Tag Archives: Navy

On Bertolt Brecht’s “The Interrogation of the Good”

The firing squads are purely aspirational, I assure you. Did I say aspirational? I meant metaphorical.

Five Reads of The Caine Mutiny

Queeg, as Captain of USS Caine, is a perfect metaphor for The Caine Mutiny’s climactic typhoon, Halsey’s Typhoon. 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 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.

Review: The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023)

…for some reason, the director of this latest derivative of Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny” decided to rip the narrative from its critically important historical setting, copy/pasted it into a contemporary setting with only slipshod and superficial changes to dialogue, and filmed what is otherwise a shot-for-shot remake of an earlier–superior–adaptation of Wouk’s work.

The Military’s Free Expression Problem

Trigger Warning: this post is calculated to offend racists, misogynists, transphobes, homophobes, and all you other bigots out there. So don’t read it if you fit into one of those categories.

Navy Officer Accessions, SARBs, and the Nuke Draft

USNA Service Assignment Review Boards I will preface this by noting that my knowledge is dated. As of posting, it has been nearly ten years since I left my job in USNA’s Career Information and Officer Accessions Department (I guess they’re calling it Officer Accessions & Talent Optimization now). It was a small department, consistingContinue reading “Navy Officer Accessions, SARBs, and the Nuke Draft”