Neil Sheehan's The Arnheiter Affair is a lively and thoroughly fascinating account of one of the most important controversies in modern American military history. The central figure of this true story, Lieutenant Commander Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter, was a naval officer of questionable ability in all departments when he was somehow given command of the destroyer escort Vance in the latter part of 1965. An Annapolis graduate, a fatuous worshiper of Lord Nelson, an ambitious, overbearing, thick-skinned man, he appeared to have almost none of the lambent human qualities that even the most zealous military officer must possess if he is effectively to command men, and his behavior from the outset was something less than auspicious. He made it plain that he knew little and cared less about the mechanics of running a ship, and soon established aboard a regime that Sheehan aptly describes as one of “whimsical tyranny.” This extended from his insistence on saluting and upon immaculately clean daily dress—items of routine usually dispensed with on a small ship at sea—to the humiliating impromptu lectures he required of his officers after dinner, on such recherché subjects as how to use a finger bowl. A Protestant himself, he enforced (against regulations) strict attendance at his Protestant-oriented religious lectures, to the chagrin and outrage of the many Catholics among the crew. Sedulous in regard to his own creature comforts, he smoked cigars bought with money paid to a “Boner Box” by officers guilty of small infractions of the rules, and enjoyed twenty-minute showers with preciously hoarded water while the rest of the crew, bathless, sweated in the dreadful heat of the Gulf of Siam.
Arnheiter's lack of sensitivity about the nuances, the proprieties inherent in rank and privilege was almost boundless, but his official behavior as commanding officer of the Vance while patrolling the Vietnamese coast was even more bizarre. In a zone of the sea relatively far removed from any important enemy activity, Arnheiter was forced to resort to ever more quixotic maneuvers in order to satisfy his bellicose fantasies. He once nearly ran his ship aground as he invented targets and emplacements onshore which he claimed were “demolished” by his three-inch guns. He “annihilated” detachments of Vietcong guerrillas (they turned out to be a flock of chickens), and dangerously set out to stalk a Red Chinese submarine. Also, in a desperate spasm of machismo, he radioed a series of false position reports in order to give the impression of intrepid seamanship. Finally, to cap it all, the relentless skipper fabricated an engagement with the enemy in which he claimed to have performed personally with conspicuous gallantry, and dictated a totally spurious commendation, the intent of which was to award himself the Silver Star. At this point, mercifully, the Vance and its by now despairing and morally bedraggled crew were spared further misery. The cumulative effect of Arnheiter's conduct could not go disregarded for long even in a navy that tends to insist that its officers can do little wrong. Arnheiter was relieved of his command at Manila Bay, some four months after the excruciating, hair-raising, sometimes wrenchingly comic odyssey began.
On the level of a nautical adventure alone, Sheehan's book makes an engrossing tale. The parallels with Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny are, of course, obvious. Like Queeg—indeed, like all fanatics—Arnheiter seemed cursed with a fatal humorlessness. Whimsy, yes, but no humor. One feels that even a vestige of a real sense of humor might have allowed the bedeviled captain some insight into the more ludicrous consequences of his own monomania; and his dire self-obsession and its tragicomic effects are unfolded by Sheehan with the skill and subtlety of a first-rate novelist. But examined on another level, The Arnheiter Affair tells us some important and disturbing things about the American people and their relationship to the military establishment. The Arnheiter affair did not end with the captain's relief from his command in the Philippines: it only began there. For with the single-minded self-righteousness of his breed, Arnheiter disclaimed the accusations against him and mounted a vociferous campaign to exonerate himself, protesting that he had been victimized by his subordinate officers, who had slandered him with trumped-up charges. For a brief but agreeable period it must have seemed to Arnheiter that his efforts in his own behalf would bear fruit. Valiant support chugged up to his side from the left and right, from the middle, from every hand. Americans have never fully understood the role of the military in their own society, and perhaps it is their native egalitarianism that has caused the citizenry to harbor an inane and nearly indefatigable passion for whoever appears to be the underdog—witness the example of Lieutenant William Laws Calley.
Initially, Arnheiter was made to look like a martyr by the press and the other media. (Sheehan covered the story for The New York Times, and one of his winning points is a gentlemanly admission of his own knee-jerk liberal reaction to what then seemed Arnheiter's beleaguered plight.) Yet the captain also found some of his most ardent defenders among the high Navy brass, including an illustriously placed officer who risked and ultimately ruined his career by campaigning in Arnheiter's defense. As usual it was a case of feverish wish-fulfillment—the captain as symbol satisfying every immediate and shoddy fantasy while failing to instill in anyone the desire to inspect the hard moral and legal aspects of the issue at hand. “To the liberals,” Sheehan writes, “he was a little man who was victimized by an impersonal military institution. To the conservatives, the mutinous behavior of Arnheiter's subordinates was a manifestation of the general disorder and mockery of authority that was polluting the qualities of national life.” But an official review of Arnheiter's case and Sheehan's own careful investigation amply demonstrated that neither of these situations was the case. To put it in the simplest terms, the captain was exposed as a fraud and a menace.
Unlike the actions of Lieutenant Calley, Arnheiter's conduct did not result in injury or the loss of any human lives (although it clearly contributed to the mental breakdown of a crewman and helped wreck the career of at least one of the ship's officers), and consequently the case lacked some of the sensational aspects of the more recent scandal. Yet just as one of the revelations of Calley's court-martial lay in the shocking fact that a man of the lieutenant's wretched caliber and qualifications should never have been made an officer in the first place, so the Arnheiter affair demonstrated that the Navy likewise had much to answer for in justifying the promotion of an Arnheiter to such a delicate position of command. Arnheiter often appeared to be a simple clown, and the story as Sheehan has put it down does contain much comic flavor of the Mister Roberts variety—this is what helps make the book so consistently entertaining—but the narrative is also filled with somber and sobering overtones. The author is not being at all facetious when he speculates upon how Arnheiter's imbecilic game of hide-and-seek with the Chinese submarine might easily have helped precipitate another world war. On this plane, the Arnheiter affair no less than that of Calley demonstrates the potential for disaster that exists for us when at any level of authority there is a crucial abdication of personal responsibility, and shows the danger that is always present when even one small device in the grotesque, precariously balanced supermechanism of war we have fashioned for ourselves is handed over to cranks and fanatics.
[American Scholar, Summer 1972.]