So it was with some relief that I received my orders at the end of 1966 to report to Jacksonville, Florida, where I would join a squadron on the USS Forrestal and complete Replacement Air Group (RAG) training. I trained exclusively in the A-4 Skyhawk, the small bomber that I would soon fly in combat missions. Later that year, we sailed through the Suez Canal, on a course for Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf and war.
PART III
–– CHAPTER 14 ––
The Forrestal Fire
Tom Ott had just handed me back my flight helmet after wiping off the visor with a rag. Tom was a second-class petty officer from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and a fine man. He had been my parachute rigger since I came aboard the USS Forrestal several months earlier to begin RAG training off Guantanamo Bay. A parachute rigger is responsible for the maintenance and preparation of a naval aviator’s equipment. Tom had heard me complain that I often found it difficult to see through my visor. So he always came on deck before launch to clean it one last time.
I was a thirty-one-year-old A-4 pilot, and like most pilots I was a little superstitious. I had flown five bombing runs over North Vietnam without incident, and I preferred that all preflight tasks be performed in the same order as for my previous missions, believing an unvarying routine portended a safe flight. Wiping off my visor was one of the last tasks executed in that routine.
Shortly before eleven on the morning of July 29, 1967, on Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf, I was third in line on the port side of the ship. I took my helmet back from Tom, nodded at him as he flashed me a thumbs-up, and shut the plane’s canopy. In the next instant, a Zuni missile struck the belly fuel tank of my plane, tearing it open, igniting two hundred gallons of fuel that spilled onto the deck, and knocking two of my bombs to the deck. I never saw Tom Ott again.
Stray voltage from an electrical charge used to start the engine of a nearby F-4 Phantom, also waiting to take off, had somehow fired the six-foot Zuni from beneath the plane’s wing. At impact, my plane felt like it had exploded.
I looked out at a rolling fireball as the burning fuel spread across the deck. I opened my canopy, raced onto the nose, crawled out onto the refueling probe, and jumped ten feet into the fire. I rolled through a wall of flames as my flight suit caught fire. I put the flames out and ran as fast as I could to the starboard side of the deck.
Shocked and shaking from adrenaline, I saw the pilot in the A-4 next to mine jump from his plane into the fire. His flight suit burst into flames. As I went to help him, a few crewmen dragged a fire hose toward the conflagration. Chief Petty Officer Gerald Farrier ran ahead of me with a portable fire extinguisher. He stood in front of the fire and aimed the extinguisher at one of the thousand-pound bombs that had been knocked loose from my plane and were now sitting in the flames on the burning deck. His heroism cost him his life. A few seconds later the bomb exploded, blowing me back at least ten feet and killing a great many men, including the burning pilot, the men with the hose, and Chief Farrier.
Small pieces of hot shrapnel from the exploded bomb tore into my legs and chest. All around me was mayhem. Planes were burning. More bombs cooked off. Body parts, pieces of the ship, and scraps of planes were dropping onto the deck. Pilots strapped in their seats ejected into the firestorm. Men trapped by flames jumped overboard. More Zuni missiles streaked across the deck. Explosions tore craters in the flight deck, and burning fuel fell through the openings into the hangar bay, spreading the fire below.
I went below to help unload some bombs from an elevator used to raise the jets from the hangar to the flight deck and dump them over the side of the ship. When we finished, I went to the ready room, where I could check the fire’s progress on the television monitor located there. A stationary video camera was recording the tragedy and broadcasting it on the ship’s closed-circuit television.
After a short while, I went to sick bay to have my burns and shrapnel wounds treated. There I found a horrible scene of many men, burned beyond saving, grasping the last moments of life. Most of them lay silently or made barely audible sounds. They gave no cries of agony because their nerve endings had been burned, sparing them any pain. Someone called my name, a kid, anonymous to me because the fire had burned off all his identifying features. He asked me if a pilot in our squadron was okay. I replied that he was. The young sailor said, “Thank God,” and died. I left the sick bay unable to keep my composure.
The fires were consuming the Forrestal. I thought she might sink. But the crew’s heroics kept her afloat. Men sacrificed their lives for one another and for their ship. Many of them were only eighteen and nineteen years old. They fought the inferno with a tenacity usually reserved for hand-to-hand combat. They fought it all day and well into the next, and they saved the Forrestal.
The fire on the flight deck was extinguished that first afternoon, but the last of the fires still burned belowdecks twenty-four hours later. By the time the last blaze was brought under control, 134 men were dead or dying. Dozens more were wounded. More than twenty planes were destroyed. But the Forrestal, with several large holes in its hull below the waterline, managed to make its way slowly to Subic Naval Base in the Philippines.
It would take almost a week for the Forrestal to reach Subic, where enough repairs would be made to the ship to enable it to return to the States for further repairs. It would take two more years of repairs before the Forrestal would be seaworthy enough to return to duty. All the pilots and crew who were fit to travel assumed we would board flights for home once we reached the Philippines. It appeared that my time at war was to be a very brief experience, and this distressed me considerably.
Combat for a naval aviator is fought in short, violent bursts. Our missions last but an hour or two before we are clear of danger and back on the carrier playing poker with our buddies. We are spared the sustained misery of the infantrymen who slog through awful conditions and danger for months on end. Some pilots like the excitement of our missions, knowing that they are of short duration, but most of us concentrate so fiercely on finding our targets and avoiding calamity that we recall more vividly our relief when it’s over than we do our exhilaration while it’s going on.
I did not take a perverse pleasure in the terror and destruction of war. I did not delight in the brief, intense thrill of flying combat missions. I was gratified when my bombs hit their target, but I did not particularly enjoy the excitement of the experience.
Nevertheless, I was a professional naval officer, and the purpose of my years of training had been to prepare me for this moment. As the crippled Forrestal limped toward port, my moment was disappearing when it had barely begun, and I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal.
A distraction from my despondency appeared on the way to Subic in the person of R. W. “Johnny” Apple, the New York Times correspondent in Saigon. Serving as a pool reporter, he arrived by helicopter with a camera crew to examine the damaged ship and interview the survivors. When he finished collecting material for his report, he offered to take me back to Saigon with him for the daily press briefing irreverently referred to as the “Five O’Clock Follies.” Seeing it as an opportunity for some welcome R&R, I jumped at the invitation. I passed a few days there pleasantly, wondering about my future, and beginning a lifelong friendship with Johnny.