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Ex-Halsey CO fires back

When Cmdr. John Pinckney took command of the destroyer Halsey on May 18, 2006, in San Diego, he assumed the lead of a state-of-the-art American warship yet to make its maiden deployment and, with it, a crew crackling with energy.

Under its previous commander, the Halsey set a record for getting a ship certified to deploy, doing so within 200 days of commissioning. The plank-owners began training while still in the shipyard, and within months of arriving in home port, it was surge-ready.

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Interview with Cmdr. Pinckney

But after Pinckney showed up, there were problems.

In nearly two hours of interviews with Navy Times the week of Oct. 21, Pinckney tried to explain what went wrong with his command and how that ended an otherwise remarkable career, one that took him from seaman to commander of one of the world’s most modern warships.

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Drink up, blow up, cover up

The trouble might have started when he arrived in San Diego in May, but it got out of control six months later in Kagoshima, Japan. On the night of Nov. 2, after hosting Japanese VIPs and, according to the Navy’s official investigation, allowing sailors to drink alcohol to excess, fire broke out near one of the ship’s main reduction gears in the engineering spaces.

During this time, it wasn’t what Pinckney did, but what he failed to do that sparked his downfall: He stayed in his stateroom during and after the fire, leaving the situation to his crew. “I never go to the scene of a casualty,” he explained.

While Pinckney stayed put, the Navy investigation concluded, the efforts to fight the fire got off to a poor start. Some sailors were too drunk to get into their firefighting gear. A few months later, the same area caught fire after the ship returned home to San Diego. The cause of that fire is still under investigation.

Pinckney acknowledged a simmering “discord” between him and his wardroom. He said the other officers didn’t support what he wanted to do. But one chief saw a CO who prized keeping junior sailors happy, a priority not wholly shared by his wardroom and mess.

One petty officer, who served under Pinckney and who asked not to be named, said the command environment declined rapidly during Pinckney’s tenure. “Halsey is home to some fine sailors, and I say that having served on three other ships,” he wrote in an e-mail to Navy Times. “What we lived through on the 2006 deployment was as close to a ‘Caine Mutiny’ style experience as you can get.”

The ship completed its Western Pacific deployment and returned to San Diego on Dec. 24. The second fire, in January, damaged the main reduction gear so badly it had to be replaced — at a cost of $8.5 million.

Vice Adm. Terrance Etnyre, commander of Naval Surface Forces, fired Pinckney on Feb. 2 for loss of confidence.

A preliminary investigation, which was obtained by Navy Times and served as the basis of an Oct. 22 cover story, focused on the night of the first fire. It revealed that during and after the reception for Japanese dignitaries on Nov. 2, Pinckney repeatedly encouraged on-duty sailors to drink alcohol.

One on-duty officer told the executive officer she was just holding a beer “to placate the CO,” according to the executive officer’s statement to investigators. The XO told investigators, “I took alcohol away from one duty section member ... who got upset and indicated that the CO said it was OK.”

Another crew member reportedly accepted a beer from the skipper, but poured the contents overboard.

Pinckney, in his interview with Navy Times, disputed nearly every assertion made by other crew members in the investigation. But he didn’t dispute staying in his cabin while the crew reacted to the emergency. Asked to respond to accusations by the crew that he ignored repeated calls and knocks on his cabin hatch, Pinckney said he could not hear the alarm bells, or the knocking on his door from the passageway. Besides, he added, it was his policy to leave casualty response to others.

“I never go to the scene of a casualty. That’s why we have all these people who are trained. I let them do their job, I get the report, then I act,” Pinckney said.

Similarly, Pinckney denied hearing alarms and said he only learned of the fire when his executive officer called him in his cabin to tell him it was extinguished.

“When they rung for the fire they only rung that on enlisted circuits,” he said. “They did not ring that throughout the ship. I live in officers’ country. I did not hear any bells.”

However, the investigation report quotes an officer who told investigators that Pinckney called down to tell that officer to stop using the 1MC to provide updates as the crew fought the fire.

Pinckney concedes that he delayed sending a report on the fire up his chain of command until the next day, but he disagreed with the investigation report’s contention that the commander failed to mention that the fire affected the critical MRG in his official communications to the destroyer squadron and strike group commanders.

“The [chief engineer] and I sat there on the computer and we sent off that e-mail. And I got a reply back. I directed that the same verbiage be used for the Kitty Hawk,” he said. “It said we had a fire in the dehumidifier, a flashover in the MRG and that we’re investigating and we’ll send a further report.”

According to the investigation report, however, “When the SITREP was sent on 3 November 2006, mention of the MRG was specifically excluded by the CO.”

Pinckney said he was not fully aware of the extent of the drinking aboard his ship. Although he was present on the ship throughout the event, he said his chiefs and officers failed to report the problems to him. In fact, he said, it wasn’t until he was back in San Diego two months later that he learned on-duty sailors had been drinking at all.

“I didn’t know there was anything wrong until January. And I am like, ‘Where in the heck did this come from?’ How can you have an [executive officer, command master chief, command duty officer, engineering duty officer, master-at-arms] and none of this stuff get reported?”

Asked if he believes someone had it in for him, Pinckney said: “Me, personally, I do. These reports that are supposed to come up to the CO, I didn’t get any. My question is, ‘Did this stuff really happen?’ ... I hate to say this, but it was an authorized function in port and hey, it didn’t go absolutely right.”

But Pinckney also acknowledges that, in the Navy, someone is always accountable. “Someone has to pay.”

He admits there were problems in the wardroom. “One of the issues that was brought out was that there wasn’t a harmonious relationship between the XO, the [assistant operations officer] and myself,” he said. “There were meetings where I’d walk out and the things I’d talked about would be harshly criticized. I would hear about that through a backloop,” he said. “There would be wardroom meetings and I’d talk about the things I wanted to do, and they would strongly question those things.”

A chief who served under Pinckney and asked not to be identified said he had concerns about Pinckney’s command style early on.

“He was very much concerned with the morale and well-being of the junior sailors, and that caused some problems in the upper levels,” he said. “He’d keep the blueshirts happy, but the chiefs and the officers were trying to get some work done.”

Standards loosened, the chief said, and the skipper emphasized recreation events such as bingo nights and extra liberty chits, which weakened duty sections. Civilian garb became more common aboard the ship.

“It kind of turned into a joke after a while,” he said, referring to the lax standards.

The chief was witness to the friction with the leadership during deployment. It wasn’t that Pinckney was a “rebel,” he said, but he definitely had his own way of doing things. “He had to do something right to make it that far,” the chief said. “But my gut feeling [upon Pinckney’s arrival aboard ship] is he would be relieved of command within two or three months.”

Pinckney faults the investigation for not going deeper into what happened that night, and he said the investigator never asked him to make a statement.

“I can say, ‘Did he talk to everybody? Did he identify the people who said they were on duty that were drinking?’ ... All of that was glossed over. And basically it says ‘Hey, let’s go to the top, whack right there, OK, everything else is fine and then we move on.’”

Pinckney, who was an enlisted fire controlman before earning his commission in 1987, was in command nine months. He retired in July and is now living in Charleston, S.C.

Recovering from what happened has been hard. He said he feels “slighted” and “damned” by media reports based on the investigation. And being relieved is “a burden I will carry forever.”

“The worst thing that could ever happen to anybody that’s in command is to lose command.”

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