(2 of 2)
Ashore, however, he proved a master realist in the war of words that followed his dismissal. An admiral and one of the Navy's most brilliant captains went to bat for him — and eventually struck out. Until this happened, however, Arnheiter appeared to be some sort of martyr. He had tried, he said, to fight the war and bring the sloppy old Vance up to scratch, only to be sabotaged by a mollycoddle crew and a wardroom full of intellectuals and Vietniks. Arnheiter even dreamed up a word to describe what had happened to him: he had been "Vanced."
Neil Sheehan was one of many newspapermen who, under daily dead line pressure, could not check the facts and more or less bought Arnheiter's story. He wrote this book in part to set the record straight — and he has done so admirably. Inadvertently, however, he may have set it a bit too straight. In place of a martyred captain, readers now tend to get a some what loony martinet. If that version is far closer to truth, it somehow discourages reflection upon the captain's tortuous character. Mixed in with the sheer fudge and swashbuckle, there was in Arnheiter the pathetic likeness of an honorable inspiration: drilling the crew in riflery to repel prospective boarders, trying to lay on the young seamen some sort of religious inspiration, holding sessions about the strategic purpose of the war. The disobeying of orders to get near the enemy, too — how often have such devices been tried, and forgiven afterward when they were successful, by such naval heroes as Robert Mitchum and John Wayne?
Sheehan did the Times presentation of the Pentagon papers and before that took the time to prove that large portions of a book chronicling U.S. atrocities in Viet Nam were fake. He naturally and justly decries the manipulation of the press, and cites the defense of the Vance's deposed skipper as a case in point.
But, personal crotchets aside, Arnheiter's more truly American tragedy lay elsewhere. He foolishly believed that heroic stance and flashy press releases could turn a sauerkraut war into liberty cabbage.
∎Timothy Foote