WASHINGTON (CN) — The drowning deaths of nine young servicemen who plummeted to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean after being trapped inside a decrepit amphibious assault vehicle demand an immediate culture shift inside the Marine Corps and Navy, lawmakers told senior military officials Monday.
Last July, a training exercise three miles off the coast of San Clemente Island, California, went horribly awry.
Fifteen Marines and one Navy sailor packed into a 26-ton AAV, short for amphibious assault vehicle, and headed into high surf. Their training for such an exercise was incomplete or nonexistent and the seafaring tank was dubbed “operationally inoperable” by Marine Corps mechanics just months before the young men boarded it.
Excessive leaking inside the nearly 30-year-old vehicle in addition to botched engine intakes, a shoddy transmission, a loss of emergency communications, downed emergency light systems and improper training culminated in a frantic 45 minutes for the men shoulder-to-shoulder inside the AAV’s hull.
Only a few of those inside managed to escape after the vehicle commander, straddling the sinking vessel, opened a hatch and hoisted Marines out as it sat just inches above the water line.
But waves overcame them as they attempted to disembark and water rushed in, sinking the AAV to the ocean floor with eight Marines and one Navy sailor – all donning heavy flak jackets, helmets, rifles and gear – trapped inside. The eldest servicemember among those who drowned was just 22 years old.
Nearly a year later, the pain and frustration from that day still looms large in Peter Vienna’s life.
Vienna is the stepfather of Navy Corpsman Christopher “Bobby” Gnem, who drowned during the accident. On Monday, Vienna described the tragedy to members of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness as a “predictable outcome resulting from a reckless disregard for human life.”
“If I hear one more time, ‘We have to train like we fight,’ I think my head will explode,” Vienna said before emphasizing the simultaneous frustration and respect he and his family have for the U.S. military, which first offered Gnem a burgeoning world of opportunity.
Now, Vienna said he has spent much of the last year on suicide watch as he and his wife, Gnem’s mother, and their family wrestles daily with who to hold accountable in light of legal precedent like the 1950 Supreme Court decision in Feres v. United States, which bars claims of negligence from being brought over injuries to active-duty military members.
Vienna pointedly asked legislators how it could be that an institution like the Marine Corps or Navy could “self-police or self-punish all while hiding behind an antiquated law” and offering nothing that resembles justice for those individuals or families who willingly sign themselves up for service.
“Carve out something within the Feres doctrine that doesn’t allow gross negligence," Vienna said. "When a situation like this has as many issues as there were, you can’t call it anything other than gross negligence."
He added, "In a situation like this, there needs to be accountability and without accountability this is just going to continue. And in three or four years, we’ll watch another hearing about lack of training and shoddy equipment and it’s just going to recycle itself."
Lieutenant General Steven Rudder, commander of the Marine Corps Forces Pacific, found in his final review of the incident it was a “confluence of human and mechanical failures” that caused the AAV's sinking and “contributed to a delayed rescue effort” that left nine dead.
“Ultimately, this tragic mishap was preventable,” Rudder wrote.
But a “mishap” is not how Vienna would define it. Nor is it how Peter Ostrovsky would sum it up.
