The crew of the Forrestal learned early in 1967 that they would be heading to Vietnam later that year. In the meantime, they trained and became more familiar with what was to many still a bewildering and frightening place to work.
The flight deck was a busy place during launch and recovery operations, with planes and people making the most of every small bit of space. Newcomers had to trust that the more experienced hands on deck—some thirty-year-olds were called “old men”—would train them well and guide them through the daily hazards. At any moment, planes might be taking off on one end of the carrier while planes landed on the other end, with dozens of others scattered across the deck waiting their turns or being broken down for storage below. Bob Shelton had the same reaction as most sailors the first time he looked on the flight deck during a launch: it seemed a frenetic melange of men and machinery, even though the trained eye could see that it was a carefully choreographed ballet.
There were scores of men on deck, each one in a color-coordinated outfit that signified his role. Their brightly colored jerseys and headgear gave the flight deck an oddly festive appearance in a navy where gray on gray, with subtle highlights of gray, is the predominant color scheme. Purple indicated fuel handlers, the “grapes” who fueled planes and took care of fuel-pumping stations, while yellow outfits indicated aircraft-handling officers, catapult and arresting-gear officers, and plane directors. Red gear was worn by crash and salvage crews, explosive-ordnance-disposal teams, and others responsible for handling the bombs and other explosives. There were other designations for blue, green, white, and brown outfits.
The color coding resulted in a sea of multicolored dots running around the flight deck, all of them gesturing in carefully orchestrated signals because the incredible noise of jets landing and taking off made it impossible for them to hear one another. Everyone wore a “cranial” that had bulky hearing protection built into a canvas head covering. The cranial cut the noise to a bearable level, but it also had the odd effect of isolating the wearer, creating a lonely effect within a sea of people and activity. For some of the deck crew, the cranial had a two-way radio for communicating with the officers in control areas off the flight deck. But most of them relied on a set of careful, deliberate hand signals, usually large and dramatic gestures designed to be seen and understood clearly. The crew needed to communicate with confidence when moving planes about and conducting various operations that could kill people, so the gestures tended to be sweeping and often were done with a flourish, like those of an old-time baseball umpire adding some drama to his strike call.
When a plane was ready for launch, the pilot saluted the catapult officer, signaling that he was ready to be launched; then the catapult officer, known as the “shooter,” would decide whether the plane was ready from his vantage point just outside the plane. From a kneeling position, the catapult officer would then lean forward to signal the launch to the catapult-deck-edge operator, the crewman who actually fired the catapult. Once the aircraft was “cocked” on the catapult, he kept his hands above his head until he received the launch command from the catapult officer. With his hands still over his head, the catapult-deck-edge operator would turn forward and look up the deck to be sure everyone and everything was clear. The catapult-deck-edge operator would then rotate back down the deck to make sure everything was safe to launch the aircraft. Only then would he face his console, lower his hands, and push the catapult trigger. All of this happened quickly, with the plane seeming to fire off the catapult as soon as the shooter leaned forward, the plane’s wings just clearing his head by a few feet.
One of the blue shirts on the flight deck was Ed Roberts, the rock-and-roll drummer from Atlanta. He had been assigned to the crews in charge of moving the planes on the deck, a difficult and dangerous job. Roberts had first been given an office job on the carrier, but he quickly decided he didn’t like that and asked for a transfer. The office job was easier, but he was really just a gofer and he couldn’t stand the piddly-ass work like running down to retrieve laundry and then sorting out everyone’s underwear. Plus, he had a fear of being trapped belowdecks if there was any trouble, unable to see what was happening. No one seemed to think there was much risk of the Forrestal being attacked, but Roberts had seen enough World War II movies to know that if planes got in to attack his ship, the action would be up top, and that’s where he wanted to be.
On the flight deck, one of Roberts’s main jobs was to chock the planes, placing heavy blocks on either side of the wheels to keep them from rolling once a plane was parked. He also tied down the planes with chains. The aviators depended on Roberts and the rest of the deck crews to do their jobs well, because the airmen were to a large degree just vulnerable cargo until the plane was actually in the air. Danger was everywhere on the flight deck, and after the aviators were strapped into their jets they depended on the deck crew to move their planes about, arm them with deadly bombs and missiles, and set up the dangerous catapult shots. Each crew had a “plane captain,” a sailor who was responsible for that particular plane’s preparation, movements, and launch. John McCain’s plane captain was a baby-faced twenty-year-old named Robert Zwerlein who, despite his gentle demeanor, gave orders on the flight deck with the kind of authority that was necessary when lives were at stake. Watching him gave no doubt that this young man in the brown jersey could be trusted to get McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk in the air. But when he took off his goggles and headgear, he looked more like the quiet soul his mother knew so well.
Like so many of the young men serving on the Forrestal, Robert Zwerlein was an example of good, old-fashioned small-town Americana. Known as Bobby to his family and friends, Zwerlein was the middle child in the family. His father had served three years in the navy, and his older brother also had joined the navy. So when it came time for Zwerlein to make a decision about his future, the navy was an obvious choice.
The Zwerleins were a solid, loving family that stayed close. They ran the local Tastee-Freez stand in the small town of Port Washington, New York, and Bobby and his two brothers worked there after school, handing out ice-cream cones and chocolate sundaes to all the locals. It was the kind of place that everyone in town stopped by every once in a while, and over time, the entire community came to know Bobby well. They watched him grow up, from a little boy barely tall enough to see over the counter to a handsome young man who flirted with all the girls coming in for a cone.
The Zwerleins and their Tastee-Freez were a fixture in the town, and the four men of the Zwerlein family were heavily involved in the community through their volunteer firefighting. Zwerlein’s father had been a volunteer firefighter for most of the time that they lived in Port Washington, and he and his brothers hung out with Dad at the firehouse every chance they got. As they got old enough, each one eagerly joined the fire service, making their parents proud that they, too, would want to serve their community. The whole family saw the honor in volunteer service, but Bobby thought that the firehouse was the place to be. It was the Zwerlein men’s common hangout, the place their firefighter friends all went to just be with one another, tell stories on one another, and maybe have a beer or two.
The Zwerleins were satisfied that they had raised three young men with good hearts who were ready to take their place in the world as husbands, parents, and whatever else they chose to be. They also knew Bobby didn’t relish working at the Tastee-Freez so much; he would be standing at the door when Mom or Dad showed up to relieve him, ready to race out and head to the firehouse. But they knew he was a good kid, like his brothers.
Mom had always considered Bobby a little more fragile than the other two. He wasn’t the youngest, but he always got hurt, and always seemed to be sick with one thing or another. He was a sweet kid, never one to raise his voice or lash out. Bobby was the one who seemed just a bit more gentle, and that made Mom worry about him when he joined the navy.
But Bobby saw it as the next big step in his life, the same sort of move his father had made, and his older brother too. It would be a major change to leave his family and the community he loved, but that was part of growing up, and he was ready. Mom wasn’t so sure she was ready, but she had to trust that he would be okay.
After all, she told herself, he’s going to a carrier. And he’s got all that training as a firefighter. He can handle himself if anything happens. That was something she repeated to herself over and over again.
Zwerlein’s job on the flight deck required him to be right in the worst danger zones, and to stay safe he relied on good communication with the others on deck, as well as a keen sense of his surroundings. Any movements on the flight deck were performed with a deliberate attention to exactly where you were and what was around you, sometimes giving crew members the appearance of operating in slow motion, with a leisurely attitude. But nothing could have been further from the truth. The flight deck of an aircraft carrier often is called the most dangerous workplace in the world, and there are accidents on a regular basis that prove the point. This was no place to let your guard down or daydream. Zwerlein and Roberts both learned quickly that when they were on the flight deck, they had to pay attention at all times not only to operations in their immediate area but also to what was going on elsewhere that might soon come to their immediate area. During landing operations, for instance, their eyes were on the plane coming in if they were not otherwise engaged with their own job. Unless they had something else to concentrate on, they wanted to watch the landing plane so that they knew which way to run if it crashed.
If you were not ever-vigilant, you ran a high risk of being injured or killed on the flight deck. That is why the flight deck was a highly restricted space; no one was allowed there during flight operations without a specific reason. You could not just go hang out there and watch. (There was an area up on the island structure called “vulture’s row” that was accessible to most crew interested in watching the operation.) Launching and retrieving planes, and handling deadly bombs and missiles, in such a small space created dangers that were only exacerbated when the crew had to go for speed as well. To make the situation even worse, the crew often had to work in the blazing heat. The carrier was a huge heat sink in the sea, the tons of metal absorbing the sun’s rays all day long and not cooling until well after nightfall. Even though Roberts grew up in the heat and humidity of Georgia, never having lived in a house with air-conditioning, he marveled at how hot the flight deck got. He learned to turn his belt buckle to the inside so that it wouldn’t heat up in the sun and burn him when he bent over. And when he got caught in the hot exhaust of a jet, he knew that, at least for a moment, his teeth got so hot they would burn his tongue if it touched them.
The heat and long hours quickly could lead to fatigue, and fatigue could kill. The flight-deck crews sometimes had to work twelve hours or more, at physically demanding jobs, and a weary sailor was no match for the hazards that just kept coming and coming.
Ed Roberts and his friend Gary Shaver knew there were dozens of ways to get yourself killed. You could fall overboard, you could be blown overboard by a jet blast, you could be hit by a plane, you could walk into a nearly invisible spinning propeller, an arresting cable could snap and slice you in half, or you could be sucked into a jet engine. The intake of a jet engine posed one of the biggest risks because the crew had to work close by and know just where the dead zone was. A few inches outside the zone, and you would only feel the air being sucked into the engine. Just a little closer, and you would be pulled off your feet and right into the engine before you even knew what was happening. That happened with some regularity, simply because the close proximity of people and jet engines was unavoidable. Surprisingly, the crew member sometimes survived the incident because the strong suction ripped off his cranial and other gear, sucking them into the engine an instant before the person’s body would be chewed up. Despite their ferocious appearance, jet engines are delicate machines that can be destroyed instantly by even the tiniest bit of material sucked into the turbines.
With the engines so susceptible to “foreign object damage,” or FOD, each flight operation on the Forrestal began with what is called an “FOD walkdown.” For this vital precaution, off-duty volunteers who rarely got to be on the flight deck because they worked below lined up with the flight deck on one end, shoulder to shoulder, and walked the length of the ship with their eyes cast downward looking for any bit of debris. They picked up anything they found, no matter how small, from an errant screw to a bit of paper. Even a loose bit of the rubbery nonskid surface on the flight deck could be a hazard. During flight operations, the crew was careful to avoid dropping any items that could lead to FOD. Loose items were kept to an absolute minimum on the flight deck, with the crew discouraged from carrying personal items such as an ink pen or spare change.
Roberts had met Gary Shaver when he transferred to the flight deck. Shaver had already been working for a while in the same job, helping move and tie down airplanes. He had joined the navy with some eagerness, looking forward to a job in aviation electronics and thinking seriously about making the navy a career. He was eighteen years old and had started community college in his hometown of Carpentersville, Illinois, when he was hit by what should have been, in a better world, the worst trauma that could befall a young man: his girlfriend broke up with him. Shaver wasn’t enjoying college life much and he had already considered joining the navy, so as a way of getting away from a broken heart, he decided to go. Within weeks, he was in boot camp.
Shaver hoped for a job in aviation electronics, but he ended up working on the flight deck as a blue shirt, directing planes as they moved around the deck. It was tough work, but he liked knowing that his job was important, that he had a responsibility to do the job right or else people could get hurt. His crewmates came to know Shaver as conscientious at work, never one to shirk his job or drag ass in hopes that someone else would take up the slack. Shaver and Roberts often worked together, Shaver directing the planes to move about the flight deck and Roberts walking alongside with chocks and chains to secure the aircraft. Shaver had been on the flight deck for a few months already, so he knew just how scary the flight deck could be and he reinforced the main rule of the flight deck for the newcomer: “Be alert at all times. Never let your guard down.”
Roberts did his best to stay on his toes, so much so that he started chugging coffee like never before. (The Atlanta boy couldn’t get his favorite “Cocola” on board.) At one point, he reported to the sick bay and very reluctantly told the doctor that it burned when he urinated. He was afraid he had contracted one of the dreaded, but common, venereal diseases that the medics lectured about before every liberty call. He was sure he hadn’t done anything to contract a disease, but damn if it didn’t burn like hell, just like the docs said it would.
The doctor couldn’t find any indication of disease other than the burning, but he had an idea what the problem might be.
“Could be a lot of coffee. You drinking much coffee, son?”
Roberts took a minute to think about it and figure out how much he was drinking.
“Fourteen cups so far today, sir.”
Roberts hadn’t been working on the flight deck long before he found out how scary it could be. Within weeks, Roberts saw a plane blow all its tires on a hard landing, and on two other occasions, he saw Sparrow missiles fall off a plane during landing and go skittering across the deck. And around eleven-thirty one night, as Roberts was nearing the end of his twelve-hour shift and was dog-ass tired, he suddenly found a pilot’s life was in his hands. The plane had just landed and been maneuvered into a parking position. Roberts placed two tie-down chains on one side of the plane and then suddenly the ship changed direction, causing the flight deck to lean to one side. Unfortunately, the tie-down chains were on the downhill side of the lean and the plane started shifting. Roberts didn’t have time to put the tie-down chains on the other side, and his mind raced as he thought the plane was about to slip off the ship. The pilot was still inside, helpless unless Roberts could do something. He ran for a set of power-assisted brakes, a device used to move planes around on the deck, and quickly attached it to the plane’s front nose gear. There was a heart-stopping moment as Roberts wondered if the brakes would hold, but luckily they did.
Shaver, too, had witnessed an accident that reminded everyone just how dangerous a moving flight deck can be. He had just been briefed on the morning’s flight operations and was walking out to begin work when he heard an angry voice booming across the flight deck on the public-address system. It was a controller in flight operations yelling for the deck crew to “Get that tractor! Get that damn thing!” Shaver looked across the deck and saw the Forrestal’s “crash tractor” rolling across the deck on its own. The tractor was one of many squat, yellow tractors used on the deck for moving aircraft and other needs, but this one was specially outfitted with a bulldozer blade on one end. With that gear, the tractor was useful in emergencies such as, say, a flight-deck fire. An enclosed driver’s area allowed it to be driven right into a fire, and the bulldozer blade could be used to push wreckage out of the way or right over the side of the ship.
Moments earlier, the ship had turned into the wind to prepare for the morning launch and the deck had leaned to the right. The deck crew had used the strong tractor to pull away the heavy deck plating around a catapult that was being serviced earlier that morning, and then they had neglected to secure the tractor with wheel chocks or by lowering the blade to the deck. Now the leaning deck had put the tractor in motion. Shaver joined the crowd of crewmen rushing toward the runaway tractor, but it was picking up speed as it rolled toward the starboard side of the ship. No one had time to catch up to the tractor before it rolled over the edge of the deck, bumped over the catwalk, and fell in the ocean. Shaver reached the edge of the deck in time to see the bright yellow tractor float for just a second and then sink into the ocean.
The crew was embarrassed that they had lost such an important piece of equipment, but more important, someone could have been run over or pushed off the ship. Incidents like that scared the hell out of everybody, because they could happen at any moment.
Shaver had been injured himself when a jet-blast deflector, the big shield that rises out of the deck to deflect the jet’s exhaust during takeoff, suddenly lowered. Shaver was hit by the full force of the jet exhaust. In an instant, he was knocked off his feet and sent down the length of the flight deck like a tumbleweed. Shaver frantically grabbed at the deck for anything that would stop him, but the jet blast was so strong that he had no hope of hanging on even if he managed to grab something fixed. His mind was rushing through possibilities as he bumped along the deck, wondering what it would be like to suddenly go off the end of the ship and into the water. As he neared the edge of the deck, the jet’s engine shut down and he managed to stop before rolling off. He was badly bruised, and his arms and knees were bloody from scrapes.
On days like that, Roberts and Shaver were glad to have their shifts end and get off the flight deck.
But in any sort of emergency on the ship, another hazard was the sheer complexity of the carrier’s inner structure. Except for the flight deck and the hangar bays, all the other decks might as well be a maze, even to those familiar with them. An endless series of identical hatches, doorways, ladders, and hallways, the decks all looked the same and there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to how it all worked. Even before the ship was ever launched, workmen at the Norfolk, Virginia, shipyard would get lost in her interior mazes. One welder was lost in the hull all day until a search party found him exhausted and frightened. He had beaten his flashlight to pieces, furiously pounding on the hull all day long trying to help someone find him.
The sailors learned some tricks for orienting themselves within the ship, mostly by knowing what “frame” they were near. The frames were structural elements in the ship’s design that were numbered sequentially, so if a sailor was at frame 200, he knew which way to go to get to frame 225. The Forrestal also had “you are here” diagrams and placards telling a sailor exactly where he was in numerical code. If he knew how to read the sign that read “01-170-3-Q, FR 170-174, X3,” he knew his precise location. But in reality, finding your way around a carrier was difficult even for those who lived and worked on the ship for years. It was not unusual for a sailor to get lost and have to ask for directions from a “local,” someone who actually lived or worked in that part of the ship.
Even though they were riding on a huge warship that could kill them in hundreds of creative and gruesome ways, the biggest fear for the men of Forrestal was of the simplest, most basic hazard—falling overboard into the sea. It was one of the things that Ken Killmeyer feared the most, and he was not alone. Killmeyer felt the fear intensely in his first few days on the Forrestal, and the fear stayed with him on the way to Vietnam, even though he managed to push it aside so he could get his job done.
The first time he walked to the edge of the carrier deck and looked over the side, he felt a queasiness in his stomach and felt as if he were falling forward. He stepped back quickly and learned not to do that anymore, but he thought about the danger often. Killmeyer was glad that he wasn’t working right out on the flight deck, where it seemed every step threatened to send you into the sea.
Indeed, there was good reason to fear a “man overboard,” because it was not an unusual occurrence. Killmeyer’s introduction to the Forrestal included a lot of sailors yelling at him to watch out, don’t step over there. At a great many points on the ship, very little came between the sailors and the open sea—sometimes little more than a guardrail or a catwalk structure. At some spots, there was nothing to keep a man from walking right off the edge. When the seas were rough and the wind was blowing, it didn’t take much more than tripping over your feet to send a sailor over a barrier and into the sea. Once a man went overboard, he probably would be seriously injured either by the long fall to the ocean or by hitting some part of the ship on the way down. Once he was in the water, he had to be rescued quickly if he was to avoid death from exposure. When the water temperature was forty-five degrees, for instance, an uninjured sailor could lose consciousness in thirty minutes and die in one hour. If he was hurt by the fall, death could come much sooner.
Killmeyer’s work on the Forrestal put him right on the edge of the ship during operations to transfer supplies, and he was constantly aware of what could happen so quickly if he let down his guard. Part of the risk, and one of the reasons sailors feared this accident so much, was that you had no chance whatsoever of rescue unless someone noticed you fall. The accident could happen so quickly it was possible for a sailor to go overboard and for no one to see it happen. And with five thousand men on board, it could take hours or even a full day before anyone missed the sailor. By then, the ship could be hundreds of miles away. That is why carriers always have people scanning the water for a man overboard. If they spot someone in the water, sometimes just by seeing an unusual light or form in the dark sea, they quickly sound the man-overboard alarm. Then the bridge will slow the ship and bring it around, while also launching a helicopter to go back and look for the lost sailor. Other ships traveling with the carrier also may aid in the rescue.
Without an immediate rescue attempt, the sailor had no chance. But even with a quick response, the sailor still might never be recovered. Going in the water is such a nightmare that many sailors say the real enemy is always the sea, not the person shooting at them. For instance, it has often been the sailor’s custom to rescue enemy sailors after blowing their ship out from underneath them, rather than leaving them to die as soldiers might do on land. Once the enemy is no longer a threat, one sailor will help his fellow sailor in his fight against their mutual enemy, the ocean waters. And though Killmeyer’s fear of falling off the Forrestal made him feel like a real rookie, it wasn’t just young, inexperienced sailors who went overboard. In March 1942, Rear Admiral John Walter Wilcox, Jr., fell off his own flagship, the USS Washington. Despite the frantic efforts of thirteen ships searching for six hours, he was never recovered.
Killmeyer’s work in supply transfers put him at risk from the heavy cable assemblies that could knock a man off the upper tiers of the ship or pull him out of the big doors on the side. But up on the flight deck, Zwerlein and his fellow workers were in jeopardy because the flight-deck operations made it impossible to put up much of a barrier on the ship’s edge. Sometimes a light wire barrier marked the edge, but that was more symbolic than anything, just a reminder that you were close to walking off the ship. If a man was hit unexpectedly by the blast of a jet engine, that wire wouldn’t keep you from going overboard, and neither would the safety netting sticking out a few feet just below the deck edge.
The first man to ever fall off the Forrestal provided a good example of how such an accident could happen. On November 25, 1958, the ship was steaming off the coast of Spain, scheduled to pull into Barcelona the next day. There were to be two flight operations that Tuesday, with the first launch scheduled before sunrise. Jim Johnson was a plane director on the flight deck, one of several crew members responsible for directing plane movement on the deck, carefully pulling planes out of the pack where they were prepared for launch and then moving them to the catapults. All the normal hazards of the flight deck were exaggerated because it was still dark outside. The first launch would use the catapults at the midsection of the flight deck, the “waist cats,” and not the catapults at the front of the ship, so the plane directors who normally worked up front came back to help out Johnson. As Johnson was directing a plane to move forward from the fantail, the very rear of the ship, another plane director was pulling a plane forward from the starboard side. That plane director, being less familiar with the rear portion of the flight deck, got the plane hung up on one of the fittings that house the arresting cable. Rather than maneuvering the plane back and around the obstruction, the plane director instructed the pilot to rev his engine enough to get over it.
As the pilot blasted the engine over the deck obstruction, the plane cocked unexpectedly to one side and the powerful jet blast aimed directly at Johnson, who was farther back on the deck. He started sliding backward in the strong wind.
Because he was so close to the blast, he could not stop sliding even though he got down on one knee. When he realized that he could not stop and was going over the fantail, he decided to run and jump, hoping to clear the fantail and the screws.
Johnson turned his back to the wind and ran right off the edge of the ship and into the darkness, the jet blast helping to propel him beyond the structures jutting out from the ship and the big propeller blades churning the water below.
After surfacing, Johnson was still holding one of the lighted wands he used to direct planes on the carrier deck. He realized that it was a valuable asset in the dark waters, so he held on to it with all his might. As he bobbed in the water, Johnson could hear two jets being launched off the carrier, which was by now becoming a much smaller cluster of lights in the distance. His heart fell because he thought that the continued launches meant no one had seen him go over.
Johnson was wearing only his yellow jersey over a foul-weather jacket. He tried to take off his shoes, as he was trained to do, but he was too scared he would drop the lighted wand so he gave up on that. He tried pulling off the jersey, which was weighing him down, but he feared getting it stuck on his head and just left it on.
Soon, Johnson saw a ship pass about one hundred yards away with its searchlights on. A destroyer was searching for him, so he found the whistle that he used on the flight deck and started blowing furiously. The ship passed him by, and then Johnson saw two helicopters searching for him. Then the destroyer returned and the searchlights landed on Johnson.
That was when he lost his composure and began yelling for help. Men on the deck of the destroyer shouted back that they saw him and would throw a line as soon as they got a little closer. By the time the line was thrown and Johnson swam over to it, a helicopter had reached him and was hovering overhead. When the helicopter dropped a line, Johnson grabbed it and was hoisted up.
The helo carried Johnson back to the Forrestal, where he stepped onto the deck still tightly gripping the lighted wand that he had refused to let go of in the water. He had no injuries, so after a trip below to take a shower and rest for a short while, Johnson went back to work. Despite his ordeal, Johnson still showed the dogged enthusiasm typical of the Forrestal’s young men. He had been scared to death while he was in the water, but Johnson showed the attitude of a young adventurer once he was safe. He wished he had stuck with the destroyer’s lifeline instead of the helicopter’s, because then he would have had to make a daring transfer from ship to ship on a line stretched between the two.
“I could have been high-lined back aboard the Forrestal,” he said to a friend. “That would have been quite a thrill.”