The closest thing to a god on Earth is the captain of a naval ship. He has destructive firepower at his fingertips, and immense authority over and responsibility for the lives of men in his command. But what if god is mad? This is the premise of Herman Wouk's great novel The Caine Mutiny. This is the non-fiction version.

Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter was a Lt. Commander in command of the destroyer escort USS Vance, stationed off the coast of South Vietnam in 1967. The Vance had a tedious mission as part of Operation Market Time, inspecting coastal traffic to block Viet Cong weapons smuggling. Over the course of 99 days in command, Arnheiter's eccentric and authoritarian leadership drove the ship to the brink of mutiny. He was summarily removed from command. But Arnheiter did not go quietly. He alleged a conspiracy against him by his officers and the senior admirals of the Navy. Powerful allies, including Congressman Jacob Javits and US Navy Captain Richard Alexander, pressed his case in the court of public opinion. In 1968, Arnheiter's story had everything. For the Right, he was a captain who had been removed from command for trying to fight the war properly, rather than by LBJ's book. For the Left, he was the little man crushed by an impersonal bureaucracy. Sheehan wrote a few stories on the affair, and requested time to do a deeper dive. As it turned out, the media had simply repeated Arnheiter's allegations without even the basic step of checking them against the crew's recollections, and behind the facade of the brave naval officer there was a deep well of madness and fabrications.

From his first moments in command, Arnheiter had trouble with his basic duties and boundaries. He appropriated something like $1000 of the crew's $1500 recreation fund to buy a speedboat, which he planned to use to go trawling for trouble while on patrol. He demanded the officers steal a silver coffee set from a hotel for him. Standards of mess and dress went past 'martinet' to ridiculous, as he demanded dress whites be on hand in case an admiral inspected the Vance, abused officers and sailors for minor infractions, and forbid tiny traditional pleasures. Engine room snipes finished their hot and exhausting four hour shifts with a cigarette smoked on the fantail, but the image of crew in oil-spotted dungarees drove Arnheiter mad. He banned enlisted men from smoking and drinking coffee on the bridge, and forced officers to use a cup and saucer instead of mug. Meals became marathon sessions of Arnheiter blathering on about naval traditions, interspersed with the officers being forced to give short, impromptu speeches on subjects such as the proper use of a finger bowl and proper etiquette in an opera box. Arnheiter used top priority channels to order himself a special white toilet seat. Sunday services were dropped for obligatory and very Protestant 'moral guidance lectures' by Arnheiter, alienating Catholics on board. With the crew on short water rations, he forced everyone to go through multiple uniforms a day to meet his grooming standards, while taking 20 minute showers. Military life often involves danger and suffering, and it a basic principle of command that the senior officer share in those hazards rather than using rank to insulate himself.

Personal peccadilloes aides, Arnheiter was also a reckless and irresponsible naval officer. The Vance ran on cranky diesel engines, which Arnheiter abused and took no interest in the condition of, causing mechanical casualties which he did not report. In a rush to get into combat, Arnheiter pulled his ship off station into a restricted zone to do his own shore bombardment, exaggerated blasting a few dunes into destruction of a bunker complex, and then sent transmissions to operations command with a false position. In these cases, if the Navy had relied on the Vance being in a certain place to conduct an urgent mission, to rescue the crew of a downed helicopter or intercept a high-value target, the Vance would not have been able to respond. Arnheiter became so lost in narrating one of these pointless free-fires on the Vietnamese coast he nearly wrecked the ship. In another incident, while towing the ship's whaleboat, Arnheiter increased speed to the point the whaleboat nearly swamped, which would have drowned the men aboard. Arnheiter would leave loaded guns lying about the bridge, where a bad roll could have caused a weapon to fall and discharge. Morale deteriorated towards the point where one sailor, drunk during an impromptu BBQ on an island, started shouting he would kill Arnheiter. Another sailor covering a boarding action of a Vietnamese junk, found himself pointing his shotgun at Arnheiter, thinking in his exhaustion he could end all their torment with a single round of buckshot.

In the end, Arnheiter's ambition was his undoing. He wrote his own commendation for a Silver Star and forced his officers to endorse it. They included a sealed letter, indicating that the citation was fraudulent. The squadron commander, recognizing Arnheiter's distinctive writing style, gave much more credence to a report by a roving Navy chaplain that morale on the Vance was dangerously poor, and Arnheiter was removed from command.

A great naval officer often has a touch of romance. The heroes of the early frigate days of the Navy were proud and prickly men, to the point of death. Arnheiter was obsessed with great commanders, Nelson and MacArthur. But he was also dangerously unmoored from reality, an imaginative man unable to distinguish his fantasies from the hard facts. One might ask how Arnheiter achieved command, and according to Sheehan's investigations the system worked, and the personnel board recommended against giving Arnheiter a ship. Only personal intervention by his friend Captain Alexander in 1964 moved Arnheiter to the ranks of 'recommended for command', and Alexander never revealed why he did that.

The Arnheiter Affair is a forgotten incident, overshadowed by the great drama of the war, but this is still a fast and fascinating book on command and how it collapses.