Word: graf
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...should have been clear to the U.S. Navy that Holly Graf wasn't fit for command when her destroyer steamed out of a Sicilian port in 2003 on the eve of the Iraq war. Without warning, all 9,000 tons of the U.S.S. Winston S. Churchill shuddered as it cleared the harbor's breakwater. The screws stopped turning, and the 511-ft.-long ship was soon adrift. "What the hell happened?" Commander Graf demanded from the bridge. She grabbed her cowering navigator and pulled him onto the outdoor bridge wing. "Did you run my f___ing ship aground?" she screamed...
...amid all the chaos and shouting, the sound heard next was more startling. Sailors on the Churchill's stern, suspecting that their ship had run aground - meaning Graf's career would be instantly over - broke gleefully into song: "Ding dong, the witch is dead!" Newly arrived Navy chaplain Maurice Kaprow could not believe what he was seeing and hearing. "Someone came up to me and said, 'We've run aground - she's finished,' " he recalls. "I was flabbergasted. They were jumping for joy and singing on the fantail." As it turned out, one of the ship's propellers had broken...
After about 10 days aboard the Churchill, concerned about poor morale on the eve of war, Kaprow visited Graf in her stateroom. "I told her, 'I'm getting some vibes - you're a nice lady and you have a hard job' - I'm telling her some of the junior officers are concerned and are really upset," Kaprow recalled. "I'm giving her the spiel, and she just goes bonkers and cuts me off. She said she didn't want to talk about it." (See the best pictures...
...speak to each other. "I became a pariah, and she just refused to talk to me," Kaprow said. "When she saw me eating in the wardroom, she'd come in and grab her food and run away - she would not talk to me." Kaprow can't explain how Graf continued to rise up the Navy command ladder. "Certain people in the Navy are preselected for command, and no matter what happens, the Navy will make sure that it happens," he said...
After more than a month on Graf's ship, Kaprow left for the carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt to tell Graf's superior what he had witnessed. He was the second senior officer from the ship to complain to superiors about Graf. "I told all of this to the commodore," Kaprow said, "but I don't know what happened to it from there." Back on the Churchill, officers who knew that Kaprow was meeting with the commodore waited anxiously for a change in the Churchill's command climate. It never came...