The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

by Sid Holt

  “You’re going to be on watch, and you might save my life,” he told his senior chief. “You might save my life.”

  * * *

  Perez and three other sailors barely paused to consider the dangers. Loose electrical cables dangled from the ceiling. Water spewed from a broken pipe.

  Their biggest concern was the massive tear in the cabin wall. They thought Benson was in danger of falling into the ocean. The four held on to one another’s belts as they crept forward in the dark, following the captain’s voice.

  Caldwell found Benson lying in his bunk. Showers of sparks from the cables fell like rain between them.

  “Captain,” Caldwell said. “Grab my hand.”

  “I can’t get into my boots,” Benson told him.

  “Fuck your boots, captain,” Caldwell said. “Grab my hand.”

  The two men locked arms as the black waters of the Pacific streamed past. The chain of men pulled back, maneuvering Benson out of his bunk and over his desk to the corridor in front of the cabin.

  Benson was soaking wet, barefoot, and wearing only a long-sleeved T-shirt and exercise shorts. There was blood streaming down his face. He grabbed the ladder and began climbing.

  Sixteen minutes after the collision, at 1:46 a.m., Benson staggered onto the bridge. Adrenaline, fear and anger shot through him. The ship was listing, wheeling in the dark uncontrolled. The electricity was out. The screens were off. Only emergency lanterns and moonlight illuminated the bridge.

  Benson found the officer who had been in charge of the ship sobbing.

  “Captain, I fucked up,” she told him.

  The bridge was in chaos. Both officers and enlisted crew were stunned. Flashlights and cell-phone lights danced in the dark, revealing blank, open faces. For sailors used to the constant thrum of a ship moving through water, it was eerily hushed.

  Benson strode to his captain’s chair. He needed to rescue the ship. But the instant he sat, he began to slide out. His forearms curled involuntarily toward his body, as though he were lifting an invisible barbell. His hands bent at the wrists and folded down and away from his body.

  Ogilvie and White laid him on the floor of the bridge. Benson began to shiver uncontrollably. Ogilvie thought the captain was suffering from hypothermia. He told White to strip off his shirt and lay on Benson to warm him up.

  White balked.

  “Right goddamn now,” Ogilvie said. It was the second time in twenty minutes that a lower ranking sailor had issued an expletive-laced order to a superior officer.

  White lay chest to chest with Benson to keep him warm while Ogilvie slapped him or rubbed his sternum hard with his knuckles to keep Benson awake. They put boots on his feet.

  The captain had suffered a traumatic brain injury. He drifted in and out of consciousness, his lip occasionally quivering before he started crying.

  “My brain’s not working the way it’s supposed to work right now, I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” he said at one point.

  A senior officer told White to take Benson to the sea cabin, a small room with a bed just behind the bridge. “The crew can’t see him like this,” he said.

  In the confines of the sea cabin, Benson would bark orders or ask about the ship’s status. “What are the seas?” he’d ask before passing out again. He started calling his sailors by their first names—something he had never done before. At one point, he noticed a barefoot cafeteria worker named Freddy Peña. “Freddy,” Benson said, “Get your boots on.”

  The young culinary specialist turned to the ranking officer standing nearby. Benson wasn’t going anywhere. “Sir, can I wear Captain Benson’s boots?”

  It was an astonishing question in the strict hierarchy of a navy ship, in which the captain reigns supreme and officers live on top both figuratively and literally. When an enlisted cafeteria worker bends over the captain of the ship and asks to claim his boots, it is a sign that the rigid structure of life at sea was being undone by the demands of survival.

  The officer looked at the cook. Could he have the captain’s boots?

  “Absolutely,” the officer said.

  The officer was the ship’s second in command, Cmdr. Sean Babbitt. Tall, gaunt, he had joined the Fitzgerald only months before. He told Benson the ship was flooding. The Fitzgerald was now at war, the enemy the sea.

  Benson realized he was no longer in command of himself, nor of his ship. He told Babbitt: “Sean, fight the ship.”

  Chapter 2. The Combat Room

  “I Got a Ship”

  Lt. Natalie Combs was already nearing exhaustion when she reported to the combat information center for her shift the night of the crash. Like many sailors on board, Combs had been up before sunrise.

  Benson had appointed Combs as the tactical action officer for the watch. That made her responsible for the operation of the Fitzgerald’s combat information center—the warship’s fighting heart.

  The room stretches almost the width of the ship on the main deck and is filled with rows of long desks and dozens of screens. It looks like a combination lecture hall and sports bar—except that it is illuminated by pale blue light, thought to calm sailors charged with the launch of its deadly instruments. “The House of Blue Light,” some in the navy called it.

  All the ship’s major weapons systems can be fired from the center—the missiles, torpedoes, the five-inch gun. The ship’s multiple sensors pour in data. Radar screens can track planes, ships, and submarines from scores of miles away. Real-time information flows from an infrared camera and navigational, weather, and geographic equipment.

  On the Fitzgerald, the combat room also contained a laptop displaying information from the Automatic Identification System. The AIS is a commercial system used worldwide to identify ships by their name, location, and navigational path. That made the laptop an important link in the array of equipment designed to alert the Fitzgerald to nearby dangers. The Fitzgerald didn’t broadcast its position for security reasons. But the AIS allowed it to see civilian vessels.

  The high-tech combat center, however, was like so much else about the Fitzgerald—less than it seemed.

  As the ship sailed through the strait, an operations specialist named Matthew Stawecki sat in front of a radar known as the SPS-67, one of three radar systems on the Fitzgerald, and the primary radar in use in the combat room. He was charged with helping keep track of ship traffic around the destroyer. To track a ship, a radar operator must “hook” it—or direct an automated system to lock on the target and display its projected path.

  The radar was supposed to automatically follow the hooked tracks on the screen. But Fitzgerald sailors had been unable to make the feature work.

  To follow the hooked tracks, Stawecki had to repeatedly press a button that refreshed the display on his screen. The workaround made Stawecki look like he was sending a frantic message in Morse code. He would hit the button more than 1,000 times in an hour to keep the images of nearby ships updated. Just before the collision, Stawecki’s screen showed five ships around the Fitzgerald, none of them close by, none of them threats, and none of them requiring reporting to the captain.

  The SPS-67 had another problem: radars must be tuned to obtain the clearest images. On the Fitzgerald, technicians had covered a button to tune the radar with masking tape because it was broken. From his post, Stawecki could not tune the radar. So the only other thing he saw were false returns—so-called clutter that could result from the radar hitting waves, flocks of birds, or any other obstacle at sea. Stawecki would later testify that he saw no ships threatening the Fitzgerald in the crucial half-hour before the collision.

  “There was a lot of clutter; I couldn’t see a lot,” said Stawecki, who had not rested during the day. He could remember tracking only a few contacts, all of them far away. “I can’t remember exactly how far, but they were nowhere near us pretty much and, I believe, they were going the opposite direction.”

  * * *

  The Fitzgerald belongs to the Arleigh Burke
class of destroyers, named after the admiral who helped win the Second World War and led the navy during the Eisenhower years. It had beautiful lines—a steeply curving prow, four swept-back smokestacks, a foredeck with a powerful five-inch gun, and a flat aft deck for helicopter landings.

  The Fitzgerald is about as long as the Washington Monument, and wider than a four-lane interstate highway, with a main mast soaring 152 feet high above the deck. The four gas turbine engines produce more than 100,000 horsepower, capable of driving it at speeds of greater than 30 knots. That speed—more than 34 miles per hour—placed the Fitzgerald among the fastest warships in the world.

  Sleek, fast, strategically critical, the Fitzgerald could often seem closer to a wreck.

  Due to their heavy use, destroyers in the Seventh Fleet were in constant need of repair. On the Fitzgerald, the list of maintenance jobs ran into the hundreds. Most of them were minor: a request for new coolant for a refrigeration unit, another for a certain type of washer.

  But a dozen or so were considered more serious. They included problems with the ship’s primary navigation system. It was the oldest such system among destroyers based in Japan. It was running on Windows 2000, even though other ships had been upgraded. It could not display information from the AIS.

  The broken e-mail system had a “major impact” on the ship’s day-to-day operations. Microsoft Outlook did not work. Nor could commanders communicate over a classified e-mail system. The ship’s entire network was suffering. Officers could not access sailors’ work profiles, order parts, or even keep track of new repair requests.

  Technicians were constantly fixing the SPS-73, the other main navigational radar on the Fitzgerald. Sometimes, the radar would show the destroyer heading the wrong way. At other times, it simply locked up and would have to be shut down. The SPS-73’s antenna was nearing the end of its life, and had been scheduled for replacement in April. But the maintenance had been delayed when the Fitzgerald was assigned to patrol North Korea.

  A third radar, used for warfare, was slow to acquire targets, but technicians had installed a temporary fix that became permanent. “Problem known since 2012. Declared hopeless,” read notes attached to the repair report.

  Other equipment had been written off, too. The so-called Bright Bridge console was supposed to help the bridge crew by sharing information from the combat room. The console had been scavenged for spare parts, leaving the station unmanned.

  When malfunctions occurred, it could take months to fix them. The Fitzgerald skipped or shortened four planned maintenance periods during the spring of 2017—due to the navy constantly issuing orders for new missions.

  Almost two weeks before the collision, as the Fitzgerald approached its home port of Yokosuka, an engineer accidentally caused a small fire in one of the ship’s switchboards. The Fitzgerald went dark, dead in the water.

  The next day, the destroyer limped into Yokosuka harbor. For the sailors aboard, it was the first time home in four months. They did what they could not while on board: They hung out with family, took hot showers alone, and slammed down drinks at the Honch, the row of bars outside base. For Benson and his officers, it was another long week attacking the Fitzgerald’s long list of repairs and finding the right sailors to do the ship’s many tasks.

  Among its most serious shortcomings, the Fitzgerald lacked certification for providing reliable missile defense. In the best of circumstances, the Fitzgerald had a narrow window of time to take out a ballistic missile. It could target an outgoing missile only before it got too high in the atmosphere. But one officer fretted that a radar operator—reputed to be the best on the ship—was unable to locate and track missiles in the allotted time.

  * * *

  As the watch progressed into the dark early hours of June 17, Combs did not see much to worry her. All the screens in the combat room showed a quiet night on the seas. The big monitors displaying the ships surrounding the Fitzgerald showed none closer than 6,000 yards. An infrared camera operator saw maybe twenty to thirty vessels, including small fishing boats, but none a cause for worry. Combs, who had been through the area a number of times, judged the traffic a “three out of ten.”

  The number two on the midwatch was Lt. Irian Woodley, forty-two, the surface warfare coordinator. Woodley was what the navy called a mustang—an enlisted sailor who had risen to become a commissioned officer. An experienced sailor, Woodley evoked a mixed reaction. One senior officer thought he was one of the best watch standers on the ship; other sailors thought he was the worst.

  Woodley shared Combs’s opinion. He saw what his assistant, Stawecki, saw as he tapped away at his radar station: nothing near or dangerous.

  “It appeared that we were pretty much in, you know, like in open water,” he said.

  Rainford A. Graham, an operations specialist on duty in the combat room, had also seen nothing on the radar. “You trust what’s in the console,” he said.

  Graham’s faith may have been misplaced. Even if the radars had been working properly, it’s not clear the Fitzgerald’s sailors knew how to use them. One junior officer had never been trained on how to use the radars on the Fitzgerald, describing herself as “not highly confident” in their use. Technicians complained of being called to fix radar problems that were actually the result of operator errors. Radars are tricky instruments that need constant adjustments depending on weather and distance.

  Aside from radar, however, the Fitzgerald had other systems in place to detect oncoming vessels. Among them was the simple act of talking.

  One of Combs’s most important responsibilities was communicating with her counterparts on the bridge. She was a backup set of eyes and ears, making sure that officers on the bridge knew about surrounding ship traffic detected in the combat room. Even the slowest shift was supposed to be punctuated with check-ins. “Why are we not seeing more ships?” is one question a tactical action officer might ask the bridge. Constant communication was needed to ensure that no dangers went overlooked.

  Combs wasn’t the best person for that task, in the eyes of some officers on board.

  * * *

  Combs had grown up in a navy family—her father was a retired admiral who had been one of the navy’s first black senior officers. During the Second World War, her grandfather belonged to the Montford Point Marines, the Corps’ first black service members.

  After nine years in the navy, most of it in Japan, Combs joined the Fitzgerald just as it prepared to leave dry dock. Her primary job was as the operations officer, or ops, a notoriously busy position that made her responsible for a team of officers and sailors dedicated to intelligence, scheduling, and planning.

  When she arrived, she had to figure out her new job on her own: “There was no turnover process,” she said. “I was essentially just familiarizing myself with the ship as best as I could.”

  Benson and others had worked closely with Combs. Some officers considered her introverted, not the best characteristic for a tactical action officer responsible for communicating with the bridge.

  In the thirty minutes before the crash from one to one-thirty a.m., Combs never once called the bridge to apprise its officers of the ship’s surroundings—or even to question the odd lack of nearby ships in the crowded corridor. Nor did anybody from the bridge call down.

  The long silence violated orders for constant communication between the two stations, even on a night that seemed slow.

  “I did not see any contact that caused me alarm in regard to its distance for me,” Combs said.

  * * *

  Although the Fitzgerald radars did not show them, more than two dozen ships surrounded the destroyer, all close enough to track. Three of them, large vessels off the starboard bow, posed a grave danger to the warship. They were closing in. Quickly.

  But the ships didn’t appear on the combat room’s key radar, the SPS-67, because neither Combs nor Woodley nor anyone else realized that it had been set to a mode designed to scan the seas at a greater distance. With
the SPS-67 button taped over, only specialized technicians could change the tuning from another part of the ship.

  The lack of ships on the radar screen created such a false sense of security that Woodley felt comfortable asking Combs permission to leave his station for a bathroom break, which is rare for a shift in the combat room. When he returned at one-twenty a.m., he glanced at his screens. Nothing to concern him.

  “I didn’t get any radar, I didn’t pick up anything on the Sixty-Seven,” Woodley said.

  Then, at 1:29 a.m., one minute before the collision, Woodley looked up at the laptop with the Automatic Identification System. He noticed a “pop-up”—a ship that he had not seen before. It appeared very close.

  Woodley turned to Ashton Cato, a weapons specialist assigned to midwatch. Cato operated a camera with thermal imaging that could see miles away. On some nights, he would watch the crew on faraway ship decks lighting up cigarettes.

  Woodley ordered Cato to point the camera in the direction of the approaching ship. As Cato moved the camera, the screen suddenly filled with the image of a fully loaded cargo ship, lit with white lights like a Christmas tree. It was headed straight at the Fitzgerald, a few hundred yards distant.

  Cato only managed to get out a few words.

  “I got a ship.”

  Chapter 3. The Bridge

  “The Only Way for Things to Get Better Here Is for Us to Have a Serious Accident or Someone to Die.”

  Sarah Coppock, lieutenant junior grade, was the officer of the deck, responsible for the safety and navigation of the ship while Benson slept.

  She’d started her day almost twenty-two hours before and had managed to rest for one hour before taking over on the bridge. She had navigated this route out of Tokyo only once, in daylight. Despite that, Benson, before going to bed, had ordered her to steam ahead at 20 knots.