Posted on 07/29/2021 8:46:39 PM PDT by Mariner
...............this is just my personal opinion based upon much duty on many ships. There is NO WAY this is one lower echelon sailor’s fault because even if he/she set the fire it should have been put out. Leadership failed to act IN TIME !!!
Shipboard “FIRE” is beaten into sailors from their very first day MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE and fire drills are conducted daily. This is just another case of officers closing ranks and finding ONE low ranking soul to pin the blame on. I suspect some form of PC is involved too.
In the article it says arson, so deliberate I’m assuming.
“In the article it says arson, so deliberate I’m assuming.”
We shall see. Could just be trumping up a careless person, innocent until proven guilty, etc. In any event that could be the worst financial damage caused by one person in one act ever. Excluding despots/politicians, of course.
“...is considering court-martial charges”
Please don’t misunderstand this as not going forward with a court martial. Right now they are in a preliminary phase of determination on how they want to act on it. But determining that direction doesn’t necessarily just lower the punishment to an article 15.
The Uniform Code of Military Justice provides for three different types of courts-martial: summary, special, and general. These forms of courts-martial differ in the type of offenses they consider, the make up of the judge and jury and the punishments they can mete out. A good explanation is here at Military.com:
https://www.military.com/benefits/military-legal-matters/courts-martial-explained.html
A military action is no different than a civil one. It must be done properly so as not to destroy justice either way. And there are options.
wy69
#18. Let the perp work on the White House. He’d burn it down in an hour and save the taxpayers from having to pay Biden’s pension and 18 wheeler upkeep.
They may not do parole but they will let you rejoin. When I was in the Navy I spent some time working with a man who, when he was in the Air Force, murdered his commanding officer and was sentenced to 20 years. He said that during his court martial there was plenty of testimony that the guy was an alcoholic and a bully but that wasn't an excuse to kill him. I don't know if he completed his full sentence but they did let him join another branch of service when he got out.
ships, like the gallows, refuse no man.
When I was in the Army, a guy reported for duty with our battalion who had been convicted of manslaughter in the Real World. The S-2 had paperwork processed for his discharge in less than a week. He went from basic to AIT to personnel center to a one week tour on “active duty” and out.
How in the Hell would you like to be commanding officer of a guy who killed his last CO? We also had a black guy who dropped out of PT formation and was sneaking back into the barracks. His platoon commander lit out after him and was tightening him up when another brother who had drawn rifle and ammunition for American Express guard detail (back in the day, our remote unit had a traveling American Express branch twice a week). The guard make a remark about what he would do if someone talked to him like that when he had a rifle. That really set the young LT off. After the guard refused to surrender his weapon, the LT physically relieved him of it and placed him under arrest. The young man was court-martialed as fast as paperwork could be processed.
Mr. Fury was the fire watched on the USS MIAMI that day. He was talking to an ex girlfriend or women he was recently dating on his cell phone. He recently found out that she went on a date with another man. She told him in the call that he was “just a friend”. Mr. Fury responded that her recent date was more than just a friend. He wanted to confront her over the issue of her recent date. Problem was that he still had a few more hours of work. So he decided to set a fire so that he can get off work early.
“The penalty”
All of the posts so far have focused on the arson.
Do we wonder why an entire ship was burned to scrap because of a small initial blaze. Don’t ships have doors to close off areas of the ship? Don’t ships have fire control equipment?
Provocative questions posed on a morning talk show.
Someone called in and said the ship was undergoing major upgrades and the ship’s power was off, etc., so it wasn’t a fully protected warship at the time.
Name is probably Mohamed.
Anecdotal evidence of nothing......
Years ago, I had occasion to regularly visit the extremely large world distribution warehouses of a large aftermarket auto parts manufacturing company. They changed the location. I couldn’t go back there.
I learned that the very very large warehouse burned. Once the fire started, it could not be contained
It turns out the arson was committed by an employee who wanted to create a long weekend off.
That is, a sailor started the fire to keep the vessel in port so he could have extended liberty
unidentified crew member?
Funny. When I went on the USS JFK for the first time, I wanted to walk around and explore the ship, so I went everywhere that I could where passage appeared to be unrestrained.
I walked down a ladder, and I stopped at the bottom, realizing it was not a passageway, but instead a large compartment I had descended into, but...it was odd.
There was a guy standing perfectly still facing a steel beam with his nose nearly touching it.
I shifted my view, and saw another sailor doing the same thing facing a bulkhead.
And there were a few sailors sitting on the deck, not talking or moving, and looking straight ahead.
This was bizarre.
Then I looked up and saw a Marine standing there right in front of me in the short sleeve khaki shirt and blue slacks with red stripe that they wore in those days aboard ship, and he wordlessly shook his head side to side and pointed back up the ladder.
Light dawns on Marblehead. I had strayed down into the Brig...:)
I recall we used to refer to any brig or prison where Marines ran the show as “a prison where there are “men with shiny shoes” and “you don’t want to go there” to new guys.
I used to drive near the Portsmouth Naval Prison fairly often where I could see it, and it was hard to see it without thinking of all the men who had spent time in it over the years, some deserving, some perhaps not, but all ruled by hard-ass Marines.
>>He also has to pay restitution of $400 million, which is kind of comical in a way
He should study art from Hunter Biden and could make that in as few as 800 paintings.
>>It’s obvious it wasn’t a Trump maga guy.
If it was an “insurectionist” his name would be reported
Yes. There were likely little (or absent) watches, very sparsely inhabited, no compartmental integrity, fire suppression deactivated, and so on.
As I said in a previous post, fire is almost always the greatest peril to a naval vessel, and sailors spend (or at least used to spend, when it wasn’t being cut into by diversity training and CRT training) a great deal of time learning how to prevent it and fight it.
I always felt that US Navy damage control teams were well enough trained and proficient enough to fight fires caused by battle damage, and suppress nearly any fire that started in a compartment.
I don’t feel that way anymore, but even now with training and proficiency apparently quite low, if that ship had been fully manned and at sea, I doubt the fire would have been more than a blip in a typical day, it would have been suppressed in no time.
Of course, with the Fitzgerald and McCain incidents, I even wonder about fire-fighting capabilities now.
I can see your point but it was all handled by the military and I doubt the Navy didn't know about his record when they accepted him. So I guess they told his new CO to deal with it.
“Yes. There were likely little (or absent) watches ...”
We also read about inexplicable ship collisions. Or the only explanation is that those manning the ship weren’t paying attention.
“If they didn’t have him dead to rights, there wouldn’t be the circus.”
The Military Justice system is different from the civilian in that respect.
In the civilian system, it is easy to bring charges. As they say, you can get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich.
In the Military, there is a higher bar to bring charges. So when they do, the conviction rate is much higher.
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