A gay seaman defends Enterprise officer Honors

Joshua Green:

I was reading about the Navy's lewd videotape scandal when my phone rang. Total serendipity--it was Pete Clark! Longtime readers of this blog will recall that Pete was the profane sailor who'd served under Eric Massa and made a memorable appearance in the item I wrote when Massa tickled and groped his way out of Congress last year ("Eric Massa's Navy Files"). Pete's the guy who introduced "snorkeling" into the political lexicon. "Meat-gazing," too. Pete is to profanity what Mozart is to music. You have to marvel.
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Turns out that in addition to knowing Eric Massa he's good friends with Captain Owen P. Honors of the USS Enterprise, the same guy who made the videotapes that are all over the news and was relieved of his command today. Apparently, Pete is plugged in to every sex scandal in the Navy. He was furious because he felt the media was railroading his friend O.P. [Capt. Honors] and ignoring the other side of the story.
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"I grew up with O.P. in Syracuse," Pete told me. "He was my brother's best friend growing up. I know both of these people very well, Massa and O.P. Honors. I've never met a person that's never not loved the guy [O.P. not Massa], from high school till now. Even the crew."

"Dude, there's a whole story behind the friggin' political correctness and how it's friggin' ruining this country. We're relieving the most beloved aircraft carrier captain I've ever heard of, in my life--and I know a lot of people in the Navy--he's being relieved for a bunch of videos that were misrepresented because they were all cut and spooled together. See, the crew LOVED this guy. Loved him. So if you read any of these people who served with him on Facebook--black, white, female, male, gay, straight--gay people are like, 'He was great, we loved him!' It's unbelievable."

I said I hadn't realized Honors had gay supporters.

"Dude, there's gay people on the support website supporting him! Because it was a joke! It was a spoof! It was a series of tapes over an entire deployment! So then they cut 'em into, like, the funniest parts, which obviously everyone else would think was insane, and someone turned in this video, and it looks bad, but it's not! Not when it's been fully examined. But the bottom line is, he got relieved."
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"Here's a perfect example [of what I'm talking about]. Have you ever seen the movie 'Brokeback Mountain'? It's kind of weird I'm using it as an example, but have you ever seen 'Brokeback Mountain'?"

Actually, no.

"I know you don't want to admit to it, you liberal. You pole-smoker! You can't even say 'pole-smoker' anymore without getting fired! What a fucking joke. Snorkeler! You can't say snorkeler."
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"But here's the deal. In 'Brokeback Mountain,' there's parts of that movie where they're makin' out, and basically gettin' it on with each other--it's very aggressive--and if somebody just took clips of that they would think that that was what the movie was all about, and no one would have seen it. And it's actually about these two guys who are in love with each other, which--whatever. But the thing is, no one would go see the movie if you just took the clips! So that's all they did from these series of [Navy] movies over five or six months. They took these clips, and, you know, it was an ongoing story that they were telling. Ships are a really stressful environment. There's 24/7 around the clock launching of aircraft, bomb-making, fixing the bombs in the ships. On the deck it's completely dangerous. People are stressed out. And the only thing they look forward to is this movie night with the X.O. [executive officer] because before they show the movie, the X.O. usually passes the word about what's going on for the week, and O.P. is genius enough to come up with a way to do it via skits, like water conservation, things of that nature. The crew loved it! Because the previous X.O.s, all they ever did was, like, read off a freaking teleprompter or read their notes. O.P. did these skits that the crew loved! And they got ratted out for it, four years after when he had command of another ship!"
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"Dude, this is the first casualty of the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell! You take this political correct bullshit, you take Major Hassan [the Ft. Hood shooter, who Pete believes wasn't stopped because of political correctness], you take a couple other things and it leads to real degradation of the military, it really does."

A few days after Green posted that interview, he added:

I wanted to share this note from a gay sailor who served under Honors aboard the USS Enterprise and wrote in to defend his former captain. (He provided his discharge certificate verifying that he'd served aboard the Enterprise). It's a viewpoint I haven't seen elsewhere and thus is worth reading and thinking about. His letter:

Josh,

My name is Eric, I was a gay sailor that served aboard the USS ENTERPRISE during the '06 and '07 deployments. I'm not sure exactly what information you need other than that I was never once offended by Capt. Honors choice of words of brand of humor. I have been making contact with many of my fellow gay service members that served aboard that time as well, in hopes that we can get the word out there that Capt. Honors never created an anti-gay work environment and that these slanders of calling him a homophobe and gay-basher are unjust.
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I can't help to think about the GEICO commercial during all this. The one with the retired drill sergeant acting as a therapist. In all honesty, do Americans really want a military full of men and women who's first reaction to a harsh word or off-colored joke to go running to mama crying? Do we really want those people as our defense against the ever growing terrorism threat and foreign nationals with a vendetta against America? It seems thats what the media and the higher ups that be wish... Before you know it they'll be administering sensitivity training on the polite and politically correct way of killing the enemy.

If you have anymore questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. And thank you for taking the time to hear this perspective on an issue that should have never made it this far. The moment this hit the media, the military should have stepped in and handled it, and not allowed the media to blow it out of proportion.

Thank you for your time,
Eric Prenger