He forgot that discretion is the better part of valor

Ever officer on the battleship's bridge except one hit the deck. That officer was Thomas Gatch. The ship's captain was standing on a catwalk forward of the conning tower, watching the Enterprise ahead of him through the evening mist. The popular commander, who prized a certain kind of honor from studying Napoleon's wars, the literature of Shakespeare, and the history of the War Between the States, would say later that "it was beneath the dignity of a captain of a U. S. man-of-war to duck for a Japanese bomb. The reward for his bravado was a spray of shrapnel that nicked his jugular vein.

(from Neptune's Inferno, by James D. Hornfischer)


Gatch as a young naval officer