My grandfather, Frank Gustaferro, got his orders while he was working at his uncle Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was to report to the SS John Barry, set to depart in just a few days. The ship was secretly loaded with millions of silver coins destined to support wartime operations in Saudi Arabia.
On August 28, 1944, the German submarine U-859 torpedoed the John Barry. Two crewmen were killed instantly. The rest, including my grandfather, were blown into the sea—eyes burning from oil, injured, terrified, clinging to any floating wreckage they could reach.
As they drifted in the Indian Ocean, they heard Japanese aircraft overhead. My grandfather steeled himself for the strafing run he was sure was coming. It never came.
Even amid the brutality of total war, there were limits. A boundary existed—older than the Geneva Conventions, older than the United Nations, older than our modern language of “war crimes.” You did not kill shipwrecked sailors in the water. You did not shoot survivors who were no longer in the fight. You did not gun down wounded men hanging on to debris. My grandfather lived because even America’s enemies in 1944 understood that basic rule of humanity.
If Donald Trump’s administration had been in charge that day, I’m not sure my family would be here.
This week, the Department of Defense is under fierce scrutiny after a Washington Post report that the U.S. military—allegedly acting on orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—carried out a second strike on a wrecked vessel in the Caribbean on September 2, killing defenseless survivors who had already been hit once. According to the Post, Hegseth’s initial directive was that all 11 people aboard a suspected drug-smuggling boat were to be killed.
Hegseth denies ordering that everyone be left dead, and The New York Times has reported that he did not specify what should happen if the first strike left survivors. After the initial attack left people clinging to the shattered hull, Admiral Mitch Bradley reportedly ordered the follow-up strike.
The Pentagon initially rejected the Post’s account outright. But on Tuesday, the White House confirmed that a second strike did in fact occur. Hegseth now says he did not personally see any survivors after the first attack—and did not remain to witness the second.
Trump and his team have tried to defend the string of boat strikes that began on September 2 by claiming the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels, and Hegseth has cited the “fog of war” to justify the second strike. The notion that America is currently at war with drug traffickers, however, is dubious at best.
Lawmakers from both parties have raised serious concerns since the Post’s report. Admiral Bradley briefed Congress behind closed doors on Thursday about what happened on September 2. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said afterward that Bradley was “very clear” there was no explicit order to “kill them all.” Democrats, however, remained deeply troubled. Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), who viewed the full video of the boat strikes, called it “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”
“You have two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States,” Himes said.
“Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors,” he added.
If the military intentionally killed the survivors of that strike, this is not a close call or some novel legal gray zone. It is not a creative extension of post-9/11 counterterrorism policy. It is a war crime—if not simple murder. And it is profoundly damaging to America and to our service members.
It is a bleak and shameful realization that the inexperienced, low-ranking Japanese pilots my grandfather feared in 1944 may have shown more discipline, more restraint, and more humanity in those crucial minutes above the Indian Ocean than the man who now leads the Pentagon.
The Imperial Japanese military committed many notorious atrocities. Yet even within that institution, there were pilots and sailors who chose not to fire on American survivors who posed no threat. James D. Hornfischer, in The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, documents cases where American Navy personnel were spared by Japanese pilots and ship crews.
The law of armed conflict that protects those who are hors de combat—out of the fight—does not care who is in the water. Whether they are suspected drug smugglers, enemy combatants, or simply unlucky souls caught in the wrong place, the rule is the same. America is founded on the idea that “all men are created equal”—including those we fight. It is our shared humanity that keeps war from sliding fully into massacre.
The Senate and House Armed Services Committees now have to determine whether Hegseth issued an unlawful order, and whether Admiral Bradley followed it. The legal questions may be complex. The moral ones are not. If the U.S. military killed shipwrecked survivors because the secretary of Defense allegedly demanded “no survivors,” this is not venturing into some new moral frontier. It is a collapse backward into barbarism.
Both parties have a responsibility to confront this, especially the one currently in power. Only by holding ourselves accountable can we honor, and be worthy of, the men and women who served and died at sea in defense of the United States—and who trusted that the nation they served would not forsake the very humanity that once spared my grandfather’s life.
