“Let me read it now,” Admiral Mike Boorda replied. He took the paper and began skimming it, ignoring his aide and myself as he poured over the three pages of typing.
When he finished, the Chief of Naval Operations glanced at me. I was struck silent by the anger that contorted his features.
Five months earlier, buried in a pile of news releases and publications, a letter had arrived in my mailbox at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It was a desperate cry for help from a young Navy wife.
“I am writing to you as one who is lost and knows not where to turn next,” Tracy Hasty wrote. The story she told was heart-wrenching and infuriating.
Operational Systems Technician 3rd Class William Hasty was a proud young sailor who loved the Navy and going to sea on ships. Newly married and assigned to the frigate Ford (FFG-54) at Naval Station Everett, Washington, Hasty had a challenging job and looked forward to his deployment to the Persian Gulf in the fall. A college graduate, Hasty had just one year remaining on his four-year commitment and already had received one job offer from a civilian instrument company, but he still was weighing whether to make the Navy a career.
The Ford was in port at Everett on 28 April 1995 when Hasty suffered the accident that changed the course of his life.
Hasty was working as a duty-section security patrol that night when he came upon a civilian contractor working near a hatchway leading to the intake shaft for one of the ship’s gas-turbine engines. The worker asked him if there were any lights inside the access compartment, so Hasty climbed up a ladder, opened the hatch, and entered the compartment to check.
While searching for a light switch, Hasty fell 35 feet down the shaft, hit a metal screen, and landed unconscious on the deck below. He suffered serious fractures and a head injury.
As civilian emergency medical technicians raced the barely conscious sailor to an Everett emergency room, neither Hasty nor his wife realized that their nightmare had only begun. What would follow was a nine-month struggle against the mistakes and indifference of the Navy’s medical bureaucracy.
In her initial letter and several follow-up telephone calls, Tracy Hasty provided a detailed chronicle of the problems she and her husband were suffering.
Civilian doctors the night of the accident diagnosed William Hasty as suffering a closed-head injury. (This is where there is no skull fracture or bleeding, but brain injury results from the impact.) Tracy Hasty said Navy medical authorities in Bremerton had ignored her concerns about her husband's head injury and turned a deaf ear to the couple’s plea to be moved to Balboa Naval Medical Center in San Diego, where they could be close to family members.
On 5 May, Tracy said she took her husband to see an orthopedic surgeon at Bremerton Naval Hospital and told the officer that her husband was demonstrating signs of personality change and temper, which she had been warned were indications of brain trauma. A 10 May report by Navy doctors reviewing Hasty’s case listed ten medical diagnoses but did not cite either a closed-head trauma or brain injury.
“I was there telling people in patient admissions that I had documents about brain injury and if you see symptoms, get help,” Tracy Hasty said. “I told them, but they all blew it off.” A week later, she repeated her plea to a Navy medical board official at Bremerton, “but he did not listen.”
In addition to pain from injuries. Hasty suffered disorientation. blinding headaches, and sleeplessness. His moods swung from depression to rage. “The brain injury is making him someone I cannot recognize,” Tracy told me. “His loving nature has been replaced by a blazing temper.”
Hasty’s medical condition reached a crisis on 24 June, when his broken wrist in which pins had to be placed became infected. On advice of a duty Navy nurse at Everett, Tracy Hasty rushed her husband at 0300 to a nearby civilian emergency room. Several days later, a patient administrator at Bremerton Naval Hospital berated the couple for going to a civilian hospital and told them that he had decided not to allow Hasty’s transfer to San Diego.
The personnel officer refused to allow Hasty to fill out the forms that day, requiring the financially strapped couple to take a motel room for the night. The next day, the strain of visiting various offices and filling out paperwork caused Hasty’s injuries to become inflamed and he again required emergency room treatment.
Navy officials continued to ignore Tracy Hasty’s pleas that William was suffering from a head injury and needed in-depth examinations. It was not until five weeks later-three months after the accident—that the Navy finally agreed to send Hasty to be tested by neurological experts at Madigan Army Medical Center near Tacoma.
One Madigan doctor told Tracy that the impact of the fall would be long-term. “He said that William was suffering from post-concussive syndrome and that it could last for years." she said. The doctors asked what kind of physical or occupational therapy her husband had been receiving from the Navy at Bremerton. “Virtually none,” she replied.
The emerging story was the sort of red meat upon which journalists feed: Navy ineptitude, betrayal of a service comrade, and a David-versus-Goliath struggle of a couple against the bureaucracy. My initial plan was to build a full account of what had happened, inform the Navy of the impending article, and publish it.
Tracy Hasty requested that I hold off while she made a last- ditch effort to obtain her husband’s transfer to San Diego. She demanded on her husband’s behalf an Article 15 hearing with the commander of the naval hospital, where they presented the facts of the situation and requested that Hasty be sent to Balboa. By then, the Navy had received confirmation from Madigan officials that Hasty was indeed suffering from brain trauma, and several days later Hasty received orders to San Diego.
The family arrived in late September. I wished them good luck and shelved the story.
But in early January 1996, Tracy Hasty wrote me another letter. The Navy, she suspected, was going to declare her husband sufficiently healed and throw him out on the street once his enlistment term ended. The couple said their best hope for long-term recovery was for William to receive a medical retirement and disability that would provide extended health care protection. They received a jolt when one doctor “told us William was not bad enough to be medically retired,” Tracy said.
I flew to San Diego in late January to attend the AFCEA- Naval Institute convention and decided to meet with the Hasty family to see how they were faring. Hasty raised his shirt sleeve to show a skeletal right arm. He had dropped from 135 pounds at the time of the accident to 120. “I still have headaches above my eyes,” he said. “Every once in a while I lose my balance.”
By journalistic conventions, I had obtained all the elements of a major expose. The story was ready for publication, but something else stayed my hand.
The next morning, I sat in the press section on the flight deck of the carrier Kitty Hawk (CV-63) as Vice Admiral Brent Bennitt relieved Vice Admiral Rocky Spane as Commander, Naval Air Forces, Pacific Fleet. Admiral Boorda was the principal speaker.
In his introduction of the CNO, Admiral Spane noted that “Admiral Bo- orda’s strongest impact on the Navy is his ‘follow me’ leadership and his care for the troops.” Admiral Boorda himself, as he did in practically all of his public appearances, stressed the commander’s accountability and responsibility.
“There is nothing abstract about this job,” Admiral Boorda said. “We must have the best technology ... but we must never forget it is people who fight this nation’s wars.” He closed with a reference to what the late Admiral Arleigh Burke once said he hoped was his greatest accomplishment: “He hoped he had taught some people to take care of their people.”
I gazed across the harbor to San Diego, visualizing the small bungalow near Balboa Park with the young Navy couple so wracked with pain and anger and fear. Okay, admiral, I said to myself, let’s see if you mean it.
The following day, I met with Admiral Boorda for a brief interview. When we had disposed of several topics, I asked him for five minutes off the record. I told him I had assembled a story about a sailor of his who had been mistreated by the service’s medical bureaucracy. I mentioned his remarks of the day before. Then I asked him if he could take time to glance at the story I had prepared.
After he finished the text, Boorda folded the printout and placed it in his pocket. “What are you going to do with this?” he asked.
“It’s ready to go, but I’m unhappy with it,” I replied. “It doesn’t have an ending.”
“I’ll get back to you,” he said.
He didn’t have to. Two days later, Tracy Hasty called me.
“Did you talk to someone?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“We’ve had three calls from admirals today,” she said. "One said they were real sorry and the others want to make sure William is getting the treatment he needs.”
Within a week. Hasty was informed that he would not be precipitously discharged. He remains on limited duty at Balboa Naval Medical Center while his healing slowly continues. When my newspaper published the Hasty’s story, it contained a public apology issued by Commander Sheila Graham, spokeswoman for the Navy Medical Command.
I did not mention in the story what William and Tracy Hasty and I all knew by that time. Mike Boorda returned to Washington with the Hasty printout in his pocket and threw a lightning bolt down the chain of command. His comments about helping his sailors were not ceremonial boilerplate. They were the essence of his own style of leadership as a Navy admiral and as a human being.
When news flashed around the country on 16 May that the admiral had taken his life, my first call went to William and Tracy Hasty. She tearfully told me, “He [Boorda] directly was responsible ... in making people actually care about what happened. He made my husband feel that he had worth.”
My biggest regret is that I did not tape my brief conversation with Tracy Hasty right after Admiral Boorda threw his lightning bolt. As the Navy and the American people try to understand Mike Boorda’s tragic death, Tracy Hasty could tell them much about his life.
“Did you talk to someone?” she had asked. You should have heard her voice. It quavered with disbelief; it trilled with joy. After months of struggle against indifference and hostility, after weeks of uncertainty and fear, someone had answered their plea. Someone far above them did care about them and, in fact, loved them.
That was the Mike Boorda they knew.