**SPOILERS** True story of the disaster that struck the USS Iowa when it's #2 16 inch gun turret exploded in a test firing in the Caribbean Sea. The result of the explosion cost the lives of 47 members of the USS Iowa's crew. It also put the final nail in the coffin to the US Navy's use of dreadnoughts or battleships in any of its future military operations.
Desperately trying to find a scapegoat in order to blame for its shabby treatment, in letting the ship go to pot, of maintaining the USS Iowa the Navy brass came up with this bizarre story of a homosexual affair gone bad between two members of the Iowa crew. One of the sailors killed in the explosion Clay Hartwig, Dashell Eaves, had made out an insurance policy to his good friend and fellow sailor Ken Truitt, Jamie Harrold, and it was this flimsily piece of evidence, if you can call it that, that was supposed to be the reason for the deadly gun turret explosion! Trying to implicate the disaster to a broken up gay love affair, between Hartwig and Truitt, was the very hight of stupidity on the Navy's part since there was absolutely no proof that the two sailors were, actively or not, gay! In fact the Navy went one step farther in their gay angle by saying that it was Truitt recent marriage to his wife Carol, Kate Hemblen, that had his "gay lover" flip out and commit suicide, by blowing up the ship, as some kind of insane act of revenge!
The movie has Lt. Dan Meyer, Robert Sean Leonad, buck the system and take the side of the now suspected of mass murder as well as deceased Clay Hartwig. Knowing that Hartwig was nowhere near turret 2 Lt. Meyer a man with navy blue blood flowing in his veins wouldn't let him, as well as the alive Truitt, hang for something that he didn't do.
****SPOILERS**** In the end it was the Iowa's skipper Capt. Fred Moosally, James Caan, who broke with tradition in blindly going along with what his superiors tell him to and came, together with Let. Meyer, to seaman's Hartwig & Truitt defense. In a quite and forceful voice Capt. Moosally told a packed Senate Committee hearing room that he'll never go against the men who serve loyally under him to protect rear ends of his superiors in the Navy. Even if it costs him the command of his beloved ship the USS Iowa! Capt. Moosally emotionally packed testimony was so honest and heart wrenching that it not only left his supporters without a dry eye in the Senete Commitee room but had his superiors in the Navy back down, mostly in shame, in disciplining him for his brave and non a** kissing or suck-up, to them, statements!
P.S It was later brought out that the turret gun explosion was the results of an accidentally overstuffed gun powder charge not, as at first suggested, sabotage and suicide on the late Seaman Hartwig's part. But by then it was too late for Hartwig friend the happily married Seaman Truitt who's life in the US Navy became a living hell where even the suspicion of being gay was, at the time in 1989, a career ending experience.
Desperately trying to find a scapegoat in order to blame for its shabby treatment, in letting the ship go to pot, of maintaining the USS Iowa the Navy brass came up with this bizarre story of a homosexual affair gone bad between two members of the Iowa crew. One of the sailors killed in the explosion Clay Hartwig, Dashell Eaves, had made out an insurance policy to his good friend and fellow sailor Ken Truitt, Jamie Harrold, and it was this flimsily piece of evidence, if you can call it that, that was supposed to be the reason for the deadly gun turret explosion! Trying to implicate the disaster to a broken up gay love affair, between Hartwig and Truitt, was the very hight of stupidity on the Navy's part since there was absolutely no proof that the two sailors were, actively or not, gay! In fact the Navy went one step farther in their gay angle by saying that it was Truitt recent marriage to his wife Carol, Kate Hemblen, that had his "gay lover" flip out and commit suicide, by blowing up the ship, as some kind of insane act of revenge!
The movie has Lt. Dan Meyer, Robert Sean Leonad, buck the system and take the side of the now suspected of mass murder as well as deceased Clay Hartwig. Knowing that Hartwig was nowhere near turret 2 Lt. Meyer a man with navy blue blood flowing in his veins wouldn't let him, as well as the alive Truitt, hang for something that he didn't do.
****SPOILERS**** In the end it was the Iowa's skipper Capt. Fred Moosally, James Caan, who broke with tradition in blindly going along with what his superiors tell him to and came, together with Let. Meyer, to seaman's Hartwig & Truitt defense. In a quite and forceful voice Capt. Moosally told a packed Senate Committee hearing room that he'll never go against the men who serve loyally under him to protect rear ends of his superiors in the Navy. Even if it costs him the command of his beloved ship the USS Iowa! Capt. Moosally emotionally packed testimony was so honest and heart wrenching that it not only left his supporters without a dry eye in the Senete Commitee room but had his superiors in the Navy back down, mostly in shame, in disciplining him for his brave and non a** kissing or suck-up, to them, statements!
P.S It was later brought out that the turret gun explosion was the results of an accidentally overstuffed gun powder charge not, as at first suggested, sabotage and suicide on the late Seaman Hartwig's part. But by then it was too late for Hartwig friend the happily married Seaman Truitt who's life in the US Navy became a living hell where even the suspicion of being gay was, at the time in 1989, a career ending experience.