Not long after I reported aboard the Okinawa there was a major change. The executive officer was detached and the operations officer was moved up to take over the vacant position. He soon discovered that the petty officer in charge of the ship’s office might be a problem, and he decided to prepare for it by moving me from administrative assistant to the operations department to administrative assistant for the entire ship. I also became the legal officer for the ship. That had some interesting consequences later on.
The problem with the leading yeoman was one of my first tasks. It seems he had been assigned to an independent duty position in NATO before coming to the Okinawa. He had incurred a number of debts in Paris, and they were still outstanding when he was transferred. No one knew about this until a letter marked “personal” was sent to the captain by one of the creditors. That letter mentioned a number of other letters that had been sent without receiving any reply. The suspicion was that the yeoman had been intercepting letters about his own indebtedness and not showing them to his superiors. Well, a suspicion like that is not sufficient grounds for a legal search of the man’s locker and personal effects.. We made a number of drafts for fitness reports for the officers on board and gave them to the leading yeoman to type up. When he finished, we said one was missing. A search was authorized, primarily to find the missing draft. What we found was much more than that.
It seems that the leading yeomen had, indeed, been keeping all the letters referring to his debts. He had also been keeping other indebtedness claims against a few other first class petty officers with whom he had become friends. Since the letters were addressed to the ship or the captain failing to deliver them was a dereliction of duty. The perpetrator was reduced to the rank of seaman and his security clearance was revoked. Soon after he was transferred off the ship. He could no longer work as a yeoman without a security clearance. The official formal correspondence dealing with the revocation was my job. I wrote the letters, had them inserted in his service record, and, in addition, simply took over his job as head of the office. It took several months before the bureau of personnel found a chief yeomen to replace hi. Meanwhile, I learned a lot about shipboard administration.
Wetherhorn 