by Sid Holt
The navy inquiries determined that there had been widespread problems with leaders regarding shortfalls in training, manning, and equipment in the Seventh Fleet. The navy fired admirals, captains, and commanders, punished sailors and criminally prosecuted officers for neglecting their duties.
Adm. John Richardson, head of the navy, called the two collisions “avoidable tragedies.” The ships’ commanders and their superiors, he said in a written statement to ProPublica, were responsible for the results.
“The tragedies of USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain reminded us that all commanders, from the unit level to the fleet commander, must constantly assess and manage risks and opportunities in a very complex and dynamic environment,” Richardson said. “But at the end of the day, our commanders make decisions and our sailors execute and there is an outcome—a result of that decision. The commander ‘owns’ that outcome.”
Sidelined during years of land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the navy is now strategically central to containing North Korea’s nuclear threat, China’s expansionist aims, and a newly aggressive Russia.
Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin was commander of the Seventh Fleet at the time of the collisions. A naval aviator who fought in the Balkans and Iraq, he made repeated pleas to his superiors for more men, more ships, more time to train. He was ignored, then fired.
More than eighteen months later, Aucoin believes that the navy has yet to disclose the full story of the disasters. Navy leaders, he said in his first extended interview, have not taken accountability for their role in undermining America’s sea fighting ability.
“I just want the truth to come out,” Aucoin said.
In the end, the Fitzgerald’s crew fought to keep the ship from sinking. They worked in the dark, without power, without steering, without communications.
A young officer scribbled algebraic equations in a notebook to figure out how to right the listing vessel. The crew bailed out the ship with buckets after pumps failed. As the Fitzgerald struggled to return to port, its navigational displays failed and backup batteries ran out. The ship’s navigator used a handheld commercial GPS unit and paper charts to guide the ship home.
At the top of the flooded berthing compartment, just seconds after Tapia’s shout, a hand thrust up through the scuttle opening. It was Jackson Schrimsher, a weapons specialist from Alabama. Vaughan reached down and pulled him up.
Schrimsher had gotten trapped in his top bunk by floating furniture that blocked the aisle. He climbed over to another bunk and jumped down. A wall of water rushed toward him, and a locker toppled onto him. Looking up, he saw the light coming from the open scuttle and fought his way toward it.
Schrimsher had recently become certified as a master helmsman, specially trained to maneuver the ship during complicated operations. With the Fitzgerald in distress, his skills were needed. He raced off for the ship’s bridge, clad only in a drenched T-shirt and shorts heavy with seawater.
Vaughan and Tapia took one last look at each other. It was time to seal the hatch.
Chapter 1. The Commander’s Quarters
“Fuck Your Boots, Captain, Grab My Hand.”
At impact, the Crystal’s prow punched into another sleeping compartment, this one occupied by a single man: Cmdr. Bryce Benson, the forty-year-old captain of the Fitzgerald.
Benson’s cabin lay high above the surface of the ocean, four decks above his sailors in Berthing 2. The Crystal had pierced the Fitzgerald’s hull right at the foot of Benson’s bed. It crushed together the bedroom and office of his stateroom like a wad of tinfoil.
The collision jolted Benson awake. Metal ductwork had fallen on him. He was bleeding from the head. He tried to get up from his bed but could not. He was trapped, buried amid a tangle of steel and wires. He clutched the quilt his wife had sewn him, its blue and white squares forming the image of a warship.
The cabin was cold and dark. He felt air rush past him. With a shock, Benson realized he was staring at the Pacific. The tear in his cabin’s wall had left Benson with a 140-degree view of dark water and dark sky. He could make out lights from the distant shore of Japan.
He suspected the ship had been hit. He could hear the shouts and groans of his sailors.
The captains of navy warships are uniquely accountable in the modern American military. They have “absolute responsibility” for their vessels and face absolute blame when something goes wrong—whether they are asleep or even on board. In the case of a collision, no matter how minor, the consequences are usually severe: The captain is relieved of command.
The outcome is common enough that captains joke with the young officers steering their ships. “In case anything goes wrong, call me so that I can see the end of my career.”
Benson was determined not to be that captain. Just twenty hours earlier, he had set sail from the Fitzgerald’s home port in Yokosuka, Japan, after receiving last-minute orders to head for the South China Sea. Benson had ordered all sailors to report to the Fitzgerald at six a.m. to get an early start so he could squeeze in some training.
The Fitzgerald didn’t wrap up the long day of drills until eleven p.m. The ship was moving through a strait between Japan’s Izu Peninsula and Oshima Island. It was roughly twenty miles wide and filled with scores of cargo vessels and fishing boats streaming into and out of Tokyo.
Exhausted, Benson made a change to the night orders to guide the sailors who would pilot the Fitzgerald during the dark early morning hours. Normally, Benson directed the officer of the deck to call him if the ship deviated from its planned course by more than 500 yards to avoid traffic. But this night, Benson doubled the number to 1,000 yards, giving the officer more room to maneuver without having to wake him.
At eleven-thirty p.m., Benson left the bridge to turn in for the night. Captains often insist on remaining on the bridge when maneuvering through traffic at night. Or they sleep in a special cabin on the bridge. They want to monitor their officers closely during less-than-ideal sailing conditions.
Benson judged he was suffering the effects of “fatigue and sleep deprivation.” He needed to rest. He was concerned about the secret part of his mission. The Fitzgerald was going to sail through contested waters off China, which could result in confrontations with Chinese warships.
But Benson’s decisions set up a risky situation: a relatively junior crew run ragged by a long day, loosened restrictions on the officers steering the vessel, and a captain not on the bridge.
Now, Benson realized that his worst nightmare had happened. His ship was in danger. And so was the crew. He was wet, chilled, and slipping into shock. Benson reached for the phone by his bed and stopped. His brain had failed him. He couldn’t remember the four digits he’d called countless times to reach the bridge.
He fought through the confusion until the numbers came to him at last. He punched the keypad and hoped for an answer from above.
* * *
Benson and his sailors belonged to the Seventh Fleet, which won fame during the Second World War as “MacArthur’s Navy,” battling across the Pacific under the direction of the American general to retake the Philippines.
Its modern incarnation is based in Yokosuka—the navy’s largest overseas installation. The historic base lies at the mouth of Tokyo Bay, near where Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived with gunboats in 1853 to force the isolated island nation to trade with the United States. The Seventh Fleet encompasses about 20,000 sailors and some 70 ships and submarines. Its commander is responsible for an area with thirty-six countries and half the world’s population.
The Seventh Fleet is one of the most important strategic commands in the military, and its sailors and ships fight an often shadowy battle against some of America’s greatest geopolitical threats: China, North Korea, and Russia.
The fleet’s eight destroyers are key to this fight. Tough, scrappy warships, they are designed to withstand enormous damage and return the same. In the Battle off Samar in the Philippines in 1944, one of history’s greatest naval
clashes, seven American destroyers, escorts, and aircraft carrier planes managed to fend off a flotilla of twenty-three Japanese warships, including four battleships.
Some Seventh Fleet destroyers, including the Fitzgerald, play an especially important role. They can track and shoot down ballistic missiles, making them almost unique in the nation’s armed forces. No other missile defense can deploy as quickly or cover as wide an area. The system is far from perfect—it frequently misses targets during training exercises. But the half-dozen ballistic missile defense destroyers in the Seventh Fleet are the United States’ first line of defense against a North Korean nuclear attack.
From his early days in the navy, Benson was determined to helm one of these frontline warships.
Benson dedicated himself to a career as a surface warfare officer. SWOs, as they are known, are the backbone of the navy’s leadership—front-line warriors noted for their extraordinary commitment to success, but also for a competitive, sometimes backbiting culture. “SWOs eat their own” is a common navy refrain.
At every stage, he impressed his superior officers. Several of his commanders believed he would make admiral. “Make no mistake, THIS GUY IS GOOD,” wrote one officer.
The first ship he captained was the USS Guardian, an aging minesweeper. It was made mostly of wood and was in constant need of repair. He learned to get material any way he could: scavenging equipment, pestering supply clerks and getting his machinists to make custom fittings. Under his watch, the Guardian received the highest rating in its class for combat readiness. “It is obvious he is an absolute ALL-STAR surface warrior,” one superior wrote, “and the exact type of leader we need in COMMAND.”
At five feet, ten inches and 160 pounds, Benson was not physically imposing and had a baby face that emphasized his youth. But he could turn fierce when confronted with a screw-up, fixing a backsliding sailor with a piercing stare, followed by a pointed and personal lesson.
His crew thought highly of him even though, or maybe because, he was tough. They liked how he’d walk the decks to stop and chat with sailors. He loved talking about football, especially his beloved Packers. He drilled his sailors on safety—including evacuation of the ship’s sleeping quarters.
“He was about getting things done. He didn’t accept a lot of excuses,” Travius Caldwell, one of the ship’s chief petty officers, said. “He leads hard.”
* * *
On the Fitzgerald’s bridge, the jangle of the phone next to Benson’s empty captain’s chair pierced the chaos. Carlos Clark snatched up the receiver. It was Benson. His voice was shaky and uncertain. What had happened to his ship? He needed to get to the bridge, he said, but he couldn’t. Clark, an enlisted sailor in charge of navigation, had never before heard his captain sound scared.
“I’m trapped,” Benson told him.
Clark grabbed a sledgehammer, a couple of other sailors, and raced to the captain’s room, two decks below. One of the men was Christopher Perez, the Fitzgerald’s senior chief petty officer for the ship’s missile and gun systems. Decisive, sometimes headstrong, Perez served as a crucial link between the officers and the enlisted crew in weapons.
Outside Benson’s cabin, the rescue party confronted the first obstacle: The captain’s door, three-eighths-of-an-inch-thick metal, was locked shut. Chief Petty Officer Jared Ogilvie picked up the sledgehammer.
“Get the fuck back,” he shouted.
Bald and broad-shouldered, Ogilvie cracked thirty to fifty blows at the door. Nothing. Next in line was Clark. Then came Ensign Joseph White—six feet, two inches, a former offensive lineman for the Bethune-Cookman Wildcats. He split open his hand trying to bash in the door. Two more chief petty officers took shots.
Benson’s door bent only slightly.
From his bed, mangled steel just inches from this head, Benson could hear the banging. He was bleeding and soaked from a water pipe that had broken above him and could feel his body temperature dropping.
Trying to calm himself, the voice of his seventh-grade science teacher popped into his head: “Whenever you’re in a sense of panic, just try to slow down because your brain is trying to sort through all the files and it’s going too fast.”
Clark rushed back to the bridge, where he kept a thirty-five-pound kettlebell for exercise. Swinging it high over his head, he smashed it against the door. Everyone ducked. The door cracked.
Perez stepped forward to finish the job. He grabbed White in a bear hug, and the two heaved their combined bulk against the door, pushing it back enough to reveal the captain’s stateroom.
At first, the members of the rescue party thought they were looking at the back wall of Benson’s cabin, at what appeared to be a light bulb hanging down and swinging wildly. Then, they realized that they were staring through a hole at the ocean. The light was the Crystal, hundreds of yards away, steaming away from the crash.
The cabin looked like a junkyard, the captain’s desk pushed against the door, cold water flowing like a waterfall. The room had been compressed and shifted back twenty feet from its original position.
The men could not see Benson because of the dark and the detritus. But they could hear his pleas for help.
“We’re coming for you,” Ogilvie said. “Just keep talking, keep talking.”
* * *
Benson had taken command of the Fitzgerald just a month earlier, on May 13, 2017, after a brief ceremony on deck during a stop at a navy port in Sasebo in southern Japan. He’d made a few remarks then issued his commander’s philosophy to the crew: A simple acrostic—FITZ—meant to inspire the sailors: “Fighting, Integrity, Toughness, Zeal.”
Benson knew intimately the precarious state of his ship and its sailors. He had served as the ship’s second-in-command for a year and a half before taking charge from the outgoing captain, Cmdr. Robert Shu.
Sailors welcomed the change of command. Some felt that Shu had become too hands-off after three years in command. He “seemed indecisive, confused about what he wants,” one lieutenant later told investigators. Benson “was a huge positive turn. He gave us focused, clear guidance.” Naval investigators blamed Shu for creating a “culture of complacency” and “longstanding weaknesses” in training and tackling equipment problems that Benson would have to fix.
Benson also worried about the ship’s physical state. The ship had recently spent eight months in Yokosuka’s repair yards, where workers installed a new defensive system, overhauled its turbine shafts, and painted it a new coat of navy gray. But hundreds of repairs, major and minor, remained to be done.
Then there was the crew. In those eight months, nearly 40 percent of the Fitzgerald’s crew had turned over. The navy replaced them with younger, less-seasoned sailors and officers, leaving the Fitzgerald with the highest percentage of new crew members of any destroyer in the fleet. But naval commanders had skimped even further, cutting into the number of sailors Benson needed to keep the ship running smoothly. The Fitzgerald had around 270 people total—short of the 303 sailors called for by the navy.
Key positions were vacant, despite repeated requests from the Fitzgerald to navy higher-ups. The senior enlisted quartermaster position—charged with training inexperienced sailors to steer the ship—had gone unfilled for more than two years. The technician in charge of the ship’s radar was on medical leave, with no replacement. The personnel shortages made it difficult to post watches on both the starboard and port sides of the ship, a once-common navy practice.
When the ship set sail in February 2017, it was supposed to be for a short training mission for its green crew. Instead, the navy never allowed the Fitzgerald to return to Yokosuka. North Korea was launching missiles on a regular basis. China was aggressively sending warships to pursue its territorial claims to disputed islands off its coast. Seventh Fleet commanders deployed the Fitzgerald like a pinch hitter, repeatedly assigning it new missions to complete.
Lt. Cmdr. Ritarsha Furqan, the ship’s combat officer, worried that the constant pace was not provid
ing enough time for necessary training and repairs.
“We’d find a part, find a body, make do, and get underway,” Furqan later testified in a legal proceeding. “Sometimes it felt like it was unsafe or wrong.”
In March, Furqan confronted Shu: “We are not ready,” she told him. Shu, she testified, told her that he had already delivered that message to superiors. The missions would continue.
Benson’s first test of leadership was improving the ship’s state of readiness. In the months at sea after dry dock, the twenty-two-year-old destroyer deteriorated as its regular maintenance was repeatedly pushed back. Benson spent his first week in command as though he were again captain of an aging minesweeper, trying to tackle hundreds of repairs and begging technicians to fly over from the United States for help.
In the midst of the frenzied training and repairs, the ship’s critical e-mail system collapsed. Neither classified nor unclassified material could be sent. Officers were forced to set up Gmail addresses to continue working.
By then, Benson was convinced that the shortage of sailors had become critical. Right before Benson assumed command, Shu had promised leaves to more than a dozen weary crew members. One sailor planned to return to Yokosuka to see his newborn for the first time. Another wanted to attend her mother’s wedding. A third asked to go home to visit his mother, who was dying.
Benson called the sailors into his office, one by one. The Fitzgerald needed to be ready for war with North Korea. There were simply not enough crew members to replace them. He canceled all leaves.
“I need you. The ship needs you,” Benson explained to each sailor individually.
Sailors started referring to the day as “Bloody Tuesday.” Some sailors left Benson’s rooms in tears. Another could barely bring herself to look at the captain for a week. One of the affected sailors was Perez. Benson told him that he could not afford to let him go.