Oh Captain, My Captain

By Timothy Foote

THE ARNHEITER AFFAIR by NEIL SHEEHAN 304 pages. Random House. $7.95.

Think of an Ahab without a whale.

Imagine Don Quixote with a sheaf of body counts on all those windmills. Then reflect on the degree of rage generated the last time your wife or children used up all the hot water and left you aching for a bath. Triangulate, and you begin to get a fix on the plight of the U.S.S. Vance under her commander Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter, U.S.N.

The Vance was a leftover World War II DE with popgun armament and an arthritic engine room, decked out as a DER (Destroyer Escort, Radar) and dispatched to help keep track of junks along the Viet Nam coast. Arnheiter, who became her new skipper at Christmas time 1966, was another sort of updated archaism. Machinery bored and confused him. He flunked out of West Point before squeaking into--and through--Annapolis. But he was a champion debater and his head was stuffed with nautical heroes and hero worship, as well as fine sea-fighting phrases ("Seek out, engage, destroy").

Arnheiter had served brilliantly (1960-63) in a Pentagon propaganda shop, and once, at the Navy's request, wrote and published a book under a cold war nom de guerre--the purported first-person account by a Russian naval commander of his threatening undersea exploits in a Soviet submarine. Its aim was to scare readers enough to encourage larger congressional appropriations for the Navy.

With this heady background the new captain of the Vance was clearly a man bound to be mentioned in dispatches--even if he had to write them himself. He invented enemy targets where none existed and wrote crackerjack press releases praising the Vance. He disobeyed orders, falsifying the ship's position reports to get closer to shore so he could fire his 3-in. guns at imaginary Viet Cong installations--more than once interfering with the missions of larger ships. He also forced his officers to recommend him for a Silver Star.

For a while, the Vance's crew was prepared to suffer these and other bellicose crotchets. They even volunteered to man his most cinematic creation, an outboard speedboat, bought with $950 taken from the crew's recreation fund and paraded near shore flaunting a huge American flag. In Arnheiter's tactical imagination, Old Glory would draw enraged Viet Cong fire and thus reveal the lurking enemy to the punishing guns of the audacious Vance. What really got Arnheiter into trouble, though, was raising Queegsotic Caine over loose shirttails and dirty dungarees. Worse than that, the captain forced everyone to attend Protestant services, and took 20-minute showers in his cabin while the men, simmering in their floating tin box, had to do without. The Vance's crew, asserts the author, grew sullen. Eventually, a chaplain was surreptitiously sent aboard to sound out morale. Two weeks later, Lieut. Commander Arnheiter was summarily relieved.

His offenses were rank. But then his defense was too, since by naval tradition, and necessity, a captain must be granted total obedience. As depicted by New York Times Reporter Neil Sheehan, Arnheiter at sea was a man so totally out of touch with phys ical reality that he had no idea that he was goading his men to the breaking point. He did what he did "in mad innocence," Sheehan explains.

Ashore, however, he proved a master realist in the war of words that followed his dismissal. An admiral and one of the Navy's most brilliant captains went to bat for him -- and eventually struck out. Until this happened, however, Arnheiter appeared to be some sort of martyr. He had tried, he said, to fight the war and bring the sloppy old Vance up to scratch, only to be sabotaged by a mollycoddle crew and a wardroom full of intellectuals and Vietniks. Arnheiter even dreamed up a word to describe what had happened to him: he had been "Vanced."

Neil Sheehan was one of many newspapermen who, under daily dead line pressure, could not check the facts and more or less bought Arnheiter's story. He wrote this book in part to set the record straight -- and he has done so admirably. Inadvertently, however, he may have set it a bit too straight. In place of a martyred captain, readers now tend to get a some what loony martinet. If that version is far closer to truth, it somehow discourages reflection upon the captain's tortuous character. Mixed in with the sheer fudge and swashbuckle, there was in Arnheiter the pathetic likeness of an honorable inspiration: drilling the crew in riflery to repel prospective boarders, trying to lay on the young seamen some sort of religious inspiration, holding sessions about the strategic purpose of the war. The disobeying of orders to get near the enemy, too -- how often have such devices been tried, and forgiven afterward when they were successful, by such naval heroes as Robert Mitchum and John Wayne?

Sheehan did the Times presentation of the Pentagon papers and before that took the time to prove that large portions of a book chronicling U.S. atrocities in Viet Nam were fake. He naturally and justly decries the manipulation of the press, and cites the defense of the Vance's deposed skipper as a case in point.

But, personal crotchets aside, Arnheiter's more truly American tragedy lay elsewhere. He foolishly believed that heroic stance and flashy press releases could turn a sauerkraut war into liberty cabbage.

qedTimothy Foote

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