Bob Shelton and James Blaskis fit right in with the Forrestal crew, which was a mixture of young men who were inexperienced in nearly everything and old hands who had been riding the seas for many years. In some ways, they were a slice of America in 1967. The young far outnumbered the older men on the ship, and back home America was just getting used to having teenagers and young adults swarming the country in record numbers. Youthfulness has always been welcome in the military, however, because some jobs can be done only by someone who still thinks he will never die. The old hands on board knew better, because many of them had been through the kinds of experiences that will convince a young man of his mortality. On the Forrestal, these veteran sailors guided the youngsters through the daily hazards and lessons of life on an aircraft carrier, providing support that many of the boys would not understand or appreciate until they, too, were old enough to offer advice. It was a common scene to see an older sailor explaining the navy’s ways to a lot of younger men who were eager to do the right thing, if only they knew how.
The navy has excelled at turning boys into men, and for many, it represented an opportunity for a career and travel that were otherwise out of reach. Times were difficult for young men in the States in 1967, with the looming possibility of a draft letter arriving in the mail. Even if they hadn’t been drafted yet, any day they could be, so employers were reluctant to waste time hiring them.
If a young man did get drafted, he would most likely end up in the infantry and be sent to the jungles of Vietnam. Even though most American youths didn’t know much about what was going on in Southeast Asia, they did know that a lot of boys already had been killed in the jungle wars. But if they volunteered instead of waiting to be drafted, they could select which branch of service they would serve in, and might even have some input into the sort of duty they were assigned. That is how a great many of the young men ended up on the Forrestal.
If you weren’t a gung ho volunteer, eager to be in the thick of things, an aircraft carrier was the plum assignment. Vietnam had little navy to speak of, and carriers did all their work sitting out in the water, far away from any land-based threats. Being assigned to the Forrestal, one of the world’s biggest and most powerful carriers, was a relief to many because they saw it as the safest place they could be. Safety is a relative matter, of course, and an aircraft carrier actually can be extremely dangerous. But for a young man going to Vietnam in 1967, there was little doubt that he would go home after a year or two on the Forrestal. They would ride out their tours of duty there and then return home to pick up the lives they left, satisfied that they had fulfilled their obligations.
Shelton and Blaskis joined the Forrestal about the same time as Ken Killmeyer, Robert Zwerlein, and Paul Friedman. When they first reported to the ship, they were all dumbstruck by its size. Especially for youngsters who grew up in small towns and had yet to see anything of the world, the ship looked like the biggest thing on earth. And they weren’t too far from the truth.
When she was constructed, between 1951 and 1954, the Forrestal was the largest warship ever built. At 1,039 feet long, the carrier would reach the eightieth floor of the Empire State Building if stood on end. Even sitting in the water, she was as tall as a twenty-five-story building. The ship’s tall masts, which are full of radar and other equipment, were designed to swing down and lie on the deck temporarily so the ship could pass under the Brooklyn Bridge.
The flight deck was 252 feet wide and as long as three and a half football fields, creating four acres of “sovereign U.S. territory,” as the navy likes to brag. The ship displaced eighty thousand tons and was way too big to fit through the Panama Canal, making it necessary to go the long way, an easterly route around South Africa in order to get from her usual territory in the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The Forrestal was so powerful that she was considered to be the crown jewel in the navy’s fleet, and she had to be named for a prominent leader from American history—the late James V. Forrestal, a former secretary of the navy and the first secretary of defense, acclaimed for building the modern navy. She was nicknamed “FID” for “First in Defense,” a reference to both her namesake and her position as the country’s big muscle that would be moved into position against an aggressor. Later, the navy added “Fidelity, Integrity, and Dignity” to the FID moniker.
Military ships tend to get a reputation as they age, and the Forrestal was known for always being on time, and also as the “ship with a heart” because of the charity work that her crew always did in the local communities they visited around the world. They would lend a hand with building a clinic or would donate books to a third-world library.
As the new men stood in long lines waiting to board the ship, her gray hulk was all they could see. It took up their entire field of vision. Once they boarded, the size of the ship was underscored by one of the first scenes they witnessed. As the newbies walked by with duffel bags slung over a shoulder and their jaws hanging open in awe, some of the crew already on board were playing football in one of the big open hangar decks. Not a scaled-down game on just a small piece of open deck; they were playing a full-sized football game, with plenty of room to spare.
The men arrived at the ship through slightly different paths, but many of them had similar motives. Shelton and nineteen-year-old Ken Killmeyer had both faced trouble getting work because of their draft status. In his hometown of Pittsburgh, Killmeyer had just graduated from high school and was still living with his parents while looking for work. The first question employers always asked was “What’s your draft status?” And when Killmeyer told them he was 1A, meaning he was at the top of the list, employers rolled their eyes and sighed. The employers were as disappointed as Killmeyer that they couldn’t hire the tall, lanky kid who obviously wanted to work. “You could be the best guy in the world, but you’re only going to be around for a short while and then you’re gone,” they said.
After a lot of rejections, Killmeyer decided not to sit around and wait to be drafted. He talked it over with his dad, and they decided that the navy was a safe bet.
“Well, you’re not going to be shot at. You’ll survive it all, and you won’t even be in the jungles,” his dad told him one night. “You’ll be coming home, Ken. We don’t know that for sure if you get drafted.”
Shelton had arrived at his decision in the same way, but he was out on his own and twenty-one years old by the time he started thinking about enlisting. Shelton had grown up in a little town called Kilgore, Texas, a flat piece of land with oil fields that employed nearly everyone there. He had worked in the oil fields himself as a teenager and then ambled around East Texas for a while before taking a job managing a gas station in Longview, Texas. It was a decent job, but he was smart enough to know there was no future in it. And when he tried to find a better job, he received the same response Killmeyer heard in Pittsburgh: “Thanks, but we’re looking for men who have fulfilled their military obligation.” Every time he heard that, it reminded him that he could be drafted and end up in the jungles of Vietnam.
So in August 1965, Shelton took a walk downtown to the air force recruiting office.
I might as well get this over with, he thought.
Shelton had been interested in flying since he was a child, so the air force seemed like a good choice. The recruiter was glad to have him and, after a pep talk about why he should join, sent Shelton home to get his birth certificate. Shelton came back an hour later, ready to sign up with the air force. But when he reached the recruiting office, it was closed. Shelton figured maybe the recruiter had just stepped out for a minute, so he waited outside the door. Before long, someone from the navy recruiting office next door stuck his head outside.
“Hey, it’s hot out here. You might as well wait in here if you want.”
Shelton took him up on the offer. It wasn’t long before he had agreed to join the navy and pursue a career in aviation electronics. It wasn’t the air force, but he’d be working in the exciting world of naval aviation on an aircraft carrier.
Killmeyer and Shelton first went through boot camp and studied different fields for a short while before being assigned to active duty. Killmeyer was excited about the prospect of serving in the navy and studied hard for various duties. But his first assignment to an active-duty post at a Philadelphia naval station was to keep the milk machines full in the mess hall. From morning to night, he was filling the machines with plain and chocolate milk. In between, he cleaned the floors.
When he was called to the Forrestal in March 1967, Killmeyer was eager to go. No matter what his job would be on board, surely it would be more exciting than filling milk machines.
When Shelton drove into the Norfolk, Virginia, naval base to board the ship, he didn’t think much of the drab, utilitarian base. The Forrestal, on the other hand, was more impressive, a huge gray monster looming in front of him. He’d worked on marinas around the Texas coast, so he thought maybe he’d like being on a ship. He hadn’t yet stood in too many lines.
When Paul Friedman graduated from high school in 1965, all of his buddies received a stern reminder that they might be drafted soon. They all had to strip down to their underwear and wait in line for preinduction physicals, the exams that would help classify them as good prospects or not so good prospects for an early draft. It was a clear warning that Friedman might not get to spend the next few years on the beach and working small jobs, as he had hoped. Like Killmeyer and Shelton, Friedman decided to join the navy as a matter of self-preservation, a way to control his destiny. He could have gone to college and deferred his draft for years, as many did, but Friedman just didn’t see himself as college material. Joining the military was not a far-fetched idea for most young men anyway, because they had been raised in the John Wayne generation, an era in which military service generally was seen as honorable, though sometimes inconvenient. If they cared one whit about global politics, they probably believed that communism was a spreading scourge that must be stopped, and also probably believed in the domino theory as much as their parents did. In the early and mid-1960s, the antiwar movement had not yet seized the nation, and though being drafted and sent to Vietnam was scary, there was nothing strange about serving your country. Joining the military was a perfectly reasonable thing to consider, and if it gave you more control over your life, it could be the best option.
When a high school buddy returned from navy boot camp for a visit, Friedman grilled him about which assignments might be best. If Friedman volunteered, the navy would allow him to select his general track, but there would be no guarantees. Like a kid leafing through a toy catalog, Friedman looked through the navy manual to see which jobs he might like. Navy corpsman? No, they’re the medics who go in with the marines. He might as well join the marines and go to the jungles. Weather forecasting? Hmmm, maybe. The school was in Lakehurst, New Jersey, so Friedman could spend time sending up weather balloons not too far from home. But then he saw navy aviation, which he knew meant carriers, and that was exciting to him. And besides, carriers never got to within one hundred miles of the real action.
Friedman was very reluctant to leave his home in Rockaway Beach, New York, a real beach community outside of New York City that provided this Jewish kid the opportunity to live the life of a surfer. He’d worked at the World’s Fair that summer in New York City, but Friedman spent his days riding his surfboard along the waves and romancing beautiful girls on the beach. It was a sweet life for a good-looking eighteen-year-old. Like many young men in the mid-sixties, Friedman wasn’t at all happy about being torn away from a good thing. The only consolation was that he was pretty sure he would return.
Down south in Atlanta, however, returning from the war didn’t make Ed Roberts feel much better about going. Sure, he was glad to get in the navy and avoid the jungle fighting, but he just couldn’t understand why the government wouldn’t leave him and his friends alone. They had worked hard in the past years to make their rock-and-roll band a success, and they were finally getting somewhere. Then the draft notices started showing up.
Roberts grew up in Atlanta. He had started playing the drums when he was twelve years old, first in the school band, then in every other band he could join—the dance band, the all-district band, the all-city band. In 1964, the year he graduated from high school, he teamed up with some buddies and formed a band called the Fugitives, after the popular TV show. The Fugitives started out playing old standards they’d learned in school, like “Give My Regards to Broadway,” but then the Beatles hit it big. They started learning all the Fab Four’s songs and suddenly they were in demand for parties and were even booking commercial venues around Atlanta. The tall kid banging away on the drums was starting to think his band could really amount to something.
Every one of them knew that the draft could throw a wrench in the plans, and like all young men across the country, they were exploring their options. Roberts’s father had seen a lot of combat in Europe during World War II, and he didn’t want his son to go through the same thing. They talked it over as Roberts worked with his father during the day in his heating and plumbing business. The older Roberts urged his son to look into the National Guard and the reserve programs that would help keep him out of Vietnam, and Roberts agreed that was a good choice. Whatever he ended up doing in the military, he didn’t want to be in a jungle where you couldn’t see the people shooting at you. And he had read enough about Vietnam to know that the Vietnamese were using dirty tactics like booby traps. He didn’t want to go.
Roberts and one of his buddies started checking into the National Guard and the reserves, but they found that all of the Atlanta units had waiting lists. They couldn’t sign up right away, but Roberts made friends with a couple of the recruiters at the naval air station outside Atlanta and started thinking about the navy as an option. When he talked it over with his dad, they agreed that the navy might be his best choice.
“At least you have a place to sleep and regular meals,” his father said. “That’s more than you’re going to get in the army.”
Even so, Roberts didn’t want to join the navy yet, because the Fugitives were getting bookings and having a good time. He also was studying biology at Georgia State University on a part-time basis. He knew it was risky to wait until he was drafted, so he also hedged his bet by hanging around the naval air station and talking to the recruiters. They treated him to free meals in the chow halls and talked about everything from the navy to the Fugitives. They liked the kid and made it clear that they’d like to sign him up for the reserves if only the list weren’t so long already. But they told him they would help if things got desperate.
“If you get your draft notice, come right over here right away,” one of the navy recruiters told him. “Don’t even go home. Have your mother watch out for it and call you if it comes in the mail, then you come right over here.”
Roberts’s nineteenth birthday was approaching, and he knew the draft notice could be coming soon. He was worried about what might happen, but he also was excited about what was already happening with the Fugitives. In February 1966, the band landed an audition for a touring rock-and-roll show called “Holiday for Teens.” If they could get signed for the tour, the Fugitives would tour the country, which would give them all sorts of opportunities to contact record producers. This was a huge development for a bunch of Atlanta boys, just at the time when nothing was more glamorous for a teenager than being in a rock-and-roll band.
The Fugitives practiced hard in the weeks before the audition. And then just days before the audition, Roberts’s mother called him while he was working with his father to say that his draft papers had arrived. Roberts’s heart sank, but he did what he had planned. He raced over to the naval air station and told his friends there he had been drafted. Just as they had promised, they bent the rules to get him into the navy reserve program. He’d still have to go in the military, but this way, he got a little more time.
The reserve program required him to sign up right away but he could spend the first year training part-time at the local base. Then he would be assigned to active duty for two years, followed by another year in the reserve. Roberts signed the papers.
Just a few days later, the Fugitives were auditioning for the rock-and-roll tour. They made it and soon found themselves driving around the country in five Oldsmobile Coronados and five Vista Cruiser station wagons plastered with “Holiday for Teens.” The tour was a blast, with the Fugitives playing for screaming teens from Miami to Las Vegas. They made a television commercial and were in a parade, and they had girls adoring them. Every time a girl screamed, they were a little more confident that their band had a future.
The tour lasted for a few months and then the band was back home in Atlanta, still playing a lot of shows around town. Roberts still hadn’t told his bandmates that he’d signed up for the navy, but now it was time to report to the base for his training. There wasn’t very much for him to do, certainly nothing rigorous. Mostly he just learned the basics of navy life, like swabbing a deck and polishing the brass. But the navy made one dramatic change right away. They cut Roberts’s hair.
To be in a rock-and-roll band in 1966, you had to have long hair. Roberts and his bandmates had been cultivating their look for a while, and they all had slightly shaggy hairstyles, not really all that long but enough to set them apart from the crisp hairstyles of Middle America. When Roberts showed up for practice one day with his hair trimmed short, the Fugitives were outraged. How could he ruin his hair that way? Roberts couldn’t tell them the truth. He was afraid his friends would be angry that he’d joined the navy, so he lied and told them he cut his hair just because he wanted to look good for his college classes. They were mad at him, but he could live with that.
He kept his secret as long as he could—going to his navy training on the weekends and still showing up for the band’s gigs—but finally he had to tell them. He was scheduled to go on active duty in February 1967, and after that, the Fugitives would have to find a new drummer.
Roberts didn’t know yet that he would end up on the world’s most powerful ship. When the Forrestal was put in service in 1955, she was the navy’s pride and joy, the biggest, best, and most advanced aircraft carrier the world had ever seen. She would soon start collecting a number of historic “firsts” in naval aviation, and before her long career ended. The Forrestal ushered in a new class of aircraft carriers that would follow her design and thus be categorized as “Forrestal class.” She was the first “supercarrier” ever designed, and she represented everything the navy had learned from the pivotal use of carriers in World War II and the years since.
The Forrestal was built with more than double the fuel and weapons loads of the most modern Essex-class carriers that came before her, and promised to be more useful and versatile than any other carrier on the sea. Her flight deck extended one hundred yards farther than the Midway-class ships that were developed at the end of World War II. Built in the early days of the Cold War, it helped fulfill the United States’ goal of having the biggest and most powerful military in the world. And it would even carry nuclear weapons at times, ready to deliver them to ground targets within distance of her planes.
Despite her size, the Forrestal could move in a hurry. Her four main propulsion engines delivered more than 260,000 horsepower, enough to keep 1,430 1968 Ford Mustangs cruising along at ample speed. Those oil-burning engines powered four propellers that could move the ship at a brisk thirty-three knots, about thirty-eight mph. (A top speed of thirty-eight mph may not sound like much unless you remember that this is a war machine the size of a skyscraper coming your way.) The crew was made up of the sailors assigned to the ship itself, plus the airplane pilots and their own specialized crew. When an air wing was aboard, the Forrestal carried a total crew of about five thousand men and about ninety planes.
The Forrestal was the first carrier specifically designed to handle jet aircraft. The ship was designed and built at an exciting time in naval aviation, part of the service’s huge leap forward in using jets rather than propeller-driven planes. She was the first carrier built with four steam catapults instead of two hydraulic ones, and four deck-edge elevators instead of three. Her flight deck was the first to be designed as a key load-bearing member of the ship’s structure, rather than just a flat surface stuck on top of the ship. That change reflected the sophistication of carrier design since the days when they were seen as oddball ships with a runway stuck on top. With the flight deck as a load-bearing part of the ship’s structure, the entire ship was strengthened. But there was a cost: if the flight deck was severely damaged, the rest of the ship could be compromised.
Designing such an advanced ship required the very best of 1950s technology. The Forrestal was breaking new ground in many ways, and engineers were challenged to come up with new ideas that were difficult to test. Anchoring a ship, for instance, is a fairly simple concept until applied to a ship this big. For such a massive vessel, the anchor chains had to be both heavy enough to hold the ship in place and strong enough not to snap when pulled hard. The engineers designed a 2,160-foot monster weighing 246 tons, each individual link twenty-eight inches long and seventeen inches wide, weighing 360 pounds each. The chain’s breaking strain was calculated to be 2.5 million pounds.
Engineers were still refining the ship’s design as her keel was laid on July 14, 1952, trying to incorporate the best innovations from the U.S. Navy’s own experience with carriers and also the lessons of other countries. The ship was originally designed with the same axial landing deck that most carriers had used up to that point, meaning the “runway” on the deck ran the entire length of the ship from one end to the other. But as the ship was being built, the designers switched to an angle deck design that the British had developed. This method used a landing zone on the rear of the ship that was angled off to the left of the ship’s centerline, essentially dividing the ship into a rear landing area and a forward catapult launching area. Previous designs had required the entire deck to be cleared for landings, or necessitated net barriers or similar devices to keep landing planes from running into the other planes parked forward on the deck. With the angle design, the carrier could conduct launches and landings simultaneously, and planes could more easily take off again if they missed the arresting cable. They would continue off to the port side of the ship rather than all the way straight down the length of the flight deck.
The Forrestal also was the first ship to incorporate a system of mirrored lights to guide pilots in for landing, instead of the World War II–era method of having a man stand on the deck with signal paddles and wave them at the pilot.
The result was a ship of such strength, size, and endurance that the Forrestal was an all-purpose carrier; no other carrier was better at anything. The ship was christened and launched on December 11, 1954, and assigned to the naval station at Norfolk, Virginia. Her total building costs came to $188.9 million.
She also was designed with some previously unimaginable creature comforts. Shelton and Blaskis slept on foam-mattress bunks in cubicles that afforded at least a little privacy, barely realizing this was a substantial change from the bare-bones crew quarters of previous carriers and almost all other navy ships. Another major improvement was the ship’s air-conditioning.
Most ships had no air-conditioning at all, and the crew of a carrier certainly could not expect such luxury even when cruising through the hottest climates. But seven five-hundred-ton air-conditioning units on the Forrestal provided more cooling power than that used at Radio City Music Hall. The crew could enjoy air-conditioned living spaces twenty-four hours a day, though much of the working space was not cooled. Aviators could even take an escalator up to the flight deck, a more necessary addition than it might seem. Once the aviators were suited up for a flight, they would be lugging nearly one hundred pounds of gear. If they hustled up four flights of steps, they would be perspiring heavily by the time they got to the plane and soaking wet by the time they reached the cold air of high altitude flight.
The Forrestal was promoted as the first carrier to try to make the crew reasonably comfortable during long voyages, but the ship’s builder explained that the improved accommodations “are not just for luxury, because experts have found that air-conditioning and good recreation and sleeping quarters will make the Forrestal a ‘happy ship’ which will lead to greater crew efficiency.”
Though by 1967 she still hadn’t seen a single day of combat, the Forrestal was known as the very best of naval might. She was the testing site for many new ideas in naval aviation, conducting trials in the 1960s for the introduction of the new F4H-1 Phantom II and A3J-1 Vigilante fighter and attack jets. In one of the most amazing feats, the ship hosted the largest aircraft ever to land or take off from an aircraft carrier: a C-130 Hercules, a fat, cumbersome cargo plane designed to move heavy equipment and troops. The “Herc” is about as different from the sleek carrier-based planes as you can get and still call it an airplane. Just to see if it could be done, the Herc made several takeoffs and landings on the Forrestal in 1963 and 1964 with cargo test weights ranging from 85,000 to 121,000 pounds. Though the tests were successful, the navy never again found reason to land a Herc on an aircraft carrier, leaving the Forrestal to hold that record.
The ship’s size and versatility made her useful as one of the big sticks wielded by American presidents. When a world conflict erupted, the first question asked by American presidents usually was “Where are the carriers?” The Forrestal could be moved into position, ostensibly for “training exercises,” to remind someone that the United States was the strongest kid on the block. No matter how strong or wild-eyed crazy the other country’s leader was, the sight of an American aircraft carrier parked just off his coastline often was enough of a reminder not to mess around too much. To a very large extent, that actually is the purpose of the aircraft carrier in the modern military arena. As part of the American arsenal throughout the Cold War, the Forrestal could accomplish much of its mission by simply existing, just sitting in the water and looking fierce. When operating in international waters, an aircraft carrier and its accompanying ships do not need the permission of host countries for landing or overflight rights. Aircraft carriers are sovereign U.S. territory that steams anywhere in international waters—and most of the surface of the globe is water.
That is not to say, however, that the Forrestal was all bluster and swagger. The presence of an aircraft carrier off a country’s coastline is little more than a curiosity until the residents understand exactly how much power it can aim at them. The Forrestal could launch nearly one hundred aircraft in an all-out strike, most of them loaded with the latest, most deadly bombs and missiles. The planes and weapons on the carrier alone often represented more than the entire military resources of the country staring at the big ship on the horizon.
Speed was an essential element of the Forrestal’s operations. When the president wanted to intimidate another country, he usually needed to do it quickly. That meant a matter of days, not weeks. That is one reason that modern carriers were designed to be as fast as possible. High speeds, however, are not easy to achieve and sustain when pushing something as big as an aircraft carrier through the water, so they were designed with power plants that are as big as the ship’s structure will allow. The Forrestal ran on fuel oil, but nuclear power is now the preferred method for powering carriers because it can easily move the ship at the thirty-three knots, or thirty-eight miles per hour, that is considered the minimum top speed for a carrier. Unlike most ships, which are designed only for short sprints at high speed, the navy wants its carriers to be able to sustain a speed of twenty knots, or twenty-three miles per hour, for long distances.
Everything on the Forrestal was a wonder to the new sailors on board. When Shelton first reported for duty, he was awestruck by the complexity of nearly everything and every task on board. Simply going from his bunk to breakfast made him feel like a mouse scurrying through a maze in search of the cheese.
One of the first priorities for the young men assigned to the Forrestal was to learn just how an aircraft carrier works. This was no ordinary type of ship, and understanding the strange world of a carrier was essential to surviving your time there, much less doing your job well. As the newcomers would soon learn, those two goals often went hand in hand.
The ship could be described as an airport operating under the worst conditions possible. It was like a busy metropolitan airport reduced to just one runway, with planes landing and taking off at the same time, often less than a minute apart. The airport was moving back and forth, and up and down. The airplanes were loaded with some of the deadliest armaments in the world, and live bombs and rockets were stacked all over the runway. Seawater and fuel oil covered everything in sight. There might be an enemy in the vicinity who wanted to destroy the airport. And of course, all the planes taking off that day had to be able to land there in a few hours, no matter what.
Operating an airport under those conditions required a number of special techniques. Taking off from the Forrestal was not easy, even for specially designed airplanes. The carriers would always turn into the wind during flight operations, and the crew carefully calculated how to combine the ship’s own speed through the water with the existing wind to achieve the optimum wind across the flight deck. With the proper wind speed across the flight deck, planes could much more easily land and take off because the wind created more lift.
Even under optimal conditions, however, airplanes needed a lot of assistance in taking off from an aircraft carrier. The Forrestal’s flight deck looked huge when you were walking around on it, but it seemed like a postage stamp when trying to land or take off from it. There was no room for the long acceleration run that would be normal at an air base on land, so the planes had to be artificially accelerated. That meant actually shooting the planes off the deck.
The Forrestal used a catapult system that attached to the front wheels of planes and, with a tremendous burst of energy, flung them off the deck at high speed. The steam-powered “cats” took a plane from a dead stop to sometimes 150 mph in as little as three seconds and one hundred yards when everything went well. Otherwise, there was a lot of swearing about “bad cats” and “cold cats.” The catapult system consisted of long pistons underneath the flight deck, with a shuttle on the deck surface that was a little bigger than a shoebox. The plane was attached to the shuttle with a tow bar, and the crew carefully calculated the amount of power needed to launch the plane. The calculations were extremely important, taking into consideration the type of plane, the total weight, the wind speed, and other factors. With the proper information, the crew could power the catapult with just the right amount of steam and send the plane airborne. Too much power on the catapult would rip the plane apart, the tow shuttle tearing the front wheel assembly right off the plane. The rest of the plane might or might not stay on the deck. But with too little power, a “cold shot,” the plane would be slowly dragged to the front edge of the ship and lightly tossed in the water just ahead of the carrier. Aviators had to be ready to “punch out” with the ejection seats during a cat launch; if things went wrong, there wasn’t much time to react.
For the aviators, though, the real nail-biting, sweat-drenching operation on a carrier came when it was time to land. The launch did not require a lot of aviators except to sit there and endure the harsh catapult, ready to respond quickly once they were airborne or headed into the water. But when it was time to land, the aviator had to call upon every bit of training, innate skill, and experience. The difficulty of landing on an aircraft carrier is legendary, and for good reason.
The cliché is that landing on an aircraft carrier is a “controlled crash.” Cliché or not, that’s an apt description. Unlike anything experienced on a commercial flight or a private plane, a landing on the Forrestal was an extremely hard, sudden stop. The plane slammed down onto the deck and was stopped by the arresting gear in a matter of just a second or two. That meant that a thirty-ton plane went from its landing speed of more than one hundred miles per hour to zero miles per hour in about two seconds.
There simply wasn’t enough room on a carrier deck to bring planes in for a gentle landing and then a leisurely stop. Instead, they had to be snatched out of the air. The planes were equipped with a tail hook, a bar several feet long that could be extended down from the tail of the plane. When the pilot landed on the deck, the tail hook snagged one of the four big cables stretched across the landing portion of the deck. The cables were only the visible part of the arresting gear, attached below deck to massive machines that controlled how much the cable would give when a plane hooked it, and absorbing much of the force exerted by the plane. The arresting cable had some give to it, extending out a few dozen yards when the plane pulled on it, but the tension had to be just right. When a plane was approaching the carrier to land, the pilot radioed how much fuel, armaments, and cargo remained on the plane so that the arresting gear could be calibrated to stop the plane with just enough resistance. Too much and the tail hook could snap right off the plane and cause it to veer out of control. Too little and the cable would stretch out as the fifty-million-dollar plane continued forward off the side of the ship, right into the water. When a plane went in the water, it was gone forever.
When all went well, the effect was an almost immediate, eye-popping stop. If the plane missed the arresting cable with the tail hook, that was called a “bolter.” Though problematic, bolters were not at all uncommon. Even great pilots missed a landing once in a while on a carrier. It could happen because the pilot just didn’t hit the landing right, or sometimes because he did everything right but the tail hook still bounced right over the wire he was aiming for. (Even with four wires to hit, the angle of approach and where the plane first hit the deck usually meant there was a chance at hooking only one wire. If the plane missed that one, the tail hook wasn’t likely to hit any of the others as the plane continued forward.) When a plane missed the wire, the pilot had to take off again immediately. There was absolutely no time to waste, because even a slight hesitation would rob the plane of the boost needed to get off the deck again. The plane would then roll right off the edge of the flight deck and into the sea, or perhaps careen into something on the deck. Because there was no time at all for the pilot to react to missing the wire, a carrier-deck landing required the pilot to go full throttle when the plane was just about to touch down. If the tail hook caught a wire, the plane would still stop and the pilot could throttle back when he felt the hard lurch. If the tail hook missed, the plane was at full power and the pilot immediately took off again. The idea was that the pilot would go onto the deck as if he were intending all along to just hit the deck with his rear wheels and then go up again (a “touch and go” landing). That minimized the need to react when, in fact, he didn’t catch the wire.
When necessary, the Forrestal could “trap” planes for landing as often as every thirty seconds. As soon as they landed, the planes began taxiing away and folding their wings, if necessary, to clear the deck. One crewman, the “hook runner,” was always standing by with a long crow-bar, his only job to watch the landing and rush forward to disentangle the arresting cable from the tail hook when that happened. Others were in charge of stowing the plane out of the way and chaining it to the deck, a safety precaution that kept planes from rolling off the deck edge in the event of a slight list or a strong gust of wind. The crewmen responsible for chaining the planes down would sometimes challenge one another between landings, conducting little races in which they hustled forward with their heavy chains to see who could complete the chain-down first.
Landings on the Forrestal were assisted by a system of landing-signal lights to the left of the deck, known as the “meatball.” The meatball was an array of special lights, each about the size of a car’s headlight, that the pilot used to determine if he was on the proper approach to the carrier. The lights were configured so that a pilot on the proper glide path would see the middle lens illuminated, but a too-high glide path would show the top lens and a low glide path would show the bottom lens. When a plane was approaching the carrier and given permission to land, the flight controller on the ship asked the pilot to “call the ball.” The pilot responded by saying he was “on the ball,” letting control know that the meatball was in sight and the pilot was proceeding with landing. If the pilot could not see the meatball, he responded with “Clara.”
Besides the meatball, there was the landing signal officer (LSO) to help guide planes in. This person was a descendant of the sailor who used to stand on the deck and wave paddles at World War II pilots to indicate how they should adjust their approach. But with the meatball doing much of that work, the LSO acted more as a coach, offering advice on how to correct a landing and then grading each and every landing or attempt. The LSO was always a highly experienced pilot, and his or her critiques could make or break a naval aviator’s career. Too many bad landings and you didn’t get to play on the carrier anymore. You had to go back to “the beach,” an embarrassing rejection by your fellow pilots.
When the plane was approaching the carrier to land, it was the LSO’s voice that came over the radio with commands for improving the glide path. The words were terse, providing only the information needed and not a single word more. A good LSO worked with the pilot’s own instincts by telling him what to do, not what was wrong. Since all naval aviators, including the LSO, were egoists who didn’t like being criticized, a command for “power!” was received better than the criticism that the plane was “low.” When split-second reactions are crucial, such distinctions become important. The LSO watched the lights on the front of the plane to discern whether it was in the proper glide path, and if the plane was too far out of the right path to correct it in time, the LSO hit the “pickle switch” that was always in his hands, and the meatball would signal a wave-off. The pilot had to abort the landing attempt and go around for another try. The LSO also was the one who would warn the pilot when a landing attempt was doomed and the plane was about to crash; sometimes the LSO’s experienced eye could see the crash coming a heartbeat before the pilot realized, and that difference could save the pilot’s life. The LSO would shout “Eject! Eject! Eject!” to the pilot, who would probably respond without taking a second to doubt the LSO.
There was always one LSO on the radio speaking to the pilots, but there would be several others on the LSO platform just to the left of the landing area, all watching the landing carefully and administering a grade. The biggest part of a pilot’s grade was determined by whether he landed successfully and, if so, what wire he hit on landing. Landing without killing anybody or causing damage usually got you an “OK” grade, which was amended by what wire you caught. Catching wire one was considered dangerous because the plane came in too low, and wire four was bad because the plane almost overshot the landing zone. Wire two was acceptable, but the best grade came from hitting wire three. So an “OK three” was the grade pilots were looking for.
The LSOs were the only people on the flight deck not wearing ear protection, because they had to be able to hear the sounds of the incoming jet to know what the pilot was doing with the engines. The LSO platform put them in an extremely vulnerable position if a jet crashed on landing, so there was a safety net nearby where the LSOs would run and jump if they had to avoid flaming wreckage.
In addition to the violence and split-second timing inherent in a carrier landing, pilots had to contend with a runway that was moving up and down, left and right. The pilots had to land on this small, small, small bit of metal in the pitch-black ocean.
One of the pilots taking that challenge nearly every day was a young John McCain, later to become a prominent United States senator and presidential candidate. In 1967, his assignment to the Forrestal was a chance to further his family’s legacy. Despite a strong family background in the navy, with his grandfather and father both four-star admirals, his attempt to follow in their footsteps did not start well. He nearly washed out of the naval academy, his bad temper and lack of discretion nearly overcoming his highly praised skills as a sailor and even the family connections that greased the rails for him. But by the time he was assigned to the Forrestal in 1967, his reputation had changed. Instead of being known as a naval-academy midshipman with a hearty disdain for the rules, he was now known as a naval aviator with a hearty disdain for the rules.
There had been some important changes since he left the academy, however. McCain still was a brash young man who knew how to have a good time, and who was willing to give a lesson to anyone else who might be less innately skilled in that area. And when it came to what he considered the less important conventions of navy life, like how well your bed was made, he still didn’t care much. But by the time he hit the deck of the Forrestal, he also was known as a serious aviator and people were starting to think he might actually live up to his family’s reputation. He was a maverick, but he was good. The navy likes that.
McCain already had served aboard the aircraft carriers Intrepid and Enterprise, and those deployments had been eventful for him. He had been aboard the Enterprise when she sailed to Cuba for Kennedy’s showdown over nuclear missiles, ready to fly off at a moment’s notice when the president declared war. Throughout it all, McCain adopted the standard-issue demeanor for military pilots—calm, maybe a bit cocky, but at all times composed and fearless.
It was during his term on the Enterprise that McCain started to think seriously about where he wanted his naval career to go. Though he had been less than enthusiastic about the navy in his younger years, by this time McCain was thinking that he might shoot for the top. Even in his most rowdy days, McCain had always held a deep respect for the notions of honor and service to your country, and as he matured a bit, he saw that he could focus on those aspects of a naval career instead of the meaningless parts he still disdained. The young man who saw no problem with having a water balloon fight in his room and talking back to his superiors at the naval academy was starting to think that he would like to command a carrier someday. Perhaps his service on the Forrestal, flying bombing runs over North Vietnam, would be a good step in that direction.
McCain and the other pilots would be put to the test during their time on the Forrestal. Flying on and off a carrier strained the skills of even the best, most experienced aviators, not to mention that people might be trying to shoot you down in the meantime. The pilots agreed, enthusiastically, that landing on a carrier deck at night in bad weather was the absolute worst, most difficult, and truly challenging thing they ever had to do. The navy even quantified this challenge during the Vietnam War by attaching biomedical sensors to aircraft-carrier pilots and measuring their physical reaction to different parts of their flights. The sensors showed that the pilots’ stress levels peaked when they had to land on a carrier at night, even surpassing the levels registered when they were fighting enemy planes and dodging antiaircraft missiles in combat. It was not uncommon for a pilot to climb out of his cockpit after a night landing on the Forrestal with sweat pouring off his pale face, looking like someone who had just barely escaped death.
To make things worse, that challenge was not at all rare. About a third of a navy pilot’s landings on the Forrestal were at night, partly out of necessity and partly because the navy wanted its pilots experienced in the very worst. Night landings washed out many a pilot who otherwise would have made a fine naval aviator.
The stress level was so high on landing because there was so much that could go wrong. Even with multimillion-dollar airplanes, sophisticated landing systems, and some of the best-trained pilots in the world, landing on a carrier still entailed a huge degree of risk. If the plane came in too steep or too far back, it could hit the “ramp,” a slight overhang on the rear of the ship intended to soften the blow a bit instead of having just a hard edge. A ramp strike was the worst landing mistake, a terrible thing to see, as the plane usually broke up and exploded, sending flaming wreckage forward onto the flight deck.
Landing too far to the left or right of the centerline also was risky because the plane might veer off to the side, either rolling off the edge of the deck or into structures and equipment on the deck. Simply coming in too steep or too fast could be deadly as well, causing the plane to smash into the deck harder than intended. Another scenario could occur when the pilot came in too low or received a wave-off from deck control. If the pilot pulled up hard, either trying to correct for a low approach or intending to go around without even touching the deck, the nose could go high enough to throw the tail hook down right into one of the arresting cables. When that happened, the plane was still in the air with no wheels touching the deck but the arresting cable was going to stop the plane no matter what. The result usually was that the plane slammed down onto the deck and pancaked. Even planes specially designed for the rough landings on a carrier could not tolerate such forces.
All of that frenetic activity on the flight deck appealed to some sailors, but Shelton was beginning to doubt his goal of working with the planes. That goal had seemed great until he learned more about how “bird farms” really worked, and realized that flight-deck work meant long hours in very dangerous conditions. By the time he reported for duty on the Forrestal, however, he didn’t have much say in where he would work, so he assumed he would be out on the flight deck or maybe working in the hangar bays. But one morning he was waiting with some other newly assigned sailors when an officer walked in the room holding seven file folders. He called out the names on the folders, including Shelton’s, and said that some of their personnel tests indicated they would perform well in the ship’s navigation department. If they wanted to switch to that from their other assignments, they could. Shelton made a snap decision: this was his chance to get out of the aviation assignment. He stood up and accepted the transfer. So did another sailor named Blaskis.
Soon, Shelton and Blaskis found themselves training for duties in the division that supplied sailors to work in the secondary conn, on the main bridge, and in the aft steering compartments. The secondary conn was a spare control center in the very front of the ship, just under the flight deck, that could be used if the main bridge high above the flight deck was knocked out of commission. It was always ready for use in an emergency, but it also was used for storing and updating maps and other navigational materials. When Shelton and Blaskis worked there, they usually spent their time updating navigation charts to indicate changes in the locations of buoys or other landmarks. They also learned to work as quartermaster on the main bridge, the central command center high up in the structure that rose above the flight deck. One of several sailors and officers on the bridge, the quartermaster recorded all activity and orders given on the bridge, creating an official record of the ship’s activity. The other duty that Shelton and Blaskis rotated through involved the after steering compartments, little rooms way down in the very bottom of the ship at the rear, near the rudders that made the ship turn. They would work long hours in those compartments, always manned in case manual control of some of the steering devices was necessary in an emergency.
Since Shelton and Blaskis were both new to the ship and learning the same duties, they found it easy to become buddies. They spent much of their free time together, Blaskis frequently teasing Shelton for what they agreed was Shelton’s stupidity in signing up for four years instead of two like Blaskis. The friends often worked side by side, and once in a while they would trade shifts when one got an assignment he didn’t much care for. Blaskis wasn’t too crazy about working on the main bridge, because that meant he had to put on his dress white uniform and be on his feet all day. The bridge was a high-profile workspace, with the captain and other officers eyeballing you all the time, and the easygoing Blaskis didn’t care for that. Shelton liked the bridge assignment, on the other hand, because it put him right in the center of the action. When he was on duty on the bridge, he knew everything that was happening on the ship. And it was an air-conditioned space, and out of the weather.
But for Blaskis, the secondary conn was better, since there were no high-ranking officers there to make things tense, and he liked working the steering compartments even more. Many of the sailors in his division, including Shelton, didn’t like that steering assignment too much because the steering compartment was small and windowless, below the waterline in fact, and the shift could be boring as hell. Most of the sailors working there always took along a book to read, even though they weren’t really supposed to. Shelton knew that was one of the reasons Blaskis liked to work in the steering compartment. He’d rather be left alone with a good book than have the captain looking over his shoulder all day.