Chapter 5
I had been recommended for my fourth star before the Little Creek inquiry opened. The recommendation had been moving through the process for three months, supported by a strong record and by the kind of quiet institutional endorsement that moves these things forward without requiring anyone to make noise about it. Hoyt had been one of the officers in that recommendation chain.
When Hoyt retired under the circumstances he retired under, the recommendation process was paused for review — standard procedure when a supporting officer's judgment is being formally questioned. The pause became a deferral. The deferral was explained, by the officer who called me, as procedural rather than evaluative.
I am fifty-three years old. A deferral at this point in my career, in a process this dependent on timing and institutional momentum, is a different thing than a deferral at forty-five.
I understood what the call meant.
I want to be clear that I do not regret the decision that produced it. Rawlins's unit had a dead sailor in its history whose family had been told a lie that I now knew was a deliberate administrative construction. That sailor's name was Petty Officer Second Class Marcus Webb, and he was twenty-six years old, and he had a daughter in Pensacola who was four when he died and is now eleven and who had been told her father's death was nobody's fault and the ocean was unpredictable and these things happen. His family was notified of the inquiry's findings in October. I drove to Pensacola in November to speak with them in person, which was not required by any protocol and which I would do again without hesitation.
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Parker gave his full statement to the investigation. His testimony was the clearest and most specific of any the inquiry received from within the unit, and it was delivered without the hedging and qualification that testimony from men who have been inside a closed culture tends to carry. He had, as it turned out, filed an informal complaint fourteen months earlier that had moved three levels up the chain and then stopped, the same way all the others had stopped. His informal complaint was the document that gave investigators the first clean trail to Hoyt's office.
He is still serving. His record has been corrected to remove a performance notation that Rawlins filed against him in the month after that informal complaint, a notation that everyone in the review found to be retaliatory and that no one had acted on at the time because retaliation, like everything else in that command, had learned how to dress itself as something administrative and unremarkable.
