A Little Humor: A Young Man With A Navy Recruiter

A goofy young man visited a U.S. Navy recruiter on his 18^th birthday. 

The recruiter, a tough, old chief petty officer, asked the young man if he could swim. 

“Why, aren’t there enough ships?”

The recruiter then asked the young man if he would be interested in submarine duty.

“Hell, no,” the young man said. “I ain’t getting on any ship that sinks on purpose.”

The exasperated recruiter then asked him why he wanted to join the Navy.

“Well, my uncle thought my joining the Navy would be a good idea.”

“What does your uncle do for a living?” the recruiter asked.

“He’s in the Army.”     

My Crime Fiction: 'Murder By Fire'

The story below is another chapter from my novel Olongapo, which I hope to soon publish.

The story originally appeared in American Crime Magazine.

Murder By Fire

By Paul Davis

I was sitting at my desk in the Radio Communications Division's Message Processing Center aboard the USS Kitty Hawk in 1971 as the aircraft carrier was on “Yankee Station” in the Gulf of Tonkin, launching aircraft that flew combat sorties against the North Vietnamese, when I came across a copy of a message for the ship’s captain.  

My small desk was located in a cubbyhole partially hidden by a series of pneumatic tubes, which we called “Bunny Tubes.” We used pneumatic power to shoot high priority messages, such as the message I was reading, in a two-foot-long missile-like container to the captain’s office and to other senior officers aboard the ship. 

As I was responsible for the administrative security of messages that were distributed, filed and eventually destroyed, a copy of the message landed on my desk. The message informed the captain that former Engineman 3^rd Class Robert Bean, a former sailor assigned to the Kitty Hawk, had died in prison.    

I remembered Bean as I attended a U.S Navy firefighting school in 1970 with him prior to our setting sail to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

After the deadly fire that killed 134 sailors and injured many more on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal in 1967, all carrier sailors were ordered to attend firefighting schools. After all, one can't call the fire department while at sea. We were the fire department. 

As the USS Forrestal was conducting combat operations on Yankee Station, a fire erupted on July 29, 1967. An electrical failure caused a Zuni rocket attached to an F-4 Phantom to launch as the jet fighter was sitting on the flight deck. The rocket struck another aircraft on the flight deck, an A-4 Skyhawk. The aircraft’s highly flammable jet fuel spread quickly across the flight deck, which ignited a series of explosions that blew sailors and aircraft apart.

At the school, we sat through flight deck footage of the Forrestal fire and watched bombs, missiles and jet fuel ignite, and we saw sailors die from the fire and explosions. I still recall the gruesome images to this day. 

I liked that officers, chiefs and other senior enlisted people trained alongside junior teenage seamen like me at the firefighting school. At one point, all of us were assigned a part of the long hose and told that we had a certain number of seconds to put it together before the instructor turned on the water. The first two attempts failed, and we all were soaked and knocked down by the great force of the water. Laughing together, we were successful on the third attempt. We were wet but happy to have worked successfully as a team.   

I was 18 years old at the time, and Bean was a couple of years older. He was squat with dirty blonde hair and a pimply face. I recall that he was surly and inattentive. More than once, the instructors screamed at him to get him to focus. He was also chewed out by a Kitty Hawk senior chief who was also taking the firefighting course.

“Son, you’re not taking this training seriously. This course can not only save your worthless fuckin' life, but it can also save the lives of your shipmates should there be a fire on the ship,” the crusty chief said in a gruff voice. “So get your head outta your ass and get with the program.”     

Bean stayed to himself that week and he didn’t join the camaraderie of his fellow sailors. He was not much of a team player, although the course stressed teamwork.    

“Always keep the hose’s stream of water between the fire and you,” I recall one of the Navy fire instructors telling us, "If you let the flames get around you, they'll reach out and hit you like a boxer's jab."

And that’s what happened to me.

We were crowded into a square cement structure that simulated a ship’s compartment. I held the nozzle of the long hose, and I began to wave the hose in short left to right movements. As I waved the hose too sharply to the left, I allowed the fire to slip past me on my right. The flicker of flame seemed almost human - perhaps even supernaturally evil - as it lashed out like a whip and struck my right arm.

The pain and shock of getting burned and seeing my arm on fire caused me to drop the hose’s nozzle and jump back. Fortunately, the instructor grabbed the discarded nozzle quickly and he ordered me out of the burning structure. To my further embarrassment, the heavy smoke and the hood of my poncho impaired my vision and I hit my head on the oval hatchway as I was exiting the structure. The other instructors and medical corpsmen rushed to me, as they believed I was seriously injured.

As it turned out, my burns were superficial and the head injury was only a bump, but my pride received some serious blows that day. I returned to the fire and completed the course without further incidents.

After graduating from firefighting school, I went on to serve on a Damage Control Team aboard the carrier and fought some real fires, but thankfully those fires were nothing along the lines of the horrendous and deadly fire on the USS Forrestal. With an abundance of bombs, missiles and JP jet fuel onboard, even a small fire on a carrier can escalate and become a major catastrophe, as it did on the USS Forrestal.

 

I later learned that Bean, who never had a girlfriend until he joined the Navy and met a portly and exuberant college student in San Diego, did not want to leave her when the aircraft carrier departed San Diego on route to Hawaii, then the Philippines, and lastly, to the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. 

After the aircraft carrier made a port of call to Hawaii, Bean was so angry and heartbroken that he became drunk in a Honolulu bar just off Waikiki Beach. 

When the bar closed, Bean took a cab back to the aircraft carrier at the Pearl Harbor naval base and he staggered aboard and leaned against bulkheads in the passageways as he traveled to his workstation below decks to an engine room compartment. The compartment space had three sailors on watch, and they told Bean to go to his rack and sleep it off as he was annoying them with his sad sack love story. Bean sat in a chair and appeared to pass out, so the enginemen on duty ignored him. 

When one of the enginemen left the compartment to go to the head, and the other two were talking to each other with their backs to him, Bean in his drunken state had an idea to punish his uncaring shipmates and cripple the carrier so it would head back to San Diego for repairs rather than go on to Southeast Asia. 

Angry at the enginemen, as well as with the entire U.S. Navy, Bean took out his lighter and reached into a trash can filled with paper. He lit a piece of paper and dropped it back in the trash can, which quickly set fire to the other papers. Bean then lifted the trash can and tossed it into a corner near a supply cabinet and ran out of the engine room compartment. 

The trash can fire ignited some stored flammable material, and the compartment was quickly engulfed with fire and smoke. The two enginemen tried to contain the fire with fire extinguishers, but they were soon overcome with smoke, fell to the deck, and died. The engineman who had gone to the head raised the alarm.   

The fire was extinguished by a Damage Control Team that came on the scene in less than a minute. Although there was severe damage to the compartment, there was not enough damage to prevent the aircraft carrier from departing Pearl Harbor later that week and sailing towards the Philippines. 

After a brief investigation, Bean was arrested, court-martialed and sentenced to prison for arson and murder. He never saw his girlfriend again.

 

The message to the captain that I read at my desk reported that Bean, who was left unattended in a prison kitchen for only a moment, died of self-immolation, having doused himself in cooking oil and then set himself on fire. He died horribly as he was engulfed in searing flames as he fell to the floor.  

Some thought it was a fitting death for a man who had committed murder by fire.   

© 2024 By Paul Davis 

Note: You can read the other posted chapters of my crime novel Olongapo via the below links:

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Butterfly'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Salvatore Lorino'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: The Old Huk

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: Join The Navy And See Olongapo

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Boots On The Ground'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'The 30-Day Detail'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Cat Street'

Paul Davis On Crime: Chapter 12: On Yankee Station

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'The Cherry Boy'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'The Hit'

Paul Davis On Crime: A Look Back At Life Aboard An Aircraft Carrier During The Vietnam War: 'The Compartment Cleaner'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Admiral McCain'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Hit The Head'

My Crime Fiction: Welcome To Japan, Davis-San

Below is my story about an American sailor visiting Japan, circa 1971. 

The story is chapter 14 of Olongapo, a crime novel that I hope to publish. 

The story first appeared in American Crime Magazine.

Welcome to Japan, Davis-San

By Paul Davis

In May of 1971, the Kitty Hawk was temporarily relieved from combat operations on Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam by another aircraft carrier and the Kitty Hawk set sail for Sasebo, Japan for a scheduled R&R period.

The Japanese had been my father’s bitter enemy, as he served as an Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) frogman in the Pacific during WWII. The old chief participated in some grueling and bloody battles on the Japanese-held beaches and islands, yet he held no rancor against the Japanese. Judging from his letters to me, he appeared to be as excited as I was about my visit to the “Land of the Rising Sun.”

I became particularly interested in Japan in 1965 when I read Ian Fleming’s James Bond thriller, You Only Live Twice. I was fascinated by Fleming’s characters and plot and his take on the cultural differences between the West and Japan. 

I prepared for my visit to Japan by re-reading You Only Live Twice, as well as re-reading the chapter on Japan in my ever-ready "travel bible,” an old paperback edition of Ian Fleming’s travelogue, Thrilling Cities.

Shortly after the Kitty Hawk docked in Sasebo, I and other sailors headed towards the city’s area known as “Paradise Alley,’ where the bars catered to American sailors. I went ashore with Salvatore Lorino and Mike Hunt, and we visited one of the bars on Paradise Alley, and we drank and danced with the Japanese bar girls. After a couple of hours, Mike Hunt suggested that we go and have what Americans called a Hotzi bath and massage. We left the bar and visited a nearby public bathhouse, called a Sento. 

We first sat in a sauna, where we sweated out the alcohol from our bodies. Then, after a rigorous shower, we slipped into the steaming hot public bath. After a while, we left the bath and went into another room for a massage. There were no sexual “happy endings” here, but the massage was very satisfying. 

My massage was administered by a slight and pretty Japanese girl who had the strength of a sumo wrestler. She squeezed, pressed, pounded and applied karate-type blows to my body. When we left the Sento, I felt so good that I thought I could leap over a tall building. 

It was a beautiful spring day, so we walked around and ended up on a narrow street. I spotted a small store that could have been an antique shop or a pawn shop.  I had no idea what kind of store it was as the signs were in Japanese. But what I spied in the shop window quickly drew me in. In the center of the window was an old and glorious set of Katana swords, more commonly known as Samurai swords. I didn’t know much about Katana swords at the time, other than the cursory knowledge I gleaned from the books I read, but these swords looked authentic to me. I entered the shop and bowed to the proprietor, an elderly man, and I pulled out a handful of yen and pointed towards the swords in the window.

His response was in Japanese, spoken softly as he continued to bow up and down. I bowed back, having read somewhere that the more you bow, the more humble and polite you are. Of course, the proprietor was always two bows ahead of me, as he had a lot more practice at this than I. Thankfully, a young woman customer spoke English and she politely informed me that the swords were not for sale. She explained that the swords belonged to the proprietor’s ancestors. I bowed again, twice, and quickly bowed out of the store. 

We spent the rest of the day and evening in a bar, and while most Americans were drinking beer or whisky, I was drinking Sake, Japanese rice wine. There is a saying that notes the man drinks the first three cups of Sake, and the next three cups of Sake drink the man.

I danced with a beautiful Japanese girl named Kimora, and she then sat with me at our table. Kimora had long dark hair, a beautiful face and a lean and alluring body. I especially loved her soft and sexy voice when she spoke Japanese, and I found her broken English to be both funny and cute. She kissed me after every swallow of the whiskey I bought her.    

Lorino noticed four stern-looking Japanese men in dark suits siting with four women at a table in the corner. Lorino knew I was an aspiring crime writer and something of a serious student of crime, so he asked me, “Hey, those guys in the corner are Jap gangsters, aren’t they?”

 “Yeah. Yakuza, I believe,” I replied.

Lorino leaned over to the girl at his side and asked her to send a round of drinks to the yakuza criminals. He told her to tell them that he wanted to meet them.

“Tell ‘em I’m Cosa Nostra.

“Cusi who?”

“American Mafia.”

She got up and went over to the mama-san and spoke to her and then returned to Lorino’s side. A waitress delivered a tray of drinks to the men and the mama-san whispered to one of the men. The man waved to Lorino and beckoned him to come over.

“C’mon, Paulie. Let’s go over.”

“I’ll pass. You go.”

“Hey, you got the black suit and shirt. You look like a mob guy. They’ll love ya.”

I was curious, so I walked over with a strutting Lorino.

One of the yakuza spoke English and he translated for Lorino. He made the other hoodlums laugh with his translations. I felt we were being mocked, and I told Lorino that we should go. Lorino brushed me off and then pulled out a wad of U.S. dollars. He said he wanted to buy shabu. The Japanese, like the Filipinos, called crystal meth shabu.

The yakuza members stopped laughing. The one who spoke English conferred with his associates and then turned back to Lorino. He took out a piece of paper and wrote the name of a bar and a person’s name in English and added some Japanese characters. He passed the slip of paper to Lorino.

“Go to this bar and ask for this person,” the yakuza member said. “Hand him this note and he will help you.”

“Thanks,” Lorino said. “Youse guys are cool.”

We went back to our table and Lorino said “Let’s go.”

“You go, I want to stay here and drink and dance with Kimora.”

“This will only take a half hour. I need you as a back-up. The girl will be here when we get back.”

Reluctantly, I went with him.

 

We took a cab to the bar and walked in. We were the only Americans there and we were given dirty looks by some of the customers who appeared to be yakuza gangsters. Lorino, unfazed at our reception and uber confident as usual, walked up boldly to the bar and showed the note to the bartender. The bartender, without a word, motioned over a young Japanese thug. The thug read the note and told Lorino in English to meet him outside in the alley.

Out in the alley, the young yakuza thug, accompanied by another young thug, asked for the money. Lorino handed over the U.S. dollars. The young thug put the money in his pants pocket and then pulled out a knife.

The thug smiled.

“So, this is how it’s going to be,” Lorino said, smiling back.

He looked sideways at me and said, “You believe this shit?” and then he delivered a swift kick to the thug’s left knee. As the thug buckled from the kick, Lorino stepped in and threw an uppercut that dropped the thug. I began to step in towards the advancing second thug, but Lorino whipped out a small semi-automatic pistol. Seeing the gun, the second thug stepped back.

The second thug helped the first thug up from the street. The first thug grinned, picked up his knife and put it in his pocket. And then he bowed. He took out a plastic bag out of his pocket and handed it to Lorino.

Lorino bowed back. He wet his finger and dipped the finger in the bag. He pulled out his finger and held it to his nose and inhaled it. His head jolted back, and he laughed.

“Very good shit,” he said and bowed.

The two thugs bowed and went back into the bar.

“Where did you get the gun?” I asked.

“Olongapo. Where else?”

 

Lorino and I took a cab to our hotel and once in our room, we snorted a couple of lines of the shabu. Lorino hid the bulk of the shabu but kept some of it on him for us to use later while we were out. I wanted to go back to the first bar we visited and drink and dance with Kimora. I became even more talkative than usual, but Lorino reacted differently to the meth. He became quiet and introspective.

We walked to the bar, and went in. Lorino gave the yakuza hoods a thumbs up.

The English-speaking yakuza explained what the upright thumb meant, and they all laughed and raised their own thumbs up.                           

After many cups of Sake, I needed to get some air, and I left the bar. Lorino followed me up the street where we saw a small restaurant with an open front. The smell coming from the restaurant was enticing. We entered the restaurant, and I stepped up to the counter. The menus were banners hanging from the ceiling, and of course they were written in Japanese. A man sitting next me to me was eating steamed vegetables and as I liked the smell, I motioned to the waitress that this was what we wanted. Although I was not big on vegetables, steamed or otherwise, after consuming the Sake, I thought this was a fantastic meal. 

I pulled out my money and having forgotten the rate of exchange for Japanese yen to American dollars, I gave the waitress a stack of yen. As we walked down the street, I heard someone yelling, “American-San! American-San!” I turned and saw the waitress coming towards me. She bowed and I bowed back. She bowed again and handed me some yen. I gathered that I gave her too much money for the meal. I bowed and shook my head as I handed her back the bills. She bowed twice and would not accept the offered bills. She bowed again twice and turned and walked back towards the restaurant.

“Can you image any other place in Southeast Asia where this would happen?” I asked Lorino. “Only in Japan.” 

“In Olongapo, they would come out and cut our throats for the rest of the money,” Lorino said and laughed. 

We headed back to the bar, where I danced and drank more Sake with Kimora. After drinking much Sake, I ended my night in a hotel room with the incredibly beautiful Kimora.  

The following day I left Sasebo and took a train with Hunt to Nagasaki.

Lorino stayed in Sasebo and partied with his new yakuza friends.

© 2024 By Paul Davis 

Note: You can read the other posted chapters of my crime novel Olongapo via the below link:

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Butterfly'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Salvatore Lorino'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: The Old Huk

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: Join The Navy And See Olongapo

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Boots On The Ground'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'The 30-Day Detail'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Cat Street'

Paul Davis On Crime: Chapter 12: On Yankee Station

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'The Cherry Boy'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'The Hit'

Paul Davis On Crime: A Look Back At Life Aboard An Aircraft Carrier During The Vietnam War: 'The Compartment Cleaner'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Murder By Fire'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Admiral McCain'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Hit The Head'

 

"Death Comes Too Late': My Washington Times On Crime Column on Charles Ardai's Short Crime Story Collection

The Washington Times published my On Crime column on Charles Ardai’s collection of short crime stories, Death Comes Too Late.

You can read the column via the link below or the below text:

'Death Comes Too Late,' A collection of 20 crime short stories - Washington Times

I love short stories. Ernest Hemingway was a great novelist, but I believe his short stories, especially “The Killers,” “Fifty Grand” and “The Battler,” are more powerful than his novels. To use a simile I believed he would have liked, his short stories are like a short right knockout punch.

I love F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and his other fine novels, but I truly love his short stories about Pat Hobby, a hack Hollywood screenwriter. I love Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” and his other classic crime novels, but I am truly fond of his short stories that appeared in The Black Mask magazine before he became a novelist. 

And of course, I’m fond of the great short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry and W. Somerset Maugham, to name a few. Influenced by all these writers, my own crime short stories have appeared in online crime magazines over the years. (You can read my short crime stories at Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction Stories )

 

Another short story writer I’ve come to enjoy is Charles Ardai (seen in the above photo), the author of “Death Comes Too Late.” Mr. Ardai, the founder and publisher of Hard Case Crime, offers 20 crime stories in the collection, including “The Home Front,” which won him an Edgar Award.

 

I like his short story “Nobody Wins,” a Shamus Award finalist, about a mob enforcer who hires a private detective to find his lost love. I also like “The Shadow Line,” another private detective story.

I reached out to Mr. Ardai and asked him whether he had a favorite story in his collection.

 

“I’ll tell you what my answer should be, and then I’ll tell what my favorite is,” Mr. Ardai replied. “My answer should be ‘The Home Front’ because I won the Edgar Award for best short story. However, my secret favorite is ‘The Shadow Line’ because I love Raymond Chandler so much. I set out to write like Chandler, and I was praying that I could come up with one or two good lines.”

 

Have you always wanted to be a writer?

 

“Yes. When I was 10, there was a kids’ page in the New York Daily News, and they provided you with $10, but they only bought one from me. That was my first published piece. I wanted to be a writer desperately, but no magazine would publish a teenage writer, except that this was in the early ’80s when Atari came out with games, and suddenly magazines were reviewing video games, and no self-respecting adult writer wanted to write about Atari. So, I went to these magazines and said I’m 13 years old and can I write about these things. Some of them let me do it, so that’s how I got started as a writer. They gave me a free game and 50 bucks. I wrote my first short story for Ellery Queen magazine, and I wrote a few stories for Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock magazines, and I actually got a job working for the publisher of Ellery Queen and Hitchcock when I was 16 or 17 years old. That’s how I started writing short stories and editing collections of short stories, which is why “Death Comes Too Late” is such a throwback for me. I love short stories, and I love returning to those early days of my career.”

 

How did you begin publishing Hard Case Crime?

 

“I quit writing for a while, and I worked for companies, and I also started a couple of companies. But then in 2001, after I’ve been out of publishing for a while, the company I started was sold to a competitor. Afterwards, I was sitting with my friend Max Phillips, and we were talking about what we wanted to do. We said we missed those old pulpy, sexy and lurid paperback covers, and we asked why no one did that anymore. Then we said, hey, you know what? Why don’t we do it? We didn’t think it was going to work, yet about 20 years later, it’s still going. Believe me, we didn’t get rich doing it. But I love doing it. I love having all these books on my shelf that I created and gave to readers. Readers came back to me and said, hey, I remember books like this growing up. I loved those books, and I’m so glad you’re doing books like this again.”

I’m certain those readers will also find the short stories in “Death Comes Too Late” entertaining. And like me, they will love the book’s pulpy cover.

 

• Paul Davis’ “On Crime” column covers true crime, crime fiction and thrillers.

 

Death Comes Too Late

Charles Ardai

Hard Case Crime, $18.99, 400 pages

Former U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst Sentenced For Selling Sensitive Military Information To Individual Tied to Chinese Government

The U.S. Justice Department released the information below:

A former U.S. Army intelligence analyst was sentenced today to 84 months in prison for conspiring to collect and transmit national defense information, including sensitive, non-public U.S. military information, to an individual he believed was affiliated with the Chinese government.

Korbein Schultz (seen in the above photo), 25, of Wills Point, Texas, pleaded guilty in August 2024 to conspiring to collect and transmit national defense information, unlawfully exporting controlled information to China, and accepting bribes in exchange of sensitive, non-public U.S. government information.

“This defendant swore an oath to defend the United States — instead, he betrayed it for a payout and put America’s military and service members at risk,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “The Justice Department remains vigilant against China’s efforts to target our military and will ensure that those who leak military secrets spend years behind bars.”

“This sentencing is a stark warning to those who betray our country: you will pay a steep price for it,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “The People’s Republic of China is relentless in its efforts to steal our national defense information, and service members are a prime target. The FBI and our partners will continue to root out espionage and hold those accountable who abandon their obligation to safeguard defense information from hostile foreign governments.”

“Those who collaborate with America’s foreign adversaries put our country, and those who defend it, at grave risk and we will do whatever it takes to hold them accountable for their crimes,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Robert E. McGuire for the Middle District of Tennessee. “We will proudly stand in support of our men and women in uniform and work diligently to protect them from people like the defendant who would sell them out for a few bucks.”

“Protecting classified information is paramount to our national security, and this sentencing reflects the ramifications when there is a breach of that trust,” said Brigadier General Rhett R. Cox, Commanding General of the Army Counterintelligence Command. “This Soldier’s actions put Army personnel at risk placing individual gain above personal honor. Army Counterintelligence Command, in close collaboration with the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Intelligence Community, remains steadfast in our commitment to safeguarding our nation’s secrets and urges all current and former Army personnel to report any suspicious contact immediately.”

According to court documents, between May 2022 until his arrest in March 2024, Schultz engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to provide dozens of sensitive U.S. military documents — many containing export-controlled tactical and technical information — directly to a foreign national residing in the People’s Republic of China. Despite clear indications that this individual, who is referenced in the Indictment as Conspirator A, was likely connected to the Chinese government, the defendant continued the relationship in exchange for financial compensation. In exchange for approximately $42,000, Schultz provided documents and data related to U.S. military capabilities, including:

• His Army unit’s operational order before it was deployed to Eastern Europe in support of NATO operations;
• Lessons learned by the U.S. Army from the Ukraine/Russia conflict applicable to Taiwan’s defense;
• Technical manuals for the HH-60 helicopter, F-22A fighter aircraft, and Intercontinental Ballistic Missile systems;
• Information on Chinese military tactics and the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force;
• Details on U.S. military exercises in the Republic of Korea and the Philippines;
• Documents concerning U.S. military satellites and missile defense systems like the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD).
• Tactics for countering unmanned aerial systems in large-scale combat operations.

Conspirator A first contacted the defendant through a freelance web-based work platform shortly after the defendant received his Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearance. Masquerading as a client from a geopolitical consulting firm, Conspirator A solicited the defendant to produce detailed analyses on U.S. military capabilities and planning, particularly in relation to Taiwan and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

As the relationship progressed, Conspirator A’s demands grew increasingly specific and sensitive — requesting technical manuals, operational procedures, and intelligence assessments. Conspirator A made explicit his interest in materials that were not publicly available and encouraged the defendant to seek out higher levels of classification, emphasizing “exclusiveness” and “CUI and better.”  Schultz agreed to obtain higher levels of classified information for Conspirator A in exchange for money.

The defendant, fully aware of the grave national security implications, used his position and access to restricted databases — including closed U.S. government computer networks — to download and transmit at least 92 sensitive U.S. military documents.

The case also revealed attempts by the defendant to recruit his friend and fellow Army intelligence analyst into the conspiracy. At the time, Schultz’s friend was assigned to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), which is the combatant command that covers China and its regional areas of influence. Schultz and Conspirator A discussed the need to recruit another person into their scheme who had better access to classified material. They agreed that such recruitment needed to be done in a “nice and slow fashion.”

The FBI’s Nashville Field Office investigated the case, with valuable assistance from the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Command and the Department of Defense.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Josh Kurtzman for the Middle District of Tennessee and Trial Attorneys Adam Barry and Christopher Cook of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section prosecuted the case.