by Sid Holt
The speed left Coppock nervous. Steering a massive warship through the ocean at night is an exercise in managed chaos. Imagine driving down a four-lane highway without guardrails, traffic stripes or dividers. It is pitch dark. Other vehicles, ranging in size from mopeds to tractor-trailers, zip around you. None of them have brakes that can stop quickly.
The bridge was the Fitzgerald’s navigation center. Perched high above the main deck toward the front of the ship, the officers and crew in the bridge held a 270-degree view of the ocean through a bank of thick windows.
The main steering console occupied the middle of the room, appearing like a cabinet with a small wheel sticking out of it to control the rudder and levers to control the ship’s speed. Other blocky consoles featured radars, navigation screens and communication tools. There were only two seats in the room, one for the executive officer and a second for the captain—a leather chair, raised up on a small platform. Benson, and only Benson, could occupy the seat. The rest of the dozen or so officers and sailors that jammed into the cramped room literally stood watch, on their feet for four- or five-hour shifts.
The members of the team Coppock was leading that night were all certified for their posts. But they were tired and some were green.
Her number two, Lt. Raven Parker, twenty-six, the junior officer of the deck, had helped navigate through the area only once before, and that was in daylight. She, too, had grabbed only an hour of sleep since the start of the day.
Ensign Francis Womack, twenty-five, had worked nineteen hours without a break. He was serving as the conning officer. His job was to relay orders from Coppock to the enlisted sailors who operated the ship’s controls at the helm.
Womack was almost as new as an officer can be. Before the Fitzgerald, he had been working at a restaurant and an industrial supply company. He told people that he was “not doing anything to make anyone proud.” He’d joined the navy to fix that.
He set foot on the Fitzgerald in January, then returned to the United States for additional training. In all, he had spent only about a month’s time at sea. He had only recently passed a test to stand watch. June 16 was the first night he had ever served as conn by himself.
“There’s a lot of things that I didn’t know,” Womack would say later.
Benson, the captain, had spent hours putting the midwatch team together. He had drafted six lineups, his planning hampered by the ship’s broken administrative network. He had tried to balance weaker officers with stronger ones. He regarded Coppock as one of the best officers that he had. She had impressed previous supervisors. One called her the best of his seventeen top officers. “PHENOMENAL LEADER,” he wrote.
“I trusted her,” Benson said.
Benson made clear in his orders what to do if the slightest thing went wrong: “CALL ME.”
Trust is the currency of a navy ship. No high-tech weapons system or advanced technology can replace it. In order for a ship to run well, sailors must have faith in one another. Hence the navy belief that it’s not the steel that makes the ship, it’s the crew.
Coppock did not trust some of her team that night. She was especially worried about Woodley, who was responsible for watching the radars in the combat room. She didn’t think he could be relied on to aggressively search for ships. Personality conflicts are the norm on a ship where crew members spend months in tight quarters. But they could impede the effectiveness of a watch team.
Still, Coppock, naturally self-assured, took the bridge undeterred. This was the Seventh Fleet. That’s just how things were. Its sailors considered themselves the most driven in the navy. The action was constant, the missions important. They prided themselves on what navy investigators called a “can-do” attitude. If your ship sailed with too few sailors, or broken parts, it didn’t matter. You made it work.
Coppock directed the Fitzgerald to head south down the coast of Japan, toward open ocean. She set the speed at 20 knots.
* * *
Earlier in the year, a rash of accidents and near misses had spooked the sailors of the Seventh Fleet. In January, the destroyer USS Antietam had run aground while in Yokosuka’s harbor. Four months later, on May 9, the USS Lake Champlain, a guided-missile cruiser, collided with a South Korean fishing vessel in the Sea of Japan.
The Lake Champlain crash caused Babbitt, Benson’s second-in-command, to issue a bulletin to the ship’s officers. At six feet, five inches tall, with deep-set eyes, Babbitt was hard to ignore. He demanded vigilance from his sailors.
“CALL FOR HELP, USE THE HORSEPOWER TO MOVE, DO NOT COLLIDE,” Babbitt wrote by hand in a note distributed to officers.
His worry almost instantly proved warranted. But his commands weren’t followed.
On May 10, one night after the Lake Champlain’s mishap, a fishing vessel got close to the Fitzgerald while it was steaming off southern Japan. Coppock was serving as officer of the deck. Her conning officer was Eric Uhden. Like Woodley, he was an experienced sailor who served years at sea as an enlisted man before becoming an officer.
Uhden alerted Coppock to the potential danger. At first, she dismissed his concern. But a moment later, Uhden said that Coppock seemed to realize her miscalculation.
She ordered the Fitzgerald to dodge the fishing vessel by turning sharply left. The Fitzgerald missed the fishing boat by a couple hundred yards.
Uhden memorialized the incident in an understated note scribbled in his private journal: “Fishing vessel got close on watch.” But nobody else knew about it. Coppock never told the captain, as she was supposed to do.
The next night, May 11, as the Fitzgerald steamed through the busy Tsushima Strait outside of Sasebo, another young lieutenant junior grade named Stephany Breau was serving as the officer of the deck. At around 11 p.m., Breau called the ship’s then-captain for help. After he returned to his stateroom, Breau maneuvered safely through traffic for 45 minutes. Then she noticed a commercial fishing vessel sail out from behind another ship.
The Fitzgerald’s radar had not displayed the two ships.
“That ship is really close,” Breau said to another officer. The fishing trawler was only 200 to 300 yards away, an extremely close distance for ships at sea.
Breau immediately ordered an emergency stop, directing all engines back full. The Fitzgerald sounded five short blasts from its whistle to warn the approaching vessel of an imminent crash.
Breau had executed a textbook response to avoid collision. Nonetheless, in a matter of three days, the USS Lake Champlain had crashed at sea and the Fitzgerald had back-to-back near misses. The close calls were significant events and should have been opportunities for critical examination.
On the Fitzgerald, that never happened. No senior officer ever heard about the first near miss. Only a handful of senior leaders were briefed on the second. Many junior officers, who might have benefited from a formal review, did not even know what had occurred.
Uhden confronted Babbitt with the ship’s dysfunction.
“Sir, we have a serious problem on the ship,” Uhden said he told the executive officer. “And the only way for things to get better here is for us to have a serious accident or someone to die.”
Babbitt denied that such a conversation had occurred.
One more incident rattled the ship’s officers. This time, Benson was to blame.
That spring, North Korea had stepped up missile tests. In an interview on Fox Business News, President Donald Trump promised to stop them. “We are sending an armada, very powerful,” Trump said.
In May, the aircraft carriers the USS Carl Vinson and the USS Ronald Reagan steamed into the Sea of Japan, the first time two carriers had done so in decades. Benson got orders to join the armada. He would have to abandon the repairs he had planned to make and sail out with a crew that had never trained to sail with a carrier strike group, a complicated operation involving a dozen ships and thousands of sailors.
Benson could have taken the rare step of refusing the order, though he risked being fired
by his superiors. But he believed his crew and his ship could do the job. On June 1, the Fitzgerald joined almost a dozen other warships to sail with the Vinson and Reagan.
The stirring image of steel and gun was just a show to warn Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader. Normally, the ships in a carrier strike group do not cluster during operations—they are spread out over miles of sea. But even a moment intended as a display of navy might almost ended in embarrassment.
During maneuvers, Benson ordered the Fitzgerald to turn slightly to catch up with another ship in the armada. Uhden, who was the conning officer, thought they were getting too close. Benson leaned close and kicked Uhden in the back of the heel. “Make the turn,” he told him. Coppock, also on the bridge, thought they might collide. She later told a friend that she had seen her career flash before her eyes, but could do nothing.
Benson had been giving the orders.
* * *
From the bridge, Coppock could see twelve miles across the ocean to distant lights glimmering in cities along Japan’s coast. The moon had risen, casting a river of light across the Pacific. The temperature was around sixty-five degrees. The waves were cresting one to three feet.
Coppock glanced up at the SPS-73 radar screen in front of the darkened bridge. She noticed a cargo ship approaching the Fitzgerald from about twelve miles away. The radar indicated it would pass behind the Fitzgerald, about 1,500 yards to its stern. She began tracking the vessel but did not pay close attention to it.
Much like the radar in the combat room, the bridge radar was not providing a complete picture. In reality, there were three large cargo ships approaching the Fitzgerald, but the SPS-73 never showed more than two of them at the same time.
It remains unclear why the radar did not show an accurate picture of the ships at sea that night. One explanation is that the three ships were traveling close together. The cargo ship Coppock was tracking was west of the Fitzgerald but parallel to two other ships following roughly the same route. Closest to the Fitzgerald was a Chinese cargo vessel, the Wan Hai 266, slightly smaller than the Crystal. Next was the Crystal, about 1,000 yards past the Wan Hai. Farthest away was the 142,000-ton Maersk Evora, one of the beasts of the ocean at 1,200 feet in length. About two dozen smaller ships, many fishing boats, bobbed around them.
Another possibility is that Coppock may not have ensured that the radar on the bridge was properly adjusted to obtain a finer-grained picture. A postcrash reconstruction showed that Coppock lost sight of one of the ships due to clutter on the “improperly adjusted” SPS-73 screen.
Even without the radar, however, Coppock and the bridge team should have been able to see unaided the lights on the masts of the cargo ship she’d identified along with the two others running parallel to it. All three were headed toward the Fitzgerald—though at times, they would have obstructed one another from view.
A video taken just minutes before the accident, for example, clearly shows the Maersk Evora illuminated from 10,000 yards away. The Crystal also had navigation lights running, and it was less than a few thousands yards away at the same time.
But nobody, it turned out, was standing watch on the starboard side of the ship.
In years past, commanders traditionally posted lookouts on the port and starboard sides of the bridge. The lookouts had one job: search the sea for hazards. But navy cutbacks in personnel prompted Benson and other captains to combine the duties into a single job. “We just don’t have enough bodies, qualified bodies, to have a port and starboard lookout,” said Samuel Williams, a boatswain’s mate first class.
Parker, Coppock’s number two that night, was supposed to walk back and forth between the two sides during the watch, with the rest of the bridge team helping her keep an eye out.
But Parker had walked out onto a small metal deck located off the bridge on the port side of the Fitzgerald just after one a.m. She was there with Womack, trying to fit in some training by helping him develop his seaman’s eye, the ability to estimate distance and bearing by sight. Parker had not received a promotion on a previous ship, after its commanding officer thought she had trouble assessing the risk posed by ships in the surrounding ocean.
Over the next fifteen to twenty minutes, the pair observed five or six ships. It may have been a good training exercise. But it was poor navigation practice. None of the ships on the Fitzgerald’s port side were a threat.
* * *
Coppock had grown up in Willard, Missouri, a town of 5,000 northwest of Springfield. During her sophomore year in high school, she flew to Hawaii with classmates from the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.
There, she toured the floating memorial that sits above the wreck of the USS Arizona, sunk during Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Inside, Coppock stared at a white marble wall etched with the names of the 1,177 sailors who died that day.
Coppock knew she wanted to join the navy.
“I wanted to be part of something larger than myself,” she said.
Coppock graduated from the University of Missouri on a navy scholarship. Her first ship was the USS Ashland, an amphibious landing craft.
Amphibious landing craft are ungainly vessels, built to ferry troops in hangar-like holds and launch helicopters from their broad decks. Their commanders were used to getting less attention than higher profile aircraft carriers and destroyers. Crews tended to be pugnacious and self-sufficient.
The ship’s rough-and-tumble atmosphere added to the challenges facing Coppock. The navy can be a tough place for women: only about a fifth of navy sailors are female, and misogyny remains an occupational hazard.
But the five-foot-four-inch Coppock was used to giving what she got in the Ashland’s wardroom, where the ship’s officers gathered to eat and talk. “You could sit there and scream at each other for hours and it was just to get stuff done. We really didn’t care. It wasn’t personal,” she said. “We’d go out and drink afterwards.”
It was a different story on the Fitzgerald.
Coppock stopped dining with her fellow officers in the Fitzgerald’s wardroom. By long navy tradition, attendance at such meals was considered necessary to forge the esprit de corps needed to run a ship. Not eating with them was akin to snubbing family.
Fellow Fitzgerald sailors noted her absence. To some, Coppock appeared disconnected. Other shipmates went so far as to call her “lazy” or “abrasive and unapproachable.”
Coppock said she stayed away from the officers’ mess because of criticism from fellow junior officers. She blamed their hostility on her singular focus on getting the job done. Mission came first, she said.
“They just kept telling me I was too aggressive, that I needed to … tone myself down,” she said.
On one thing, however, both supporters and detractors agreed on: She was superb at her full-time job. Coppock was the Fitzgerald’s anti–submarine warfare officer. Sub hunting was a shadowy game of cat-and-mouse, played between navy destroyers and potential enemies from China, Russia, or North Korea, each sussing out the other’s capabilities.
Coppock had displayed her skills in the weeks after Benson took command. She and her enlisted assistant, Alexander Vaughan, had stayed up almost forty-eight hours in the successful pursuit of a Chinese submarine off the coast of Japan. The achievement sealed Coppock’s reputation as a hell of a sailor.
It also boosted her self-assurance. She considered herself one of the better officers on the ship.
Arleigh Burke, the admiral who lends his name to the model of ship that the Fitzgerald belonged to, once reflected on what made for the best kinds of officers.
“The difference between a good officer and a poor one,” Burke said, “is about DATE @ "M/d/yyyy" 8/19/2020 seconds.”
* * *
Parker walked across the bridge to check the starboard side of the Fitzgerald. She glanced at a display to check the time. It was one-twenty a.m. As she stepped out onto the bridge wing, she saw lights shining from the bow of an approaching ship off in the distance, abo
ut six miles away. It was the Crystal. Parker alerted Coppock. Coppock told Parker not to worry—she was tracking the ship. She said it would pass 1,500 yards behind the Fitzgerald.
Parker had her doubts. “It doesn’t look like it’s going to cross us behind,” she said. Parker stepped out to the bridge wing to check again. Suddenly, she noticed something strange. A second set of lights glided out from behind the first.
It was the first time that anyone on the Fitzgerald had realized that two ships were steaming toward the Fitzgerald’s starboard bow. The Chinese cargo ship was indeed going to pass behind the Fitzgerald. But the Crystal, which had slightly altered its course, was heading straight for the destroyer.
“We gotta slow down,” Parker told Coppock.
No, Coppock told her again. “We can’t slow down because it’ll make the situation worse.” Coppock worried that slowing down might bring her into the path of the ship that was supposed to pass behind them.
In such situations, Parker, the subordinate, is supposed to express concerns to a superior officer. The navy encourages what it calls a “questioning attitude” supported by “forceful backup.” But Parker did not press her concerns with Coppock about the oncoming ship.
At one-twenty-five a.m., the Fitzgerald was 6,000 yards from the Crystal, 5,000 yards from the Wan Hai 266 and on a collision course with the Maersk Evora, approaching from 14,000 yards away. There was still time for the highly maneuverable Fitzgerald to get out of the way.
But Coppock disobeyed Benson’s standing orders. Rather than call Benson for help, she decided to continue on her own. Coppock didn’t call down to the combat room to ask for help, either.
“I decided to try and handle it,” she said.
At around one-thirty a.m., time had run out. Parker ran inside from the bridge wing, yelling, “They’re coming right at us.”
Coppock looked up and spotted the superstructure of the Crystal through the bridge windows. She stepped out on the starboard wing for a better look and realized she was in trouble. In navy terms, the Fitzgerald was in extremis—in grave danger of catastrophe.