Wetherhorn

Doing my job – part 2
There are many aspects of life on board ship. The Navy keeps track of a lot of them. Often an officer is assigned to handle some item which is not part of his primary job description. The service sometimes refers to these assignments as collateral duties. Informally, those assigned to do them call them “shi**y little jobs”. The acronym SLJO is used. It means shi**ty little jobs officer. The jobs can be anything from mess treasurer or morale officer to voting officer. One of my SLJO assignments was Legal Officer.
Obviously, not all ships carry a qualified member of the bar as part of the crew. All officers are given basic training in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. When at sea, the Captain is the ultimate authority. He dispenses punishments for minor offenses, or refers more serious matters to a Court Martial. For a large crew there may be a need for someone to screen e reported offenses and prepare recommendations for suitable penalties. That was one of my collateral duties. It occupied a significant amount of time. It also included selecting officers to act as members of the Court and prosecutors and defenders for sailors accused of more serious crimes.
A ship also has an internal sort of sheriff called the Master at Arms. He escorts prisoners, runs the jail (brig), and ensures proper conduct and discipline. The Chief Master at Arms for the OKINAWA was one of my subordinates, a petty officer, lithographer, first class, whose normal duty would be the operation of the print shop on board. The junior lithographer was very good at that job, so I was prepared to let the senior man act as chief of the shipboard police.
As legal officer, I had several cases that were a bit unusual. The first case occurred before we sailed for the Far East. The Captain received a letter marked “personal” that turned out to be a complaint that my leading yeoman in the ship’s office had run up a lot of debts while serving at his previous assignment. The Navy is not a collection agency, but when such complaints are received the individual concerned is often given counseling a budgetary help to assist him in solving the problem. This letter was different. It mentioned that no reply had been received to several previous letters. There was no record of those letters ever having been received in the office. It must be noted that the leading yeoman was the individual who opened and initially sorted all the letters received there. I was called upon to confer with the Captain about what might have happened. We suspected that the leading yeoman had simply taken the letters because they referred to him. He did not want his previous indiscretions to be known by his current commanders. Searching his locker and personal effects was not an option. That would require some probable cause. So the captain rote a few draft letters for the office to type. One mentioned the executive officer. When the typed copies were prepared, it was missing. Maybe it had been taken by the leading yeomen? With that somewhat tenuous possibility as a probable cause I drafted a search order for the man’s locker. The results amazed us. We found all the previous letters regarding unpaid debts. Not just those from the author of the personal letter, but several others, too. We also found letters regarding debts owed by a few other first class petty officers who were good friends with our leading yeomen. Armed with that evidence, we ordered the convening of a Special Court Martial for dereliction of duty, and illegal possession of official documents. A Court Martial was needed because the Captain’s non-judicial punishment could not serve as the basis for withdrawing the yeoman’s security clearance. Terminating a security clearance for cause is not a routine matter. It also left us with new problem. We had to get the Bureau of Naval personnel to find a new senior petty officer to fill the billet of leading yeoman. Meanwhile, guess who got to supervise the office?

When the ship sailed for the Vietnam War Zone she had her own crew on board. She also was carrying a squadron of Marine transport helicopters and most of a Marine Infantry Battalion. After a period of combat operations near Danang, the squadron moved ashore to the Danang Air Base. The battalion was operating ashore somewhere further inland. The ship took a break from the war and sailed to Hong Kong for some Rest and Recreation. The Marines left most of their personal effects on board, We would pick them up again when we returned about 10 days later.
Shortly after the helicopter squadron rejoined the Chief Master at Arms got a few complaints. Several marines said some of their items were missing, and one pilot said his locked stateroom had been broken into. One of the crew had sold a tape recorder to a squadron maintenance man. The new purchase was shown to a squadron mate. The second man said that recorder looked just like the one that had been stolen from him. He still had the original receipt. The serial number of the recorder was on the receipt. It matched that on the device. Another complaint to the Master at Arms followed. The crew member who had tried to sell the item was a lithographer who ran the print shop. A search of the alleged thief’s belongings turned up a number of other small items that might have been stolen. Among them were a set of earphones, a small transistor radio, and several reel-to-reel tape recordings. Most of these were identified as belonging to the roommate of the pilot whose cabin had been broken into. The alleged thief said he had purchased all the items. He also had a brief meeting with the chaplain and left something to be held by the chaplain in case of need later on.
After a preliminary investigation I recommended to the Captain that our lithographer be assigned to Special Court Martial. This also meant I had to select one officer to act as prosecutor, another to defend the accused, and three more, including one of the department heads, to sit on the court. Some of these also could be described as SLJs, but at least they were of limited duration. It quickly became clear that the only count to be heard by the court would be the tape recorder. The other items lacked means for identifying them as those which had been stolen. To further complicate matters, the supposed owner of most of those other small items was a Marine pilot. He had been killed when his helicopter collided with another aircraft while the ship was in Hong Kong.
The court convened and evidence was presented. It included the original receipt, printed in black with a red heading. The owner testified to having bought the tape recorder and another marine identified a small scratch as being specific to that recorder. It had been caused by a screwdriver slipping while changing the power supply voltage setting from 220 volts to 110. Both witnesses had been present when that occurred. The young lithographer called the chaplain as a witness for his defense. The item left with him by the accused turned out to be a new receipt. Both receipts were issued by the same retail store in Hong Kong, and both listed the serial number of the recorder. The only difference was that the new item, presented in defense, was printed only in black on white paper. Was this a case of an error by the shopkeeper? Was one of them a forgery? The president of the court and the prosecutor both consulted me about this, but separately. I contacted a Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent who was resident in Hong Kong because of the frequent visits by American ships. He checked with the shop and reported that that the shop only issued receipts with a red heading. The message containing this information, however, was not admissible in court. It was hearsay. We would have to fly the agent from Hong Kong to the ship in order to be a witness. It would not be possible to have a recess in the proceedings until that could be arranged. But I could tell the prosecutor, but not the president of the court, that even though the agent could not testify, he could make a case for the defense receipt being a forgery. The accused was a lithographer, and in charge of the print shop. It would be easy for him to make a photo copy of some receipt and fill in the details. Remember, all this took place in 1969 when making photo copies wasn’t that common.
The court found the accused guilty, but only of taking a small transistor radio and some tapes from the cabin of the marine pilot. The tape recorder was ordered returned to the original marine owner on the basis of the identifying marks. The lithographer had to refund the money he had been paid for the sale. When all that was done, the lithographer turned up at the office of the Master at Arms. He had given back the money, now he wanted the item he had sold to be returned to him. The response he got was that no one knew the location of what he claimed was his tape recorder. The device that was presented in evidence had been shown to belong to someone else and subsequently returned to that person.
In the end, some sort of justice was achieved. The court conviction resulted in the lithographer being sent for a brief term behind bars and then transferred off the ship, It’s not pleasant having a known thief as part of the crew.