Or: Who Wore it Best?
I feel obliged to begin with this disclaimer: I have not actually read Herman Wouk’s 1951 novel, The Caine Mutiny, five times. In fact, I have only read it once, and I believe that reading corresponds to what I have below labelled the “third” reading . However, I have watched the 1954 film of the same name a number of times, and just the one read of the novel is enough that I may attest that the 1954 film is a generally faithful, if abbreviated, adaptation. More importantly, the themes presented in the movie are consistent with the novel, as are the conflicts between the principal characters. I might even go so far as to say that Wouk’s central message, for good or ill, is faithfully delivered in each adaptation, which, apart from the 1954 film, includes The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial and its two made-for-TV movie adaptions (the most recent of which I just reviewed). As for what the “central message” is, well… that depends on how you read it, but it comes down to this: who was “the author of the Caine mutiny”? How you answer that says as much about you and your own particular life circumstances as it does about what Greenwald says, what Wouk meant to say, or what the text of the novel actually supports. It might even say something about Wouk himself.
Herman Wouk, USNR
For those who are unaware–and must not have already read my excellent review of 2023’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial—The Caine Mutiny is set primarily aboard a US Navy minesweeper (converted from an old destroyer) in the Pacific Theater of World War II, circa 1943-44. Herman Wouk himself served as a naval officer in that same theater, during the same time period, and aboard the same type of ship. He doubtless drew upon his own life experiences in writing the novel–though he is careful to insist in a brief introduction to the novel that “[a]ny resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental” and further insists that the officers he served under were just tops.
Wouk himself was not a professional or “Regular Navy” (USN) officer, but rather, like most of those who joined the Navy in the immediate aftermath of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, an officer of the US Naval Reserves (USNR) called to active duty for the duration of the war. While Regular Navy officers tended to occupy command positions, the “multitudes” of reservists like Wouk are what allowed the World War II-era US Navy to rapidly expand in ships and personnel to meet the challenges posed (and make up for the losses caused by) a war on two fronts against the Axis powers. However, to accommodate such growth, Regular Navy officers, too, were often advanced more rapidly than they might otherwise have been in the pre-war Navy. If, for example, the number of warships doubled over the course of a year, that meant twice as many Regular Navy officers needed to be promoted to command them. And if the number of ships doubled again the next year, even more of a shrinking pool of pre-war Regular Navy officers needed to be promoted to command them. In this respect, Regular Navy officers encountered challenges that were at least analogous to those faced by the newly-minted reservists who served under them: none of them were fully prepared (at least according to the standards of the pre-war Navy) to occupy the roles their were thrust into, and yet not only did they have to take on those roles, they had to do so while learning on the job in the middle of a major armed conflict.
It is in this context that The Caine Mutiny‘s main protagonist, Willis Seward Keith (like Wouk, a reservist) first sets foot aboard the fictional USS Caine. He is straight out of “midshipman school” and not far removed from his college days at Princeton–not unlike Wouk, who graduated from another Ivy League school embarking on a civilian career before the war. His first impressions of USS Caine are unfavorable, and he develops a particular disdain for his first Captain, one Lieutenant Commander De Vriess. But as anyone even vaguely familiar with the novel or its derivative works will know, whoever the villain of the story is, it’s definitely not Captain De Vriess. Or at least, it’s not supposed to be.
Reading the First: High School
The first time I came across The Caine Mutiny was on television. I was in high school, maybe 11th grade–honestly I don’t remember for sure–the movie was playing on basic cable (which pretty much was cable in those days), and I thought it was pretty good. What really sticks out in my mind from that first read (or rather, viewing) is my impression of De Vriess. De Vriess, for those whose exposure to the material is limited to the stage play or one of its made-for-TV movie adaptations, is Queeg’s predecessor as commanding officer of USS Caine. Ensign Keith’s initial impression of De Vriess–and mine, as a high school student watching the film as presented primarily from Keith’s point of view–are that he’s kind of a jerk. Some mix of sardonic, sarcastic (often at Keith’s expense), and cynical would be a good way to describe him. He puts Keith on the spot in front of his fellow officers mere hours after Keith arrives aboard USS Caine, he mocks Keith over misidentifying a flock of seagulls as a formation of enemy aircraft, and worst of all he gives Keith a stern talking-to over an innocent mistake (outrageous!). One might even go so far as as to call De Vriess a sinister presence in the mind of Ensign Keith and the uninitiated viewer, especially in light of the obvious power imbalance between a ship’s commanding officer and a newly-minted junior officer showing up to his first ship in the middle of a war. The slightest movement from a such a CO could be enough to crush the hapless Ensign.
On first viewing, I distinctly remember thinking of De Vriess “Wow, what a jerk! No wonder there’s going to be a mutiny on this ship. I wonder how long it’ll be and what they do with the Captain…” Which, to be clear, is a sign of good writing. Wouk clearly knew what he was doing with his depiction of De Vriess and his choice of the newly-arrived Ensign Keith as the point of view character for an audience that Wouk knew would overwhelmingly lack military experience. De Vriess, though neither coldly indifferent nor a tyrant by military standards, had just enough of an edge to his personality to make him come off that way to the uninitiated. So, on first viewing, it’s a bit of twist when Ensign Keith learns that De Vriess is due to be relieved of his command mere minutes (in terms of movie runtime) after Keith reports aboard (Keith reports aboard about 15 minutes in the movie, and De Vriess is relieved just shy of the 3-minute mark).
While Keith is understandably relieved when he receives word of De Vriess’ impending relief, it’s a bit of dramatic irony for the viewer who, knowing the title, is left to wonder–with no small sense of dread–who could be worse than this asshole? Enter Lieutenant Commander Phillip Francis Queeg, USN, a villain of such epic proportions that his name has become a synonym for “toxic leader” in very real US Navy wardrooms across the fleet, known even to those who have neither read the book nor seen any of the movies based on it. His nearest peer among the rank villainy of the already niche world of naval fiction, Mister Roberts‘ Captain Morton, doesn’t hold a candle. Though Morton is, arguably, both more toxic and less deserving of sympathy than Queeg, being overheard calling your toxic CO a “Morton” is likely to result in mere befuddlement even from someone who has seen the movie (and good luck finding someone who has actually read that book!). But call your Captain a “Queeg,” on the other hand, and you better hope they or one of their favorite toadies doesn’t find out, because the beatings will continue until moral improves (but then again, that’s bound to happen anyway serving under a real Queeg!).
Apart from that, other impressions from my first exposure to The Caine Mutiny were that Queeg was of course evil incarnate, and that surely Greenwald’s speech at the end of the movie–in which he lambasts the victorious officers of USS Caine for having been so disloyal and unsupportive of their cowardly, incompetent, Commanding-Officer-from-Hell–must have been inserted into the movie to appease the censors or gain the support of the US Navy for filming (the producers managed to secure the Navy’s permission to use two soon-to-be-decommissioned destroyers for scenes taking place aboard USS Caine and for exterior shots). Surely, thought I, no one could possibly believe all the stuff this Greenwald character is spouting, as if Queeg was just a victim of circumstance, let down by his subordinates in his time of need. As if anyone could seriously imagine that “the real author of the Caine mutiny” would be some hapless junior officer who had the misfortunate to be saddled with someone like Queeg as a leader, on whom his life depended, in wartime. That would be ridiculous.
Second Reading: Ensign, USN
I was very much in Ensign Keith’s shoes the next time I considered The Caine Mutiny, serving then as an Ensign aboard a US Navy destroyer myself. Having finally had some taste of Navy life myself, and having been bitten in the ass by my first commanding officer more than a few times on top of that, my attitude towards Keith’s first commanding officer, De Vriess, softened quite a bit. Because while my first CO was no Queeg–I have to at least give him that–he was also no De Vriess (and to be clear, I’d have much preferred De Vriess). On the one hand, he did share De Vriess’ cynicism–and then some. But unlike De Vriess, who was generally calm and collected, if somewhat curt, in dealing with newly-arrived Ensign Keith, my first CO often launched into full-on tirades, both behind the closed doors of the wardroom and in the common areas of the ship. He would for example, get on the 1MC (a ship-wide loud-speaker for any non-Navy types who manage to find this blog) and verbally berate officers for the whole crew to hear. On one occasion, coming upon him unexpectedly at a turn in a passageway, so suddenly that I didn’t quite have time to move aside before we almost bumped chests, he shouted at me “Get the fuck out of my way!” (and, after the CO huffed along past and on his way, a kindly first class petty officer came out of a nearby office, asked me if I was okay, and assured me the Captain shouldn’t speak to me like that–but I was so accustomed to such behavior from our CO that I was actually puzzled by the petty officer’s concern). And whereas De Vriess was capable of offering fair and constructive criticism of Keith and presumably other junior officers under his command, my first CO never once sat me down and provided constructive feedback. Unless, again, yelling obscenities at people in the middle of a passageway (or over the ship’s loudspeaker!) counts as “constructive feedback.”
But still, my first CO was no Queeg. I mean, if nothing else, his rants and rages and tirades were grounded in reality–just prone to being a tad blown out of proportion. He was also a capable enough mariner and tactician (as opposed to Queeg, whose overall incompetence is established early on–and most acutely in the novel).
Beyond developing a deeper respect for De Vriess and maybe coming to appreciate just how terrible Queeg was (by comparison to someone who I could have hoped would be the worst CO I ever served under–would that it had been so) my experiences as an Ensign didn’t much alter my perceptions of The Caine Mutiny‘s central conflict between Queeg and his officers, culminating in what I still considered to be Queeg’s wholly justified and absolutely unavoidable relief in the middle of a typhoon. I mean, the only way it could have been avoided is if he had actually been relieved sooner. Though I suppose I did come to appreciate, just a little, that the junior officers of USS Caine had some shortcomings and did not always act in the most professional manner when it came to Queeg, I still couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that they were in anyway to blame for the so-called “mutiny.”
The Third Reading: An Actual Read
During my second division officer tour, I actually had time to read a book every now and then. Which isn’t to say that being a nuclear engineer aboard an aircraft carrier is easy, only that it was marginally less taxing than trying to qualify as Officer of the Deck and Surface Warfare Officer straight out of college with no specific training from the Navy (the stack of SWOS-in-a-Box CDs I got notwithstanding). By contrast, before reporting to the carrier, I had a full year of training: six months in the classroom and six months of mixed on-the-job training with guided study at an operational prototype reactor where I actually had to stand watch and qualify as an Engineering Officer of the Watch to graduate and go on to join my ship. Turns out, when you give people relevant training before throwing them into the deep end, they’re a lot less likely to drown.
But on the subject of The Caine Mutiny… although the book is longer and differs from the movie in a number of ways (not least of which is a lengthy denouement after the court-martial, in which Keefer, who Greenwald, in his drunken tirade, describes as the real “author of the Caine mutiny,” is exposed as a coward and Keith, a Lieutenant by the end of the novel, gradually rises to become the last commanding officer of USS Caine), the themes are consistent between book and film. Thus, while the book adds, for example, a number of incidents that further highlight Queeg’s toxicity and ineptitude, the end result is just a higher fidelity version of the same overall picture presented in the movie. So too with the other characters. All that to say, the book by itself did not greatly enhance my understanding of the themes or characters, except that it did make clear to me that Greenwald’s alcohol-fueled rebuke of Keefer and the officers of USS Caine after the court-martial was not the work of some overzealous screenplay writer trying to make the Navy or the censors happy: it was, in fact, a faithful reproduction of a nearly-identical scene from the book, right down to the mock toast followed by splashing a drink in Keefer’s face, and Keefer just taking it like a man (but not much of a man to hear Greenwald tell it!) who knows he’s guilty and deserves all the scorn being heaped on him.
The only change in attitude I had to the characters, then, was in my perception of De Vriess who I had, on my previous “read,” come to accept as a decent enough Captain by comparison to my first, relatively toxic (but not quite Queeg-like), Captain. However, by my second division officer tour, I had greater exposure to even better leaders, particularly within Reactor Department, including two Reactor officers who had themselves commanded warships (one a frigate, the other a destroyer) and a number of mid-level leaders who, like my Reactor Officers, managed to be competent and level-headed like De Vriess, but without the casual condescension and feigned indifference De Vriess displayed towards Keith. I learned it was possible to be a good and capable officer and treat subordinates with respect (even when they’re fucking up), not in spite of being a good officer, but because that kind of basic human decency is part of what makes someone a good officer. De Vriess’ biting sarcasm was not only not required: it actually detracted from his effectiveness as a leader and a naval officer. De Vriess could have been all the good things (a level-headed and competent mariner who fundamentally did care about the wellbeing of his subordinates) without also being a dick so much of the time to Ensign Keith who, granted, was a bit of a fuck-up early on (and even more so in the novel) but who also didn’t have the benefit of four years at the Naval Academy plus years of service in the peacetime Navy to help prepare him for the challenges of wartime service.
Number Four: Goodbye, Mister Roberts
My next reevaluation of The Caine Mutiny (and its derivatives) came following my deployment to Iraq. This experience, coming after several years of “unusually arduous sea duty” (the Navy’s official term for it), caused me to empathize, sympathize, and even, to a degree, identify with Queeg.
Spending the better part of one’s twenties out to sea and then topping it off with a tour in a combat zone can take its toll on a man, you know? Had someone put me in command of a ship around that point in my life I probably wouldn’t have done so well. While I had only been in the Navy for five years at the time I deployed to Iraq and was nowhere near commanding a US Navy warship, the same would have been true of Queeg’s character if World War II hadn’t broken out while he was also in his twenties. In fact, Queeg in the novel is almost certainly much younger than his depictions in the 1954 film and later made-for-TV movies. Where Humphrey Bogart, for example, was well into his 50s when he portrayed Queeg in the 1954 film and even Brad Davis (who played Queeg in the 1988 made-for-TV movie The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial) was approaching 40, we can deduce from the novel that Queeg was perhaps 29 upon taking command of USS Caine. This can be readily inferred from an exchange between De Vriess and Queeg that makes explicit Queeg graduated from USNA in 1936 and then assumed command of Caine in 1943. By contrast, the Navy had just barely entrusted me as a temporary Officer-in-Charge (hardly a CO) of a Yard Patrol Craft (not even a minesweeper!) at age 29: by the time of Typhoon Cobra (Halsey’s Typhoon) just over a year later, Queeg would have turned 30, or maybe 31. While I would eventually manage turn 30 (and 31) aboard a minesweeper myself, it was as a mere Department Head–hardly working without a net like Queeg, being in command, in the middle of a war at sea, and with an even less experienced (and increasingly unsympathetic) crew on top of that.
So, to be faithful to the novel, Queeg should look a little less:
…and a little more:
Four years at sea plus a year on the ground in Iraq had such an impression upon that there was even a brief period of time, corresponding to this “fourth read” of mine, when I considered that Greenwald might have been right after all: if only Queeg had been better supported by his wardroom (as I was by my Chiefs and Petty Officers during my department head tour), there might never have been a “mutiny”–he might even have pulled through and become a decent enough officer in time. I mean, it’s comforting to imagine oneself as a sort of Mister Roberts character, being a champion for the common sailor and shielding hapless Ensigns alike from the worst depredations of a tyrannical Commanding Officer. But that shield weighs heavy in time, and even the best officers may be worn down and faulter after years of arduous duty. Why, even Mister Roberts, the nearest JOPA has to a patron saint, needed Victory in Europe and a fortuitous hot mic to snap him out of the depths of despair. Plus, you know, he was a fictional character–and even in my prime, I have to admit I was no Mister Roberts. Not even close.
By the time of my fourth read, I had come to realize that keeping a ship at sea really is a team sport, and everyone involved must be willing to give and rely upon support to be successful. No one can go it alone–not even the most experienced CO, and let alone someone who, like Queeg, was thrust into the Captain’s chair under the most trying conditions imaginable after a mere seven years of service. While I myself never had command, I can say that I got my best support not from my superiors, but from patriotic, hard-working, and empathetic subordinates. Such support was especially critical in my first Department Head tour, which came not long (certainly not long enough) after my tour in Iraq. So to me, on this read, it was hardly surprising that Queeg, if not adequately supported by his wardroom, would sink to the deepest depths of his own character, leading him to act irrationally and to be hyper-sensitive to criticism. And when, after the “Old Yellow Stains” incident, Queeg put himself out there and made himself vulnerable to his wardroom, acknowledging his shortcomings and calling upon his officers for support, it must have been particularly devastating to be rebuffed in the end. While Maryk, as Queeg’s second in command, was at first moved to extend to Queeg the support he desperately needed, Maryk was ultimately dissuaded at the instigation of Keefer, thus making Keefer the “author of the Caine Mutiny” as Greenwald put it.
But you know what? I was borderline insane at the time I came to that conclusion (they did eventually kick me out for having PTSD, after all), so let’s move onto my fifth and final read.
Post-Apocalyptic Teenage Drama: How I Read Now
In the final estimation, I’m back to where I started: Greenwald is full of shit. While I still grant that things might have turned out well enough if only Queeg’s wardroom had given him better support, it’s a dubious proposition at best to try and pin all or even most of the blame for a superior’s personal failings (of which Queeg had so many) on his or her subordinates within a hierarchical organization like the Navy.
First, consider Queeg’s own responsibility: he must surely have recognized that he was not handling the burdens of command well. To the extent a ship’s commanding officer is supposed to bear ultimate responsibility for all matters occurring aboard his or her ship, it would be perverse in the extreme to excuse Queeg of the most basic responsibility of ensuring that he was, himself, fit to perform the duties assigned to him by higher authority. Inasmuch as Greenwald would have us believe that Queeg might just have limped along to finish out the war (or at least the typhoon) if only he’d received the extraordinary support from his wardroom that he needed, this ignores the fact that such efforts should not have been expected or demanded in the first place. If a ship’s commanding officer requires heroic efforts from the wardroom just to keep him from turning into a mad tyrant, then perhaps that individual simply is not fit for command, and even an unfit officer should be capable of recognizing such a shortcoming in himself.
While Queeg’s failure to self-report and seek relief from superiors might be seen as evidence of self-deception or even delusion–perhaps even evidence of mental illness–I think that is a far too charitable a reading of his character in light of the numerous lapses in integrity depicted in the book (many of which found their way into either the 1954 film adaptation or the subsequent television adaptations of the stage play), with the most prominent example being the “Old Yellow Stains” incident. Although the 2023 adaptation of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, in one of many unforced errors, chose to invent some bizarre procedure of marking an underwater mine with a dye marker, in the novel (and its adaptations properly set in WWII) the incident involved escorting landing craft full of Marines to the beach during an opposed amphibious assault. Rather than continue on, under fire, to the arranged line of demarcation, Queeg broke under pressure and abandoned the landing craft to find their way own ashore, lying low to the water amidst breaking waves while approaching a low-lying and featureless beach without much navigation equipment of their own. Queeg’s hasty retreat thus exposed the Marines and the boat crews to greater risk of drifting off course amidst the towering waves, risking an indirect and suboptimal approach to the beach and more time spent under enemy fire as a consequence. During the court-martial, Greenwald insists (unconvincingly) that this cannot have been an act of cowardice, but rather that there must have been some other explanation for it (implicitly, mental illness). But really, as I see it, it’s both: Queeg was obviously disquieted by enemy fire (who wouldn’t be), so he made a conscious decision to minimize the risk to himself at the expense of hundreds of Marines. It’s entirely plausible that some kind of mental health condition, be it PTSD, schizophrenia, or a personality disorder, influenced his decision-making, but that doesn’t make his decision to abandon those Marines to their fate not cowardice. More to the point, Queeg’s steadfast insistence that he acted appropriately even after the crisis abated and he had time to recover his courage indicates a far graver flaw in his character than a mere susceptibility to fear: it represents a lapse in integrity that persists even after the physical danger has passed. Moral cowardice. The man couldn’t even admit he made a mistake, much less a mistake induced by fear.
Various other examples of Queeg’s moral cowardice–most of which occurred without even a whiff of enemy action–include his attempt to cover-up running his ship aground shortly after taking command (depicted in the novel only); ordering his subordinates to lie about steaming over his own tow-line (every adaptation); refusing to even put in the minimal effort to recover the tow after steaming over the tow-line (novel and 1954 film); smuggling alcohol aboard his ship and bypassing customs in the US (all but the 1954 film); coercing a junior officer to pay for the loss of his smuggled alcohol when they were in fact lost due to Queeg’s own incompetence (all but the 1954 film); forcing the crew to go through a time-consuming and dehumanizing strip search for a key that he well knew didn’t exist because he was too ashamed to admit he was wrong and didn’t want to look (even more) foolish in front of his officers, so instead he blackmailed a junior officer to keep a secret (every adaptation); and many other lapses in integrity too numerous to list.
The point is, Queeg shouldn’t get the benefit of a doubt when it comes to whether he realized he was unfit for command: given how obvious it was to his subordinates that he was unfit, and the extent to which he actively endeavored to cover-up his own mistakes–even outright lying to superiors at times–I think the presumption has to be that Queeg knew exactly what he was doing. It’s not that he was incapable of seeing his own shortcomings, it’s that he saw them all too clearly, and then engaged in a series of ham-fisted and foolhardy attempts to keep his superiors from seeing them too. But the real travesty, as I will discuss below, is that his superiors were perfectly willing to let him keep on doing just that–as long as he didn’t trouble them too much.
The Real Author of the Caine Mutiny
In Greenwald’s “spirited” defense of the institutional Navy and all the Regular Navy types who, like Queeg, kept the nation safe before it was “cool” or “hip” to do so (while the junior officers of USS Caine and Greenwald himself were out pursuing more lucrative careers in the civilian world), I can’t help but think of that famous, oft-misquoted line from Hamlet: “The [gentleman] doth protest too much, methinks.” And to be clear, I don’t mean Greenwald, I mean the man behind the typewriter: Herman Wouk.
Now, this isn’t to say that I think Wouk secretly detested the Navy and wished ill upon it, only that I think his protestations, delivered with Greenwald acting as his mouthpiece, might obscure a certain… insecurity on Wouk’s part. A recognition that he was not free from judgment himself.
First, as Wouk makes explicitly clear in a brief introduction to his novel, it must be noted that Wouk was cut from the same cloth and entered the Navy under the same basic circumstances as men like Keefer and Keith: that is, coming from a privileged background, after graduating from an elite school, but joining only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, having previously had his eyes set on a more lucrative career.
Further, as one may readily infer, Wouk, like Keefer (who bears the brunt of Greenwald’s criticism) would go on to leave the Navy and return to civilian life as–wait for it–an author. An author who would, as Greenwald imagined Keefer might, become famous for writing popular fiction based on his brief wartime service. Greenwald further anticipated that Keefer’s novel would cast the institutional Navy in a bad light while making heroes of citizen-sailors like the author. He even predicted that Keefer’s novel would go on to be adapted into a major film, featuring big Hollywood stars not unlike how The Caine Mutiny would in fact be adapted with none other than Humphrey Bogart getting top billing. While Wouk could hardly have known with certainty that his own life would imitate art so perfectly in this regard, I think it’s fair to imagine he might have at least hoped for as much, even if only in his wildest dreams. So, in having Greenwald launch into a self-righteous tirade against the disloyal officers of USS Caine, heaping praise on the pre-war (institutional) Navy and its faithful servants (regular Navy officers like Queeg) alongside equally harsh criticism of mere citizen-sailors like Keefer, Wouk perhaps anticipates (and moves to deflect) some of the criticism that might otherwise have been levied against him as a citizen-sailor who just wrote a whole book about what a train-wreck the Navy could be.
Or, like I said, he doth protest too much. That’s not to say I think Wouk was being insincere or willfully disingenuous when he put such words in Greenwald’s mouth, only that it may have reflected his own position writing about the Navy as a relative outsider and fearing he might be accused of self-aggrandizement if he didn’t throw in a disclaimer, rather than a well-considered and fully disinterested evaluation of the institutional Navy’s strengths and weaknesses.
Because, if not for Greenwald’s staunch defense, one might almost get the idea that the Navy, as an institution, bears much–perhaps even most–of the blame for the setting the stage for the events aboard USS Caine. Mind, this is no mere projection coming from a twenty-first century reader: there is textual support for this notion, and I’m not even referring to the novel’s most quotable line, delivered by Keefer of all people, “The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots.” No, here I refer to the circumstances around Caine‘s return stateside for a new radar (shortly after the tow-line incident). In the film and made-for-TV movies, the connection between the tow-line incident and the subsequent orders to steam all the way to San Diego for a new radar is only implied. In the novel, however, the connection is made explicit in a rare scene that takes the POV of an otherwise minor character: not Keith, not Queeg, not any other member of the Caine‘s crew, not even Greenwald. This scene, depicted only in the novel, plays out from the point of view of Captain Grace, Operations Officer for Commander, Service Squadron Pacific.
Captain Grace, “a fierce-looking old officer with a square red face and heavy white eyebrows,” personally interviews Queeg about the tow-line incident. During the course of Queeg’s brief interview with Grace, it is clear that Grace does not for one minute buy Queeg’s layered excuses and disingenuous attempts to deflect blame onto his predecessor or his subordinates. Oh, sure, Queeg finally says “I accept full responsibility for everything.” But here, as in one Admiral Richardson’s more recent testimony before Congress, it rings hollow. It’s clear enough from context, to both the reader and Grace, that Queeg doesn’t really accept responsibility, he just recognizes it as the sort of pantomime commanding officers in the Navy are expected to engage in when things go wrong on their watch–whether they really believe it’s their fault or not. And this isn’t even Grace’s first scene in the novel: in fact, an earlier scene establishes that the tow-line incident only came about because Queeg ran USS Caine aground just after taking command (a grounding that was caused by his own incompetence, but which he falsely reported as being due to an equipment malfunction), and so was ordered–implicitly by Grace himself–to stick around Hawaii and tow a gunnery target for other ships rather than steam independently to Pago Pago (where Queeg would have been largely unsupervised).
The point is that Grace, a senior officer with the experience to detect Queeg’s willful lies and misrepresentations (and the authority to launch an inquiry into Queeg’s demonstrated lack of suitability for command) chose, after consulting with his Admiral and even going to the trouble of talking with a number of Queeg’s Naval Academy classmates to confirm that Queeg had a reputation for being “[not] very bright,” to take the easy path and pawn Queeg off on someone else, to let him become their problem problem rather than launch an investigation into Queeg’s command and find out what the hell was going on. Or, as Grace put it, “[l]et this Queeg pull his next butch somewhere else.” That is why, in the explicit text of the novel, Caine was sent back to San Diego to get a new radar. As if having the CO of a US Navy warship run his ship aground one day (and lie about why!), steam over his own tow-line the next, then leave the tow itself adrift as a hazard to navigation, and top it all off by waltzing into his operational commander’s office and giving him not just a lie, but a stupid lie, in a piss-poor attempt to duck accountability is something that happens all the time and which may be resolved by simply sending the offending CO and his ship off on their merry way, homeward bound for R&R, a new radar, and a new operational commander to worry over them. I mean… what the actual fuck? How is this not a firing offense, no matter how hard-pressed the Navy might be for officers at the time?
All that to say, there is ample textual support for even the most charitable reader to conclude that the Navy, as represented by Grace and his Admiral (without even getting into how exactly it is that anyone could possibly have thought that Queeg, with such a poor reputation already, should have been given command of a warship in the first place), bears a substantial portion of the blame for allowing the situation aboard Caine to degrade to the point where a couple of citizen-sailors (Keith and Maryk) had to wrestle away command of the ship from an incompetent tyrant in the middle of a typhoon (which, fun fact, was based on a historical incident that was itself caused by a serious error in judgment on the part of one of the Navy’s most senior officer’s: hence the name Halsey’s Typhoon).
Conclusion
Take Greenwald out of it, and The Caine Mutiny is a story about a toxic leader (Queeg) enabled by an institution (the US Navy) that placed him in a position of authority over other men (the officers and crew of USS Caine) and maintained him there in spite of ample cause for concern. Men like Queeg, if left unchecked, are a hazard not only to those serving under them, but also to themselves and the organization that placed them in a position of authority to being with.
But then we do have Greenwald. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that his words are sufficient to support an alternative interpretation of the events aboard USS Caine and arrive at a different conclusion, what exactly is that conclusion supposed to be? I think it’s that we are not fit to judge men like Queeg. Or at least, that we are not fit to find fault with a fundamentally necessary institution like the US Navy for the mere existence of men like Queeg within its ranks. In that respect, Greenwald’s view is not altogether dissimilar from that advanced by Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men:
I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it!
…or even this ostensibly less toxic and supposedly more wholesome exchange between two of the defense attorneys in that same film:
Why do you like them so much?
Because they stand on a wall and the say, “Nothing’s gonna hurt you tonight, not on my watch.”
The mere fact that it is Demi Moore’s Lieutenant Commander Galloway expressing her admiration for the institution and its agents, rather than Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup expressing his scorn for those who would question him as an agent of the very same institution, does not meaningfully distinguish their ultimate conclusions, which are functionally identical. To wit: though we may be citizens in a representative democracy, we must be protected by hard men (a few good men!) who have taken it upon themselves to stand as guardians–as watchers on the wall–in what is arguably a fundamentally undemocratic institution (the US military). It’s not simply that the price of freedom is the blood of patriots: it’s that such patriots may be compelled to act in ways that appear at odds with the sensitivities of the broader society over which they stand watch, but, being human all the same, they may at times err. And that, too–accepting that such well-meaning watchers on the wall may err–is but another side of the same coin: the price we must be prepared to pay for freedom. It means accepting that sometimes shit goes sideways and the end result is that a young man ends up dead in his bed from an act of “training” gone wrong or, to the case at bar, that some batshit crazy Captain abandons literal boatloads of Marines to their fate and then, for good measure, threatens to sink the whole damn ship through his own incompetence. At base, Greenwald, Jessup, and Galloway must surely agree on one thing: we should not, as uninitiated outsiders, be so quick to judge the patriots who have freely sworn to protect us.
Except it’s kind of bullshit–kind of has to be.
Don’t get me wrong: I am a huge fan of not rushing to judge people, especially those who have endured and been shaped by very different life experiences from my own. Indeed, as I hope my progression through my “five reads” will suggest, I am even willing to allow that an individual like Queeg warrants great sympathy. He had a difficult life: four hard years at the Academy (back when the kind of hazing that would put Colonel Jessup to shame was the norm), followed seven years of arduous sea duty that included two years of especially taxing wartime service, and culminating in being thrust into command of an aging warship with a rookie crew of citizen-sailors in the middle of the most intense period of sustained naval conflict of all time.
But it’s still bullshit, this idea Wouk, through Greenwald, has put forward. Because if it’s not bullshit, then Wouk is no more qualified to defend the Navy as an institution than Keefer is to discredit it: it’s a self-defeating argument.
Setting aside Greenwald’s protestations and leaving the rest of Wouk’s novel to stand on its own, what we are left with is an engaging and well-written tale of citizen-sailors thrust into an almost unimaginable conflict, caught between the Imperial Japanese Navy on the one hand and Queeg, buttressed by Navy regulations, on the other: each, in their own way, placing the men of USS Caine in mortal peril, but with Queeg standing as the most immediate and perhaps even gravest peril as the novel progresses. In this sense, Queeg is a perfect metaphor for The Caine Mutiny‘s climactic typhoon, Halsey’s Typhoon, which, in the words of Fleet Admiral Nimitz, “represented a more crippling blow to [3rd] fleet than it might be expected to suffer in anything less than a major action” against the Imperial Japanese Navy. Though Queeg, like Halsey’s Typhoon, may be considered something of an act of God in that the Navy no more gave birth to Queeg than it conjured up the wind and waves that battered Third Fleet (and consigned nearly eight hundred men aboard three destroyers to watery graves), in both cases it was a series of errors in judgment–a failure to heed warnings of impending disaster–that placed the ships and men of Third Fleet in the path of Halsey’s Typhoon, and the men of USS Caine in the path of Queeg. And while Queeg and the events surrounding USS Caine were fictional, Halsey’s Typhoon was most definitely not, and neither is the phenomenon of toxic leaders managing to rise to command US Navy warships even into the present day.
The fact that Admiral Halsey and his staff were mostly well-meaning and faithful servants trying to do their best under trying circumstances does nothing to mitigate the disaster that befell Third Fleet. Likewise, the fact that men like Captain Grace and the institutional Navy that he represented were well-meaning but gravely mistaken in their estimation of Queeg and the hazard he posed in no way mitigated the corrosive effect Queeg had upon the men of USS Caine. And in neither case, in spite of what the likes of Greenwald, Jessup, and Galloway (and the authors and screenwriters that put words in their mouths) might say, the fact that the individuals who made such mistakes were well-meaning volunteers serving a good cause–watchers on the wall, bastions of freedom sworn to defend democracy from its enemies–should not, must not, preclude those of us under the veil of their protection from posing harsh questions when things go wrong. Otherwise, who watches the watchers?
Songs of Babylon 