Warship CO, fired for taking a trophy AK-47, described as “Holly Graf-like” in hostile command climate

Commander Frank Azzarello

We talked about Commander Azzarello being relieved of command of USS Forrest Sherman here. He was relieved for taking a seized AK-47 from a massive cache of weapons the ship interdicted in the Persian Gulf region. The weapon he took was to be made into a trophy and placed aboard ship. The skipper was rightly proud of his men and women for intercepting weaponry suspected of being from Iran and headed to Houthi rebels in Yemen. As AW1Ed called it at the time, “This decision, as it reads, seems a bit capricious for what really is a process error.” Turns out there’s more to the story.

From Navy Times;

The commanding officer of the U.S. warship Forrest Sherman was fired in January, ostensibly for taking home a seized enemy rifle that he intended to turn into a trophy for his ship’s wardroom. But that’s far from the whole story regarding what went down aboard the guided-missile destroyer under the leadership of Cmdr. Frank Azzarello.

That old AK-47 was part of a massive cache of weaponry that Azzarello’s sailors seized from a dhow in the Middle East in late 2019.

U.S. Central Command said the materiel was believed to be from Iran and headed for Houthi rebels in Yemen.

It was a crowning achievement for Azzarello, who officials say took command of the ship nine days before its September 2019 deployment and whose performance evaluation in the spring of last year predicted he would “EXCEL IN MAJOR COMMAND!”

But behind the CENTCOM press releases, Azzarello’s rising star and Forrest Sherman’s can-do mission capability, the officer had created “a command climate of harassment and fear” aboard the guided-missile destroyer, according to a command investigation obtained by Navy Times.

The first endorsement of the Destroyer Squadron 28 investigation came on Jan. 26, a day before Azzarello was fired.

It found that Azzarello belittled some officers, called others names, mocked the voices of female members and overused letters of instruction with junior officers, allegedly in the name of booting underperformers off his ship.

“I have seen officers called idiots, retarded or useless wastes,” one anonymous crew member wrote in a command climate survey cited in the investigation.

“Get your hands out of your pockets when you speak to me, you son of a bitch,” one officer recounted Azzarello saying, according to the investigation.

A junior officer who Azzarello detached for cause in 2020 told investigators that Azzarello “gives SWOs a bad name,” and that he was “Holly Graf-like,” a reference to a warship captain who was fired in 2010 for abusive behavior.

But while some Forrest Sherman members described a tyrannical state of affairs under Azzarello, his civilian attorney, Timothy Parlatore, said Monday that the case against his client isn’t as clear-cut as the investigation would suggest.

“Yeah, he used rough language,” said Parlatore, a former naval officer who said he and Azzarello attended SWO school together in the early 2000s. “Nothing any rougher than when I was a junior officer, that my commanding officer used with us, or that anybody else has used in the history of the United States Navy.”

The enemy-gun-turned-wannabe-war trophy, however, is not in dispute.

A separate Naval Criminal Investigative Service probe determined that Azzarello did take home the weapon with the aim of turning it into a war trophy for his ship but failed to follow military guidelines for such an endeavor, Parlatore said.

“When (NCIS agents) found it in his garage, it was sitting next to the piece of wood he had polished up to mount it,” Parlatore said.

“My goal of turning it into a plaque is something that is permissible if I had followed the proper procedures and regulations,” Azzarello later said in a statement at his disciplinary hearing in April. “It was a poor decision that I truly regret, but again my intent was to only commemorate a difficult deployment and difficult year for my ship.”

But at the same non-judicial punishment hearing, Azzarello was defiant in response to the conduct unbecoming an officer charge he faced for the language he used with his subordinates.

Much more at the source. Azzarello should know better than to use the type of disparaging language typically reserved for the sitting Vice President. Now clap you stupid bastards.

Thanks to Jeff LPH 3 for sending this update in.

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