The lost target

The lost target is the Navy tow target that USS Caine fails to recover during its target-towing assignment. Its disappearance becomes more than a missing piece of equipment: it exposes a conflict between recovering valuable property and avoiding further risk, and turns Captain Queeg’s decision into an official test of his command judgment. The target remains missing despite an attempt to find it, but the consequences for USS Caine are not simply punitive: the incident is scrutinized, while the ship is also selected for a long-awaited overhaul in the United States.

The recovery decision

By the time Captain Queeg considers another attempt, recovery is already in question. He sends a further dispatch to ComServPac asking whether USS Caine should try to recover the target. The minesweeper then steams in a long circle around it for an hour. ComServPac’s reply, “Act at discretion,” returns the decision to the ship’s commanding officer rather than prescribing what he should do.

Captain Queeg receives the message on the port wing, where he is watching the target with Burt Gorton and Steve Maryk. He treats the instruction as a transfer of responsibility: if he continues the search, he says, he may miss the next day’s exercise or break a sailor’s neck. He orders USS Caine to head back. His stated priorities are therefore immediate operational safety and the ship’s return, not the recovery of the target at any cost. The decision closes the search, though the ship’s return is followed by the anticlimactic fact that no exercise is scheduled for the next day and USS Caine lies alongside the dock doing nothing.

The sequence makes the target’s absence concrete without showing how it was first lost. The narrative follows the attempted recovery, the hour-long circle, and the message that places discretion with Captain Queeg; it does not supply a detailed account here of the original loss or of the target’s construction. What matters in this episode is the decision made after the loss: the ship has an opportunity to continue, but its captain judges that the possible costs of doing so outweigh the attempt.

An official accounting

The loss follows USS Caine into a formal interview. A mailgram summons the commanding officer to submit a written report in person to the ComServPac operations officer at 1300 on 22 October, describing the latest fiasco. Its insistent direction that the report be delivered in person gives the episode an institutional sequel: the choice made at sea is now something Captain Queeg must explain face to face.

When Captain Grace asks why the target was not recovered, Captain Queeg refers to his report. He says the chief boatswain’s mate did not know clearly how to proceed, and that his officers were also vague and uncertain. Because a captain must depend to some extent on subordinates, he argues, he judged it more important for USS Caine to return to base for further duty than to spend an unknown amount of time in complicated maneuvers. He acknowledges that his decision might have been erroneous, but presents it as his own judgment.

Captain Grace disputes the premise that recovery required a complicated operation. He says a target could be recovered in half an hour and that other destroyer-minesweepers had done it a dozen times. The targets cost money, and a tug sent out to search cannot find this one. The practical objection sharpens the stakes: the loss is not merely a missed opportunity aboard USS Caine, because the equipment remains unaccounted for even after another vessel is sent to look for it.

Captain Queeg answers that he is not commanding the tug. The reply shifts attention away from whether the target might have been recovered and toward the limits of his responsibility for the subsequent search. In the interview, the exchange exposes the gap between his defensive account—uncertain subordinates, complicated maneuvers, and a return to base—and Captain Grace’s view that recovery was routine, brief, and warranted by the target’s cost.

Consequences for USS Caine

The episode contributes to a pattern of questionable occurrences that senior officers discuss, but it does not by itself establish grounds for relieving Captain Queeg. Captain Grace says that, in fairness, nothing known definitely warrants that recommendation and that excessive tension in a first command might account for what has happened. The target’s loss thus carries a consequence short of removal: it becomes part of the record against which Queeg’s conduct is considered, while remaining insufficient, on the evidence then available to Grace, to justify that particular action.

At the same time, the incident sits beside an unexpectedly favorable decision for the ship. CincPac wants two destroyer-minesweepers sent to the United States for overhaul and new radar installations before the Flintlock push. Captain Grace notes that USS Caine has spent twenty-two months in the forward area, and the admiral approves recommending it. The contrast is striking: although the target has not been recovered and Queeg has had to account for his decision, the old ship receives an assignment its previous captain, Captain de Vriess, could not secure in a year of combat steaming.

Significance of the missing object

The target functions as both equipment and evidence. As equipment, it has a clear practical value: Captain Grace stresses that such targets cost money, and says their recovery is a task other destroyer-minesweepers have repeatedly completed. As evidence, its disappearance gives the command decision a lasting form. Captain Queeg’s order ends the search; the tug’s failure to locate the target confirms that it has not been recovered; and the required report makes the choice answerable to superior officers.

The episode’s irony lies in the uneven results that follow. The target remains missing, and the interview exposes sharply different assessments of the judgment behind abandoning it. Yet the same period brings USS Caine a long-sought overhaul assignment. The lost target therefore marks a genuine failure of recovery without determining the ship’s whole institutional fate: it records a contested decision, contributes to scrutiny of Captain Queeg, and coincides with a material opportunity for a vessel that has endured twenty-two months in the forward area.