TWO TRAGEDIES PRODUCE DIFFERENT RESPONSES

The captain of the submarine that collided with a Japanese fishing
boat, killing nine men and boys, has received as punishment a letter
of reprimand. His Navy career is in tatters, and Cmdr. Scott Waddle
will retire Oct. 1, years earlier than he would ever have planned.

In response, the Japanese government acknowledged the United States
has accepted responsibility for the accident.

On the same day Waddle's punishment and forced retirement were
announced, a different tragedy in another part of the world was
resulting in a far different sense of responsibility.

In Peru, that country's air force fired on a plane that crash-landed
in the Amazon River, killing a woman and her 7-month-old daughter.
The air force pilots said they suspected the plane was smuggling
drugs. In fact, the plane was carrying American missionaries.

The Peruvian authorities had their jets pursue the plane with
missionaries aboard because a CIA-operated surveillance plane warned
the small airplane might be ferrying drugs. After the plane crash,
Americans aboard the surveillance plane expressed their concern to
the Peruvians that procedures hadn't been followed to identify the
small plane.

Indeed, the plane with the missionaries aboard had contacted the air
tower of an airport only 10 minutes away before it was shot down.

But as the submarine commander was learning his fate, the Peruvian
air force was insisting that it had done nothing wrong in shooting
down the plane with the missionary family aboard. The husband and
father of the dead woman and her daughter was also a missionary. He
and their 6-year-old son were rescued.

There is a stark contrast between the submarine collision in the
Pacific Ocean and the shooting down of the airplane in the Peruvian
jungle.

In both cases, it appears likely that proper procedures weren't
followed. If the submarine went through all of the required
procedures before the submarine rapidly surfaced under the fishing
boat, the sailors and officers aboard didn't make appropriate
decisions based on their information. And if the Peruvian jet pilots
tried to identify the small plane they were chasing, they didn't
refrain from firing at the plane -- continuing to strafe the crashed
plane in the river below.

Neither the sub captain nor the Peruvian air force pilots can offer
good excuses for what happened in either tragedy. But at least the
American incident resulted in a fair and open inquiry whose results
satisfied even the government of the victims.