Young sailor Peter Mims will live in infamy. The petty officer third class successfully hid in his ship’s engine room for about a week, triggering an expensive and expansive search and rescue effort. His ability to evade capture is impressive in a small sense, but mainly just disturbing.
He snuck around the cruiser Shiloh, hoarding Pop Tarts and peanut butter. Shipmates said he liked to deliver intriguing boasts, like saying he could blast fireballs from his hands. After he went missing for a week, he was found stinking of excrement.
But there is another sailor in this epic tale who deserves some attention.
Mims disappeared on June 8. Several days later a Shiloh sailor spotted him in the middle of the night.
Now, if you were that sailor, and you just spotted the infamous missing Peter Mims, what would you do? A) Try to apprehend him. B) Don’t engage, but sound an immediate alarm and wake your fellow shipmates. C) Chat it up with Mims for a bit, then go back to sleep for 90 minutes.
If you answered C, you might be “that guy” on the cruiser Shiloh. For his inaction and his failure to end the Mims fiasco early, that sailor gets a MISFIRE.