Jeff Huber: Bathtub Admirals

The military is a deserving topic for satire. Dumb commanders working within a dumb system telling dumb people to go off and die in frequently hilarious ways - what's not to like? Joseph Heller's Catch 22 and Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove are among my personal favorites, and when I stumbled across Jeff Huber's Bathtub Admirals, a novelized recollection of great political and military Navy fuck ups, I did not hesitate.

This is the story of one Jack Hogan, a career Navy type. It chronicles his rise and fall in an environment full of backstabbers, brown-nosers and out-and-out crazy types. ´Huber depicts the Navy circa 1990 to 2001. He takes on feminism in the armed forces as well as the "don't ask - don't tell" policy concerning gay soldiers, but the main topic of this tale is the paradoxical world of soldiers in a great army at peace, "sandbox generals and bathtub admirals" playing war. This is interlaced with Hogan's personal tragedies, making Huber's novel at times a quite depressing read.The Navy comes across as a great make-work project of the Cold War: Anything the aircraft carrier groups can do, a dude in missile command can do more thoroughly by turning a few keys. And yet the Navy steams on, doing basically useless exercises, while its admirals and captains scheme for promotion and political clout.

The politics inside the Navy are depicted as vicious. Admirals rise by backstabbing and bald-faced lying, grudges fester for decades, most members of the armed forces are depicted as harboring deep, incandescent hates for each other. The small mindedness and stupidity depicted is breath-taking: Reading this book reminded me why I did mandatory civil service instead of doing an army stint.

At times, Huber introduces terms like "Catch 69" (for the paradoxes of "don't ask - don't tell") or "fix felony" (for a illegal method to clear up some fuck up). Maybe these terms are common currency in the Navy (Google didn't find them), maybe Huber wanted to pull a Heller. I don't see these terms gaining traction any time soon, but they do a good job at encapsulating the behavior as well as the mental contortions necessary to get along in the military. The novel is populated with figures that, I suspect, are easily recognizable by readers that work in the Navy, while laymen like me just recognize them as the usual busybodies, career monsters and broken men existent in any large bureaucracy. The higher up such a figure is in the hierarchy, the more likely it is to be depicted as a caricature of a human being.

As for the situational comedy: Military fuck ups involve the easily wounded pride of old men, callow douchebags you would not trust with a McDonald's checkout counter and huge, expensive and incredibly dangerous hardware. Usually, the results are massive explosions in all the wrong places, warplanes being piloted by monkeys, ships being capsized by men without trousers etc. This, of course, is a recipe for comedy gold. Bathtub Admirals delivers on this count, but this is not its strongest point. It is much better in describing the politicking behind the screens, the narrow-minded commanders and their futile exchanges, intrigues and attempts at one-upmanship, sometimes peppered with surreal elements, like the moment where an officer pulls a readiness report literally out of his ass, not without putting on rubber gloves beforehand.

This is a good read. It paints an interesting and disturbing picture of the US Navy. It quite is amusing, and unexpectedly dark in some places. At times, I got the feeling that Huber tried very hard to create a Yossarian for the 21st century and that he fell short, but overall, Bathtub Admirals can be recommended for its surreal humor and its topic.