wished to discuss the tiny golden "V" pins he wore on his Vietnam ribbons to denote a combat valour he may never have displayed.
Others might have dismissed it as an insignificant affair. Not Boorda, a proud man whose sef-deprecating wit masked a sensitive nature. By the time he arrived home, his mind was apparently made up. In his study, he wrote two letters,the first to Bettie, his wife of four decades. It was, a friend said, a "tragic note filled with despair and apology". He feared he was about to be exposed as a fraud and he simply "could not stand this attack on my integrity".
The second letter was to the navy that he had served so faithfully since he lied about his age in 1956 to enlist at 17. He apologised for wearing insignia to which he may not have been entitled and hoped that his sailors would feel, as he did, that it was simply an "honest mistake".
Taking a .38 revolver from his desk, Boorda walked out of the house and down a garden path that meandered through the navy complex, sat down on a bench and shot himself.
The seeds of his self-destruction had been planted a year before. In February 1995, a former marine colonel named Roger Charles received an intriguing tip-off from a navy contact at the Pentagon. America's most senior admiral was regularly to be seen in publc wearing medals he had not earned.
Charles realised it was potentially an electrifying story. The navy was awash in scandal. From the appalling sexual debasements of the notorious 1991 Tailhook pilots' convention, to allegations of cheating and crime at the Naval Academy in Annapolis,the navy's top brass was reeling.
Now it seemed that Boorda, a legendary former enlisted man who had gone from "zero to hero" from the bottom-most rank to the topmost had done a little cheating of his own. Charles decided to check. After leaving the marines,he had become a specialist reporter for the National Security News Service, a privately funded Washington agency focusing on defence. On March 6 last year the agency filed a brief request, under the US Freedom of Information Act, for details of Boorda's medal citations.
It seemed a harmless enough application, one of thousands that are filed by the American media every year. Yet few have provoked as much chaos or distress. It took more than a year for Charles to pin down is story. And once it was out, once the biggest guns of the Washington media establishment had picked it up and were threatening to run with it, it blew up in everyone's face.
The suicide left Washington stunned. Television cameras were record President Bill Clinton when an aide slipped him a note with the news. Clinton's jaw dropped and his shoulders sagged.
John Dalton, the civilian navy secretary, was one of many senior officials who paid tribute to Boorda. He declared him a "sailor's sailor" who was "loved by all the people who knew him by officers, enlisted sailors as well". Unfortunately, Dalton was wrong.
There was a great deal more to Boorda's death than a simple matter of public honour and private shame. Behind the rows of ribbons that adorned the admiral's chest lay a complex battle between a navy struggling to adapt to a shrunken role in a post-cold war world, and a voracious media tearing at the tumblng security barrier that for so long preserved the military from the scrutiny imposed on politicians.
As the head of a service with an increasingly fragmented and uncertain future, Boorda, 56, found that his worst enemies were not Iranian battleships or Russian submarines but the far more insidious threats of sexual politics and political correctness. For months they had been threatening to overcome him; when Boorda's honour and bravery were challenged, it may merely have been the last straw.
A former chief of Nato forces in southern Europe, Boorda returned to the Pentagonto take command of the navy in 1994 in the wake of the worst scandal in the service's history. Reverberations from the 1991 Tailhook convention, at which dozens of women were assaulted by drunken naval aviators, were sapping morale. A string of embarrassing problems at the Annapolis officers' academy,from cheating in examinations to drug abuse and car theft, had further helped turn the navy into a recurring media headline - starched uniforms stained by disgrace.
While there seems no reason to doubt that Boorda was popular in his early days as chief he was the first "mustang", or enlisted man turned officer, to make it to four-star rank the fallout from Tailook began to spread dangerous mistrust.
Amid widespread complaints that the officers involved in the sexual rampage had not been properly punished, Boorda found himself under pressure from his political peers to crack down on suspected wrong-doers, whether or not formal charges had been brought. Reports began to circulate that a secret blacklist had been formed of officers present at the convention. They were allegedly being denied promotion or forced out of the navy, even though some claimed to have played no role in the sexual assaults.
As resentment grew among middle-ranking officers that the top brass were caving in to the politically correct civilian overlords of the powerful Senate armed services committee, the embarrassing case of Naval Commander Robert Stumpf became, in the eyes of many officers, a test of Boorda's loyalty to his men.
Stumpf was a decorated Gulf war heroand popular former commander of the navy's Blue Angels precision flight team. Some called him America's best pilot. He had been present at the convention but witnesses insisted he had left before any trouble broke out. He was formally exonerated of any misconduct by the official commission of inquiry. Yet his promotion to captain was blocked and his career effectively destroyed. His name was on the Senate committee's blacklist.
According to naval sources, Boorda's failure to protect Stumpf - and other officers in a similar plight was viewed by many in the navy as evidence tha he had "sold out" to gender-led political correctness. Last month, in a blitering public attack, James Webb, a Vietnam veteran and former navy secretary, claimed that fine naval careers were being destroyed by "hearsay and unsubstantiated allegations". In a pointed remark aimed at Boorda, he asked: "What admiral has had the courage to risk his own carer by puting his stars on the tble and defending the integrity of his people?"
Last week Boorda suffered another painful, public blow when the Navy Times published an anonymous letter from a naval officer that called for the admiral's resignation. "The US navy has gone aground," said the letter. "Cover-up and deception are rampant." The author claimed that Boorda was derisively referred to behind his back as "little Mikey Boorda".
While his courage was being questioned in public, Boorda was nursing a secret. Someone at the Pentagon had become so disgusted with Boorda that he had tipped off the media about the admiral'ssuspect decorations. As soon as the navy learned that Charles had filed a request for Boorda's medal citations, it alerted the admiral. He immediately stopped wearing his "V for valour" pins, which are described in naval regulations as "combat distinguishing devices" (CDDs).
The navy provided Charles with the medal citations on July 20 last year. It was immediately clear that Boorda's commendations for service on board various ships off Vetnam btween 1965 and 1973 contained no mention of any CDDs.
It was now up to Charles to prove that Boord had worn the "V" pins.
But as luck would have it, he could trace no archive photograph that showed Boorda with a full set of ribbons. And by last July, Boorda had indeed stopped wearing the pins.
The story languished in Charles's files until last month, when, by chance, a Washington publication called Defense News published an old picture of Borda. He was wearing his Vietnam ribbons with "V" pins. Charles suddenly had his proof. He promptly took history to Newsweek, which just happens to have on its staff America's most decorated combat veteran, retired army colonel David "Hack" Hackworth.
As a man with at least 20 medals for valour, eight of them purple hearts signifying wounds in action, Hackworth could claim to be an expert in the field. According to on senior Pentagon official yesterday, weeks before the suicide Hackworth had been bragging to his military friends that "I could bring down a navy admiral".
For Boorda, the long wait was nearly over. He must have known, the moment the navy advised him of the citation request, that serious embarrassment beckoned. When he was told on Thursday before lunch that Newsweek's Washington bureau chief was coming to talk to him about the medals a couple of hours later, he asked an aide how he should handle the interview, then quickly answered his own question: "I'll tell them the truth."
Instead, he retreated to his home. A father of four, the eldest of whom was sevrely handicapped, he was found slumped on a bench beside his house by a passer-by who heard the shot.
Some of Boorda's friends argued last week that he might have committed an honest mistake; that he might have believed he was entitled to the "V" pins. That view was supported yesterday when Elmo Zumwalt, a former admiral, was quoted as saying that a 1965 naval manual suggested that service in a combat zone was sufficient to qualify for a pin no specific evidence of valour was required.
Yet Boorda must have known in his heart and he acknowledged in his suicide note that media reaction would be sceptical. Everyone knows how seriously military men regard their treasured slips of coloured ribbon. The merest hint of fraud would have seriously damaged the admiral.
While nobody can ever be sure what goes through the mind of a man contemplating suicide, it seems likely that Boorda was appalled by his growing unpopularity in the service. Other friends said he had been deeply affected by the death of his father earlier this year. It must also have ben a hideous strain, waiting more than a year for a story to come out that he must have known might end his career. When eventually the media caught up with him, he knew this was one battle he could not win.
He shot himself in the chest, where admirals wear their medals.
Brenda C. Jinkins
"As a man with at least 20 medals for valour, eight of them purple hearts signifying wounds in action, Hackworth could claim to be an expert in the field. According to on senior Pentagon official yesterday, weeks before the suicide Hackworth had been bragging to his military friends that "I could bring down a navy admiral".
THIS IS THE SAME DAVID HACKWORTH WHO IS INSTRUMENTAL IN TURNING THE PRISONER ABUSE STORY INTO A MEDIA CIRCUS.
It was determined shortly after his death that HACKworth was wrong; despite his bragging that he was going to nail an admiral, the device had been authorized. But HACKworth still "nailed" his admiral.
A few weeks after this, HACKworth had to remove the Ranger Tab from his list of awards on his own website, when it was pointed out to him that he had never earned it. HACKworth's response was that he had made a simple error and always thought he had.
HACKworth has proven that he will do anything for money and media attention...including dishonor himself.
I understand that.
But blaming him for the death of an Admiral is wrong.
redrock
Not at all. And I was only one of several thousand service people who flooded him with e-mails offering to discuss his bragging about bringing down an admiral in person.
Of course the brave HACKworth never took a single person up on their request. He was probably too busy back at the club high-fiving it with his press buddies.
redrock
Keep your blinders on.
He was doing that? I have never went to his web site. He was listing himself as RANGER qualified? And he was not?
I have always been less than impressed with Hackworth; I did read his book and felt the need to shower afterwards.
Let me say for the record, that NOT A SINGLE woman was ASSAULTED at Tailhook91. I was there. What you had were a bunch of drunk women who did not want to explain their behavior to their husbands and boyfriends who were NOT there.
What Boorda did to Stumpy and the rest of us was unforgivable. He knew that no one was guilty of anything, yet he went along with Congress to save his own skin. Beyond that, he did not deserve what happened to him, although he knew that he did not have the confidence of the Officers who served beneath him.
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