In the months before they sailed for Vietnam, the men of Forrestal went off on the kind of adventures that make great recruiting posters. As part of the navy’s Atlantic Fleet, the Forrestal usually ventured to destinations in the Mediterranean—Naples, Rome, Barcelona—as well as all the Caribbean ports of call. In February 1967, the Forrestal went on a training cruise to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the men enjoyed shore leave, with the requisite heavy drinking and carousing. Already, the youngsters had stories to tell.
Another physician joined the Forrestal when it reached Cuba, and Dr. Kirchner was glad to hand over control of the carrier’s medical department. For another four months, the Forrestal sailed the Atlantic, stopping in the Virgin Islands and visiting Cuba again. On May 18, the carrier left Norfolk for a roundabout trip to Vietnam. First she had to stop nearby at the Virginia Capes for a one-day “Family, Friends, and Dependents Cruise,” a popular day trip in which sailors could invite their loved ones on board to see where they worked and to watch carrier operations up close. These cruises were always fun for the crew and their families, and this one was especially important. Everyone knew the Forrestal was heading into danger, at least in theory.
The next day, the carrier was all business. She sailed on to Saint Thomas, in the Virgin Islands, to pick up a group of navy officials so they could conduct an “Operational Readiness Inspection,” the final test to see if the Forrestal was ready for war. The navy inspectors studied the ship and its crew for three days and awarded a grade of “Excellent” before disembarking again in Saint Thomas.
Plans called for the Forrestal to take a southerly journey to the other side of the world, all the way down and around the Cape of Good Hope, at the bottom of Africa. Going through the Panama Canal was not an option for such a huge ship; she wouldn’t fit. As she worked her way south, the Forrestal crew looked forward to crossing the equator on June 19. Rowland took a lot of flak from the crew for insisting that they not grow beards on the voyage, even though it was common for navy commanders to bend the rules on facial hair when crossing the equator. But a beard prevents an oxygen-breathing apparatus (OBA), the full face mask that supplies oxygen during a fire, from making a tight fit. The complaints made their way to the captain, and he called Rowland in.
“Captain, there ain’t no damn way in hell that a man can fight a fire with an OBA and a beard,” he insisted. As a compromise, Beling had agreed to let the crew grow beards until the ship crossed the equator but then everyone had to shave.
Crossing the equator is cause for celebration on a ship. The crew was excited about observing the naval tradition of initiating all those who had never crossed the equator before, the pollywogs, with an elaborate and messy ritual that would make them shellbacks. Those who were already shellbacks would mercilessly haze the others with age-old ceremonies on deck. The shellbacks faced a logistical problem, however. There were only about five hundred of them versus nearly five thousand of their intended targets. Normally, most of the sailors on a ship were shellbacks and they took advantage of their numbers to force the others through a gauntlet of abuse that included paddlings, elaborate costumes, and kissing a fat man’s belly.
The night before the crossing, the pollywogs organized a revolt. They wanted to become shellbacks, but they knew the numbers were on their side. Instead of submissively following orders for the hazing, they turned the whole initiation into a good-natured free-for-all and forced the shellbacks to go through some of the same rituals with them.
Four days later, the carrier anchored off of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The crew knew that this would be the last big liberty call for a while, so they practically stampeded off the ship. Rio welcomed them; the city was full of nightlife and the kind of entertainment that leaves a young sailor broke and happy at the end of the evening. Rio also turned out to be one of the few episodes that cheered Ed Roberts’s view of his stint in the navy. Soon after coming aboard, Roberts joined one of the bands made up of crew members, and they played for various parties and recreational activities while at sea. Playing drums for the Dynasties made him feel a little better about leaving the Fugitives behind, particularly when they played in Rio de Janeiro. The Dynasties occasionally played for local crowds at their ports of call, and the Rio locals loved them. The rock-and-roll hits that the Dynasties played hadn’t made it to Rio yet, so the crowd roared when they played songs by the Doors or Paul Revere and the Raiders. The Dynasties played up their rock-star roles, with Roberts getting furious on the drums. He even had a favorite move where he jumped up, kicked his stool away, and went nuts. He didn’t let on that it was just for show and he couldn’t really play the drums standing up.
The stop in Rio seemed to provide everyone with a chance to create a memory. Shaver, the blue shirt who worked with Roberts on the flight deck, took full advantage of his opportunity. Drinking with some buddies at a little bar in Rio, Shaver found one of the specialties was a mixture of whiskeys in an unusual flask with a spout at the top. He was already pretty far gone when the bartender challenged him. If he could chug an entire flask of the whiskey concoction, the bartender would give him the flask to take home and another free one to share with his buddies. Shaver was game and managed to swallow it all down, but he was completely shitfaced by the time his buddies dragged him through the dark streets of Rio back to the small boat that would return them to the Forrestal. Hey, no problem. All he had to do was get back on the ship, find his bunk, and sleep it off. But the seas were a little rough in the port that night, and Shaver faced one last challenge. He had to leap off the boat onto the little platform floating by the ship, and then onto the ladder that would take him aboard. It required a bit of timing even in good conditions, and Shaver most certainly was not in good condition. He miscalculated one of the jumps and went right into the water. The cold water instantly sobered him and he felt a big marine reach in and drag him up by the collar. He still was holding on tightly to the flask he’d won in the bar.
On another night in Rio, Shaver and some of his pals took pity on a friend who had been unable to get liberty that night. They couldn’t stand the idea of him sitting bored on the Forrestal while they were having a good time in Rio, so they decided that if he couldn’t get to the local flavor, they would bring some of the local flavor to him. It took a little scheming, but they managed to get three prostitutes from Rio aboard the Forrestal and deliver them to their very appreciative friend.
After three memorable days and nights in Rio, the carrier hoisted its anchor and continued on its journey. The rituals at the equator and the time spent exploring exotic cities, not to mention the long days at sea, helped the group of strangers bond. They began to form friendships, to get to know people from different parts of the country and people who were very different in some ways. They settled into the daily life aboard ship, learning from some of the more experienced hands who knew more than the basics taught by the navy. Spill fuel oil on your work clothes? Don’t send them to the laundry. They’ll never get all that stuff out. Just tie a rope to the jeans and throw them overboard. Let them trail in the carrier’s wake for a little while and the churning seawater will clean them right up.
The Forrestal sailed around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa. The trip past South Africa was not an easy route, exposing most of the crew to their first big storm on an aircraft carrier. The ship ran into a storm with huge waves, big enough to bat it around like a little boat on a three-hour cruise. It takes quite a rough sea to send a carrier lurching from side to side, but on that night, mashed potatoes and gravy went flying and covered everything in the dining halls.
Then the carrier headed north of Australia and passed close by the tiny island of Yap, where Captain Beling had been shot down years earlier. After a stop at Subic Bay in the Philippines, the Forrestal would go on to Yankee Station.
Though the Forrestal crew partook of liberty calls just as much as any other ship’s crew, their cruise to South America and other destinations involved a great deal of training, both in standard, everyday operations and in emergency operations, like firefighting and man-overboard drills. When the crew was not being trained and drilled on specific operations, the daily tasks of running an aircraft carrier still amounted to practice in procedures that could be vital later on. Ken Killmeyer had been aboard for only a few months, but already he had a number of assignments on board. Though some were as boring as cleaning his crew’s sleeping area, others put him right in the middle of the action. Killmeyer served as a messenger on the ship’s bridge, standing by to answer the phone and relay messages to others on the bridge, or running messages elsewhere on the ship. As with Shelton and Blaskis, that position put him in the brain of the ship, standing within feet of the captain and making him privy to everything on the bridge. And it also gave him a terrific view of the flight deck.
When he wasn’t working that job, Killmeyer was involved in resupply operations, in which a supply ship would pull alongside the carrier and transfer goods along cables suspended between the two. It was a complicated and potentially dangerous operation, but it had to be done frequently, because a carrier requires quite a lot of everything to keep going. The supply ship might provide fuel oil for the ship’s engines, jet fuel, food, mail, bombs and other armaments, or just about anything else found on board. Killmeyer was a “phone talker” for the operations, standing on a small deck jutting out from the side of the carrier and communicating to the carrier’s crew and also the other ship’s crew, helping coordinate the delicate operation. The two ships would remain in motion for the entire operation, carefully matching each other’s speed and movements to keep a steady distance between them—about two hundred feet separating them at twelve knots, or about fourteen miles per hour. The maneuvering was a challenge to the captains of both ships, but it was better than bringing both ships to a halt and letting the seas push them around. At least when they were in motion, they had control over where the ships went.
The operation began with the carrier crew firing a line over to the supply ship with a device similar to a shotgun, then both crews would rig the lines for transferring the goods. If fuel was being transferred, the carrier crew hauled over the big hoses from the supply tanker and coupled them to the carrier’s intake pipes. With other goods, big crates and wooden pallets stacked with supplies were hauled over. It was customary, however, for the captains to first exchange small gifts. The first package sent over the high wires might be a box of cigars or some cookies made specially by the ship’s cook. It was typical for the transfer to last several hours.
Resupply operations were routine, but on a carrier, routine never means safe. There was ample opportunity for error in the operation, especially if the ships did not synchronize their movements precisely. Straying a little too far away from the other ship might mean breaking the transfer cables and dumping the supplies in the ocean, not to mention the danger of high-tension cables suddenly snapping and whipping back toward the crew. Mismatched speeds could have the same results. But if one ship veered in toward the other, there could be a disastrous collision, probably to the detriment of the smaller supply ship. Such accidents happened despite the efforts of captains and crews who performed this operation regularly, sometimes several times a day for the supply ships, because the sea didn’t always cooperate. When a sudden wind or current shoved the ship in the wrong direction, or if steering control failed on one of the ships, a captain would call “Emergency breakaway!” and the two ships quickly disconnected their lines and veered away from each other. Lines went flying, fuel gushed from severed hoses, and sometimes a ship got way too close for comfort. Killmeyer had seen a few of those, and they were always scary. One supply ship, the USS Caloosahatchee, had two breakaways with the Forrestal on successive days. The first day, the supply ship lost steering control and went wild in the water, causing Captain Beling to veer sharply away while the crews slammed sledgehammers on hook assemblies to send the hoses leaping off. Fuel oil covered everything, and one crewman was hit in the head by a flying pulley assembly. The ships tried the transfer again the next day, but the Caloosahatchee again veered off too far from the carrier, causing the hose teams on the front of the carrier to abandon the transfer and release the hoses. The crew on the back of the carrier, however, was determined to complete the transfer. They hung on as the rear of the tanker swung in close and its front swung away, popping the other team’s hoses.
On the same voyage, the Forrestal crew also saw firsthand how dangerous magnesium flares could be. Pilot Ken McMillen was sitting in his A-4 Skyhawk one evening, waiting to be launched off the ship. The deck crew was completing the preparations for arming the plane with bombs and magnesium flares, when suddenly the world lit up behind McMillen. A brilliant white light reflected off the pilot’s rearview mirrors and into his eyes.
Nearly blinded, McMillen frantically looked around his plane. He couldn’t make out what was happening, but he knew the only thing that could produce such blinding light was one of the flares. But McMillen didn’t know for sure if it was from his plane or another nearby. If it was from his plane, was it still on his plane and burning a hole into the fuselage? The pilot twisted around in the tight seat, one way and then the other, desperately trying to see what was happening to his plane.
Out on the deck, the unexpected flare had confused the crew, not to mention blinding those who had been working in the dim light on the deck. No one knew exactly what to do, and crew started giving conflicting directions to McMillen. One person signaled him to pull forward, and then another signaled him to push back. McMillen kept calling the control tower to ask what was going on. “Is it my plane? Is it my plane?”
The tower never responded and McMillen knew that if the flare was burning white hot on his own plane, it could ignite his fuel and everything else aboard. Even if it were on the deck nearby, it still could be a danger to him.
McMillen responded the way most carrier pilots would. He stayed with the airplane. Aviators on an aircraft carrier are trained to stay with their airplanes at all times, and for good reason. The deck of an aircraft carrier is a tightly choreographed stage, and no one wants an aviator moving around on foot when he could be safely out of the way in his cockpit. And more important, the aviator needs to be with the plane in case it has to be moved. So the rule was this: Don’t go topside until your plane is ready, then go immediately to your plane and stay there. When you leave your plane, get off the flight deck as quickly as possible. The aviators may have been the glory boys of the aircraft-carrier set, but no one wanted their feet on the flight deck.
McMillen knew the rule, but he still spent several frantic minutes debating whether to leave the airplane. Finally, a petty officer grabbed the flare by its parachute and flung it into the sea. The incident was over quickly, but it gave McMillen a good scare. He never found out if the flare came from his aircraft, and sitting helpless in the cockpit had tested his resolve about staying with the plane. He wondered if he would have the nerve to do that again, or even if it was wise.
Robert Zwerlein and Ken Killmeyer had gotten lucky with the lottery of work assignments. With five thousand men on board the Forrestal, not everyone could have a glamorous job, but they at least had not gotten the worst. Zwerlein was in an enviable position with a job as John McCain’s plane captain. He had a great deal of responsibility, with McCain relying on him to make sure that everything was in order before they shot him off the ship. It was a high-profile job for Zwerlein, and he loved it. He wrote home to his parents often, telling them how exciting it was to work on the flight deck, how demanding the job was. He told his mother that he enjoyed the fast-paced atmosphere, that it was satisfying to be part of such a great crew.
There were things he didn’t tell his mother, though. Zwerlein never mentioned that the flight deck was the most dangerous place he could be on the carrier. Mothers don’t need to hear that when their boys are so far away from home. They need to hear that the ocean is beautiful and their boys are having a great time. But the danger was on Zwerlein’s mind. He saved those thoughts for when he wrote to buddies back home, knowing they also would not trouble his mother with his fears. The letters Bobby sent them contained plenty of excitement just like the ones he sent to Mom, but he also confided in them that the flight deck was a place where men died.
Paul Friedman, on the other hand, had ended up in an assignment not so directly in the path of danger. He was not pleased with his assignment. He had expected to become a munitions technician, loading missiles onto airplanes. That would put him on the flight deck, or at least up in the hangar bays. Instead, he was assigned to be just another hand working in the kitchen, pretty much the lowest job around. His superiors told Friedman it was only a temporary assignment, something that a newbie might have to do for a while, but he wasn’t so sure. He just knew that he didn’t want to peel potatoes every day when he could be up in the middle of the action.
Shelton also was not so happy with life aboard the Forrestal. He was trying hard to make the best of it, but the Texan used to big open spaces just couldn’t stand being crowded on the ship with thousands of men. The carrier was huge, but the living spaces were small. And though he realized that the Forrestal had amenities many other sailors would envy, that didn’t make it any more pleasant to stand in line every time he wanted to buy a postage stamp. Still, Shelton was a bit of a pragmatist. He didn’t enjoy the everyday life on the carrier, but he knew he had it a damn sight better than the guys who had to work down in the belly of the ship every day. And the guys who ended up in the jungles…no comparison.
Roberts felt the same way as Shelton about navy life. He didn’t want to be here, but he wanted to be in the jungles of Vietnam even less. He kept telling himself that every day when he went to work on the flight deck, but it didn’t make him much happier to be out there in the sun, sweating furiously and working harder than he had ever worked in his life. He wasn’t used to a cushy life, having done a lot of physical labor for his father’s business back home, but working on the Forrestal’s flight deck was more demanding than anything he had experienced. In just a few weeks of working on the flight deck, the six-foot, two-inch Roberts dropped from 205 pounds to 175. The quick weight loss left him looking a bit gaunt and feeling less than energetic. In addition to the hard work, he knew that he’d lost weight partly just because he didn’t have time to eat. With the long work hours every day, his free time had to be divvied up between sleeping and eating. When he came off the flight deck after twelve hours, covered in soot and grease, he often found he wanted sleep more than he wanted food. At least he didn’t have to stand in line to get some sleep.
Another newbie, Frank Eurice, had become a machinist’s mate in the engine room, just as he expected. He wasn’t thrilled about being on the Forrestal, but it wasn’t like he’d been ripped away from anything great back home in White Marsh, Maryland. He had been laid off from his job at the local Montgomery Ward department store, where he was the store’s expert in drilling holes in bowling balls. When he went home after being laid off, his mother was already crying when he walked in the door.
Eurice asked her what was wrong, but she couldn’t speak through her sobbing. She just pointed to the mantel over the fireplace, and when Eurice looked that way, he immediately knew what was going on. Perched on the mantel was a telltale envelope from the United States government. Eurice didn’t have to open it to know that he had been drafted.
When he was assigned to the Forrestal, he was glad to be on a big carrier. It turned out that for him and Roberts, the rock-and-roll drummer from Atlanta, their assignment to the Forrestal would spark childhood memories.
Eurice remembered the mighty Forrestal from when he was eight years old. The carrier had just been launched and was hailed as the most magnificent warship afloat. The little boy in parochial school saved ten cents per week from his milk money until he had three dollars to buy the plastic model of the Forrestal. He lovingly assembled the Forrestal and kept it displayed in his bedroom for years.
Roberts remembered the Christmas when two of his neighborhood pals received the Forrestal model from Santa and he didn’t. He was terribly disappointed.
Now, at eighteen years old, Eurice was actually controlling that ship’s propulsion, receiving orders from the bridge to rev the engines up or down. He was the kid with his foot on the gas pedal of an aircraft carrier.
The training cruises had assured Beling that his crew was in good shape, but he knew that there was no way to anticipate what might happen when the Forrestal went to Southeast Asia, so he tried to prepare his crew for the very worst. He was amply supported in that effort by Merv Rowland.
On the voyage around the tip of Africa, he and Rowland stepped up the routine drills and exercises. Rowland convinced Beling that the ship should have “general quarters” drills for two hours every evening. General quarters was an emergency condition that sent each sailor racing to his preassigned station when the alarm sounded, ready to handle whatever was happening. It was used as an all-purpose response to combat or just about any other kind of threat to the ship. The idea behind general quarters was to get all points on the ship manned, but especially those positions that might be crucial in an emergency. Some sailors might be assigned to combat tasks such as manning the defensive guns on deck, while others went to firefighting stations, medical-aid stations, or important engineering work. Others simply reported to certain areas of the ship and awaited further instructions. Even when a position was already occupied by a sailor on regular duty, someone else might rush in to take that position for general quarters because the very best person for each task was to be at the station for general quarters. If the ship was threatened in any way, general quarters assured that the ship’s best helmsman was steering the ship, for instance, and not just whatever helmsman happened to be on duty at that time.
Some drills and exercises were carried out all the time, but the pace was increased dramatically on the way to Vietnam; two hours of general-quarters drills every night was much more than the usual routine. And to make the drills even more useful, Rowland decided to simulate damage to the ship. Each department head judged a different zone in the ship each night, making notes of any deficiencies during the drill. The next night, the crew tried to correct those deficiencies.
The crew tired of the constant drilling, but Rowland could not be deterred.
“We’re going in harm’s way, and repetition is a damn good instructor,” he replied. “You go over it and over it, and then when it comes time to do something, you can do it by reflex. You don’t have to stop and think or ask somebody. You do it.”
Beling and Rowland knew that warships are complicated and, by their very nature, replete with deadly hazards. Over the years, the navy had found that its ships were susceptible to serious accidents at any time, including fire, collision, and grounding. Between 1900 and 1967, the U.S. Navy experienced at least seventy major accidents resulting in the loss of life and substantial damage, as well as hundreds of smaller incidents. Sixty men were killed in 1905 when a boiler exploded on the gunboat Bennington, while she was moored in San Diego. Fifty years later, a carrier also named the Bennington suffered an explosion and fire that cost 103 lives. The accidents often led to important changes in operations for the navy, with the tragedies providing vivid lessons in what men could do better. And in more than a few instances, such as those involving the grounding of ships in shallow waters, the accidents publicly humiliated the commanding officers and threatened their naval careers.
Of all the accidents that could befall a navy ship, though, fire was at the top of the list. Fires were common, and they were serious. The prospect of a major fire was terrifying to sailors for one obvious reason: there was no way to escape, short of abandoning the ship. The crew could not simply exit the building and wait for firefighters to show up. When a major fire broke out on a navy ship, the crew immediately had to engage it with the same determination they would wield against an enemy firing shots at them. If they didn’t, the fire would quickly consume their ship and, at best, they would have to abandon it and take their chances in the sea. At worst, there could be massive loss of life on some of the big ships, with thousands of crew crammed into them, not to mention the tons of volatile materials that could blow the ship out of the water. Some sailors had specialized training in firefighting, but in truth, every sailor was a firefighter. They had to be.
The navy’s major lessons in ship fires started just months earlier, on October 26, 1966, when flames broke out aboard the aircraft carrier Oriskany. She had already taken a role as a major player in the war in Vietnam, mounting over twenty thousand successful sorties against land targets earlier that month. She had been at Dixie Station off of Vietnam for much of her work, but late in the year she moved to Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin, another ocean grid from which she could launch air strikes on a twenty-four-hour basis.
The crew of the Oriskany was planning to launch six Skyraiders and seven Skyhawks on an attack just after midnight. But the weather had turned nasty, so the launch was rescheduled for 7:30 A.M. that day. The rescheduling meant that the crew had to remove and stow much of the ordnance that would have been used, because it was unsafe for it to sit on the flight deck or on the airplanes for more than seven hours.
The attack had been planned for the early-morning darkness, so the ordnance included a lot of Mark-24 Model 3 flares. When activated and dropped from a plane, this parachute flare could provide up to two million candlepower of light for three minutes, lighting up ground targets. The flare created its tremendous light through a combination of magnesium and sodium nitrate, chemicals that were kept separate in the flare until a sharp pull on its lanyard mixed them. When ignited, the chemicals combined and burned furiously at a temperature of four thousand five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Furthermore, the chemical composition of the flare resisted all firefighting efforts; once ignited, a magnesium flare would burn white hot for its allotted three minutes, and there was practically no way to stop it. Though the pyrotechnic flare was not designed to kill directly, it was one of the most dangerous items on board.
The Oriskany had thousands of the flares stored belowdecks, including some in a storage locker in the forward hangar bay just below the flight deck. That storage locker had not been officially declared safe for the dangerous magnesium flares, but the crew used it because it was so much closer to the flight deck than the other designated flare lockers farther belowdecks. What they didn’t consider, however, was that the more convenient storage locker was directly above a row of officers’ staterooms.
When the crew cleared the flares from the thirteen planes, they started putting them in the unofficial storage locker on the hangar-bay level. Large skids stacked with the magnesium flares were moved down to the storage locker and then the flares were placed individually inside. The night crew left a large pallet of the flares sitting outside the storage locker when they quit for the day, and when the day crew came on at 7 A.M., there was still a big stack of flares to be moved inside. This was a lousy way to start the day, because it meant a morning full of backbreaking work. To make matters worse, the Oriskany was scheduled to receive a transfer of armaments later that day. More hard work ahead.
To speed the job, the one sailor responsible for the storage-locker area convinced another sailor to help him move the flares inside. They moved the skids as close to the locker door as they could get it, and then one started passing the individual flares to the other, who stacked them inside. This method worked fine on the first skid parked close to the door, but as they finished with a skid, the sailor outside the locker moved back to another skid and the distance between the two men grew a little farther. Soon, they were tossing the magnesium flares instead of handing them off.
It didn’t take long for the accident to happen. As the sailor outside tossed the flares to the man inside the locker, the lanyard on a flare got caught on something. The outside man instinctively tugged on the flare to free it, and both men heard the loud “pop!” as the flare activated. The sailor dropped the flare to the deck, and almost instantly it began to shine with a tremendous light, the heat radiating out to unbearable levels, and toxic fumes spewing forth. The man who activated the flare immediately panicked and ran away, leaving the other sailor in the locker filled with the deadly flares.
That sailor also began to panic, recognizing the deadly heat produced by the magnesium flares and the danger of fire aboard a carrier. He ran out of the flare locker to a place near where the flare lay burning on the steel deck. In the heat of the moment, the sailor’s urge to respond to the accident served him poorly, and he did the most illogical and dangerous thing possible.
Though intensely hot and dangerous, the flare could have been left to burn on the steel deck for its three minutes, after which the incident would have been over unless something else had ignited. Or the sailor could have thrown the burning flare overboard into the sea. Instead, the sailor managed to pick up the burning flare by its parachute and fling it into the flare storage locker where 650 magnesium flares were already stacked. He then slammed the door shut and secured it tightly. Then the sailor ran into the hangar bay shouting “Fire!”
Predictably, the white-hot flare ignited others in the locker, and soon there was a ferocious chemical fire consuming the forward portion of the Oriskany. The flares generated massive amounts of toxic fumes that spread through much of the ship via the ventilation system. The fire spread quickly. By the time the hangar-safety petty officer arrived on the scene, the locker was already buckling from the heat and spitting clouds of deadly fumes. He immediately ordered the crew to throw the remaining skids of flares overboard.
The bridge sounded the fire alarm and then shortly thereafter the general-quarters alarm that signified a serious emergency. Explosions rattled the ship as the fire spread from one compartment to another. The captain maneuvered the ship to help clear the smoke, turning first one way and then another. The ammunition magazines were flooded with seawater to keep them from exploding, a possibility that surely would have meant the end of the Oriskany. The fire ravaged the ship for nearly two hours before the crew brought it under control, and then it broke out again with a new vigor when fifty-five-gallon drums of paint in an elevator shaft exploded. The crew continued fighting the fires until 11:58 A.M.
Once the Oriskany was under control again, the death toll was terrible. The fire killed eight enlisted men and thirty-six officers, including twenty-four veteran pilots who had survived many combat missions over Vietnam.
The navy conducted a major investigation of the Oriskany fire and concluded that it could be traced to the unsanctioned use of the storage locker in the hangar bay, poor training in the handling of flares, and poor performance by the two seamen moving the flares. The navy also cited the Oriskany’s executive officers for poor leadership related to the other problems. In addition, the investigation determined that the fire spread as quickly as it did partly because there was not enough fog-foam equipment for firefighting. A number of policy improvements and technical changes in aircraft-carrier operation flowed from the Oriskany fire, viewed at the time as one of the worst ever on a naval vessel.
Some of the safety improvements derived from the Oriskany fire were put into place on the Forrestal, such as the emphasis on adequate fog-foam firefighting equipment. But the navy still had a lot to learn about aircraft-carrier fires as the Forrestal made her way to Yankee Station.
The aviators weren’t spared from the drills. They didn’t get much flight time during the six-week voyage, but their leaders decided the time should be put to good use anyway. They reminded the aviators that they had to be in good shape if they expected to outrun “Charlie” if their plane went down, and so they required daily exercise regimens in the tropical heat. On many days, the fliers could be seen running laps around the flight deck, huffing and puffing in their heavy flight gear.
There were general-quarters drills, firefighting drills, and man-overboard drills, far more than the crew was used to on a normal basis. The men spent many hours fighting pretend fires and rescuing pretend victims from the water, with many others standing around waiting to be counted as part of the man-overboard drill. Counting heads was a major part of the drill, or a real event, for a man-overboard. When the alarm sounded, every single person on the ship had to be counted and then representatives from the different divisions reported the numbers to an administrative officer. If everyone was accounted for, the alarm could be canceled. If not, the count should reveal who was missing.
Killmeyer hated the man-overboard alarms because they reminded him of the risk of falling off the ship, and he couldn’t help thinking about the poor guy out in the water if it wasn’t a drill. And besides, a man-overboard alarm was always a major headache for everyone. Captain Beling was never happy about going to all that trouble for a false alarm. If a man were recovered, he was likely to get a lecture about staying on the damn ship.
On the trip to Southeast Asia, the Forrestal had a number of false alarms for men overboard, plus some incidents in which men actually went overboard, at least one of whom was thought to have committed suicide, a mess cook who jumped overboard on the first day out of Norfolk. Word spread on the ship that some of the crew were getting anxious about going to Vietnam, losing some of their confidence in the safety of an aircraft carrier, and apparently one or more decided to jump. Even in peacetime, it was not unusual for an aircraft carrier to have individuals panic at the thought of going to sea for a long stretch. Sometimes only the prospect of leaving home for a few months of hard work at sea was enough to make men take desperate measures.
All the false alarms and men overboard tried Beling’s patience. He declared to the crew one day, over the public-address system, that if anyone else fell off the ship, he wasn’t stopping. Other ships would look for the sailor, but the Forrestal was continuing on. There were no more false alarms after that.
Beling and Rowland were also mindful of the Oriskany’s experience at Yankee Station, when the magnesium flares set off a terrible fire. The possibility of fire was on their minds, and Beling wanted his crew to know what happened on the Oriskany and what lessons might be learned from the experience, so he requested a summary from the navy. Nothing was available. Seeing no better option, he ordered reprints of a Reader’s Digest story and distributed them to everyone on board.
As the ship sailed toward Subic Bay in the Philippines, the last stop before Vietnam, many of the crew were beginning to question some accepted procedures, especially now that they were going into combat for the first time. The men knew they were about to be challenged, and they were as prepared as possible. Even beyond the normal demands of working on an aircraft carrier, a combat situation would put extraordinary stress on standard procedures and the crew’s ability to complete all their assigned tasks. The Forrestal was about to go into a “high tempo” combat operation, which meant that planes would be launched in large numbers and in a very small time frame, straining the already tense flight-deck operations. Unlike training exercises in which time was not necessarily a critical factor, the launch of aircraft for an air strike against land targets required precision timing and speed, speed, speed. The planes had only a limited amount of fuel and they all had to be in the air simultaneously to carry out a coordinated attack. While they were launching one group of planes, another group might be returning from a mission, low on fuel and eager to land once the deck was cleared. That meant getting planes launched as quickly as possible.
With the need for speed a paramount concern, the crew of the Forrestal reassessed some standard procedures. Unfortunately, two separate groups were both contemplating a safety shortcut that, though technically not allowed, they thought would be fine because other safety measures were in place. The weapons systems on the Forrestal had redundant safety measures in place so that if one failed, the other could still prevent a disaster. What the two groups didn’t know was that each one was relying on the other’s safety rule to cover the one they were about to circumvent.
One group, the Weapons Coordination Board, was composed of representatives from the air wings on the ship and others directly involved in arming the planes with rockets, bombs, and other weapons. On June 29, 1967, on the way to Vietnam, the Weapons Coordination Board decided that the Forrestal crew could ignore a navy rule regarding “pigtail connectors” in the arming system of rockets on the planes. Called a pigtail because it was a curly cable resembling a telephone handset’s cord or a pig’s tail, this device connected the triple ejector rack (TER) to the launcher used for various rockets on the planes. Simply put, the TER was a component underneath the plane that ejected and fired the rockets when the pilot activated the system in the cockpit. But the TER could not fire the rockets unless the pigtail connector was attached between it and the actual launching device for the rockets.
Navy regulations clearly stated, “The pigtail connector shall not be plugged into the launcher receptacle until just before takeoff.” There was no dispute that “just before takeoff” was when the plane was sitting on the catapult, only seconds before being launched off the deck. This was meant to keep the rocket-firing systems disconnected until the very last moment to prevent a rocket from being accidentally fired while the plane was still on the deck.
There was another rule to achieve the same goal. The firing system also used a device called a TER electrical-safety pin, or just a TER pin. (It also was called an intervalometer pin.) This small device, which was plugged into a receptacle in the rocket-firing mechanism, interrupted the electrical system and prevented a firing command from reaching the rocket. Navy regulations clearly stated that the TER pin was to be in place the whole time the plane was armed on the deck, and the crew was supposed to remove it immediately before launch, as the plane was sitting on the catapult.
The pigtails and the TER pins were a double layer of protection against human error or even an electrical malfunction that could fire the rocket. Without the pigtail in place, the electrical signal could not reach the rocket. Even with the pigtail in place, the firing command still could not reach the rocket because it could not get past the TER pin.
The only problem was that waiting to fully arm the rocket on the catapult was not the fastest way to get planes off the deck and in the air. Everything had to move quickly and smoothly when launching planes, and once the plane was on the catapult, any last-minute steps would just slow the system down, especially if there was a problem. A plane having difficulty on the catapult would delay every plane in line behind it. It was better to take care of as much as possible while the plane was back “in the pack” waiting for takeoff.
So the Weapons Coordination Board decided to circumvent the rule about pigtails, giving the crew permission to plug in the rocket pigtails while the plane was back in the pack. The board acknowledged that this was a deviation from standard practice, but said the rockets would still be safe because the TER pin would be in place. But unbeknownst to the board, other members of the crew had gotten in the habit, without any official approval, of removing the TER pins while the planes were still being prepared for launch. They operated on the same theory that it was much more expedient to remove them before the plane got to the catapult. Those crew members thought the shortcut was acceptable because the rocket pigtails would not be plugged in until the plane was on the catapult. There was a breakdown in communication, one that led to the Forrestal inadvertently causing rockets to be fully armed while the planes were sitting on the rear of the ship, bunched up and pointed at one another while being loaded with explosives.
The weapons board’s decision to circumvent the pigtail rule was never forwarded to the captain. No one with authority to overrule the weapons board ever saw the board’s report, and no one realized the conflict with the habit of removing the TER pins early.
The pigtail decision did not go unnoticed, however. Ken McMillen, the pilot who had the frightening experience with the magnesium flare, heard from an ordnance crewman about the decision. The crewman was responsible for loading the planes in McMillen’s division with bombs and rockets, so he was familiar with why the pigtail shouldn’t be plugged in early. He expressed some concern to McMillen, who also acted as a safety officer within the squadron. McMillen, in turn, went to his friend and fellow pilot Jim Bangert, who was a safety officer one step up in the chain of command.
“Hey, our people are having some problems with this new thing about arming the rockets while we’re still in the pack,” McMillen told Bangert one day. “You think that’s really safe?”
Bangert said he had wondered about the new policy, too, and said he would look into it. A few days later, after checking with the Weapons Coordination Board, Bangert went back to McMillen and said that was indeed the new policy. Bangert apparently had no idea of the conflict between the pigtail and TER pin shortcuts.
“That’s what they say we’re doing now,” Bangert said. “They say it’s the only way to get all the planes launched fast enough.”