Henry "Hank" Croskey Mustin (August 31, 1933 – April 11, 2016) was a vice admiral in the United States Navy and among the namesakes of USS Mustin (DDG-89). He distinguished himself during both the Vietnam and Cold Wars. As a flag officer he commanded Cruiser Destroyer Group 2, US Second Fleet, NATO Striking Fleet Atlantic, and Joint Task Force 120, where he was responsible for 225 ships and 2,100 aircraft spanning over 45 million square miles from the Arctic Circle to the Equator. Vice Admiral Mustin directed US Navy arms control planning, including the START negotiations with the Soviet Union. He led high-level US interagency delegations to Moscow, London, Paris, Lisbon, Oslo and Seoul. As Commander, NATO Striking Fleet Atlantic, he instituted major strategic changes to the defense of NATO that shaped the nation's maritime strategy. He also served as the senior US military representative to the United Nations. He retired from the navy on January 1, 1989, after nearly 34 years of active duty service.

Early life and education

A Navy junior, Mustin was born in Bremerton, Washington, on 31 August 1933, as the sixth generation of distinguished naval officers and great-nephew of George Barnett, the 12th Commandant of the Marine Corps. He was the son of Vice Admiral Lloyd Montague Mustin and Emily Proctor Mustin, and namesake of his late grandfather Captain Henry C. Mustin a pioneering naval aviator. Of her eldest son, Henry Croskey Mustin, Emily would often say that he "was born with his feet planted firmly on the ground." In the late 1940s, while attending St. Stephen's School in Alexandria, VA, he acquired the nickname Hank, as if to reinforce a rootedness, despite his many moves as a Navy junior.

Mustin remained at St. Stephen's through his sophomore year of high school. As a tenth grader, he was captain of the football and baseball teams. The high scorer on the basketball team and the player with the highest batting average on the baseball team, he won both the teams' cups as outstanding player, as well as the cup for the school's outstanding athlete. In the late summer of 1948, Mustin moved to Coronado, CA when his father received orders to command his first ship. Mustin's grandmother, Corinne, and her second husband, Admiral George D. Murray, would frequently visit North Island to visit the Mustins and their friends. They would often throw grand cocktail parties at the air station's flag cabin, and Mustin would often find himself in the presence of such Navy notables as Halsey and Nimitz. He recalled that "the events of the war were fresh in these guys' minds. They would be talking over what now are the famous battles of World War II, and they'd be saying 'Well, so-and-so was nervous and abandoned his ship too early.' They talked the way we do about guys that are the giants of history. All that stuff had a great influence on me." As a youngster Mustin admired and respected his father and his friends. There was never any doubt in his mind that he wanted to join the navy and be like them.

Mustin's determination to attend the U.S. Naval Academy was unshakeable. He graduated from Coronado High School, Coronado, California, in 1950, but not yet seventeen, he was too young for admission to the Naval Academy. At the time, neither his father nor his mother wanted him to do a year at a West Coast university fearing the effect on his resolve, so the decision was made for him to enter the University of Virginia prior to competing for a slot at the Naval Academy. Upon completion of his first year at UVA, Mustin was selected for a SECNAV appointment to the Naval Academy joining the class of 1955. During Christmas leave in 1953, his Third Class year, Mustin met Lucy Holcomb. During the Holiday, Lucy's brother Russ got four tickets to a Harlem Globetrotters game and proposed that they take each other's sisters. After going to that game, Mustin never dated anyone else. In 1954, during his Second Class year, he proposed at the Ring Dance and they became engaged. They were married later the next year.

At the time, the officers who were prestigious, were destroyer sailors and which was the assignment Mustin also wanted. On service selection night, he drew a number high enough to let him pick USS Duncan (DD-874), a San Diego–based Gearing-class destroyer.

Early career

USS Duncan (DD-874) In those days, each destroyer division had four destroyers: one long-hull radar picket destroyer, a straight stick, long-hull destroyer, and two Fletcher-class 445s. Two divisions made a squadron. Pacific destroyers primarily were serving as escorts, screening the carrier battle groups in the strike force, Task Force 77.

Mustin was fortunate to be in the Duncan, the division's radar picket destroyer (DDR). Before the Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization Program, which added substantial anti-submarine warfare capability to World War II destroyers, a DDR was a coveted ship, and the Duncan had one of the earliest three-dimensional radars, the SPS-8. Though he preferred the Gunnery Department, Mustin's commanding officer, Commander Ed Conrad, assigned him to serve as the fifth officer in Engineering Department, an assignment which inspired many follow-on tours in engineering.

The Korean War had been over for two years. The front-line mission of the Pacific Fleet was now patrolling the Taiwan Strait and protecting Nationalist China. Among Mustin's other duties was watch standing, which on the Duncan came with surprises that revealed the lax state of morale in some quarters of the navy of the mid-fifties. One night, a week into his first Pacific crossing, the ship was steaming in close formation, and Mustin was on the bridge during the mid-watch. The officer of the deck turned to him and said "Okay, kid, you've got it." With that, he eased himself into the captain's chair and went to sleep. Mustin was conning the ship. Shortly thereafter, he had to give his first rudder command. He turned to the helm and to his horror saw no helmsman and no helm. Several seconds later, the sailor bounded into the pilothouse with the wheel. Unbeknownst to Mustin, the bridge watch played a game in which the helmsman would unscrew the helm from its mounting and run from his station onto the starboard wing of the bridge, around the pilothouse past the signalman's station aft, and enter from the port wing back to his station. His object was to return in time to reattach the helm and answer orders before the officer of the deck tried to maneuver the ship.

Following two weeks of exercises in Hawaiian waters, the Duncan arrived in Yokosuka on 30 August 1955. While in Japan those officers on the Duncan whose service obligation ended with the Korean War went home. The ship went from twenty-two officers to eleven. Mustin found himself now the second officer in the Engineering Department. In the meantime, Mustin also was continuing to learn. Later the next year while in San Diego, the chief engineer left, leaving him as department head. He came to rely heavily on a Chief Blazewski, a thirty-two-year veteran who "had a row of hash marks that were running up his arm." He took Mustin under his wing, and trained him to ensure that they could run the department without too much meddling from above. Blazewski's style illustrated how the chief petty officers could hold a ship together, Mustin observed. "You had this wardroom all of a sudden losing all of the experienced officers with very junior officer replacements, like me. And this sort of half-mutinous gang of draftees and other guys who couldn't wait to get out. It was a difficult time, and the chiefs made it all work."

USS Bunting (MHC-45)

In December 1957, Mustin was promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) and wanted to command a ship. He got an important endorsement from his captain, CDR Pete Smith, and in May 1958 the Bureau of Personnel gave him command of a mine hunter, USS Bunting (MHC-45), homeported in Mayport, Florida. Five years junior to the officer he relieved, Mustin became the young skipper of a crew of thirty and an expectant father as well. His first son, Lloyd M. Mustin II, would arrive in February 1959.

The tour in Bunting proved extremely rewarding, though not without its challenges. Her mission was to identify and plot all minelike objects in the Mayport Channel and approaches to maintain an accurate plot that, in the event of war and Soviet mining of the channel, would enable ships to distinguish real mines from false positives. The challenge of the mission was distinguishing objects moving with the current. Merchant ships constantly added heavy trash to the bottom. Mustin quickly realized that his mission was essentially a "make-work operation." He thus appreciated the need to build morale. Every time the carriers would deploy, the air station band would play, making for a ceremonious occasion, to the delight of both crew and dependents. He asked that the band extend the same courtesy to Bunting whenever she deployed to Norfolk, and he got it. Moreover, when Bunting returned to her berth along the south wall, he would have his sea detail on deck to render honors to any carrier tied alongside the north wall. The relatively tiny Bunting, however, would steam past the much larger ship unseen, below the sight of the Officer of the Deck, and thus the carrier never returned honors. Mustin's annoyance led him to pay a call on the executive officer of USS Saratoga (CV-60), then the flagship of RADM George Anderson. After hearing his complaint, the good-natured Executive Officer assured him that the carrier would rectify the oversight. The next time the Bunting rendered the Saratoga honors, "all six of our sea detail came to attention and hand saluted, and six hundred guys returned it," said Mustin. "My guys loved this."

During his final month in command, Mustin took his father, by this time a rear admiral, on a day's operation. He borrowed a two-star flag from a signalman on the Saratoga for the day. When they returned that afternoon, Mustin did not render honors to the carrier, knowing that Admiral Anderson was not onboard and that his father, on the diminutive Bunting, was senior. The Saratoga's executive officer happened to be sitting in the captain's chair on the bridge and noticed the Bunting's apparent lapse. "We finally got that wise-ass kid," Mustin later heard that the officer had gleefully remarked. "He didn't render honors." The Saratoga signaled, "Why didn't you render honors when you came by?" Receiving Mustin's reply, he jumped from his chair. "Son of a bitch! He's got his father onboard." Putting his binoculars to his eyes, he saw Lloyd's borrowed two-star flag, so big it could not furl. In no time, the Saratoga sounded honors, to the delight of Lloyd, Mustin, and the Bunting crew.

Naval Postgraduate School

Aware that he had placed himself in a relative backwater, Mustin had been contemplating his next professional move. "My whole career was a series of battles with detailers about where I was going to go, what I was going to do; all of which I won, and a lot of which I got advice from my dad on." Lloyd acknowledged the fun Mustin was having and the leadership experience he was gaining, but he advised that at some point Mustin would need a technical degree before he got too senior. Bunting qualified as Mustin's second sea tour, meaning that he was slated for a shore posting. "I had gotten some offers to be a Flag Lieutenant someplace and my dad said, 'You don't want to do that. You want to stay away from being a Flag Lieutenant until you're persuaded that the guy you'll be a Flag Lieutenant for will be a force in the Navy.'" He recommended that Mustin go to the Postgraduate School, which had moved in 1952 to Monterey, California. Mustin applied and was accepted.

Middle career