Word: commandant
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...really voluntary. But the problem with this response is that it offers a positively dismal assessment of people’s ability to improve themselves. To uphold PSLM’s position, it isn’t enough to say that low-level employees are currently unable to command higher wages. Instead, we have to say that they will never be able to do so—that there is something so fundamentally inferior about them that they are helpless to acquire the knowledge that would make their labor more valuable...
Dressed in his officer's whites, Commander Scott Waddle stood motionless on the grass last Wednesday, staring into the waters in front of his house inside Pearl Harbor Naval Base. Commander is an empty title at this point. Waddle was relieved of his command of the U.S.S. Greeneville immediately after the nuclear attack submarine collided with the Japanese fishing boat Ehime Maru on Feb. 9, an accident that killed nine of the people aboard that vessel. For Waddle, it has been two months of public humiliation and recrimination. Yet even after the Navy put him through a wringer...
...home life was stable, his work in the Navy was frenetically competitive. Waddle had always seen himself as destined to fight a war and told his men as much. In October 1999, in his first major sortie after taking command of the Greeneville, he took to sea off San Diego to fight a mock battle against the John C. Stennis carrier group. "They were one to two miles away, coming toward us at 18 knots--and we went up to periscope depth. I was taking my guys into the most dangerous peacetime situation. Any one of those ships could have...
Before the tragedy, Waddle represented the "new Navy" preached by his mentor, Rear Admiral Konetzni--one with a more solicitous, flexible command style for a Navy of volunteers, not conscripts. While Waddle can be obsessively gregarious, he is also astonishingly attentive to details heard in conversation. He can remember waiters' names days after they have served him in a restaurant, and acquaintances' names from 25 years ago. He would track the lives and careers of his crew, regularly inquiring about girlfriends, family crises, career plans. "I detested the way I was treated as a junior officer early on--like...
This is what recurs in his nightmares--the lack of control. "I am back on the ship, but I am not captain, and there is no captain in command." Some nights he cannot sleep at all, lying awake in a cold sweat, holding his wife Jill...