In the old days, having a superior officer pull for you was called having a “rabbi.” The USS Winston Churchill had a different kind of rabbi altogether in the lead up to Operation Iraqi Freedom:
The man known as the “combat rabbi” aboard the Churchill found the environment aboard the ship to be “weird, absolutely weird.” (CAPT Holly) Graf would talk to some of her officers but not to others. She would show up at the daily morning intelligence briefing in apparel Kaprow had never seen on a Navy warship before. “She’d be wearing black slippers,” he says, “with one fuzzy ball on each one.” Then there were the tirades. “She would argue with the briefers, belittling them,” Kaprow says. “Just absolute vile stuff that I had never heard from a C.O. before.”
After about 10 days aboard the Churchill, concerned about poor morale on the eve of war, Kaprow visited Graf in her stateroom. “I told her, `I’m getting some vibes — you’re a nice lady and you have a hard job’ — I’m telling her some of the junior officers are concerned and are really upset,” Kaprow recalls. “I’m giving her the spiel and she just goes bonkers and cuts me off. She said she didn’t want to talk about it.”
For the rest of his time aboard, they didn’t speak to each other.
He did speak to Graf’s DESRON commander after transferring to the TR.
Nothing much came of it.
It has to be bad, when the Chaplin has nothing good to say about you.
It took seven years for Navy management to recognize she had problems? Has any word been published regarding her XO tour? I’ll bet that was no cakewalk, either.
With all these accusations of cruelty flooding the media, can there be any other explanation except that CAPT Graf was a registered Republican and Bush supporter?
You forgot the Tea Party part…
And the Minute Man vigilante stuff too.
Surely I will incur the wrath of some women, but during my time in the military I’ve noticed something. There are plent of rote incompetents both male and female. I would say it’s equally distributed. I will leave alone the issues of sexual relations and pregnancy.
But I have also noticed sometimes consistently different ways in which men and women behave when they are poor officers/leaders. The defining characteristic of poor women leaders has been in my anectdotal experience their flat refusal to even acknowledge sometimes nearly half the command, to the point of ignoring superiors they pass in the halls even when the superior gives them the greeting of the day. They won’t acknowledge some others unless directly talked to, and most of those eventually just stop trying to even talk to them. They let their personal flippant attitudes override their professional obligation to engage with and tap into the resources of sometimes the best members under their cognizance, even if they don’t like them. There are different ways male officers can screw it all away, but I have never seen that particular behavoir in one of them and have seen it quite a few times in women.
Looks like the Rabbi was trying to deal with the Devil and the Devil would have none of it….
She was likely a quota hire, having been told that all her life that the system needed to make things right due to all the bad white males who had ruined our country and oppressed her….
I bet she’ll get invited to be on OPRAH & THE VIEW –
“On today’s OPRAH, we will speak with Capt. Holly Graf – Our topic, How She was railroaded off her ship by BAD MEN and why we hate them….”
Hardly a quota hire, SK1. Here’s her FO sister: http://www.navy.mil/navydata/bios/navybio.asp?bioID=528
Wow. Someone tell me if I’m reading this right, her first TWO tours (a base in Naples and a class officer tour at OCS) were SHORE tours? In today’s world your first tour is sea, no ifs ands or butts about it. And if the detailer gives you OCS class officer or ROTC class officer after that tour it’s the Navy’s way of saying thanks for playing but here’s the door out.
“your first tour is sea”: Not quite true, even if stash duty ain’t what it was. Especially not true for, say, all the YNs straight from A school to flag offices or the Pentagon.
Butts? Where is you overwrought male brain residing these days?
What sea tours were available to her in 1981? Not many.
Dare I click on that link? I mean, it might have That Picture of Captain Graf on it. Y’all have seen the effect looking at that face has on me.
Not nearly as scary. You can see a hint, though.
Black slippers with fuzzy balls on them? Are you kidding me! On the feet of the CO of a US Navy Destroyer! Arleigh Burke is spinning in his grave.
I guess you can do what you want when you’re the CO, but I think I’d find another way of expressing my individuality. But since my feet are size 15C, I might not be able to find black slippers—much less ones with “fuzzy balls”.
I’ll give her a pass on that one. The captain of HMNZS New Zealand wore a grass skirt into battle. It being a gift from the Maori.
More than one battle it appears: (from wiki)
“During the battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland the captain of HMS New Zealand, J.F.E. (Jimmy) Green, wore a Māori grass skirt (piupiu) over his uniform. This skirt had been presented to the ship’s former captain, Lionel Halsey during the tour of New Zealand to ward off evil; when Halsey relinquished command to Green he passed the skirt on, which no doubt helped to enhance her reputation as a lucky ship.[5][40][41]”
From the RNZN Museum web site:
“HMS NEW ZEALAND took part in all three major North Sea battles with German ships: Heligoland Bight 28/8/14, Dogger Bank 24/1/15 and Jutland 31/5/16. She contributed to sinking two cruisers. She was hit only once, at Jutland, with no casualties. Her good fortune was attributed by some to the Captain having worn a sacred tiki and piu-piu presented to the ship by an old Maori Chief at Rotorua in 1913, with the advice always to wear them in battle.”
Don’t think black slippers with fuzzy balls is quite int he same league
Near the end of the TIME story:
“[The chaplain] was the second senior officer from the ship to complain to superiors about Graf. “I told all of this to the commodore,” Kaprow says, “but I don’t know what happened to it from there.”
Okay, who was the Commodore who lacked the balls to investigate and take any action? He is complicit with this dereliction of duty by CAPT Graf and risking one of our precious few ships.
The root cause of this entire fiasco is “Policitcal Correctness.” where no one dare fire, criticize, or even raise questions about the performance of a member of the protected classes. This is a command failure to act just as grievous as those who failed to take action on Major Hassan.
John,
“The root cause of this entire fiasco is “Policitcal Correctness.” where no one dare fire, criticize, or even raise questions about the performance of a member of the protected classes. This is a command failure to act just as grievous as those who failed to take action on Major Hassan.”
We have a winner! Her gender and her protectors who anointed her for high things irrespective or temperament, competence, or performance are the majority contributors to this embarrassing and in many ways (for the careers she blunted or destroyed) tragic fiasco.
Yelling sometimes is required of a leader, as combat is a loud place and attention needs to be gained. But it is a sliding scale that rapidly loses effectiveness. But abusiveness? Lack of self-control? I can think of nothing more than those two characteristics in a leader to put a command in danger when rounds are flying. Graf’s seniors MUST have known that, but were too afraid of her “protection” to do their jobs. Shame on her. Shame on her “protection”. And shame on her seniors for not stopping this after her XO tour.
A significant percentage of you folks here are career military professionals. How is it even remotely possible that not one Officer witness to this atrocity lacked the courage to do whatever it took to remedy this situation? Men risk their lives and fall on grenades for each other, and no one had the temerity to risk a career? You cannot be telling me that this is the military example of leadership. This did not happen in a vacuum.
Just because you don’t see the dead and wounded doesn’t mean that people didn’t put themselves in the line of fire in hopes of changing this situation. But quietly careers will founder. Subtle additional or missing language in fitreps will be the signal. No one gets points for going against the command until senior leadership makes the turn against the commander and starts looking for a reason for removal.
Cynicism, Gray, jaded cynicism. Why should I risk my children’s future. etc., when the system will crush you like an ant and everyone else merrily go on their way? Same reason public school teachers–if they have the means–place their own children in pvt schools rather than sacrifice them upon the alter of public education as they realize that the “leavening effect” of keeping their children in the public system is like p*****g in the ocean–the “improvement” they might make by their mere presence being overwhelmed by the size of the problem/ocean even as their own young lives and future prospects are ruined. Who indeed, would be the first to have the temerity to bell the cat with the power of the entire PC command structure arrayed against one?
PS:And don’t think this ethical dilemma doesn’t eat people alive, Gray. I knew a Sr. Major flt commander with a wife, six kids (true) and a station-wagon with a tail-gate that swings both ways (1968 Buick) that lived the tortures of the damned, torn between speaking out about what he viewed as serious leadership deficiencies in our Wing and the need to protect his career and family. There are no simple, easy answers here…In the case of the Major I watched this drama play out first hand–it was not a pretty sight…
I was laughing when I started reading about the “Combat Rabbi” because it reminded me of our Rabbi on Saratoga in ’92. He was junior for a Chaplain (just a LT which is, I think, where they start) but was eager to learn about the Navy and flying, and always had a lot of energy and ALWAYS had a smile. Kind of a Father Mulcahy kind of guy. He often flew with the Tomcat squadrons and everyone giggled with Dart Fogg called and asked the Air Boss if it was OK if they did a “Rabbi Flyby.”
So I clicked Lex’s link and lo and behold, it was “my” Rabbi, Mo Kaprow. Folks, I gotta tell you, if he had negative stuff to say – it must have been really, really bad.
This sounds so much like “The Caine Mutiny” it’s eerie. So, where did Herman Wouk get his background? Maybe this isn’t the first such instance in Navy history? If you’re an idiot but have friends in high places for whatever reason, you can get promoted in any business.
George V.
Aren’t psychological profiles done on senior officers and particularly those with the keys to serious weaponry? No interviews of people who worked with / for her before letting her have more than one ship?? And what about that grounding??? Lex – I thought that was among the major sins that made those command pins fly off . . . so much that does not compute here. Can you imagine how many others’ careers she stifled or stopped?
CVN-71 Carrier Battle Group (including Cruiser-Destroyer Group
was commanded by Rear Adm. John C. Harvey Jr during the 2003 COMPUTEX and Mediterranean deployment in support of OIF and OEF, of which the USS Winston S Churchill took part. I do believe the Admiral can be contacted via his Fleet Forces Command blog and contributes to the USNI blog as well.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/navy/batgru-71-med03.htm
That should say Cruiser-Destroyer Group 8.
OK, no disrespect to the forum here, but the outrage on this post is a bit surprising.
To all those career officer types out here, I ask– don’t we each have one (or several) CO stories about the incompetent, the petty tyrants and the stone cold crazy-as-a-s&#t house rats? To say nothing of those who couldn’t fight their way out of a deep sleep, let alone a cockpit/bridge/foxhole. How many of them did you see relieved? Zero, I’d wager, or maybe just one. Consequently, putting all the PC/women/diversity/psychology theories aside, I am actually more surprised, in a way, she did get the axe.
Its not right what happened here. It IS extreme-sounding, even for the aforementioned looneys we have all seen. There are several airline pilots from my first squadron who should be in command about now, except the crappy leadership made them hang it up. All that said, nobody got relieved. Barring the obvious stuff like bedding down a junior officer or trooper, lying and stealing, the only other high-percentage way to get relieved is grounding a ship or somehow killing somebody. Not right, but there it is.
And just because I can’t stand not to say it, pretty sure the sister Admiral is sans-Sea Deployment ribbon… but it may just be the quality of the photo. “How can I be an Admiral without my hat (going to sea)?”
Yeah, that biography is completely throwing me for a loop. As I stated above she had two shore tours right off the bat, the second of which is usually a death knell, then went into the reserves and somehow she’s now an Admiral. I know officers who were never enlisted retired at O5 and O6 who did nothing but go to sea, fight, and were exemplary leaders. Obviously her history/bio doesn’t prove her leadership ability or a lack thereof, only those who served with her can attest to that, and I think it’s only fair to give her the benefit of the doubt with Defense Meritorious Service Medal (but no Legion of Merit for an Admiral seems rare to me) but usually the path to flag rank is paved with certain billets that are not negotiable.
Although a bit hard to tell I make out her ribbons as (backwards order of precedence since the bio already names the big ones)
Expert Pistol
Sharpshooter Rifle
Armed Forces Reserve Medal
Overseas Service Ribbon
Global War on Terrorism Service Medal
National Defense Service Medal
Navy Meritorious Unit Commendation
No Sea Service ribbon apparent? Also no GWOT Expeditionary Medal or Iraq Campaign medal despite being deployed to Ramadi for 9 months?? The picture MAY be prior to her Iraq deployment but no sea service is knocking my socks off.
…I think it’s only fair to give her the benefit of the doubt with Defense Meritorious Service Medal…
In the Army, the MSM is known as “The Ladies’ ARCOM.” I know an E-6 who got one recently because — and I quote — “She didn’t screw up as badly as she *could* have.”
In Vietnam, I got an ARCOM for busting up an NVA assault on a Green Beanie outpost with only two firing passes — in 1995, I got one for painting a six-foot diameter battalion logo on a CONEX…
The Legion of Merit is pretty much the standard award for a major ship or shore command unless you screw it up. That is the same award presented to Ike for planning and directing the invasion of North Africa. Talk about medal creep.
HAH! GREAT point XAIRBOSS!
Yesterday I had the honor of awarding three medals to a WWII veteran of Europe. (His records lost in the fire in KC.) Three medals. EAME theater, Army good conduct, and WWII Victory medal. The EAME theater ribbon had one silver star in lieu of fifth battle star:
Normandy and assault on Brest/St Malo, the breakout and battles in Northern France, the Ardennes (St Vith), assault across the Rhine, and Germany/Central Europe.
Medal creep pretty much nails it, XAB.
Used to was, ya got an Air Medal for meeting one of the following criteria in a combat zone:
1. Fly 25 Combat (i.e., actually getting shot at) Hours *and* 25 Combat (i.e., actually getting shot at) Missions — e.g., flying combat assaults into a hot LZ, or rolling in on a SAM site, etc.;
2. Fly 50 Combat Support (i.e., sometimes getting shot at) Hours *and* 50 Combat Support (i.e., flying ammo resupply or mail into a mud fort) Missions; or
3 Fly 100 Indirect Combat Support (i.e., technically, you’re in a war zone, but you’re flying so high that nobody thinks it’s worthwhile to shoot at you) Hours *and* 100 Indirect Combat Support (i.e., flying the USO troupe from one base to another) Missions.
Period.
Last month’s “Hail and Farewell” for a couple of USAF types going back included a hatfull of Air Medals to guys who instructed in Cessna 172s, had never flown outside the friggin’ pattern, and we haven’t had any ground-to-air incidents since March of 2008 — a full 18 months before they even *got* here.
Yeah — the Air Farce logs *Combat* time in 172s, with student pilots on board…
They wanted to give him the MoH, but he declined.
Anyone know who was the Commodore of DESRON 2 for this deployment?
Makes me wonder what I would/could do if I were faced with a similar situation… probably not much more than Kaprow did. At some point, if the officer in question refuses to listen to or acknowledge advice, then the chaplain turns to “damage control” and attempts to maintain the morale of the crew in the face of difficult circumstances.
On a different note:
Nose, does this mean that if/when I’m assigned as a chaplain to a carrier I can fly in a jet? Cool!
Rabbis only, sorry.
I think you’ve got another leadership well to draw from. The senior chaplain in Yoko back in the Nineties was a former airdale combat vet. As far as I could tell, the smart ones listened to him; the not-so-smart ones knew the chaplain knew how the Navy world worked and not listening would bite them in the tail. That rabbi might have been seeing his first failing command; you’ve seen one or two in your day I would think, right?
It is an ethical challenge. When do you go over your bosses head? As a recruiter, I worked for a guy who was absolutely incompetent, if somewhat nice enough. But he made an already difficult job twice as hard.
His boss asked me one day if he should be fired. How do I answer that? I expect my boss to be loyal to me, and in return, I should be loyal to him.
In the end, I weaseled out and damned my boss with faint praise. He wasn’t relieved, but was very pointedly reminded that he was eligible to retire.
XBradTC, loyalty is a two-way street, but if your boss’s boss asks your opinion you owe him the same loyalty and to give him an honest answer to an honest question.
If he’s asking you, he’s already figured out your boss isn’t all that and a box of Cracker Jacks. What he’s looking for now is data to correlate and determine what sort of action he’s going to take. You’d do him and your boss a disservice by providing them less than accurate opinions.
– Max
I was thinking someone similar, Max. If you have an incompetent direct-report who is doing damage, it would seem your loyalty is to the organization.
Typo above. Someone = someTHING
Has anyone considered the reason there’s a plethora of bad leaders is because the good leaders don’t stand up to their superiors publicly? I know there’s that line about “respect for the chain of command” but I have news for you: Your enlisted know when they have bad leadership. If you keep your mouth shut you’ll just be seen as part of the problem, and you might even end up with more discipline problems. If I know MMCM (or LT) has fought some idiocy and lost I know there’s no way MM1 is going to win, so we can focus on getting the job done instead of fighting battles that may or may not have already been lost.
@ Nose: Like you say, if Mo thought there was a problem, there WAS a problem. You could sit down with him, vent about someone who was driving you bat$%^& and by the time you were done talking to him, he’d have feeling sorry for the guy! He’s a national treasure; whatever congregation he’s wound up at or whatever he’s doing, they have a real “keeper” on their hands.
ProwlerAMDO: (and everyone else) She’s a *Reservist*! Her career pattern is very typical for many Selected Reserve Flags: Do active, leave, go up the ladder gradually in the Reserves into larger units, get an O-5 command, get an O-6 command, start doing increasingly larger blocks of extended active duty on various staff jobs, make sure the right people in the right places notice you, get tracked for CAPSTONE and meet certain other criteria set by CNAVRES and CNO/SECNAV and bang, you get your Flag. Due to a declared “shortage” of Flags, get recalled indefinitely to active duty filling various billets that require a Flag. She appears to be a designated “administrative/personnel” wonk.
VR,
Comjam
Comjam
Thanks for explaining that. I honestly don’t know much about how the reserves work, and coming from an active duty standpoint I was scratching a hole in my skull.
And Lex is not at least a Vice-Admiral. Life really is not fair.
Of course, to be fair (heh) Lex deliberately derailed from the Flag track to look out for his family.
Were I President, with good blackmail data on those Congresscritters, I could solve that problem. Lessee, we toss the Veep out of the Naval Observatory, and make that family quarters for CO of whatever command we set up for Lex, like, say, roving unattached inspector and auditor of all ships and stations, answering only to me, and at that only once a year?
Ah, but power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I take the dismal, tragic view of human nature. Such a position would prove too tempting (a direct line to the president to recommend promotions, actions, etc.) possibly even to our good host, and if not to him than certainly to the inevitable lesser being who would occupy it.
Still, I like the thinking behind it.
Just a fond hope that we could get the girls to prefer telescopes to horsies.
Yeah – ComJam’s got it. Navy Reserve admirals come in two flavors…1) folks that would have been admirals on active duty (Cotton, McDonald, Anderson fit that bill) and then there are the true “Reserve Admirals” who don’t know di@k about tactics or strategery, but did go to War College and the right seminars. The first reserve CO I worked for was a great guy, but knew nothing (Not. A. Thing.) about modern strike warfare – AS A SQUADRON CO! He’s got a star now.
In the Naval Reserve, getting a star has little to do with leadership and nothing to do with being a warrior.
I wore pink bunny slippers in command, and the crew loved them. I knew of Graf in her XO tour in Japan, and ALL of us were surprised she screened for command. I’m not sure what the crew thought, but she was not well liked by her CO.
It’s pretty clear that there was explicit or implicit directive to promote females in her year group for reasons other than performance.
I wounldn’t be surprised if the flags were being measured on promotion rates for women/minorities with quotas for screening certain numbers, etc.
Was in a different CRUSDES Staff when she had Churchill. She fired so many of her department heads when she got there the Commodore told she wouldn’t get any more replacements if she fired another one. It was her job to train her officers. Seems like that part of the job description just didn’t fit.
Flatlander,
What?! Say it isn’t so? A diversity directive? The Navy would NEVER have an inplicit quota system. /snark
Virgil,
Thanks for the reply, and yes I understand cynicism; when you find the word in a dictionary it has a photo of me as an illustration. I spent a career (post mil circa 1970/RVN) in public safety. While doing that I arrested three bad ones of our own intimates. (I remember telling a higher level Chief on that one “and if you are dirty, I’ll take you too” when questioned about being “sensitive” regarding the matter”. I also let it be widely known that everything was double documented in several secure locations in the event of…) Career? I lost a big promotion. As the Russians say “tuffsky shitsky”. I’d do it again in a heartbeat because I owed to the good guys.
Good on ya, mate. Good on ya…
More brass like that needed all around. Mindful of a recent posting here, The Chairman would do well to take note.
Best ever answer on a police qualification exam:
Q: Would you give your own mother a traffic citation?
A: It’s about time somebody did.
Robin Graff holds the rank of RAdm, but wears only one broad stripe instead of a Broad and narrow stripes. When I was in the lower division wore both but also something else that showed they were lower division. have things changed that she would wear only a “Commodore’s” stripe?
Yeah, I think they have. Ever since I’ve been in (embarassingly short so I won’t say it) the lower division rear admiral has been one broad stripe. As far as I know there is no separate indication of commodore as that’s a title vs. a rank now, and since most in aviation, the only place I have any experience, are O-6′s they sport four narrow stripes.
I don’t remember how long it has been, but for a time the Nav actually renamed the lower division to Commodore. Most who saw it thought “What a dufus thing to do.”, and it didn’t last long; cuppla three years or so.
Prowler: Dinnae know that about the ‘narrow stripes’. I did see most Commodore slots filled by Captains about ready to get their flag, however.
Back in the day, both RADM (lower half) and RADM (upper half) wore two stars and the gold wide band and one narrow band on blues. This of course caused much consternation among one stars in our sister services who, by date of rank, could be senior to a navy two star (lower half)
The navy finally tried to remedy this by creating a true one star and calling the Commodore/Admiral IIRC but finally gave up and returned to calling them all RADM but kept the one star and broad gold band sans the narrow band which two stars wore.
xairboss, When they made that true one star, with one broad stripe, one of the first to hold the rank referred to himself as an “Ensign Admiral” seeing as how he only had one stripe. JO’s liked the term, wished it had stuck.
Too bad it didn’t. Of course, it could still be an informal title.
The Public Health Service (becomes part of the Navy in war time) uses the rank of Commodore with a broad band and one star. The guy I work under is a retired PHS O-6 Engineer and when I explained the Commodore vs Rear Adm thingee, he thought it strange. But then I thought it strange for the PHS to use Naval rank structure parallel to Civil Service structure int he same organization.
My observation was all squadron Commanders held the title of Commodore. The Sqdn Dog of CORTRON 8, my old squadron on the Courtney, was an O-5 and was called Commodore. So it wasn’t just O-6s up for flag rank.
Ok, I finally clicked on the link and saw only an official pic of Rabbi Kaprow looking a bit distracted, but cheerful and friendly. The “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” comments from other ranks were funny. M’self, I imagine her saying under her breath, “and your little dog, too!”
This is a shame. Where are the Good Witches in Oz-er, the Navy? I can think of two, Grace Hopper and Joy Bright Hancock. But they’ve been dead a while. Who is Glinda the Good these days among the navychix?
Bump! Really, where are the Good Witches, the responsible grownup female Naval Officers, in all of this?