The Navy said yesterday that it is investigating the “clearly inappropriate” videos made by USS Enterprise Capt. Owen Honors in 2006 and 2007 while he was the ship’s executive officer. Today they say it is unclear whether he will deploy with his ship when it leaves to support combat missions in Afghanistan this month.
Broadcast to the crew of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the videos (sample below) include anti-gay slurs, mimicked masturbation, profanity, men pretending to shower together and women pretending to shower together. The Virginian-Pilot broke the story. Offended or not, this is a good point:
Of note is the quality of the XO Movie Night videos and the time that Honors appears to have devoted to them, even as the Enterprise was simultaneously supporting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its air wing was dropping record numbers of bombs. The videos have plots, scripts, props and recurring characters.
In several instances, Honors plays more than one character in the same scene. To achieve this, it appears he recorded different takes in which he played the different roles, and then superimposed the takes over each other, allowing himself to appear on screen as two or three people at once.
“Some of it was pretty complicated stuff,” the former ship videographer said.
The videographer said that while he knew the movies weren’t appropriate, in some ways he can understand how they happened.
“In his defense, I’ll say that sometimes, when you’ve been out to sea for a while, cut off from everything, you start to think things that you would never normally do are actually a good idea,” he said. “You do stupid stuff to stay sane.”
In the video Honors repeatedly says that the captain and the admiral know nothing about the content. They should have. They might have saved him from himself. This sample was edited by The Virginia Pilot to mask profane language and some faces. It still contains content that many will find offensive:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WopAHvbg9LU&feature=player_embedded
We don’t know why the videos came to light now. The captain has his supporters; the Support Captain Owen Honors Facebook page has 4,343 Likes.