A BATTLE WITH NO VICTORS

By LANCE MORROW

The news of Admiral Jeremy Boorda's suicide passes through the indignation-and-acceptance machine:

Stage 1: Anger (upon hearing the bulletin). God damn the media, anyway!

Murray Kempton said the task of editorial writers is to come down out of the hills after the battle is over to shoot the wounded. Is it the job of jackboot reporters in this country to conduct house-to-house searches, ransacking private lives for every disreputable little secret, driving quarry to such humiliation that their only refuge is self-destruction? Shame on my profession! To hell with its venal careerism, its hypocrisy, its prurience, its pietistic ruthlessness.

Stage 2: Denial. Or, anyway, incredulity, and stray questions.

Was the admiral consciously, advertently guilty of the lie? Apparently so.

A strange mess: Everyone's worst fear (being found out) enacted in a flash tragedy. Why did he wear two V-for-valor pins? Two seems to be piling it on a bit thick. Did the first false-macho decoration demand a twin, a second iteration, to make it convincing?

Why, in any case, would a man who had ascended to such high rank require these small, phony proclamations of martial virtue to be pinned above his chest hair? Because he started out so low in rank? Why wear tokens asserting that years ago he was somewhere--in combat in Vietnam--where it could so easily be proved that he was not?

Then a pettifogging voice in the back of the mind speaks up: But he was near the fighting, was he not, on station in the South China Sea, in the theater of war, anyway?

The sadly practical question that mystifies everyone: Why did he take his life over something that he probably could have explained away after some necessary minor embarrassment? He could have apologized, said it was an unintentional mistake, a technical mix-up of the fruit salad. He might have offered his resignation to the President, which the President might then, with a gracefully deprecating remark, have refused.

Stage 3: Bargaining, this time between two professions, the journalistic and the military, to determine whose behavior violated what standards.

One's first intemperate disgust at the media for pursuing the admiral even to his death, his ritual shame, his seppuku, erupted behind the question: Who cares? Who gives a damn if he wore a couple of battle decorations he should not have?

The answer, of course, is that those men who did serve in combat in Vietnam must care about it and must consider it an affront, not only to their service but to the sacrifices made in an ill-conceived war by the 57,600 Americans who died in it and the hundreds of thousands more who left arms and legs and sometimes pieces of their sanity in Vietnam. It is self-evident that no one who had not earned the decorations for valor in battle should have worn them, least of all the Navy's top officer.

If the poet laureate of England (Tennyson, say, in the days when the post and poetry mattered) had been found guilty of plagiarism, it would be an interesting cultural scandal. To wear the valor decorations, as Boorda did, amounted to a kind of moral plagiarism--a theft of other men's honor, and therefore a debasing of the coin rewarding their courage.

All of which drags back Vietnam once again after all these years. What was wrong with Boorda wearing the pins had something to do with what was wrong with Vietnam. It was a mendacious war, for all the valorous blood spilled there. Everyone knows that far too many ticket-punching military careerists doled out too many extravagantly overstated battle citations--a corrupting form of self-congratulatory fantasy related to the practice of inventing big enemy body counts to measure American progress in the war.

The press certainly might set aside an hour to examine its own sometimes untidy motives. Like the military in Vietnam, the media can be wrecked by shallow, dishonest, irresponsible careerists.

Still: Should reporters pursue a story such as the one about the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations wearing combat decorations he did not earn?

The writer Paul Johnson, in reviewing the history of Watergate and the Nixon Administration, suggested that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did a disservice to America and its interests by pursuing the story of a cheap burglary at the Democratic national headquarters until, in effect, the two reporters drove Nixon to an extremity much like suicide.

Johnson had it wrong. Two reporters on a Saturday morning at the Washington Post have no way of knowing that reporting on a break-in might help bring down a presidency. Reporters working on Watergate--or a report about the Chief of Naval Operations' battle decorations--are like someone driving on a winding road through a forest at night: they can see as far as their headlights and not much farther. It is their work to start the engine, switch on the lights and set off down that road. They must try to be decent and intelligent, but they are not responsible for the destination.

Stage 4: Acceptance. The truth is powerful, and sometimes it is unpredictably destructive.