The Forrestal reached Subic Bay in the Philippines on July 18 and then sailed off four days later for her assigned post at Yankee Station, in the Tonkin Gulf south of Vietnam. She was almost there.
Back home, most people had not paid much attention at first to the buildup of hostilities in Vietnam and the United States’ growing presence in Southeast Asia. But by 1967, the country’s involvement had reached the point that average Americans were concerned, though not always in the same way. The old guard was worried about the spread of communism and saw North Vietnam as dangerous, generally going along with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ explanations that U.S. involvement was unfortunate but necessary. The younger generation wasn’t buying it.
In 1967, the antiwar movement had not reached a fever pitch yet, but the opposition was making its voice heard. The men of Forrestal saw some of the protests before leaving for Vietnam, and on the trip over, they heard about more of it from their friends and family back home. Most of them saw the protests as an affront. Even if they weren’t crazy about going to Vietnam or had even thought through the politics enough to disagree with the U.S. involvement, they didn’t like being criticized by a bunch of college kids. A great many of the sailors fell in the ranks of Middle America, not necessarily supporting the war but uncomfortable with longhaired kids denouncing their country. It was unpatriotic.
The media were bringing home some images of the war by 1967, and that was starting to turn the tide in the opposition’s favor. In April, opponents of the war marched in protests across the country, including two hundred thousand who gathered in New York’s Central Park. About 150 young men burned their draft cards at the rally, openly defying the law and signaling a new vigor to the movement. The protestors screamed for Lyndon Johnson to bring home the half a million troops in South Vietnam.
The president was feeling the heat, but not just from the protestors. He could dismiss them as a bunch of misguided college students, naive at best and traitorous at worst, but he could not deny the reports from his own advisers. A year earlier, even those who had pushed for the bombing and ground combat had produced one report after another showing poor results and poor prospects. After two years of the world’s strongest country throwing its military might against a supposedly backward jungle nation, victory was nowhere in sight. Johnson was willing to bomb the North Vietnamese mercilessly, but apparently the North Vietnamese were willing to take it and wait for the Americans to leave.
Military leaders pushed Johnson to expand the campaign against North Vietnam, a move encouraged by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He is considered the leading architect of the bombing campaign in Southeast Asia, though by late 1966 he and other civilian leaders had also concluded that the effort was futile. Known for his aggressiveness in pursuing the military effort in Vietnam, McNamara was reluctant to tell Johnson and others in the administration that the Vietnam War might not be winnable. Some other resolution might be necessary, but the question was how to get out.
The buildup in Vietnam had been long and progressive, and the Johnson administration could not back down without losing face. Since July 1965, there had been a steady escalation in the bombing of targets in Southeast Asia, accompanied by a buildup of ground troops. By the end of 1966, the United States had more than four hundred thousand ground troops in Vietnam. After a brief bombing pause in 1966, the administration expanded the bombing again, targeting North Vietnamese supply lines. The bombing moved closer to the major cities of Hanoi and Haiphong, and also to the Chinese border. In 1967, the United States flew 122,960 attack missions in Southeast Asia, hitting 5,261 motor vehicles, 2,475 railroad cars, and 11,425 water craft. Some 3,685 land targets were hit by carrier-based planes.
Fewer than one thousand four hundred Americans had died in Vietnam in 1965, but the figure had jumped to five thousand by 1966 and would reach nine thousand total by 1967.
America’s huge military presence in Vietnam came at a high cost, with the country spending millions of dollars every day. The daily bombing runs over North Vietnam pushed the military’s supply efforts to the breaking point, and by 1966 there simply weren’t enough bombs. Pilots reported going out on bombing runs with only half of what they needed to do the job right, and others were sent out with other types of ordnance, like rockets, that were inappropriate for the mission. The U.S. military couldn’t keep enough bombs in the supply line, and the pilots’ grumbling was working its way back to the White House and the media back home.
On January 25, 1966, the White House received a cable from Bangkok, Thailand, in which a number of leaders in the American military structure in Southeast Asia assessed the war effort and its future prospects. The cable represented the conclusions reached by General William Westmoreland and Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, the commander in chief of the U.S. forces in the Pacific, whose carriers had been largely responsible for the bombing runs. Also represented by the cable were General Dick Stilwell, regarded as a slick spinmaster in Saigon who worked hard to suppress negative reports in the media, and several ambassadors: Henry Cabot Lodge, the ambassador to South Vietnam; William Sullivan, ambassador to Laos; Graham Martin, ambassador to Thailand. This was not a whiny complaint from an antiwar crowd; these were the administration’s point men for the war effort.
The message they sent to the White House was problematic, especially because it came at a time when the public was starting to question the war effort.
“As far as air actions are concerned, we recognize that the sortie [bombing run] rate may have to be curtailed because of existing and foreseeable shortages in the supply of iron bombs,” the cable said. “Iron bombs” refers to unguided, high-explosive bombs, what the public thinks of as simply a bomb rather than something like a missile.
The shortage of bombs was troubling to President Johnson, but more so to McNamara. Though he would soon seek alternatives to the bombing campaign, in early 1966 he still was in favor of it. The intricate plans for demoralizing the North Vietnamese and interrupting their supply lines could not be carried out unless the United States had enough bombs in its supply lines. McNamara was rankled by the cable from Bangkok.
He met with President Johnson in late January to discuss whether to resume the bombing campaign, which had been halted as part of peace negotiations. McNamara expressed his concern that “further delay on resumption of bombing can polarize opinion in this country. I feel we should resume, and send the execute order tonight.”
McNamara clearly did not want to slow the bombing campaign for any reason, because he felt that doing so might give the antiwar protesters a foothold. And if it were slowed due to a shortage of bombs, the country would look weak in its enemy’s eyes.
McNamara declared that there was no bomb shortage. Years later, he sticks by that assessment, writing in his 1995 memoir In Retrospect that he and the military leadership “did our utmost to keep U.S. troops in the field as well supplied and well protected as possible. As the war heated up and passions increased, some critics of the Johnson administration alleged that matériel shortages had compromised our soldiers’ safety. This was not the case.” He goes on to quote a 1966 letter from General Bus Wheeler, who wrote that “there have been no shortages in supplies for the troops in Vietnam which have adversely affected combat operations of the health or welfare of the troops. No required air sorties [a sortie is an attack mission by one aircraft] have been canceled.”
Those who were actually in Vietnam knew the truth was different. Admiral Leighton W. “Snuffy” Smith, Jr., flew over 280 missions in Vietnam during three tours as a navy pilot, during which the military structure in Vietnam encouraged him to do whatever was necessary to send positive reports to Washington, including lying about the success of bombing runs. One day, an intelligence officer told him he should report hitting a target bridge when he had in fact missed it. He felt that an air of deceit had worked its way down from Washington.
The more Smith saw of the lies, the angrier he became. He saw Secretary McNamara on a news report saying, “There’s not a shortage of weapons,” and soon after he was assigned another mission to bomb a bridge. At the pilot’s briefing, Smith was informed that he would be armed with 2.75-inch rockets instead of the five-hundred-pound bombs that he expected.
“Why in the world are you assigning me this target with this weapons load?” he asked.
“That’s all we got” was the reply.
Smith complained, and he was not the only pilot unhappy with the shortage of bombs, but the complaints fell on deaf ears in Washington. Sitting in the White House, McNamara and the others controlling the war effort could not be troubled by details like whether there actually were enough bombs to carry out the instructions they sent down the military chain of command.
The White House ordered more bombing. The navy would have to do whatever it took to get enough bombs on those planes.
Like the entire military structure during the Vietnam War, the United States Navy constantly found itself pitted between the directives coming out of the White House and the realities of what was happening in Southeast Asia. The directives from Washington often bore little relationship to what military leaders in combat, or even those sitting in the Pentagon, knew was necessary to fight the war.
Naval officers with both the practical insight and enough authority might have resisted instructions that needlessly put their men at risk, but they needed the right information. As the Forrestal would soon demonstrate, the necessary information could be lost in the navy’s vast bureaucracy.
The Forrestal depended on other ships. Despite her size and strength, or actually because of them, the Forrestal did not sail off on her own. Instead, she was accompanied by destroyers and other smaller ships that provided various types of support. They helped defend the carrier from any water-based threats because they were far more maneuverable and carried more weaponry for close combat. Together, the carrier and her support ships were known as a battle group.
The battle group, in turn, was supported by supply ships that rendezvoused with the Forrestal and the other ships to transfer all manner of goods. Some ships supplied fuel oil or jet fuel, and others provided food or other goods. And some ships like the USS Diamond Head provided ammunition. Among navy ships, the Diamond Head was an outcast of sorts, the dangerous cousin that still had to be invited to family gatherings once in a while. Far from glamorous, she was a utilitarian cargo ship that hauled tons of ammunition from storage depots all over the world out to the ships that needed replenishment. At any time, her holds might be chock-full of bombs, rockets, grenades, black powder, small-arms ammunition, and pretty much anything else that could explode. (The irony was that, even with all that ammunition on board, she had only two small guns mounted on the deck to defend herself. One of them usually worked.)
The Diamond Head’s task was to load up and then steam out to where the other ships were in transit or already stationed for duty. The work was dirty, especially in a navy that often makes a sailor seem like a fastidious housekeeper with nothing better to do. On the Diamond Head, the dangerous cargo was usually dirty and greasy, and there wasn’t much hope of maintaining the spotless appearance that other navy ships required. Hard physical labor was routine, with the young men manhandling bombs and other explosives as they moved them on or off the ship. The worst part of working on the Diamond Head, however, was knowing that you were on a floating powder keg. All of the sailors knew that they were riding a massive bomb in the ocean, liable to explode with little warning if something went wrong. And with all those tons of high explosives on board, there would not be much left to find. It was a fear that shook many of the 160 sailors when they were first assigned to the Diamond Head, but after a while, they became resigned to the possibility of their ship exploding underneath them. Still, there were idle moments on the long voyages out to meet another ship when a sailor’s mind could start wandering: If this thing blows up, what will be the last thing I see? Will I see the deck actually coming up at me?
The fear was very real for these Diamond Head sailors because their ship was not exactly a showpiece. She was old and, though she could still do her job, she was plagued by electrical problems that occasionally started small fires on board. Fires on any ship are serious, but the danger was nightmarish for a supply ship stuffed with explosives. When a fire broke out, the Diamond Head sailors had to attack it quickly, and ferociously, because they didn’t have a second to spare. The risk of fire and explosion aboard ammunition ships was so serious that they were shunned by navy ports. When the Diamond Head docked at a naval base, either to pick up ammunition or just to let the sailors off for shore leave, she was not allowed to pull up alongside the other ships. She had to dock far away, sometimes a forty-five-minute bus ride back to the base, or anchor out in the deep water and send her men to shore in small boats.
The Diamond Head shared a small honor with the Forrestal. She was the first ammunition ship from the navy’s East Coast fleet to go to Vietnam, and the carrier was from the East Coast. When the Forrestal set sail for Vietnam in June 1967, the Diamond Head was already in the area servicing the other ships there. She had settled into a routine of visiting naval ports to pick up ammunition and then running out to where the other ships were at work. She supplied everything from the carriers to the little gunboats that worked their way up the rivers in Vietnam. Most of the time, the Diamond Head picked up ammunition at the Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines, not far from Vietnam, and then sailed for about three days back to where the other ships were stationed. Once there, she traveled around the area, fulfilling orders for ammunition. The Diamond Head might supply six or seven ships in one day.
In the months before the Forrestal arrived, the Diamond Head sailors had grown accustomed to the routine of docking far out in the undeveloped part of Subic Bay and then driving back to the naval base. With help from Filipinos hired by the naval base, they trucked tons of ammunition back to the Diamond Head and loaded it on board. When they stopped for their pickup in July 1967, the sailors were surprised at some of the ammunition they were taking on board. It was old and was clearly not in good shape—dirty, rusty, even leaking. The sailors didn’t necessarily know much about the ammunition they worked with every day, but they could tell that this batch was different. Some of the bombs looked different in design, and they clearly hadn’t been stored well. When the crew asked the local sailors about this, they learned that the bombs had been sitting in open-air Quonset huts in the Philippine jungles for years, exposed to the humid weather and the occasional storm. No one was sure just how long, but from the grime layered on the bombs, it had been more than a few years.
The Diamond Head sailors asked why they were taking on such old matériel, bombs that looked like they should have been destroyed long ago. The local sailors working at the base said they had an order for one-thousand-pound bombs, and these were the only ones they had in that size.
These weren’t the first old bombs the Diamond Head had loaded in Subic Bay, though the condition was especially noteworthy this time. The sailors had gotten used to loading filthy bombs that had sat out in the jungles. On one recent trip, there was a commotion on the pier as the bombs were being loaded onto the Diamond Head. The Filipino workers were shouting and scrambling around one of the stacks of bombs and then, much to the amazement of the Diamond Head crew, they pulled out a snake that was long enough to require four men to hold it. The snake had been living in the bomb pallets, apparently for quite a while. On other trips, the crew had found large green tree frogs living among the bombs, a few of which inevitably made their way into the officers’ quarters as a prank.
But this ammunition was frightening, even to the Diamond Head crew, who were accustomed to the prospect of blowing up at any moment. The young men on the ship were not weapons experts, but they knew that such old and poorly maintained bombs could be overly sensitive, liable to explode with the slightest mishandling. To make matters worse, these were thousand-pound bombs, which were big enough to destroy the ship on their own. The crew didn’t like having the old ammunition on their ship, but that was what the navy told them to pick up. At least they could get it off in just a few days when they met up with the Forrestal.
As the Diamond Head was picking up the old bombs in Subic Bay, the Forrestal was just arriving at Yankee Station. The carrier steamed into position on July 25, sixty-seven days after leaving Norfolk.
Yankee Station was a spot in the water off of North Vietnam that looked like any other—except the navy had declared it a staging area for launching air strikes against North Vietnam. Located in the Gulf of Tonkin, about seventy-five miles east of Mui Ron Ma in Ha Tinh Province, North Vietnam, Yankee Station was eighteen degrees above the equator. For sailors on a big steel ship sitting out in the water, Yankee Station guaranteed hot, humid days interrupted only by the occasional rainstorm. Captain Beling was glad to be there, having brought the Forrestal for her first days of combat ever, and his first day of combat as the commander of an aircraft carrier. Plus, there was the matter of upholding the honor of the navy’s Atlantic Fleet. The carriers from the Pacific Fleet had been on Yankee Station for some time already, and now the new kid on the block was determined to show the other carriers what she could do. The Forrestal joined a number of other navy ships assigned to Yankee Station, including the aircraft carriers Oriskany and Bon Homme Richard. The carriers would cruise around the Yankee Station area almost constantly, rarely coming to a halt for any reason.
When the ship arrived at Yankee Station, Captain Beling was confident that his crew and his ship were ready for combat.
For the first four days on Yankee Station, all seemed well. Hundreds of planes were launched in those four days, the crew working fast and hard to meet the demands of high-tempo combat operations.
On their fourth day at Yankee Station, the crew started gearing up for what they knew would be a major air strike the next morning. Two launches were scheduled for the next day, making up the biggest air strike the Forrestal had launched so far. Though the specifics were not passed on to much of the crew, they learned enough to know that this one would really test their skills.
The pilots always knew a lot more about the missions than nearly anyone else on the ship, so twenty-six-year-old Rocky Pratt knew the target for the alpha strike was a rail line north of Hanoi. Pratt flew A-4 Skyhawks like Ken McMillen and John McCain, but he was not going out on the alpha strike the next day. Instead, he had been assigned to stay back on the ship and wait for others to report on “lucrative targets” they had spotted while on their missions. Instead of those pilots deviating from their flight plan, Pratt would take off and attack the targets they had spotted. Because he wasn’t a primary pilot for the alpha strike, he had not attended the briefing for that mission. But by the time he meandered through the Forrestal’s big hangar bay that evening, he had spoken with his buddies enough to learn that the planes would hit a rail line—hard. He had marveled at how big the air strike was going to be, and he noted that his buddies were excited about the target. The rail line was just south of the Chinese border, in an area that previously was off-limits to air strikes. But now the Forrestal had been given the honor of plunging deep into the previously forbidden territory, with the aim of disrupting supply lines to the North Vietnamese. The way Pratt heard it, the plan was to lay bombs on the rail line itself, but also to lob bombs at a mountainside in hopes of causing an avalanche to cover the railroad. The planes were to carry thousand-pound bombs, bigger than the ones they usually carried on such raids.
Pratt was thinking about the mission as he entered the hangar bay, noticing right away that the carrier was taking on some sort of cargo from a supply ship alongside. The other ship was the Diamond Head, which had rendezvoused with the Forrestal to transfer four hundred tons of ammunition, including the thousand-pound bombs and other armaments for the big alpha strike the next morning. The two ships were cruising alongside each other with lines strung between them, their crews hoisting large wooden pallets stacked with bombs and rockets, cargo nets crammed with rocket fins and other nonexplosives, and box after box of other ammunition.
Pratt watched the transfer for a moment, the careful operation of the two ships always a wonder to anyone nearby, and he strolled past the big open hangar doors to get a better look at the ammunition ship and the operation. As he did, he could hear one of the ordnance officers pitching a fit. The officer was an older man, about fifty, whom Pratt knew casually, so he was curious about what had set him off so badly.
Pratt moved a little closer until he could hear what was going on.
“These are comp B bombs!” the older sailor yelled. “These are goddamn comp B bombs and they’re old as hell. Why are we getting this shit?”
The ordnance officer was yelling at two other officers, and all three seemed upset at what they were seeing. Pratt didn’t want to get involved in any trouble, and he didn’t really know enough about weapons to be sure what all the fuss was about anyway, but he stepped in close enough to take a look at what the officers were yelling about. He saw bombs that looked like nothing he had ever seen before.
They were big and fat, thousand-pound bombs sometimes known as “fat boys” because of their appearance. They looked like the kind of bomb you saw falling out of World War II planes in old black-and-white movies, not the sleeker bombs he usually carried. He also noticed that the bombs were in wooden crates that looked very old, and some of the crates were even rotting. Pratt could read a stencil on one of the crates indicating the bombs had been manufactured in 1935.
Nineteen thirty-five? Geez, that’s before I was born!
The older, seasoned sailor was growing red-faced with anger as he talked about how dangerous the bombs were.
“These damn things get real sensitive when they get old and start degrading like that,” he said. By then, a group of sailors had gathered around to see what all the commotion was about. “Hell, they’ll go off in a fire, and they’ll go off just from a bad vibration. There’s no telling what could set these damn things off.”
The crew working on the arms transfer was used to handling bombs and other ammunition, so they knew the officer was saying that the bombs were far more sensitive than the other ones they used. In normal conditions, a bomb is not extremely sensitive to heat and vibration. In fact, the newer H-6 variety was designed to withstand high temperatures without blowing up at full strength. If exposed to a fire, they would melt and burn, or they might detonate at far less strength than intended. They wouldn’t blow up at “high order,” the way they were intended to blow up on a target, and they could be trusted to survive some length of time in a fire without any detonation at all.
But the old, decaying bombs sitting on the Forrestal’s hangar deck were an entirely different matter.
“Goddammit, these things get a lot more sensitive to heat when they get old like this,” the officer explained to anyone close enough to hear. “A fire will sure as hell set them off, and I don’t know if they can even take the vibration of a launch. The plane’s damn catapult launch might set off the bombs right there.”
The ordnance crew was beginning to understand why the officer was so upset, and Pratt was close behind. They were looking at a stack of bombs so old and faulty that nearly anything could set them off, and the blast would be enormous. And of course, the bombs weren’t sitting safely in a warehouse somewhere. They had just been delivered to a ship where it was nearly impossible to keep them from exposure to the kind of things that could set them off unexpectedly.
The officer was getting livid, and others in the hangar bay were noticing the commotion. The men working under him were getting scared to handle the bombs, and several suggested tossing them over the side of the ship. The officer considered that option for a moment but then said no. He wasn’t sure he could authorize jettisoning ordnance like that without being sure there was an immediate danger. He was sure the damn things were dangerous, but making his case with the higher-ups was a different matter. Clearly, the navy had sent these old bombs because the Forrestal needed them for its mission the next day. The officer knew that the navy had been short of ordnance for the past couple of years, making it hard to carry out its bombing raids in Vietnam. Throwing these bombs over might make them short on thousand-pound bombs the next morning, and he would have to explain why.
The weapons officers passed word on to Captain Beling that the bombs were too dangerous to keep, and he radioed over to the Diamond Head to straighten things out.
“Take these damn things back and give us something we can use,” Beling told the Diamond Head captain. “Sorry, can’t do that,” the Diamond Head skipper replied. “That’s all we have for you.”
Beling was angry, but he had orders to carry out the next day and he couldn’t do the job without thousand-pound bombs. He’d have to keep the damn things, but he wasn’t happy about it.
In the hangar bay, the situation didn’t look right to Pratt either, but this wasn’t his business. He moved on as the men continued arguing. One of the last things he heard as he walked away was one of the ordnance officers saying, “These goddamn things are not going down in my weapons storage!”
Pratt was curious about the incident, but he had no intention of pursuing it. As a pilot, he didn’t get involved in much that didn’t directly involve his airplane, and he certainly wasn’t an expert at weapons handling. But when he bumped into the ordnance officer later that night, he was still curious about what he had seen. They were friendly enough that Pratt could bring it up and ask why everyone had been so upset.
“Rocky, did you look at those bombs?” the man replied, starting to get agitated all over again.
“Yeah, they looked weird,” Pratt said. “What were they?”
“Those are old comp B bombs. Composition B.”
“Well, what’s that?” Pratt asked, still not seeing what was so wrong.
“Rocky, they don’t make those bombs anymore. The H-6 bombs were built and designed to replace comp B. They’re a different type of explosive.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think they looked like what we usually carry.”
“Did you notice that they’re banded bombs? You have to put a band around it to hang the damn thing on the airplane!”
“What does that mean?” Pratt asked.
“That is World War Two. Those things have come off an ammunition dump somewhere. They should have been disposed of, and somehow or another here they are in the damn system. And we don’t know what to do with them.”
“So that’s what all the excitement was about? You wanted newer bombs?”
“Rocky, composition B was very dangerous,” he explained, more than a hint of impatience in his voice. “Did you notice that it was dripping?”
“No.”
“Well, if you had looked you would have seen a few spots on the deck. The stuff drips as it ages. That’s dangerous because it’s a fire hazard. Number two, composition B becomes sensitive to heat and sensitive to vibration when it ages, and it becomes more powerful.”
The ordnance officer went on to explain that the old bombs could increase their explosive power by 50 percent under the right circumstances, meaning the thousand-pound bomb could explode with the force of a fifteen-hundred-pound bomb. A huge explosion. That’s fine if it blows up on target, but not if it blows up on the ship, he said.
“Did you see the markings on those things?” he asked Pratt. “I know you’re not going to believe me, but those dates…Damn it, one or two of them were dated 1935! And I know the rest of them have to be nearly that old. They’ve been sitting in some goddamn disposal area in a weapons depot all this time. They shouldn’t be on this ship. That’s what the argument was about.”
Pratt had gotten the message, and he was concerned. Even if he wouldn’t go out with those bombs strapped underneath him tomorrow, his buddies might.
“Well, what the hell are they going to do with them?” Pratt asked.
“I’m not sure. One group wanted to wheel them right across the hangar deck and throw them off the other side of the ship. But I don’t know, they’re going to need all the big stuff for that strike tomorrow, so it looks like we’re keeping them. The captain talked to the skipper of the ammunition ship and they said that was all they had to give us. The captain didn’t seem real happy about it, but he said we just have to keep the stuff.
“The weapons officers wouldn’t let them down in the magazines with everything else, so they’re moving it all topside and just storing it out on the deck.”
The conversation upset Pratt, but he still wasn’t sure if he had any role to play in the problem. He wondered if he should get involved by telling his superiors, but then he saw the ordnance officer again that same night. This time, some of his fears were allayed.
“Well, it looks like they’ve decided these things won’t go off from the vibration of the catapult shot, so they’re going to put them on that big launch tomorrow. We’ll just get rid of them as fast as we can.”
The ordnance officer seemed less upset, resigned to having the bombs on board for as short a time as possible. Pratt took his word that the bombs would be fine stored up on the flight deck. Hey, with those things, his buddies might have a good shot at bringing that mountainside down tomorrow.
Pratt settled down for the evening, and many of the rest of the ship’s crew joined him. There were still men working all over the ship, as there always were at night, and some of the crew were still finishing up the ammunition transfer from the Diamond Head. Once the four hundred tons of ammunition was all on board, it still had to be put away, so those men would not be able to call it a night for quite a while. But for a lot of the crew, the day’s work had come to an end and they were settling down for a late-night snack, maybe even a game of cards before they hit their bunks and fell asleep.
For others working late into the night, they would not be able to hit their bunks until much later, 2 A.M. for some. Once they did, they fell asleep quickly, exhausted from the night’s hard work. Most of them would have to get up early the next morning for the big air strike, so the few hours of sleep were precious.
At 3:15 A.M., the quiet throughout most of the ship was shattered by the man-overboard alarm. Every single man had to get up and assemble in his division for a head count, standing in his underwear or whatever he could throw on, half asleep and barely standing erect. They had done this a hundred times before, but it was especially maddening when it happened in the middle of the night. The men were held in assembly for more than an hour as the division heads counted repeatedly to determine if anyone was missing. Others throughout the ship had to scramble to their stations to aid in the rescue attempt.
One man was missing. Word spread quickly that this was no false alarm, which shook some of the men out of their stupor. After a while, they heard that the man had been spotted in the water but not recovered. That immediately spawned questions. Why couldn’t they pick him up? It was nearly dawn before the men were allowed to return to their bunks and try to get some sleep. They went back to sleep, but many were bothered by the sudden loss of a shipmate. Most didn’t know the man, or even know who he was, but they knew they had lost their first life on Yankee Station.
They cared because he was a fellow sailor, and they cared because it just as easily could have been one of them. It also was a bad omen, a lousy way to start their long deployment on Yankee Station.