Rico says when a story hits entitled Raunchy videos starring Enterprise skipper come to light, you gotta go see. Unfortunately, not that skipper of the Enterprise, but the real one, as Corinne Reilly of The Virginian-Pilot reports:
In one scene, two female Navy sailors stand in a shower stall aboard the aircraft carrier, pretending to wash each other. They joke about how they should get six minutes under the water instead of the mandated three.Rico says this guy's career just tanked. But, if that wasn't enough, there's Mark Thompson's article in Time:
In other skits, sailors parade in drag, use anti-gay slurs, and simulate masturbation and a rectal exam. Another scene implies that an officer is having sex in his stateroom with a donkey.
They're all part of a series of short movies produced aboard the Norfolk-based aircraft carrier Enterprise in 2006 and 2007 and broadcast to its nearly 6,000 sailors and Marines. The man who masterminded and starred in them is Captain Owen Honors, now the commander of the carrier, which is weeks away from deploying.
The videos, obtained by The Virginian-Pilot this week, were shot and edited with government equipment, many of them while the Enterprise was deployed supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time, Honors was the carrier's executive officer, or XO, the commanding officer's deputy. He took command of the ship in May.
In the videos, Honors indicates that he's trying to entertain the crew. They were shown roughly once a week on closed-circuit shipwide television, according to a handful of sailors who were assigned to the Enterprise at the time. The sailors requested anonymity for fear of retribution.
One of them said he mailed a complaint about the videos to the Navy Inspector General this week. Others said crew members who raised concerns aboard the ship in 2006 and 2007 were brushed off.
The videos were part of what Honors, 49, called XO Movie Night. "They were the XO's project," said one former Enterprise sailor, a ship videographer who, on one occasion, was asked to help in the filming. "He was the one coming up with scripts and the jokes. He was the one planning it."
The Enterprise, the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, is set to deploy overseas this month. The videos raise serious questions about Honors' judgment, especially while the carrier is under way, said another sailor, an officer aboard the Enterprise who was also there when the videos were being shown. "When the ship pulls away from that pier, he's it," the officer said. "To me, that's scary."
It's unclear why the videos recently resurfaced, although one sailor who spoke to the newspaper said they remain on at least one shipboard computer.
Honors is a native of Syracuse, New York, and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1983. He went on to fly the F-14 Tomcat and work as a test pilot before serving as XO on the Enterprise from July 2005 to September 2007. Honors did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Enterprise's then-commanding officer, Larry Rice, who was later promoted to the rank of rear admiral, and now works at the Norfolk-based U.S. Joint Forces Command.
Rear Admiral Raymond Spicer and Vice Admiral Daniel Holloway, who commanded the Enterprise carrier strike group during Honors' time as XO, could not be reached.
The Navy released a written statement late Friday in response to The Pilot's inquiries. "The videos created onboard USS Enterprise in 2006-2007 were not created with the intent to offend anyone," the statement said. "The videos were intended to be humorous skits focusing the crew's attention on specific issues such as port visits, traffic safety, water conservation, ship cleanliness, etc." The statement said that, when leaders with the carrier strike group became aware of the inappropriate content in early 2007, production of the videos ended. At least one video that includes anti-gay remarks and officers pretending to masturbate was made after July of that year, according to Honors' comments in it. The Navy said it plans to launch an investigation.
Some were giving support to Honors. By this morning, more than 1,000 people had joined "We Support Captain O. P. Honors!" on Facebook.
At the beginning of the videos, Honors jokes that his bosses shouldn't be held responsible for them. "As usual, I want to say that the captain and the admiral, they don't know anything at all about the content of this video or the movie this evening, and they should absolutely not be held accountable in any judicial setting," he says. The sailors who spoke to the newspaper said it's hard to believe that Honors' superiors on board weren't aware of the videos as soon as he began showing them in 2006, given that they were routinely broadcast for the entire crew. "People talked about them," the former ship videographer said. "People looked forward to them, at least the people who thought they were funny."
A female sailor who was assigned to the Enterprise at the time said she and a number of other women on board were offended by the videos. She said some crew members complained about them, and in fact, Honors acknowledged it on camera. In one movie, he says, "Over the years I've gotten several complaints about inappropriate materials in these videos, never to me personally but, gutlessly, through other channels." He adds, "This evening, all of you bleeding hearts... why don't just go ahead and hug yourself for the next twenty minutes or so, because there's a really good chance you're gonna be offended." Then Honors tells his viewers to get ready for something that always pleases: "the F-bomb". The video goes on to show a string of clips edited together in which he uses the expletive. The next portion is a series of clips displaying Honors and other sailors, including officers, pretending to masturbate. It's set to a song called Spank. After that, the video returns to Honors. "Finally, let's get to my favorite topic, something foreign to the gay kid over there: chicks in the shower," he says. He gestures to the person next to him, who, through a trick of video, is Honors wearing the blue coveralls of a Navy surface warfare officer, or SWO. SWOs include the officers who crew the ship; they don't include fighter pilots and other aviators. Repeatedly in the videos, Honors, a former Top Gun pilot, draws distinctions between aviators and SWOs and refers to SWOs as "fags".
The video then shows two female sailors pretending to shower together and two male sailors pretending to shower together. While the shots imply nudity, they don't show any; the men are filmed from the waist up and the women from their shoulders.
In one instance, the women are in the shower stall with a cardboard cutout of Honors.
The sailors who spoke to The Pilot estimated that Honors made a few dozen videos for XO Movie Night. They said not all of them contained sexual jokes and anti-gay remarks.
The videos were shot and edited using equipment from the ship's public affairs office, which typically spends deployments documenting and publicizing the good work of sailors.
Of note is the quality of the XO Movie Night videos and the time that Honors appears to have devoted to them, even as the Enterprise was simultaneously supporting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its air wing was dropping record numbers of bombs. The videos have plots, scripts, props, and recurring characters. In several instances, Honors plays more than one character in the same scene. To achieve this, it appears he recorded different takes in which he played the different roles, and then superimposed the takes over each other, allowing himself to appear on screen as two or three people at once.
"Some of it was pretty complicated stuff," the former ship videographer said. The videographer said that while he knew the movies weren't appropriate, in some ways he can understand how they happened. "In his defense, I'll say that sometimes, when you've been out to sea for a while, cut off from everything, you start to think things that you would never normally do are actually a good idea," he said. "You do stupid stuff to stay sane." He added that electronic communication with the rest of the world while at sea can be difficult; it was nearly impossible to email or upload videos from the carrier in 2006 and 2007. "He probably figured they'd never get off the ship."
t's hard to believe, twenty years after Tailhook, that some Navy officers still don't get it. So here's the drill: if you don't want your gay-bashing and sexual-harassment antics leading the network news, keep your comments close-held among like-mind cronies and, God forbid, don't broadcast them via video to the entire crew of the USS Enterprise. Because if you do, someone is going to tip off the hometown paper; in this case, the Norfolk Virginian Pilot.
In one scene, two female Navy sailors stand in a shower stall aboard the aircraft carrier, pretending to wash each other. They joke about how they should get six minutes under the water instead of the mandated three.
In other skits, sailors parade in drag, use anti-gay slurs, and simulate masturbation and a rectal exam. Another scene implies that an officer is having sex in his stateroom with a donkey.
They're all part of a series of short movies produced aboard the Norfolk-based aircraft carrier Enterprise in 2006 and 2007, and broadcast to its nearly 6,000 sailors and Marines. The man who masterminded and starred in them is Captain Owen Honors, now the commander of the carrier, which is weeks away from deploying.
Sure, these college-frat videos are four to five years old. But this kind of stuff was finished after Tailhook, nearly a generation ago. It's worth noting: these weren't made by some testosterone-crazed solo aviator, but the Number Two officer aboard a Navy aircraft carrier, who is slated to head out as its commander shortly. It raises as many questions about the Navy as it does about him, just like the case of Captain Holly Graf.
Capt. Honors– savor the name– is, according to Navy officials, likely to lose command of his carrier before it heads out from Norfolk on its imminent cruise to support U.S. war efforts in Afghanistan. He's lucky if that's the sole toll. It cost Ernie Blanchard a lot more.
Peacetime deaths in the military always seem in some degree senseless. In the case of Captain Ernie Blanchard, the U.S. Coast Guard's top spokesman, that was even truer than usual. Blanchard, it appears, died from a few offensive jokes.
On 10 January of last year, he strode to the podium of the Old Wardroom dining hall at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, to inspire the 118 cadets of Bravo Company and their guests with tales of Coast Guard glory. Aiming to start on a light note, Blanchard promised to "dispense with the political correctness" and opened with several risqué jokes as guests finished their strawberry-covered cheesecake. Blanchard said he had seen a cadet's fiance wearing a brooch featuring maritime signal flags. Blanchard's joke: "She said the flags meant, 'I love you.' They really said, 'Permission granted to lay alongside.'" Then Blanchard offered one about his old buddy, Captain Patrick Stillman, the commandant of cadets. On Stillman's wedding night, Blanchard said, the captain told his bride she could do anything she wanted. "So she immediately went to sleep," he said. Finally there was the one about the cadet who wondered why his fiance was wolfing down a costly meal at a fancy restaurant when she never ate like that at home. "She replied," Blanchard said, "that her mother didn't want to sleep with her." By now, the laughing had stopped.
School officials and cadets, including many of the 25 women who had been present, complained about Blanchard's poor taste. Three days after the dinner, Stillman called Blanchard to express formally the academy's displeasure. Within hours, Blanchard faxed a letter of apology to the academy, where he taught political science from 1977 to 1981. "Old sea dogs need to adapt," he conceded, "and change the way we have always done things." With the letter, Blanchard and Stillman thought the subject was closed.
But, under pressure from a dozen Coast Guard women, most of them at the academy, the Coast Guard brass launched a criminal probe into the jokes, according to a recently concluded review of the case obtained by Time. This was not Blanchard's first such cultural clash. In 1990, as skipper of the Legare, a sleek, new 270-foot cutter, a female petty officer charged him with sexual harassment, saying he and another commander had treated her unfairly and called her a "Jewish-American princess". (For good measure, she wasn't Jewish.) While Blanchard was never punished, the Coast Guard concluded he had harassed the woman. After his speech to the cadets, academy instructors argued that Blanchard needed to be punished if their lessons about gender equality were to take root in a service not always welcoming to women. "All the sexual jokes he told were typical 'male power' jokes and involved males doing it to females," said Judith Youngman, a political-science teacher at the academy.
For Blanchard, the father of two teenagers, the probe threatened to end the career to which he had devoted 30 of his 46 years. "Newspapers are going to have a field day," Blanchard fretted. "My children are going to be humiliated." He abandoned his exercise regime and stared blankly out his office window instead. His unease mounted as his colleagues avoided him. "As chief of public affairs, his phones rang all the time," his widow Connie, an elementary school teacher, told Time. "It was very noticeable when all that stopped."
Blanchard also feared the loss of a pension that a court-martial might mean. He offered to resign if the Coast Guard would halt its probe, but on 10 March, he was turned down. Three days later, Blanchard met with Vice Admiral Arthur Henn, the Coast Guard's second-ranked officer, to ask for time off. "His face was drawn and a little pale," Henn said. "He was mortified that he had caused such potential embarrassment to the Coast Guard and his family."
The next afternoon, Blanchard went into his suburban Virginia backyard, put the muzzle of his grandfather's Smith & Wesson revolver to his head and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The gun had misfired. He could have taken that as a sign he was meant to live. But Blanchard pulled the trigger a second time. The gun went off. He left no suicide note. A Navy psychological autopsy concluded that "his style seemed consistent with someone whose duty it was to shoulder the burden and assume responsibility, even as that style clouded his ability to keep his situation in perspective. The emotional pain and shame that Captain Blanchard felt he had brought upon himself and the Coast Guard led him to choose suicide as a solution."
Coast Guard officials see the case as a freak tragedy with no larger lessons. Still, some in the Coast Guard are asking whether the institution should have let the potentially career-ending charges hang over Blanchard for so long. By comparison, when a top Navy admiral suggested during a breakfast with the press last year that U.S. servicemen charged in the rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl would have been smarter to hire a prostitute instead, he was out of his job by dinnertime. "The stress level went up as it dragged on and on," Connie Blanchard says. "I've struggled with this, but I think he believed that was the best thing he could do for his family: to end this case by ending his life."
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