Part 18 (1/2)

15.

”We Changed the Rules”

The USS Iowa was an awesomely potent weapon.

Launched August 27, 1942, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the huge battles.h.i.+p with its crew of fifteen hundred was armed with the biggest, most powerful guns of any U.S. wars.h.i.+p ever: nine 120-ton leviathans, each sixty-eight feet long, capable of lofting 2,700-pound explosive projectiles onto targets nearly twenty-three miles away.

The giant rifles with their sixteen-inch bores could be fired twice a minute in a complex series of steps requiring a five-hundred-page manual to describe. They were safe, too. Through several wars and innumerable engagements across decades of service, not a single sailor inside a sixteen-inch gun turret on any U.S. naval craft had ever been killed due to a misfiring.

Not until April 19, 1989.

That morning the Iowa was conducting routine gunnery exercises in the Caribbean, about three hundred miles north of Puerto Rico. Turret One fired four times without incident. Then it was Turret Two's turn to fire.

Instead at 9:55 a.m., before it discharged a single round, Turret Two was rocked by an enormous blast that annihilated all forty-seven sailors working inside.

The navy at once placed Rear Admiral Richard D. Milligan, a former battles.h.i.+p captain himself, in charge of investigating the unprecedented explosion.

At first, the official probe was entirely technical, focused on how the fatal explosion might have occurred. But in early May, a letter from Ohio abruptly redirected everyone's attention.

Kathlene Kubicina, introducing herself as the sister of twenty-four-year-old Gunner's Mate Clayton M. Hartwig, one of the forty-seven who'd perished, informed the navy that her dead brother had taken out a double-indemnity life insurance policy. The beneficiary, wrote Kubicina, was Kendall Truitt, another sailor aboard the Iowa. Kubicina was curious to know if Hartwig's family qualified for part of the $100,000 benefit, too.

Kathy Kubicina's letter came just as the navy's technical investigators were reporting that although they did not know what had caused the fatal detonation, the how apparently was no accident.

Confronted with the possibility that the navy now should be searching for a who, quite possibly Clay Hartwig-gun captain in Turret Two that day-Admiral Milligan called on the Naval Investigative Service for help, asking the NIS to probe Hartwig's past for any possible clues. NIS investigators crisscrossed the country in search of both physical evidence and anyone with a connection to Hartwig, from Kendall Truitt to the dead sailor's boyhood pals.

Meantime, agent d.i.c.k Ault at the BSU received a call from an old acquaintance, NIS commander Tom Mountz.

Ault, a former marine whose specialty at the BSU was spies and espionage cases, had met Mountz in the course of interviewing more than thirty traitors for a secret government research project. Now Mountz wanted to know if the BSU would do an equivocal death a.n.a.lysis on the Iowa explosion.

Ault, who had done several such a.n.a.lyses in partners.h.i.+p with Hazelwood, approached Roy to join him. In what would prove a fateful decision for both agents, Hazelwood agreed to team up.

Roy had already learned from the Tawana Brawley fiasco (see Chapter 19) that the search for simple truths in a complex criminal investigation is easily subverted, and then overwhelmed, when other agendas intervene. In the Iowa case, Ault and Hazelwood would discover the price of promulgating an unpopular point of view, especially at their level in the federal food chain.

”I knew at the time what probably was going to happen,” Roy recalls.

”Either we would make the navy unhappy, or the politicians and the media and Hartwig's family would attack us. We were going to get hammered one way or the other.”

Hazelwood and Ault's a.s.signment was essentially interpretive; they were to create for the navy what the late Dr. James Brussel called an ”inferential mosaic” from evidence supplied to them by the NIS. Neither Hazelwood nor Ault took any part in the field investigation or witness interviews.

Nor did either agent ever consider the possibility that the explosion aboard the Iowa was an accident. The navy confidently informed them it was not. Their only concern was whether enough behavioral evidence was available for Hazelwood and Ault to decide among three possible options: Had Petty Officer Hartwig committed suicide, or homicide, or a suicide/homicide? If so, for what reason?

As gun captain in Turret Two on April 19, Clay Hartwig was stationed near the gun breech, the perfect spot to do mischief. Later forensic investigation would show that Hartwig was bent at the waist, peering upward through the open breech, when 660 pounds of gunpowder packed in five silk bags exploded back down the barrel at him.

Accelerating to nearly twice the speed of sound at a temperature of three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, the blast reached Hartwig in about one-twelfth of a second. He was killed in an instant.

Clay Hartwig didn't feel a thing.

He was the third of three children in the family of Evelyn and Earl V. Hartwig, a navy veteran. Both of Clay's older siblings were girls.

One sister told the navy that her younger brother was considered a loner within the family, that Clay spent most of his boyhood by himself in his room. She described him as nonathletic, friendless, and estranged from his family, but not overtly hostile toward them, either. She could not recall a time where Clay ever had lost his temper.

This description of Clay Hartwig wouldn't vary in significant detail among the many people who spoke to the navy interviewers. They uniformly characterized Hartwig as aloof and immature-a disgruntled loner.

He collected combat-style knives and guns, and read Soldier of Fortune and similar men's magazines. Young Clay also purchased many books about World War II, with specific interest in wars.h.i.+ps.

In his junior year in high school, Clay befriended Brian Hoover, then a ninth grader. Hoover would tell the NIS of how the older boy described making pipe bombs and blowing up trees with them. Hoover said that he and Hartwig together built a makes.h.i.+ft Molotov c.o.c.ktail from detergent and gasoline. They detonated the device in an open field.

The NIS investigators uncovered little to suggest that Hartwig ever was interested in girls. The one female friend from his youth they did find was four years his junior, a seventh grader he met about the same time he met Brian Hoover.

The violent subtext in Hartwig's personal history included a self-destructive streak. Hoover once walked into Hartwig's room to discover his friend intently stroking a sharp knife blade across his wrist.

Hoover told investigators that he took the knife away, and that Clay believed his friend's intervention saved his life. So grateful was Hartwig that he wrote out an informal will, leaving Brian Hoover everything he owned. NIS investigators later found the doc.u.ment tucked in one of several Bibles in Clay's old room at home.

According to those who knew him, self-dramatizing gestures of this sort were typical of Hartwig, who also was apt to bear bitter grudges against those he believed had wronged him.

When he joined the navy out of high school in 1983, Hartwig began sending Hoover two hundred dollars a month. He kept up the practice for eighteen months, until Brian disclosed to Clay that he'd had s.e.x with a girl of their mutual acquaintance.

Hartwig immediately suspended the monthly stipend to Hoover.

The young sailor's s.e.xual orientation became a public issue within weeks of his death when a television network reported he was h.o.m.os.e.xual. The questions had been raised before.

There were whispers on board the Iowa that Hartwig and Kendall Truitt, his life insurance beneficiary, were physically intimate, rumors that Truitt has repeatedly denied.

Hartwig's rumored h.o.m.os.e.xuality is not an idle question for the purposes of understanding what occurred in Turret Two, however. Statistics indicate h.o.m.os.e.xual males commit suicide at a substantially higher rate than do heteros.e.xual males in the same age group.

In any event, Hartwig apparently had scant s.e.xual experience with females. A woman in Norfolk, Virginia, the Iowa's home port, told the NIS that Hartwig impulsively proposed marriage to her on their second date. They'd gone to bed together, but he had kept his pants on and nothing happened between them.

Another of Hartwig's very few known female acquaintances said she had notified Clay by letter that she expected them to consummate their relations.h.i.+p on his next return from sea. Reticent as he was about the subject, her demand for s.e.xual performance may have unnerved him.

It was not Clay Hartwig's habit to discuss intimate matters directly with anyone. Instead, he wrote letters and notes, hundreds of them, to both men and women he regarded as friends.

Hazelwood and Ault read a wide a.s.sortment of them.

”One thing about me is I show very little emotion,” he wrote in an undated note to Truitt, ”. . . and I never express my feelings out loud. But it's different when I write it down. It's much easier for me to do it that way.”

When Clayton Hartwig did talk about himself, he was given to exaggerations and outright lies, confecting a fantasy life altogether different from the world Hartwig actually inhabited. He wore unauthorized insignia on his uniform, and showed off a navy SEAL members.h.i.+p for which he did not qualify. On and off the s.h.i.+p, Hartwig bragged about the hush-hush high-level a.s.signment in London he'd been promised if he reenlisted.

No such special a.s.signment existed. In fact, his performance reviews suggested he lacked the aggressiveness to be a good leader.

Hartwig persevered nearly to the end of his six-year enlistment in the navy, even though he appears not to have succeeded particularly well, or to have enjoyed navy life.

He was scorned and ridiculed by s.h.i.+pmates, according to Kendall Truitt. Another Iowa seaman recalled Clay calling the wars.h.i.+p ”a d.a.m.n pig.”

Nor did his fascination with violence subside. Hartwig owned two handguns. Found in his possessions after the explosion was a technical manual, Improvised Munitions. His sister Kathlene reported that in the summer of 1988 Clay came home on leave with what he described as explosive materials from the Iowa, substances used ”to shoot the big guns,” he said.

Reportedly, Hartwig also said when he was home that if an explosion occurred inside the Iowa's gun turrets, there'd be no survivors.

After her brother's death, Kathlene found in Clay's typewriter a list of all the crewmen a.s.signed to Turret Two. NIS investigators also discovered in his room an alb.u.m devoted to newspaper accounts of s.h.i.+p disasters.