Chapter 3

YOUNG MEN AND OLD

Few of the men on board intended to make the navy a long-term commitment, but for others, the Forrestal was a glorious assignment, the high point in their naval careers. John Beling was thrilled when he learned he had been named the new captain of the Forrestal, and he was even more excited when he heard that the carrier was going to Vietnam. Though she was the most fearsome vessel on the water, she had never seen a day of combat. When Beling first saw her tied up at the dock in Norfolk, he thought she was like a powerful horse, pawing at the stable floor and waiting to be set loose. He was eager to see what she could do.

Beling knew the ship could fulfill her mission, and then some. Now that the White House was escalating the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, the navy needed another carrier to join those from the Pacific Fleet. The Forrestal had not been deployed yet because she was with the Atlantic Fleet, but the war in Southeast Asia had grown and in 1967 the call came.

Commanding a carrier is the ultimate goal for a naval aviator. There are higher posts to reach late in a military career, but for a pilot, the command of an aircraft carrier represents the absolute pinnacle. In a field as rarefied as flying jets off aircraft carriers, it is a huge responsibility, and an equally huge honor. The captain of an aircraft carrier holds a place of great respect within the naval community, and everyone recognizes that he didn’t get there easily. A navy career can lead to advanced positions with more money, privilege, and security, but that’s not what a man sits and thinks about when he is old and tired. He remembers what he enjoyed the most and did the best.

In 1967, John Beling had reached such a pinnacle. He knew that his assignment to the Forrestal would be the glory days he would remember for the rest of his life. No matter what else might await him, he could not imagine anything more fulfilling than serving as captain of this ship.

But he was much more than captain to the men who served him. To many, he was a father figure of sorts, especially to those still making that transition from boy to man. Beling was the leader of the ship, and the young men looked to him, and to the other older and more experienced sailors, for guidance and reassurance.

When he assumed command of the Forrestal in 1966, Beling was forty-six years old, an accomplished naval aviator, and one of the rising stars in the navy. A native of Harrington Park, New Jersey, Beling flew bombers and fighter-bombers in the Pacific during World War II. When the war ended, he studied aeronautical engineering and nuclear physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and served as operations officer on the aircraft carrier Intrepid. Then he was commanding officer of two attack squadrons, and commanding officer of the supply ship Alstede. By the time he was assigned to the Forrestal, it was clear that the navy trusted Beling with powerful command positions and the lives of many men.

Most of the younger crew on board had only a sketchy knowledge of Beling’s background—that is, if they knew anything at all. Some had heard that he was a pilot in World War II and had been shot down, but he rarely told the whole story to anyone. It was typical of Beling to downplay his own involvement in anything noteworthy.

The truth was that Beling had been to Southeast Asia before and almost didn’t make it back. He came within a moment of dying in the waters of the Pacific Ocean like so many other pilots and crewmen whose planes went down on raids against the Japanese. Beling was a twenty-five-year-old bomber pilot in 1944, stationed on the carrier USS Yorktown. One day in July, he and his co-pilot flew their dive bomber to a tiny island in Micronesia called Yap. The lush tropical island, located just nine degrees north of the equator, was a beautiful green spot in the Pacific Ocean, surrounded entirely by a broad shallow lagoon and nearly ninety miles of barrier reef. The island was held by the Japanese, and Beling’s mission was to hit their installations.

As they got to the island, Japanese planes came up to meet the dive bombers and their fighter escorts. Beling, in the front seat, took aim at one of the Japanese planes with his guns and, for just a split second, regretted having to shoot it. The target was a “Betty,” which the American pilots considered a beautiful plane. Beling zeroed in on the plane’s right engine and squeezed the trigger, watching as his cannon shells cut through the plane and started a fire in the engine. But the fire died out quickly and Beling didn’t have time to chase the plane for another shot. The island was almost directly beneath him now and he had to continue on his bombing run.

Beling’s escort fighters were taking care of the Japanese planes, so he turned his attention to the island, where antiaircraft guns were filling the air with exploding metal. He was lining up his plane with a good target when he felt a jolt and the whole airplane shuddered. The plane showed no ill effects, so Beling disregarded it and continued to concentrate on the bombing run. He didn’t realize that a large-caliber antiaircraft shell had blown through his plane without exploding. Beling squeezed the trigger on his cannons and strafed the island as he lined up his bombing target.

He was low and almost on top of the small island before he realized his plane was on fire. The flames were visible outside the cockpit, but then they died down and Beling thought he might be okay. Then they reappeared inside the cockpit. The plane started to fill with smoke. His co-pilot called for them to bail out, but Beling realized they were right over the island and would land in Japanese hands. Besides, they were too low to bail out.

“No, don’t bail yet!” Beling yelled. “Wait! Wait!”

He realized that he still had control of the plane, so he made a big climbing turn under full power to get the plane away from the island and up high enough for their parachutes to do some good. But as he pulled the yoke back hard, Beling felt the fire crawling up his legs. Within seconds, his legs were completely on fire and he thrashed about the cockpit, trying furiously to put out the flames. Beling screamed in pain. He struggled to pull away from the heat, but the tiny cockpit offered no hope of that. His hands and arms were catching fire as he tried to beat out the flames below. With the fire growing larger every second, Beling frantically decided to jump out of the plane now, even though he couldn’t tell exactly where he was in relation to the island or how high.

It turned out that he was about one thousand five hundred feet high, enough altitude for his parachute to break his fall. Beling watched as his plane crashed into the ocean, then he landed in about three feet of water about a hundred yards off the island. He never saw what happened to his co-pilot. He thought maybe the other man had gotten out in time while Beling was too distracted to notice.

Beling stood up in the shallow water and looked around. He was in agony from the burns that covered his legs and much of his arms. His flight suit was mostly burned off. As he stood there, he could see that the fighter escorts were strafing the antiaircraft gun that had shot him down. He was close enough to see the Japanese installations on the island, but so far no one was shooting at him. Once the antiaircraft gun was out of commission, the fighters circled over Beling and one dropped an inflatable life raft to him. He knew they would send help if they could.

The bundled life raft landed near Beling and he struggled over to it, every movement causing excruciating pain in his legs. He inflated the small one-man raft and flopped into it. He saw that the landing on the coral reef had torn open the dye marker intended to help rescuers spot him, and the green dye was filling the raft as seawater splashed in. He didn’t care.

Beling wanted to get away from the island as quickly as possible, because he didn’t know if the Japanese would start shooting at him or send a boat to take him prisoner. After trying a few different positions, he found that lying on his back made the raft the most stable in the breaking waves. So he lay there staring up at the blue sky and paddling with both hands. But he soon realized that the coral reef surrounding the island was making his journey difficult. The waves broke hard over the reef and Beling had to contend with higher and higher surges as he got closer to the reef. Paddling was exhausting, and the pain was growing worse every minute. He had to take frequent rest breaks. When he had to urinate, he saw that the urine was fluorescent green because the dye marker had soaked into his body through the burns on his legs.

After more than an hour, Beling saw a navy seaplane headed his way. Landing inside the reef was too risky for the rescue plane because of the shallow water, so it skittered down just outside. Beling paddled with all his might as the Japanese opened fire on the seaplane with mortars.

That’s why they didn’t shoot at me. I was the bait so they could get a bigger target.

But the rescue plane did not come alone. Fighter planes had come along for support and they strafed the island while Beling paddled furiously to make it over the reef. The shelling stopped and the rescue plane maneuvered as close as it could get. Once Beling made it over the reef, the pilot on the seaplane stepped out on the pontoon landing gear and urged Beling on. He yelled words of encouragement, partly because he was eager to get away from the island.

The pilot had left the plane’s engine revving high so they could make a quick getaway, but Beling feared hitting the props as he got close to the plane. The pilot’s weight at the door was making the prop on that side dip low and rock in the waves, so Beling called out for the pilot to get back in his seat and move the plane in a slow circle. Beling rolled off the raft and swam toward the plane, trying to reach a rope that the pilot had left trailing in the water. The young man struggled to follow the plane, every kick of his legs sending terrible pain throughout his body, but he finally grabbed the rope. The plane continued to roar forward and Beling was pulled through the water for a while, desperately clinging to the line. Finally, the pilot pulled the line in and grabbed Beling, heaving him into the backseat. The bare metal of the seat was torture on his burned legs, but he had to endure a long, slow ride back to the plane’s home, the cruiser USS Biloxi.

Medics on the Biloxi began treating Beling’s extensive burns, but it would be a slow, painful process of recovery. His flying days were over for a long while, and it was weeks before he could walk again.

 

Beling was a contrast of personality traits, at once brash and cocky as hell but still humble about his own achievements. He was proud of his work in the navy, but like a good officer, he was more likely to defer all the credit for an accomplishment to the men working under him. Like many military leaders with the authority to get away with it, Beling wasn’t at all shy about bending the rules just a little or saying whatever would get the job done. And if he tweaked the military establishment a bit, so much the better. Like most accomplished military men who worked their way up the ranks and earned their position through real work, he harbored at least a slight disdain for the desk jockeys back home.

Beling was a strong leader, quiet-spoken and accommodating to his men when possible, but he expected everyone to meet his high standards. He was a very intelligent, well-educated man with a highly analytical mind. Unlike some high-ranking officers whose training emphasizes just doing everything the one “right” way, Beling was a creative problem solver. A smallish man, like most military pilots, Beling nevertheless exuded great authority. He was well liked by those serving with him, but he was known as a real bulldog whenever he was dealing with something that mattered to him, and most things mattered to him. Officers working with him learned not to bring up any problems or ideas at the end of a meeting when what they really wanted was to just end it and leave. No matter how late the hour and how tired everyone was, Beling would insist on hammering out a solution right then and there.

And the cardinal rule in dealing with Beling was never to bullshit him. If you did and Beling found out about it later, God help you. The best policy was to assume that Beling knew the answer to whatever question he was asking and admit when you didn’t know. Beling had quite a temper when riled, and nobody wanted to be on the receiving end of it.

The other Forrestal officers also learned that Beling was even more determined than most captains about looking out for the welfare of his men—and most of them also had good intentions in that area. Very soon after he took command, the ship’s hierarchy discovered that he was a hands-on captain, someone who wanted to see it all for himself. He was not a captain content to enjoy his own privileges while giving no thought to the lowly sailors working under him. To the contrary, Beling didn’t hesitate to get right down to what mattered. And to sailors on a long sea cruise, what matters is food. Beling had a habit of touring the ship in the evening hours, accompanied by another officer or two, just to see for himself how things were running. One evening on the ship’s first cruise after Beling took command, he opened the door to one of the big coolers used by the enlisted men’s kitchen and found that the floor was covered with cockroaches. That set off a tirade that those present still remember as one of the worst they’ve ever seen from a navy officer. Beling had the supply-department chiefs rustled out of bed and brought down to explain the mess, which they couldn’t. First thing the next morning, the whole area was fumigated and the captain was still hot about the incident when he called the supply chiefs in that day to tell them, in very clear terms, that no such scene should ever be found on his ship again.

Beling sampled the enlisted men’s meals without any notice to those working the kitchen. He would usually grab a fellow senior officer to go with him, and they would get in line with the rest of the men. More often than not, the senior officer accompanying the captain on those surprise trips to the mess hall was Merv Rowland, the Forrestal’s chief engineering officer. He was responsible for overseeing a great many of the ship’s operations, so he was handy to have around when Beling asked questions or gave orders. Usually, he and Rowland sampled the “night rats,” or rations, the meal made available in the middle of the night for men working around the clock. The kitchen sometimes skimped on the night rats, serving a meager or lousy meal just because it wasn’t considered as important as the daytime meals. But for those working odd hours, that midnight meal was their primary meal, and Beling knew it mattered a lot to them. The captain’s orderly would knock on Rowland’s door around midnight and tell him that the captain wanted him to accompany him to the enlisted men’s mess, or dining hall.

“Awwwwww, shit. I don’t want to do this tonight,” Rowland would growl, standing at the door in his underwear and still half asleep.

“The captain says you do, sir,” the orderly would reply.

The two senior officers would go through the line with the enlisted men, the suspense in the room building as they approached the servers. They would take trays just like everyone else and then stand right there and taste it. By this time, the mess hall was silent, with all the hungry sailors eagerly watching to see the captain’s reaction. On more than one occasion, Beling slammed the tray into a garbage can and loudly declared the food unfit for his men, demanding to see whoever was in charge of handing out that crap.

Rowland would hustle back to his stateroom and get the supply officer, a commander whose stateroom was next to his.

“Sid, the old man wants to see you on the mess deck,” Rowland would tell him. No other explanation was necessary.

“I’ll kill that goddamn commissary officer,” Sid would reply, referring to the man who was in charge of the midnight meal.

“Okay, but first you got to see the captain.”

The supply officer would get dressed and rush down to where the captain was waiting to give him hell.

“Get rid of this shit and feed these people!” Beling would yell, dressing down the officer right in the mess hall. He would demand that the midnight meal be just as good as the noon meal, every time. “Goddamn you, you’re going to feed them, and I’m going to work them. Give these men something they can eat!”

The mess-hall workers would trash the food that Beling had sampled and break out something more palatable. Instead of cheese sandwiches, the men might get pork chops just as the day workers had. As Beling stormed out, the enlisted men would cheer, but the captain hadn’t done this for the applause. He did it because, by God, nobody was going to treat his men like that.

 

Though it was hard to keep up with Beling sometimes, Rowland trusted him and had great respect for him. They got along well, and each man admired how the other could get a job done. Rowland had learned to work with Beling’s feisty nature, and besides, he was no cream puff himself.

At forty-eight years old, Rowland was hardly an old guy in the civilian world, but on a ship full of nineteen-year-olds, he was one of the sages. He was a tough sailor, gruff as they come and able to take charge of any situation. He’d push his cap back on his round head and start barking orders, and he didn’t take crap off of anybody. But like many senior officers, Rowland also relied on his paternal instincts, looking out for the boys as best he could while still getting the job done. The men working for him knew that if they had screwed up in a bad way, they should march right down to Rowland’s stateroom and tell him about it. More often than not, they’d leave with blisters on their ears from all his shouting, but no formal disciplinary action in their records. Rowland was like an ornery old dad who would never tell you how much he cared, but who showed it in everything he did. He was tough as nails, but everyone knew he cared about them.

Very few of the men working with Rowland knew what a tough life he’d lived. He was born to a privileged family in Asheville, North Carolina, his father a successful railroad businessman who provided a comfortable home, with a maid and all the luxuries that could be found in the 1920s. He saw a movie every Saturday, and the streetcar that ran down the street in front of his home was a symbol of just how sophisticated his neighborhood was. By North Carolina standards, Rowland was a little rich boy living in the big city. But when the stock market crashed in 1929, Rowland’s father lost most of his fortune and the family was forced to move to an old farm where the roads got so muddy that the mail had to be delivered on horseback. The change was a shock to twelve-year-old Rowland and his two sisters, going from the comfortable life of city kids to a run-down farm with no electricity, an outhouse, and water that had to be carried one hundred yards to the house in pails. The kids went barefoot all summer, getting a new pair of shoes only when the first frost hit the ground. Rowland’s father struggled through different jobs, trying to put his machinery experience in the railroad to use, and somehow he managed to get all three of his children through high school.

After high school, Rowland struck out with a friend, Lester Millhouse, to find work. Things could not have been much worse for two boys trying to become men. The Depression was in full swing, and there was no work to be found anywhere. Rowland carried letters of recommendation from his doctor, his schoolteachers, the clerk of the court back home, and the county sheriff. They all attested that he was a fine young man, but unfortunately, plenty of other fine young men were out there looking for work.

The two friends hitchhiked all over the Southeast, joining the many others trudging the countryside in search of a few pennies. At one point they took dangerous jobs in a coal mine in Harlan, Kentucky, and worked there for three weeks until the miners went on strike. It seemed everyone there was carrying a pistol during the strike, so Rowland thought he should get out before the shooting started. He and Millhouse hitchhiked to Knoxville, Tennessee, mostly just because that’s where the truck they were in was headed. They had seventy-five cents between them.

The two boys spent the night at a Red Cross shelter and then went looking for jobs. There weren’t any jobs to be had, so they went to the navy recruiting station, where they underwent preliminary physicals and took written examinations. Millhouse was rejected for being color-blind, and though Rowland had done well on the tests, the recruiter couldn’t take him either. You’re from North Carolina, he said. You have to go back there if you want to join up.

So the two boys spent twenty-five cents on an all-you-can-eat meal in Knoxville, working hard to get their money’s worth, and then they started hitchhiking north. They had a friend in Ohio and hoped they might find work there. But before they got very far out of Knoxville, it started raining hard. They were soaked to the bone when Rowland finally got up the courage to go to a roadside motel and beg the owner to put them up for the night. He was on the verge of tears at that point, tired and cold, scared at what the future might not hold, and the woman gave in. The adventure continued the next morning, the boys slowly hitchhiking north and making their way to Alva, Kentucky, where they got jobs in another coal mine. Rowland and Millhouse were happy to have these jobs, not just because they were desperate for work, but because this was a good mine to work in. Unlike most coal mines, it had eight-foot ceilings, so they could stand up as they worked.

Only three weeks later, these miners went on strike and the National Guard was called in. A friend tipped them off that things were going to get violent soon, and urged them to leave right away. They did. After three weeks of backbreaking work, the boys still had no money in their pockets. They had bought food and work clothing on credit at the company store, but they hadn’t been paid yet.

Rowland and his friend stuck out their thumbs again, this time heading back toward Asheville. They survived by eating green apples found along the way. Once they reached Asheville, an uncle put Rowland and Millhouse up for the evening, giving them the first real meal they’d had in days. The next morning, the uncle drove Rowland over to the navy recruiting station, and he signed up. The navy accepted Rowland, but he had to join the long list of other desperate young men wanting to work. The recruiter told Rowland he would be called up at some point, but until then, he was still on his own. It took another six months of waiting, hitchhiking, and scrounging for work before the navy summoned Rowland to duty.

By then, the navy looked like a godsend. For at least a few years, Rowland would have twenty-one dollars a month, a bunk, a doctor, and a dentist. No more green apples.

The navy suited Rowland well, partly because he knew there wasn’t much else out there for him. Once he made it inside, Rowland took his job seriously and excelled, soon realizing he could make the navy a lifelong career. He studied engineering as he served on a variety of ships, and when World War II struck, Rowland was right in the thick of things. From Casablanca to Tokyo Bay, Rowland experienced some of the worst.

Rowland made it to the rank of commander, a clear leader for his men. Like Beling, Rowland was a hands-on sort of leader, likely to throw on a pair of coveralls and go crawling through a condensator to find the damn problem for himself. It was his job to keep the ship functioning properly in every way, and he knew the Forrestal inside and out. He had his finger on the ship’s pulse at every moment, attuned to the slightest changes in her movement, vibrations, and sounds, ready to respond to any problems. When he slept, Rowland dozed lightly. If there was a change in the ship’s speed, he could sense it and immediately pick up the phone by his bedside to see what the explanation was.

With Rowland and Beling in charge of the ship, the young men on the Forrestal knew they were in good hands. Rowland and Beling, in turn, depended on Washington, trusting their superiors to support the ship well.

The younger men’s trust was well placed.

 

For Beling and Rowland, the Forrestal’s deployment to Vietnam was another chance to excel at their life’s work. When the orders came for Vietnam, Beling was ready to pull that ship out of Norfolk right then and get going. He was a professional warrior, and this was what they did. There was a war to be fought in Southeast Asia, and Beling was eager to get over there and show the world what the Forrestal could do. In addition to his personal stake in performing well, Beling knew that the navy’s Atlantic Fleet was looking to the Forrestal to do them proud. She had to prove herself among Pacific Fleet carriers that had been on the job for a while already.

Despite his eagerness to get going, Beling knew that there was work to be done before the ship and crew would be ready for war. The navy scheduled months of training time before the carrier’s planned arrival off Vietnam in July. Beling took to the training as heartily as he did everything else, and his determination was contagious among the officers he commanded. Rowland felt it directly. They both had been to war before, so the deployment to Vietnam was nothing new in that sense. In fact, the assignment didn’t even rank as especially dangerous for the two men who had been shot at by the Japanese twenty-five years earlier. But they knew they were going into a war zone and that thousands of young men under their command would be facing their first real brush with danger. Like many military leaders, Beling saw a certain elegance in striding off to battle. He was proud to be commanding these men, men he considered a good and well-trained crew, and he was determined to do a good job. At the same time he worried about them, hoping that if he lost any of his crew, it would be for a good reason.

Rowland had similar emotions, remembering the first time he was deployed to a war zone, but comforted by the fact that the Vietnamese wouldn’t be attacking his ship the way the Japanese had. The two seasoned officers discussed the situation extensively, and they agreed that the men of Forrestal would be ready by July. They would step up the training and drills for the crew, just to make sure everyone was on his toes when they got there, but Beling and Rowland knew they had a good bunch of guys on the ship.

Before Beling ever left Norfolk, he went out of his way to make sure the ship was well supplied for its first trip into a war zone. Every ship has a budget for supplies, and on this occasion, Beling made sure to tinker with the budget so that he could get more emergency supplies. It was only a precaution, but he decided to bring on more medical supplies and firefighting equipment than the ship had carried on previous cruises.

Beling made other changes in the ship’s operations. He wanted to replace the ship’s doctor before leaving Norfolk, but the new doctor wasn’t available yet. So Beling called in Dr. G. Gary Kirchner for a talk. Kirchner had just finished his residency in Rochester, Minnesota, when he was drafted and assigned to the Forrestal. He was brand-new to the navy and reported to Norfolk thinking he would be one of four doctors on board, in addition to scores of sailors trained as corpsmen, better known as medics. But when he showed up in Norfolk, Kirchner was called to the captain’s quarters for more than the usual welcome.

“Well, Doctor, I’ve looked over your service record and…well, it’s pretty thin, isn’t it?” Beling said. “You have just gotten in the navy?”

“Yes, sir,” Kirchner replied. “I don’t really know one heck of a lot about the navy, but I am learning.”

“Well, I have a piece of bad news for you,” Beling said, putting the file down and leaning back in his chair. “The Forrestal’s medical officer has been transferred.”

“Oh, will his replacement be here soon?”

“No,” Beling replied. “In fact, he won’t make it here by the time we will go to Guantánamo for the training and the operational-readiness inspection. I’m going to make you the medical officer. You will be the head of the department and I will provide to you any assistance that you will happen to need.”

Kirchner stammered a “Yes, sir” and pledged to do his best, but in truth he was scared out of his wits.