Navy has fired 6 commanders since January, triple its usual monthly rate


Crew members said Capt. Holly Graf created an "environment of fear and hostility." (AP)

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 6, 2010

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 04326.html

The Navy has fired six commanding officers since the start of the year -- triple its usual monthly rate -- including a foul-mouthed captain who was dismissed for subjecting her crew to "cruelty and maltreatment" aboard a warship in the Pacific.

Capt. Holly Graf, commander of the USS Cowpens, a guided-missile cruiser, was relieved of duty Jan. 13 after an investigation found she cursed so much at her 400-member crew that even the sailors -- no strangers to four-letter words -- were intimidated. According to the Navy inspector general's report released this week, officers complained that their captain humiliated them in front of the rest of the crew by calling them "idiots" and "stupid" as she spat a stream of obscenities. One noncommissioned officer said Graf treated him like a toddler, forcing him to take a "time out" by standing alone in an empty watch room.

Although verbal abuse would hardly put Graf among the worst tyrants ever to command a ship at sea, her former crew members have been exacting mutinous revenge in recent weeks by posting hundreds of anonymous comments on the Internet that describe her as "Horrible Holly," as well as a modern-day Captain Bligh.

Graf's has been highlighted in much of the criticism. One Web site, http://www.militarycorruption.com, called her "an incompetent and unstable 'politically correct' poster girl for all the super feminists at the Pentagon and the U.S. Naval Academy."

Graf has also been accused on the Web site of endangering sailors' lives by engaging the Cowpens in a "drag race" with a destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, near Okinawa, Japan. The inspector general's report confirmed that the race had taken place last year but concluded that allegations Graf had endangered the Cowpens were "unsubstantiated."

I'm quite sure that Miss Holly was plenty foul mouthed, and this story shows just how politically correct our Armed Forces have become

Churchill said that the British Empire was built on " Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash"
and the reading of history that I have done says that the role of cabin boys in the past were quite athletic , one wonders what the enlisted men most junior were commanded to do for their quarterly reviews, one blanches at the thought

Good,toss her out on her @ss.
Bad officers ruin so many good sailors' (potential) careers.

Cdr Hamm you stillout there?

According to what I've heard it was the drag races that got her canned.