Remembering my earliest civil rights action

Back in 1997, I was assigned to the USS Coronado (AGF-11) as the leading petty officer of the Ordinance Division. I was a fire controlman first class petty officer with over 17 years in service – about two-and-a-half years from my transfer to the Fleet Reserve with a retirement pension.

My division officer was Ensign Moore. (NOTE: The division officer’s name has been changed in this article to protect her privacy.) She was the first female weapons officer (WEAPSO) that the USS Coronado had had in its over 20 years of service.

She was fairly young. I believe she was 23 years old when she became my division officer. She was also very fit and attractive. If she was a just a few inches taller she would have had the makings of a fashion model.

The USS Coronado was an old ship at the time, and many pieces of equipment that had been on the ship at its commissioning had been removed, so there were many screw holes missing screws, and many cableways that traversed through the bulkheads (the walls) of the ship that had spaces where cables had previously traversed.

Well, one weekend I had two different enlisted sailors in my department (the organizational level one up from my division) tell me that sailors were watching Ensign Moore shower, and that she had a birthmark on a particular part of her body that was usually covered.

I was distressed. I initially felt in a quandary over what to do, if anything, with that information. After two days of agonizing over it, I sought the advice of a female chief petty officer off my command. I told her I didn’t know what to do with the information, and she called me on it. She told me I did know what to do with the information, but that I knew it would be hard to do what I knew was the right thing to do.

That chief asked me a couple of rhetorical questions in the process. She asked me: 1.) How would I feel if that woman being peeped at in the shower was my mother or my sister; and 2.) How would Ensign Moore feel if she found out later that I knew she was being peeped at while she was showering, but didn’t tell her.

On that Monday evening, I told Ensign Moore that people were peeping at her when she showered. I remember that her face turned sheet white. Then, we called in the senior chief master at arms (who was also female), and she took my verbal report of the incident.

To make a long story short, they discovered that there were four sailors who were peeping at all of the women officers who were using a particular shower that had many empty screw holes and empty cableways. It was just Ensign Moore was their favorite to peep at. It was based on how very attractive she was. Three of the sailors were discharged for their actions, and the fourth, who had turned “state’s evidence,” received the maximum punishment he could receive in a non-judicial punishment hearing.

I was treated differently by my peer petty officers. I wasn’t trusted with much personal information after that. I had the senior chief signalman on the ship come up to me and told me I handled it wrong. I should have taken this incident to the chief’s mess instead of to the ship’s master at arms, so that no one would have gotten in trouble over this. And, I was dealing with significant depression already so this contributed to a couple of months of even deeper depression.

A few months later, one of the three discharged sailors saw me while I was crossing the street by the 32nd Street Naval Station, and he revved his car, squealed his tires and sent me the message that he could run me over at that moment, and that he wanted to run me over. My guess is he didn’t run me over because of the potential consequences of injuring or killing me.

Even though it cost me personally, I realized I did the right thing for the right reasons, and that I had to continue that sort of behavior for the rest of my life.

That incident changed my life, and how I look at actively working to make the world a better place. I’d do it again, now without a moment’s hesitation. Doing the right thing for the right reason is everything to me.