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.