Article 48J6G Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by its Own Navy

Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by its Own Navy

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by T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose and Robert Fatu
from Articles and Investigations - ProPublica on (#48J6G)

by T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi

It's the dead of night, and the USS Fitzgerald is on a secret mission to the South China Sea.

The sailors on the $1.8 billion destroyer are young, tired and poorly trained.

Disaster strikes at 1:30:34 a.m.

A little after 1:30 a.m. on June 17, 2017, Alexander Vaughan tumbled from his bunk onto the floor of his sleeping quarters on board the Navy destroyer USS Fitzgerald. The shock of cold, salty water snapped him awake. He struggled to his feet and felt a torrent rushing past his thighs.

Around him, sailors were screaming. "Water on deck. Water on deck!" Vaughan fumbled for his black plastic glasses and strained to see through the darkness of the windowless compartment.

Underneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, 12 miles off the coast of Japan, the tidy world of Berthing 2 had come undone. Cramped bunk beds that sailors called coffin racks tilted at crazy angles. Beige metal footlockers bobbed through the water. Shoes, clothes, mattresses, even an exercise bicycle careered in the murk, blocking the narrow passageways of the sleeping compartment.

In the dim light of emergency lanterns, Vaughan glimpsed men leaping from their beds. Others fought through the flotsam to reach the exit ladder next to Vaughan's bunk on the port side of the ship. Tens of thousands of gallons of seawater were flooding into the compartment from a gash that had ripped through the Fitzgerald's steel hull like it was wrapping paper.

As a petty officer first class, these were his sailors, and in those first foggy seconds Vaughan realized they were in danger of drowning.

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At 6 feet, 1 inch and 230 pounds, Vaughan grabbed a nearby sailor by the T-shirt and hurled him toward the ladder that led to the deck above. He yanked another, then another.

Vaughan's leg had been fractured in three places. He did not even feel it.

"Get out, get out," he shouted as men surged toward him through the rising water.

Berthing 2, just below the waterline and barely bigger than a 1,200-square-foot apartment, was home to 35 sailors. They were enlisted men, most in their 20s and 30s, many new to the Navy. They came from small towns like Palmyra, Virginia, and big cities like Houston. They were white, black, Latino, Asian. On the Fitzgerald, they worked as gunners' mates, sonar experts, cafeteria workers and administrative assistants.

Seaman Dakota Rigsby, 19, was newly engaged. Sonar Technician Rod Felderman, 28, was expecting the birth of his first child. Gary Rehm Jr., 37, a petty officer first class, was the oldest sailor in the compartment, a mentor to younger crew members.

As the water rose past their ankles, their waists, their chests, the men fought their way to the port side ladder and waited, shivering in the swirling debris, for their chance to escape.

Shouting over a crescendo of seawater, Vaughan and his bunkmate, Joshua Tapia, a weapons specialist, worked side by side. They stationed themselves at the bottom of the ladder, grabbing the sailors and pushing them, one by one, up the steps. At the top, the men shot out the small opening, as the rising water forced the remaining air from the compartment.

Suddenly, the ship lurched to the right, knocking sailors from their feet. Some slipped beneath the surface. Others disappeared into the darkness of a common bathroom, carried by the force of water rushing to fill every available space.

Vaughan and Tapia waited until they were alone at the bottom of the ladder. When the water reached their necks, they, too, climbed out the 29-inch-wide escape hatch. Safe, they peered back down the hole. In the 90 seconds since the crash, the water had almost reached the top of Berthing 2.

Now they faced a choice. Naval training demanded that they seal the escape hatch to prevent water from flooding the rest of the ship. But they knew that bolting it down would consign any sailors still alive to death.

Vaughan and Tapia hesitated. They agreed to wait a few seconds more for survivors. Tapia leaned down into the vanishing inches of air left in Berthing 2.

"Come to the sound of my voice," he shouted.

The Fitzgerald had been steaming on a secret mission to the South China Sea when it was smashed by a cargo ship more than three times its size.

The 30,000-ton MV ACX Crystal gouged an opening bigger than a semitruck in the starboard side of the destroyer. The force of the collision was so great that it sent the 8,261-ton warship spinning on a 360-degree rotation through the Pacific.

On the ship's bridge, a crewman activated two emergency lights high on the ship's mast, one on top of the other: The Fitzgerald, it signaled, was red over red - no longer under command.

The collision of the vessels was the Navy's worst accident at sea in four decades. Seven sailors drowned. Scores were physically and psychologically wounded. Two months later, a second destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, broke that grim mark when it collided with another cargo vessel, leaving 10 more sailors dead.

The successive incidents raised an unavoidable question: How could two $1.8 billion Navy destroyers, protected by one of the most advanced defense systems on the planet, fail to detect oncoming cargo ships broadcasting their locations to a worldwide navigational network?

The failures of basic seamanship deeply embarrassed the Navy. Both warships belonged to the vaunted 7th Fleet - the most powerful armada in the world and one of the most important commands in the defense of the United States from nuclear attack.

ProPublica reconstructed the Fitzgerald's journey, relying on more than 13,000 pages of confidential Navy investigative records, public reports, and interviews with scores of Fitzgerald crew members, current and former senior Navy officers, and maritime experts.

The review revealed neglect by Navy leadership, serious mistakes by officers - and extraordinary acts of valor and endurance by the crew.

The Fitzgerald's captain selected an untested team to steer the ship at night. He ordered the crew to speed through shipping lanes filled with cargo ships and fishing vessels to free up time to train his sailors the next day. At the time of the collision, he was asleep in his cabin.

The 26-year-old officer of the deck, who was in charge of the destroyer at the time of the crash, had navigated the route only once before in daylight. In a panic, she ordered the Fitzgerald to turn directly into the path of the Crystal.

The Fitzgerald's crew was exhausted and undertrained. The inexperience showed in a series of near misses in the weeks before the crash, when the destroyer maneuvered dangerously close to vessels on at least three occasions.

The warship's state of readiness was in question. The Navy required destroyers to pass 22 certification tests to prove themselves seaworthy and battle-ready before sailing. The Fitzgerald had passed just seven of these tests. It was not even qualified to conduct its chief mission, anti-ballistic missile defense.

A sailor's mistake sparked a fire causing the electrical system to fail and a shipwide blackout a week before the mission resulting in the crash. The ship's email system, for both classified and non-classified material, failed repeatedly. Officers used Gmail instead.

Its radars were in questionable shape, and it's not clear the crew knew how to operate them. One could not be made to automatically track nearby ships. To keep the screen updated, a sailor had to punch a button a thousand times an hour. The ship's primary navigation system was run by 17-year-old software.

The Navy declined to directly answer ProPublica's questions about its findings. Instead, a spokesman cited previous reports that the Navy published during its own months-long review of the collisions.

The Navy inquiries determined that there had been widespread problems with leaders regarding shortfalls in training, manning and equipment in the 7th Fleet. The Navy fired admirals, captains and commanders, punished sailors and criminally prosecuted officers for neglecting their duties.

Adm. John Richardson, head of the Navy, called the two collisions "avoidable tragedies." The ships' commanders and their superiors, he said in a written statement to ProPublica, were responsible for the results.

"The tragedies of USS Fitzgerald and USS John S. McCain reminded us that all commanders, from the unit level to the fleet commander, must constantly assess and manage risks and opportunities in a very complex and dynamic environment," Richardson said. "But at the end of the day, our commanders make decisions and our sailors execute and there is an outcome - a result of that decision. The commander 'owns' that outcome."

Sidelined during years of land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Navy is now stragegically central to containing North Korea's nuclear threat, China's expansionist aims and a newly aggressive Russia.

Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin was commander of the 7th Fleet at the time of the collisions. A Naval aviator who fought in the Balkans and Iraq, he made repeated pleas to his superiors for more men, more ships, more time to train. He was ignored, then fired.

More than 18 months later, Aucoin believes that the Navy has yet to disclose the full story of the disasters. Navy leaders, he said in his first extended interview, have not taken accountability for their role in undermining America's sea fighting ability.

"I just want the truth to come out," Aucoin said.

In the end, the Fitzgerald's crew fought to keep the ship from sinking. They worked in the dark, without power, without steering, without communications.

A young officer scribbled algebraic equations in a notebook to figure out how to right the listing vessel. The crew bailed out the ship with buckets after pumps failed. As the Fitzgerald struggled to return to port, its navigational displays failed and backup batteries ran out. The ship's navigator used a handheld commercial GPS unit and paper charts to guide the ship home.

At the top of the flooded berthing compartment, just seconds after Tapia's shout, a hand thrust up through the scuttle opening. It was Jackson Schrimsher, a weapons specialist from Alabama. Vaughan reached down and pulled him up.

Schrimsher had gotten trapped in his top bunk by floating furniture that blocked the aisle. He climbed over to another bunk and jumped down. A wall of water rushed toward him, and a locker toppled onto him. Looking up, he saw the light coming from the open scuttle and fought his way toward it.

Schrimsher had recently become certified as a master helmsman, specially trained to maneuver the ship during complicated operations. With the Fitzgerald in distress, his skills were needed. He raced off for the ship's bridge, clad only in a drenched T-shirt and shorts heavy with seawater.

Vaughan and Tapia took one last look at each other. It was time to seal the hatch.



Chapter 1. The Commander's Quarters

"Fuck Your Boots, Captain, Grab My Hand."

At impact, the Crystal's prow punched into another sleeping compartment, this one occupied by a single man: Cmdr. Bryce Benson, the 40-year-old captain of the Fitzgerald.

Benson's cabin lay high above the surface of the ocean, four decks above his sailors in Berthing 2. The Crystal had pierced the Fitzgerald's hull right at the foot of Benson's bed. It crushed together the bedroom and office of his stateroom like a wad of tinfoil.

The collision jolted Benson awake. Metal ductwork had fallen on him. He was bleeding from the head. He tried to get up from his bed but could not. He was trapped, buried amid a tangle of steel and wires. He clutched the quilt his wife had sewn him, its blue and white squares forming the image of a warship.

The cabin was cold and dark. He felt air rush past him. With a shock, Benson realized he was staring at the Pacific. The tear in his cabin's wall had left Benson with a 140-degree view of dark water and dark sky. He could make out lights from the distant shore of Japan.

He suspected the ship had been hit. He could hear the shouts and groans of his sailors.

The captains of Navy warships are uniquely accountable in the modern American military. They have "absolute responsibility" for their vessels and face absolute blame when something goes wrong - whether they are asleep or even on board. In the case of a collision, no matter how minor, the consequences are usually severe: The captain is relieved of command.

The outcome is common enough that captains joke with the young officers steering their ships. "In case anything goes wrong, call me so that I can see the end of my career."

Benson was determined not to be that captain. Just 20 hours earlier, he had set sail from the Fitzgerald's home port in Yokosuka, Japan, after receiving last-minute orders to head for the South China Sea. Benson had ordered all sailors to report to the Fitzgerald at 6 a.m. to get an early start so he could squeeze in some training.

The Fitzgerald didn't wrap up the long day of drills until 11 p.m. The ship was moving through a strait between Japan's Izu Peninsula and Oshima Island. It was roughly 20 miles wide and filled with scores of cargo vessels and fishing boats streaming into and out of Tokyo.

Exhausted, Benson made a change to the night orders to guide the sailors who would pilot the Fitzgerald during the dark early morning hours. Normally, Benson directed the officer of the deck to call him if the ship deviated from its planned course by more than 500 yards to avoid traffic. But this night, Benson doubled the number to 1,000 yards, giving the officer more room to maneuver without having to wake him.

At 11:30 p.m., Benson left the bridge to turn in for the night. Captains often insist on remaining on the bridge when maneuvering through traffic at night. Or they sleep in a special cabin on the bridge. They want to monitor their officers closely during less-than-ideal sailing conditions.

Benson judged he was suffering the effects of "fatigue and sleep deprivation." He needed to rest. He was concerned about the secret part of his mission. The Fitzgerald was going to sail through contested waters off China, which could result in confrontations with Chinese warships.

But Benson's decisions set up a risky situation: a relatively junior crew run ragged by a long day, loosened restrictions on the officers steering the vessel and a captain not on the bridge.

Now, Benson realized that his worst nightmare had happened. His ship was in danger. And so was the crew. He was wet, chilled and slipping into shock. Benson reached for the phone by his bed and stopped. His brain had failed him. He couldn't remember the four digits he'd called countless times to reach the bridge.

He fought through the confusion until the numbers came to him at last. He punched the keypad and hoped for an answer from above.



Benson and his sailors belonged to the 7th Fleet, which won fame during the Second World War as "MacArthur's Navy," battling across the Pacific under the direction of the American general to retake the Philippines.

Its modern incarnation is based in Yokosuka - the Navy's largest overseas installation. The historic base lies at the mouth of Tokyo Bay, near where Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived with gunboats in 1853 to force the isolated island nation to trade with the U.S. The 7th Fleet encompasses about 20,000 sailors and some 70 ships and submarines. Its commander is responsible for an area with 36 countries and half the world's population.

The 7th Fleet is one of the most important strategic commands in the military, and its sailors and ships fight an often shadowy battle against some of America's greatest geopolitical threats: China, North Korea and Russia.

The fleet's eight destroyers are key to this fight. Tough, scrappy warships, they are designed to withstand enormous damage and return the same. In the Battle off Samar in the Philippines in 1944, one of history's greatest naval clashes, seven American destroyers, escorts and aircraft carrier planes managed to fend off a flotilla of 23 Japanese warships, including four battleships.

Some 7th Fleet destroyers, including the Fitzgerald, play an especially important role. They can track and shoot down ballistic missiles, making them almost unique in the nation's armed forces. No other missile defense can deploy as quickly or cover as wide an area. The system is far from perfect - it frequently misses targets during training exercises. But the half-dozen ballistic missile defense destroyers in the 7th Fleet are the United States' first line of defense against a North Korean nuclear attack.

From his early days in the Navy, Benson was determined to helm one of these frontline warships.

Benson dedicated himself to a career as a surface warfare officer. SWOs, as they are known, are the backbone of the Navy's leadership - front-line warriors noted for their extraordinary commitment to success, but also for a competitive, sometimes backbiting culture. "SWOs eat their own" is a common Navy refrain.

At every stage, he impressed his superior officers. Several of his commanders believed he would make admiral. "Make no mistake, THIS GUY IS GOOD," wrote one officer.

The first ship he captained was the USS Guardian, an aging minesweeper. It was made mostly of wood and was in constant need of repair. He learned to get material any way he could: scavenging equipment, pestering supply clerks and getting his machinists to make custom fittings. Under his watch, the Guardian received the highest rating in its class for combat readiness. "It is obvious he is an absolute ALL-STAR surface warrior," one superior wrote, "and the exact type of leader we need in COMMAND."

At 5 feet, 10 inches and 160 pounds, Benson was not physically imposing and had a baby face that emphasized his youth. But he could turn fierce when confronted with a screw-up, fixing a backsliding sailor with a piercing stare, followed by a pointed and personal lesson.

His crew thought highly of him even though, or maybe because, he was tough. They liked how he'd walk the decks to stop and chat with sailors. He loved talking about football, especially his beloved Packers. He drilled his sailors on safety - including evacuation of the ship's sleeping quarters.

"He was about getting things done. He didn't accept a lot of excuses," Travius Caldwell, one of the ship's chief petty officers, said. "He leads hard."



On the Fitzgerald's bridge, the jangle of the phone next to Benson's empty captain's chair pierced the chaos. Carlos Clark snatched up the receiver. It was Benson. His voice was shaky and uncertain. What had happened to his ship? He needed to get to the bridge, he said, but he couldn't. Clark, an enlisted sailor in charge of navigation, had never before heard his captain sound scared.

"I'm trapped," Benson told him.

Clark grabbed a sledgehammer, a couple of other sailors and raced to the captain's room, two decks below. One of the men was Christopher Perez, the Fitzgerald's senior chief petty officer for the ship's missile and gun systems. Decisive, sometimes headstrong, Perez served as a crucial link between the officers and the enlisted crew in weapons.

Outside Benson's cabin, the rescue party confronted the first obstacle: The captain's door, three-eighths-of-an-inch-thick metal, was locked shut. Chief Petty Officer Jared Ogilvie picked up the sledgehammer.

"Get the fuck back," he shouted.

Bald and broad-shouldered, Ogilvie cracked 30 to 50 blows at the door. Nothing. Next in line was Clark. Then came Ensign Joseph White - 6 feet, 2 inches, a former offensive lineman for the Bethune-Cookman Wildcats. He split open his hand trying to bash in the door. Two more chief petty officers took shots.

Benson's door bent only slightly.

From his bed, mangled steel just inches from this head, Benson could hear the banging. He was bleeding and soaked from a water pipe that had broken above him and could feel his body temperature dropping.

Trying to calm himself, the voice of his seventh-grade science teacher popped into his head: "Whenever you're in a sense of panic, just try to slow down because your brain is trying to sort through all the files and it's going too fast."

Clark rushed back to the bridge, where he kept a 35-pound kettlebell for exercise. Swinging it high over his head, he smashed it against the door. Everyone ducked. The door cracked.

Perez stepped forward to finish the job. He grabbed White in a bear hug, and the two heaved their combined bulk against the door, pushing it back enough to reveal the captain's stateroom.

At first, the members of the rescue party thought they were looking at the back wall of Benson's cabin, at what appeared to be a light bulb hanging down and swinging wildly. Then, they realized that they were staring through a hole at the ocean. The light was the Crystal, hundreds of yards away, steaming away from the crash.

The cabin looked like a junkyard, the captain's desk pushed against the door, cold water flowing like a waterfall. The room had been compressed and shifted back 20 feet from its original position.

The men could not see Benson because of the dark and the detritus. But they could hear his pleas for help.

"We're coming for you," Ogilvie said. "Just keep talking, keep talking."



Benson had taken command of the Fitzgerald just a month earlier, on May 13, 2017, after a brief ceremony on deck during a stop at a Navy port in Sasebo in southern Japan. He'd made a few remarks then issued his commander's philosophy to the crew: A simple acrostic - FITZ - meant to inspire the sailors: "Fighting, Integrity, Toughness, Zeal."

Benson knew intimately the precarious state of his ship and its sailors. He had served as the ship's second-in-command for a year and a half before taking charge from the outgoing captain, Cmdr. Robert Shu.

Sailors welcomed the change of command. Some felt that Shu had become too hands off after three years in command. He "seemed indecisive, confused about what he wants," one lieutenant later told investigators. Benson "was a huge positive turn. He gave us focused, clear guidance." Naval investigators blamed Shu for creating a "culture of complacency" and "longstanding weaknesses" in training and tackling equipment problems that Benson would have to fix.

Benson also worried about the ship's physical state. The ship had recently spent eight months in Yokosuka's repair yards, where workers installed a new defensive system, overhauled its turbine shafts and painted it a new coat of Navy gray. But hundreds of repairs, major and minor, remained to be done.

Then there was the crew. In those eight months, nearly 40 percent of the Fitzgerald's crew had turned over. The Navy replaced them with younger, less-seasoned sailors and officers, leaving the Fitzgerald with the highest percentage of new crew members of any destroyer in the fleet. But naval commanders had skimped even further, cutting into the number of sailors Benson needed to keep the ship running smoothly. The Fitzgerald had around 270 people total - short of the 303 sailors called for by the Navy.

Key positions were vacant, despite repeated requests from the Fitzgerald to Navy higher-ups. The senior enlisted quartermaster position - charged with training inexperienced sailors to steer the ship - had gone unfilled for more than two years. The technician in charge of the ship's radar was on medical leave, with no replacement. The personnel shortages made it difficult to post watches on both the starboard and port sides of the ship, a once-common Navy practice.

When the ship set sail in February 2017, it was supposed to be for a short training mission for its green crew. Instead, the Navy never allowed the Fitzgerald to return to Yokosuka. North Korea was launching missiles on a regular basis. China was aggressively sending warships to pursue its territorial claims to disputed islands off its coast. Seventh Fleet commanders deployed the Fitzgerald like a pinch hitter, repeatedly assigning it new missions to complete.

Lt. Cmdr. Ritarsha Furqan, the ship's combat officer, worried that the constant pace was not providing enough time for necessary training and repairs.

"We'd find a part, find a body, make do and get underway," Furqan later testified in a legal proceeding. "Sometimes it felt like it was unsafe or wrong."

In March, Furqan confronted Shu: "We are not ready," she told him. Shu, she testified, told her that he had already delivered that message to superiors. The missions would continue.

Benson's first test of leadership was improving the ship's state of readiness. In the months at sea after dry dock, the 22-year-old destroyer deteriorated as its regular maintenance was repeatedly pushed back. Benson spent his first week in command as though he were again captain of an aging minesweeper, trying to tackle hundreds of repairs and begging technicians to fly over from the United States for help.

In the midst of the frenzied training and repairs, the ship's critical email system collapsed. Neither classified nor unclassified material could be sent. Officers were forced to set up Gmail addresses to continue working.

By then, Benson was convinced that the shortage of sailors had become critical. Right before Benson assumed command, Shu had promised leaves to more than a dozen weary crew members. One sailor planned to return to Yokosuka to see his newborn for the first time. Another wanted to attend her mother's wedding. A third asked to go home to visit his mother, who was dying.

Benson called the sailors into his office, one by one. The Fitzgerald needed to be ready for war with North Korea. There were simply not enough crew members to replace them. He canceled all leaves.

"I need you. The ship needs you," Benson explained to each sailor individually.

Sailors started referring to the day as "Bloody Tuesday." Some sailors left Benson's rooms in tears. Another could barely bring herself to look at the captain for a week. One of the affected sailors was Perez. Benson told him that he could not afford to let him go.

"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 cellphone 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 20 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 Pena. "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 5-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 5-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 7th 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 email 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 email 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 20 to 30 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 10."

The No. 2 on the midwatch was Lt. Irian Woodley, 42, 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' 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 Comb'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 30 minutes before the crash from 1 to 1:30 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 1:20 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 67," 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 22 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.

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 No. 2, Lt. Raven Parker, 26, 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, 25, had worked 19 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 17 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 7th 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 7th 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 6 feet, 5 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 12 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 65 degrees. The waves were cresting 1 to 3 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 12 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 post-crash 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 No. 2 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 1 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 15 to 20 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 5-foot-4-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 48 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 10 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 1:20 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, about 6 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 ligh

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