A glimpse of hell

Early one April morning in 1989, during a routine training exercise in the Caribbean, the center gun in Turret Two of the recommissioned battleship USS Iowa blew up. A batched investigation of the forty-seven fatalities began mere hours after the deadly explosion. Captain Fred Moosally, an Annapolis football star who had recently taken command of the Iowa, declined an offer of assistance from a professional accident team aboard a nearby aircraft carrier. Matters worsened when the investigation began on land. An investigative panel was led by a rear admiral whose handling of a sister ship to the Iowa had come under critical review. A technical team managed to lose key evidence - two 2,700-pound projectiles, in a locked storage facility - while conducting tests that proved nothing but the team's own incompetence. Squads from the Naval Investigative Service tried to twist testimony from grieving relatives of the slaughtered crew members. The concerted effort to pin blame for the Iowa explosion on Seaman Hartwig, supposedly acting to revenge a thwarted homosexual affair, ultimately destroyed careers up the chain of command of the U.S. Navy.