Explosions
APRIL 19, 1989
ABOARD THE USS IOWA
ATLANTIC OCEAN
“I have a problem here. I’m not ready yet. I have a problem here. I’m not ready yet.”
They were the last words anyone heard from the center gun of Turret Number Two. They came from the turret’s main gun room, from Gunner’s Mate Richard Lawrence, the cradleman.
The gun turret was nothing more than a big gun, like the inside of a hugely magnified pistol into which the crew dropped ninety-pound bags of gunpowder not much larger than basketballs to propel the gun’s orange-tipped 2,700-pound bullets. The powder bags were hoisted from magazines at the bottom of the turret, carried into the gun room, and gently set into the end of the sixty-six-foot gun barrel. At the bottom of each powder bag were red patches containing explosive black powder to ignite the bags. Because burning embers left in the barrel from a previous firing could cause a premature explosion, the gun captain placed a foil packet between every two gunpowder bags immediately before firing. The packet contained chemicals for cleaning the barrel to make it safe for reloading. Then the gunner’s captain would give the order to fire, and everyone in the gun room would leap behind a red line, to avoid the fierce recoil from one of the world’s largest guns.
Moments before the gun should have fired, at about 9:55 A.M., an explosion tore out of the center gun on Turret Two. Artists later recreated that moment in drawings that could never accurately suggest the inferno that engulfed the turret that morning. The blast from the gun, imploding inside the ship, tore apart crewmen’s bodies and sent a ghastly fireball rolling through the turret. Some men had time to try to run for the hatches, and that is where their burned and suffocated bodies were found.
From the bridge of the sleek ship, another crewman captured the moment on videotape. Turret Number One raised its guns and lowered them without firing; there had been a misfire. Turret Two was directed to shoot next. The guns lowered so they would be parallel to the sea during reloading. The first gun raised up and fired. On the middle gun, however, the tarp between the barrel and the turret suddenly swelled up like a balloon. Flames spewed from the gun barrel, shooting straight out; smoke billowed from the turret. The ship rocked with a fierce explosion.
The gunnery crew knew the rhythm of the loading, firing, and reloading cycle as well as they knew the constant hum of the ship’s engines. When Ken Truitt heard the explosion, he thought at first that the gun had fired early. “That didn’t sound right,” Ken said to a crewmate. His crewmate tried to radio the powder magazines; there was no response. Ken ordered the powder stored and stepped into the next room. The lights were out and three sailors were screaming. He opened the door to the powder flats, saw bags of explosives on fire, and shouted for someone to tell him what was going on. No one answered. “Evacuate,” Truitt heard a crewmate shout. “There’s gunpowder that’s going to explode.”
Truitt and other crewman on the bottom floor of the magazine leaped for their Oxygen Breathing Apparatus, which looked like scuba gear and was designed for such conflagrations. They would have to flood the powder magazines to prevent an even bigger disaster, but there was no way to tell if water was actually pouring in. Truitt ventured down the stairwell to see whether the huge cranks had turned to allow sea water in to douse the flames, all the while thinking, “I’m going to die. I’ve got gunpowder in here that’s burning. I’m going to die.” When he got to the magazines, he saw a door closed improperly, preventing flooding. He closed the hatch, water began to fill the room, and he returned to his magazine, where he met the ship’s firemen. One asked if he had been to the gun room. No, he said. “They’re all dead,” a fireman said. Of fifty-nine crewmen in Turret Two, only twelve had survived.
Truitt and his crewmates worked in the turret when the fire was doused for seventeen hours. All around them lay body parts, pieces of friends, some decapitated, some burned so badly that they could only be recognized by a tattoo, others mangled beyond recognition. Though the Navy would tell grieving families that the sailors had died instantly, the placement of some of the bodies, piled on top of each other by the hatch doors, frozen in death like mannequins, testified to their final attempts to escape the holocaust. The men on the lower decks had died of asphyxiation, because the fire had pulled the air through the turret’s ventilation system, literally sucking the oxygen out of their lungs. At one point, Ken thought he saw pieces of Clay, too, but he could never be sure.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
About an hour after the explosion aboard the USS Iowa, hours before anyone outside the Navy would know of the tragedy, a meeting was taking place. For the first time, forty-six years since the Defense Department began formally banning homosexuals from the military, the issue was being taken up by an official government body. The topic of discussion before the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service was not homosexuality per se, but the relationship between the exclusion of gays and sexual harassment of women. DACOWITS had not planned even to discuss this subject when they met at the conference that morning. The Military Freedom Project had simply lined up speakers of their own, and then put them behind a microphone during a “public comment” period, when anyone could raise any issue to the committee.
Among those testifying were Darlene Chamberlin, who recalled the purge of gays at Scott Air Force Base in 1982, the investigation that had brought her assistance from Rabbi Bruce Diamond. “I have an eighteen-year-old sister who will be on active duty in the military this year,” said Chamberlin. “Is her career over because she has a sister who is a lesbian? Will she be investigated for knowing someone gay?”
Captain Judy Meade, awaiting the final word from the Marine Corps on whether it would accept her administrative board’s decision, also testified about being charged and discharged without the benefit of facing one’s accusers. Petty Officer First Class Mary Beth Harrison, just months away from her final administrative discharge hearing, said that aboard the USS Grapple women who did not respond to male advances were called “dykes.” When she held up a copy of a sign that had appeared on the Grapple, the sign with the word Dykes struck through with a slash mark, she provided photographers with the picture that would make the newspapers.
DACOWITS Chairwoman Connie Lee responded, “I’m not convinced that the system is not working.” The military justice system already had mechanisms for handling sexual harassment, she said, “if we decide there is harassment here.”
When a subcommittee met later that day to discuss sexual harassment, they studiously avoided the issue’s lesbian component, until Kate Dyer, an aide to Congressman Gerry Studds, asked whether they would discuss it. The subcommittee chairwoman nervously said they would, but they did not. At the end of the day, the DACOWITS executive committee issued a recommendation that the military institute training sessions to curtail sexual harassment against women and “expand existing leadership training to include dealing with unfounded allegations of homosexuality against Service members.”
In making this statement, DACOWITS was not saying lesbians should be allowed to stay in the military; only that the Defense Department be certain that the women it did eject from the service really were lesbians and not merely the slandered objects of unrequited advances. This was hardly a statement for gay liberation, but organizers of the Military Freedom Project, which made its public debut at the hearing, pronounced the DACOWITS hearings “historic” and called the recommendation “a good first step.”
The fact that the issue of homosexuality came up only tangentially to a fairly obscure commission tucked deep in the military bureaucracy demonstrated how embryonic the lobbying efforts against Pentagon policies were. Though liberal gay activists complained that the policy was being preserved by the Republican administration, which was currying favor with religious conservatives, the fact was that the policies were protected by both Republican and Democratic politicians.
The Democrats who chaired the committees on armed services in the Senate and the House of Representatives had steadfastly declined to hold hearings on the issue of gays in the military. Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia was known to be hostile to the idea of allowing gays to serve. The more liberal Congressman Les Aspin was thought to be somewhat sympathetic, but he had never made any public statement or gesture, nor had the topic ever been discussed openly in his committee. The chairwoman of the house subcommittee on military personnel, Representative Beverly Byron of Maryland, was a conservative Democrat who was not interested in addressing the gay policy.
The lonely voices calling for reform belonged to Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, a ranking armed services member, and Congress’ two openly gay members, Gerry Studds and Barney Frank. Congresswoman Connie Morella, a liberal Republican from Maryland, had recently weighed in on the issue by asking the Pentagon to investigate the “Gestapo tactics” used by military investigators during gay purges. Their voices, in a capital city where hundreds of issues competed for congressional and media attention, were not enough, and on Capitol Hill the subject remained a nonissue.
The presence of two acknowledged homosexual congressmen did occasionally create anomalous moments on the Hill. As chairman of the subcommittee on fisheries, Congressman Studds, who represented the important fishing port of New Bedford, supervised the U.S. Coast Guard. This was a position of no small influence, since the House originated all funding bills, making Studds the point man for any issues relating to the service. Though the Coast Guard was part of the Department of Transportation and not the Department of Defense, it rigidly adhered to the Pentagon’s gay policies, because Coast Guard sailors could be called to serve in military situations. At a hearing during this period, Studds asked the Coast Guard to explain its gay regulations, which it did by claiming the importance of consistency with other military services. Studds noted that it was odd that he was a good enough man to be in charge of the Coast Guard for the House of Representatives but not good enough to swab decks on a Coast Guard vessel.
THAT AFTERNOON
CLEVELAND, OHIO
Clay Hartwig took after his dad, Earl, not only in appearance, with his tall build, distinctive chin, and sleepy blue eyes, but in his quiet, even shy, disposition. Neither Clay nor Earl laughed aloud; they smiled or at most chuckled quietly. Clay’s older sister, Kathy, took after her mother, Evelyn, who was garrulous and outspoken. Thirteen years older than her brother, Kathy had left home to marry when Clay was only five. Since then, she and her husband, an electrician at a local Ford plant, had had three children and moved into a small house in Cleveland. With children always under foot and Kathy Kubicina’s gruff but humorous demeanor, friends were reminded of the blue-collar family in the popular new television show “Roseanne.”
Kathy sat nervously on her couch that afternoon, her Cleveland Browns stadium blanket pulled up over her. She had heard the news of an explosion on the Iowa hours before. She spent the rest of that afternoon on her couch, drinking cans of Pepsi-Cola, smoking cigarettes, and watching the television, hoping for any word that her brother was alive. Late that night, she called Ken Truitt’s wife. She knew that Clay had not liked Carole, but Kathy hoped she might know something. Carole, however, knew nothing of Clay, only that Ken had survived.
The next afternoon, Earl and Evelyn Hartwig opened the door to two Naval officers in their dress whites. Evelyn began to sob.
A few miles away in her living room, a local television news crew was waiting with Kathy when her parents called. “He’s dead,” she heard, and she started to cry.
Across the country, other Naval officers in dress white uniforms were making similar visits to the families of the forty-six other crew members killed in the worst peacetime Naval disaster in more than a quarter century. Like most of the enlisted men in the services, most of these men were born in 1967, 1968, or 1969. Less influenced by the countercultural sixties than the Reagan-era eighties, most had sought out their assignments on the battleship, the symbol of American Naval strength.
What most vexed the Navy in the first days after the accident, as officials attempted to come up with an explanation for the disaster, was that no one had lived to tell what really happened. Though critics had long questioned the wisdom of resurrecting such old ships, the Navy hated to admit that their antiquated mechanisms and antique explosives might have caused the tragedy. To admit this would be to admit that battleships were dangerous, and battleships were a most beloved vessel of the seagoing service. As it was, the Secretary of the Navy ordered that all the sixteen-inch guns on the four battleships be silenced until investigators determined what had caused the blast.
But there was a significant problem. Admiral Richard Milligan had ordered the turret washed out and thoroughly cleaned after the explosion, even before the ship pulled back into its home port of Norfolk. Much of the most important evidence had been washed overboard.
From the start, the explosion thrust twenty-one-year-old Ken Truitt into the limelight. His efforts in the turret, which had required no small amount of heroism, brought him to the attention of the ship’s captain. Ken was intelligent and articulate, and a presentable role model for the Navy. The ship’s officers put Truitt on center stage for press conferences. He became a veritable USS Iowa poster boy. There was hardly a story on the incident anywhere in the national press that did not include a poignant comment from Kendall Truitt. And his moment in the national spotlight was only beginning.
The remains of Clayton Hartwig had been transported to Dover Air Force Base, where military morticians had the grisly task of reconstructing and then identifying the bodies, largely through dental records. Notice that Clay was among the dead had come late, after much uncertainty. His body was the last to be found, and when it was carried off the Iowa to be flown to Dover, it became autopsy number 47.
APRIL 1989
NORFOLK NAVAL STATION
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
Kathy Kubicina had not planned to go to Norfolk for the official memorial service for the dead Iowa crewmen. Their bodies were at Dover Air Force Base; Clay would not be in Norfolk. But the Navy had said it would fly her and her husband there, as well as Earl and Evelyn Hartwig, and Kathy thought she might learn something about the cause of the accident.
President George Bush, just three months in office, delivered a moving tribute to the Iowa crewmen, with his newly sworn-in Secretary of Defense, Richard Cheney, at his side. “They came to the Navy as strangers, served the Navy as shipmates and friends, and left the Navy as brothers in eternity,” Bush said, and pledged an answer to the mysteries of the accident. “I promise you today, we will find out why—the circumstances of the tragedy,” he said. Although some Navy officials later argued that it was not necessary to explain the accident to others, the remark sounded like an order from the Commander in Chief. From that moment on, an explanation was imperative, because the President had said so.
Kathy sought out Ken Truitt, and they talked over an early lunch together. It was Ken who told Kathy that Clay had taken out an insurance policy at the Navy credit union and named him as beneficiary. Knowing of their friendship, she was not shocked by this information, but it bothered her. She knew Clay and Ken had not been as close since Ken’s marriage. She thought her parents, who lived on her father’s railroad pension and meager Social Security checks, should be Clay’s beneficiaries.
Back in Cleveland, she wrote her local congresswoman, Mary Rose Oakar, asking her to pass along to the Navy her request to change the name of the beneficiary on Clay’s insurance policy in favor of her parents.
When the letter from Congresswoman Oakar arrived, the Navy’s frantic search for the cause of the blast took an abrupt shift. That one male crew member had made another male crew member his insurance beneficiary read homosexual to Navy investigators. And the suspicion of homosexuality led to suspicions of all sorts of other diabolical behavior. The explosion might not have been an accident, the Navy mused, but a criminal act of one crewman against his shipmates. This required the expertise of an agency that knew much about homosexuals, the NIS.
APRIL 28, 1989
RESTHAVEN MEMORIAL GARDEN
AVON LAKE, OHIO
A procession of two hundred cars accompanied Gunner’s Mate Clayton Hartwig to the cemetery, where he was buried with a twenty-one-gun salute, taps, and full military honors. His grave was covered in mounds of red tulips and white chrysanthemums, and his body was placed under a small white marble headstone:
In the days that followed, Evelyn and Earl Hartwig experienced a terrible listlessness. They did not know what to do with themselves. They came to Kathy’s house and sat. They did not want to be alone.
Meanwhile, Ken had become a minor celebrity. He had enlisted in the Navy from Marion, Illinois, so the Illinois State Senate invited him to address a session and receive a certificate of honor for his heroism on the day of the explosion.
On May 3, Kathy received a phone call from a Navy captain who said the service would look into helping her, so when two agents from the NIS appeared at her door five days later, she was ready to greet them.
By way of an introduction, one agent explained that the NIS was “the FBI of the Navy.” Neither made an effort to conceal their guns. One sported a Velcro ankle holster. At first they talked about the insurance claim, but then one of the agents took a strange tack, according to Kathy.
“Do you consider yourself a liberal person?” he asked.
Kathy said she did.
“Do you have any gay friends?” he asked.
Though mystified, Kathy said that she did.
“Do you think your brother might have been gay?” he asked.
Kathy told him that it wouldn’t matter to her whether he was or not.
“I want you to sit down and explain to me why your brother left money to another man,” the NIS agent said. “Draw me a profile.”
Kathy could not understand why they needed a “profile” for an insurance policy probe. The agents said they would be back in touch.
Soon after, Kathy heard from Brian Hoover, Clay’s best friend in high school, and she learned more about how the NIS conducted investigations. The NIS agents had told Hoover that Kathy and her parents had said that Brian was gay; they wanted to know if Clay was gay, too. When they saw that Hoover wore a Navy ring, they ridiculed him. “Were you lovers?” one agent said. “When you wear a Navy ring on your left hand, that means you’re engaged.”
At Earl and Evelyn Hartwig’s home, the NIS agents found Clay’s upstairs bedroom remained exactly it was before he left Cleveland for the Navy, with its ship models and books on Civil War and World War II history. Evelyn allowed them to go through the room, but asked them not to disturb his belongings. “Don’t worry,” an agent said. “It’s not a criminal investigation. If it were, we’d be tearing this room apart with a fine-tooth comb.”
The agents were lying. By then, the Iowa investigation was a criminal investigation with two major suspects, the reputed homosexual lovers: Clay Hartwig and Kendall Truitt.
The NIS interview with Ken Truitt was standard. “Tell us about Clay,” one agent said. Ken said they were friends. “What do you mean by friends?” the agent pressed. Ken said they were best friends; there was nothing he would not have done for Clay.
The agents mentioned another friend of Clay’s. “We know they were fucking each other,” one agent said. They believed Ken was gay, too. “We’re not on a witch-hunt, Ken,” one agent said. “I’ve got gay friends. That doesn’t bother me. You can tell us.” Ken said that if he was gay, he would tell, but that he was not. The agents pressed on. Was Clay suicidal, might he have wanted to kill himself or others? Ken said he was not, and that if he had wanted to commit suicide, it would have been much easier to jump overboard or use a lighter in the powder magazines at night. The agents got back to their original tack: “Ken, we know you’re gay. We know you and Clay were gay. We know you’re lying to us.”
“Did he love you, Ken?”
They were friends, Ken said.
“Did you love him like a brother?”
Maybe, Ken said.
The NIS agents liked that answer; now they had a statement that Hartwig and Truitt loved each other; therefore, they must be gay.
Because he had nothing to hide, Ken let the NIS agents search his home. They spent hours poring over every autographed entry in his high school yearbooks and his wife’s high school yearbooks. They even pawed through Carole’s underwear.
When Ken came home for lunch to find his wife in tears, he learned that NIS agents had interviewed her as well. In the course of two interviews, they had asked Carole Truitt such questions as, “Has [Ken] ever fucked you up the ass?” “Is he rough with you?” Did Ken ever have sex with Carole while Clay watched? Had Carole ever had sex with any of Ken’s friends? Did she ever have sex with Hartwig? Did she ever have sex with other Iowa crew members? Wasn’t Ken really gay? Did she marry him to provide a cover so no one would suspect? How often did she and Ken have sex? When the agents found pictures of the couple on their honeymoon, one agent asked if Clay had been with them and taken the photographs. That was when Ken Truitt called the NIS and told them to “get the fuck out of my life.” He would no longer cooperate with them.
By then, however, the NIS agents had their first theory on the Iowa explosion. In a search of Ken’s locker, they had found a burlap bag, the kind filled with powder during the firing of the big gun. Gunner’s mates routinely picked up such items as souvenirs, or to use when teaching gunnery techniques to new sailors, but the agents believed Ken might have used such bags to make an explosive device to kill Hartwig, so he could collect the insurance money he knew was coming to him if Hartwig died. Added to Clay’s dislike for Carole Truitt, the plot thickened with the possibility of a homosexual love triangle. The NIS now had a suspect in the Iowa explosion: Ken Truitt.