Daniel Villines's Reviews > The Caine Mutiny

Much like the main character of The Caine Mutiny, Willis Keith, I served in the Navy as a reservist on active duty during our first conflict with Iraq and observed (and experienced) many of the eccentric, illogical, and wasteful processes employed by the Navy. As with the crew of the USS Caine, I recall a few endless pre-dawn mornings where we were instructed to move at full speed from one place to the next only to spend the rest of the day waiting for our next set of instructions. I also served under seemingly eccentric and remote captains that ruled with unimaginable power and did not hesitate to exercised that power on the unlucky individuals that were caught "pressing the envelope" of standing orders. The Caine Mutiny brought all this to back to the forefront of my memories and did so with accuracy.

The shortcomings of this book are similar to those of many World War II novels in that it tries to capture so much of life in that era that it distracts from the central themes of the book. As it is, it reads like a black-and-white war movie complete with scenes that are over-dramatized. The book also includes pages and chapters devoted to relatively pointless sub-plots. If Wouk had only decided to focus on the matter at hand, the intensity of this book could have been amazing. Instead, I found the book a bit watered down and drawn out.

One additional thing that struck me about this book is that the main setting is a small destroyer that has been modified to perform mine sweeping operations. One of the last scenes of the book tells of this destroyer being hit, almost head on, by a Japanese suicide plane. This same scene was a reality for my grandfather serving on board the USS Abner Read on November 1, 1944. Only in his experience, the suicide plane dropped a bomb that sailed down the main smokestack and exploded in the engine compartment below the waterline. The aircraft continued its dive and exploded on the aft deck of the ship. My grandfather managed to climb up from the smoke filled, blacked-out passages below the deck in order to abandon ship before it sank. This is a picture of the Abner Read before it went down by the stern 36 minutes after the initial hit.

I remember my grandfather’s stories of his service on board the Abner Read, which I received with the excitement of a young boy reveling in the exploits of his grandfather. Since then I’ve grown to realize how serious and traumatic these events must have been for my grandfather and The Caine Mutiny served, in a small way, to bring some semblance of life to these realizations.

This is truly a three-star book under ordinary circumstances, but this book meant a lot to me while reading it. So, in a personal way, it rates the extra star.