Nine major explosions occurred on the flight deck, all of them from the old composition B bombs. The big fat bombs that had looked so unstable when they were delivered the night before were cooking off in rapid succession. With each blast, the ship vibrated so badly that the men’s lower legs became numb.
When all the bombs had exploded, the scene became less hellish, but only slightly. The massive explosions had stopped blowing men and equipment all over the deck, but the fire itself was out of control and spreading. Other materials—fuel tanks, smaller ammunition, various volatile materials on the planes—continued to explode without warning. The fire had spread both forward and starboard, engulfing more planes and equipment, exposing more ordnance to the heat that had caused the other explosions. The fire was getting worse—much worse.
Explosions from the flight deck had spread shrapnel, burning jet fuel, and flaming debris throughout the ship, ripping holes in armor-plated decking and steel bulkheads. With the violent explosions penetrating far beneath the fire scene, the ship was like a crate of fireworks with a bonfire on top, just waiting for one explosion to send one piece of hot shrapnel to the wrong place.
One of the most sensitive spots was the liquid-oxygen-generating plant. In order to supply the pilots’ breathing systems in the planes, the ship generated and stored large amounts of oxygen, the quintessential fuel for any fire. The liquid-oxygen plant was located near Hangar Bay 3, on the left side not far below where the fire was raging on the flight deck. On this morning, the tank held 750 gallons of liquid-oxygen stored in the tank there—making it a highly volatile target, far more flammable and explosive than the JP5 jet fuel up on the flight deck. The liquid-oxygen tank was virtually unprotected, with no special armor or protective barriers; an explosion on the flight deck easily could penetrate it and ignite its contents.
The two sailors working there knew how dangerous the liquid oxygen was. John Dickerson and Robert Clark often thought that their workstation was a scary place to be in case of a fire, but like every other Forrestal sailor with a dangerous job, they got used to it. The first fire alarm, however, had sparked every latent fear and Dickerson rushed over to the big door leading from the oxygen plant to one of the big hangar bays. He was straining to pull the heavy, watertight door closed when the first bomb exploded. Dickerson kept his grip on the door and went flying with it as the blast flung it wide open. He was left hanging off the door in the hangar bay outside, and when the initial shock wore off, he realized that general quarters had sounded.
I’ve gotta go, but I have to close this hatch first…
Dickerson’s general-quarters station was a repair locker some distance away, but he could see that Clark was shaken by the bomb blast and wouldn’t be able to secure the hatch right away. He had to get that hatch closed to protect the oxygen plant as much as possible, and to protect his friend Clark, who would stay there for general quarters. Dickerson shoved on the heavy door and threw his body against it, then he started “dogging” the hatch closed by locking all the handles that surrounded the door frame.
Satisfied that the door was secure, he pounded on it a couple times and yelled, “Be careful, man!” before leaving Clark. Dickerson raced off to his general-quarters station.
Back in damage control, Merv Rowland knew what would happen if the liquid oxygen ignited. When a crew member in damage control asked about the vulnerability of the oxygen tank, he made no bones about the result.
“If that thing blows, we’re gonna be the biggest damn blowtorch you’ve ever seen,” he said. “It’ll blow this ship out of the water, no doubt about it.”
In the oxygen-generating plant, Clark recovered from the initial shock of the bomb blast and saw that the fire must be very close. He could feel the heat building to a nearly unbearable level within minutes, and then the bulkheads separating the liquid-oxygen plant from the rest of the ship started to glow red. Clark watched as the paint first bubbled and then burned off. Every time something exploded, red-hot shrapnel would come flying into the compartment. Clark tried to take cover, but he knew that wouldn’t help if the shrapnel hit the liquid oxygen. And there was no telling how many more explosions were coming. Clark picked up the phone and called damage control for help.
Rowland had been monitoring the reports from that area closely and personally took Clark’s call. The lone sailor sounded scared as he reported that the fire was all around him.
“It’s getting hotter than hell out here!” the man yelled over the phone to Rowland. “What do I do, sir? The fire’s getting close!”
“Dump it, son!” Rowland yelled back. “Dump it all!”
Rowland wanted the sailor to get rid of the liquid oxygen to eliminate the explosion hazard, but there was just one problem. The Forrestal had no emergency dump capability for the liquid oxygen. There was no way to just flip a few switches and send all the liquid oxygen whooshing overboard in a hurry.
Instead, Clark had to hook up a one-inch diameter, sixteen-foot-long hose—no bigger than a typical garden hose—to the liquid-oxygen tank and run out to the platform jutting out from the edge of the ship. There he stood with the hose in his hand, pointing it out to the sea and trying not to spill the super-cold liquid on his flesh. And while he was doing this, the fire raged directly overhead, explosions blowing debris onto the sponson and sending burning material directly down on top of him. A bad stroke of luck could ignite the oxygen venting from the hose, leading directly back to the storage tank.
After a moment standing there under the flaming debris, Clark decided to leave the end of the hose dangling off the edge of the platform and retreat back into the oxygen-generating plant. The fires had not let up and the sailor was still scared, with good reason. While he had been venting the liquid oxygen, the fire and the blast damage had spread to the compartments all around him, trapping him there with the big oxygen tank. He had no way out. He called Merv Rowland again in damage control.
“It’s still real bad here, sir!” the sailor said, sweat pouring off his face from the heat. “What do I do if it gets worse?”
“Put on your life jacket and go swimming!” Rowland replied. “That’s the only goddamn way you can get away from it!”
Clark considered taking Rowland’s advice, but he didn’t want to. He looked over the side of the ship and thought about how dangerous it would be to jump overboard, trying to weigh that against the fire. Going overboard was a tempting prospect as he watched the oxygen vent and imagined it igniting. It took more than an hour for the liquid oxygen to slowly pour through the hose. He never jumped over, and later, Clark would find out that the bomb shrapnel blew holes in the deck on opposite sides of the oxygen tank, just missing it by twenty feet on one side and fifteen feet on the other. If fate had thrown either piece of shrapnel just a little closer, the liquid oxygen would have been ignited.
A similar situation involved an eight-inch pipe that ran along the side of the ship and pumped jet fuel from the storage tanks belowdecks up to the flight deck, where it could be pumped directly into the planes. The pipe was blown apart early in the disaster, and if the fuel crew belowdecks had not responded quickly, they would have been pumping six hundred gallons of jet fuel directly into the fire scene every minute. When they got word of the fire on the flight deck, the crew immediately initiated a drain-back procedure to stop the flow of fuel to the flight deck and also drain out the fuel already in the pipes.
When Gary Shaver finally landed after being blown through the air by the first blast, he found himself lying far forward on the flight deck. He had witnessed the death of Gerald Farrier, the head of the crash crew who tried to wave off other firefighters when he saw that McCain’s first bomb was about to explode. After what seemed a long journey through the air, Shaver tried to get up, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t hear anything. The cast on his right hand was gone. He felt a burning pain throughout his body, and when he looked down, he could see why. Blood was everywhere, and his clothes were singed and smoking. And his left arm was gone.
Wait a minute, it’s not gone. It’s over here.
There was a moment of calm and clarity as Shaver realized his left arm was still attached, barely, but it was draped behind his neck and hanging down the front of his right shoulder, the hand resting on his chest. Shaver reached up and grabbed his left hand with the right, hanging on to it to secure the mangled arm. As he looked over to where his left arm should be attached, he could see bones and bright red flesh. He had a tiny second to marvel that no blood was coming from the wound, and then it started spurting out in great jets.
Just then, Shaver was hit by another explosion and went tumbling across the deck. Then the pain hit him. He had been too stunned to feel it at first, but then it came on like a red-hot poker throughout his body. It was unlike anything he had experienced before, so bad that it went beyond anything he could even conceive of as pain. He was in absolute agony.
Screaming, Shaver tried to crawl away from the fire. His mind was totally out of control, certain he was about to die, consumed by the terrible pain and fear that grew worse with every breath.
As he flopped along the deck, someone grabbed him by the neck and pulled him toward the island. The area behind the island was crowded with injured and dying men, some seeking aid on their own, dragging themselves to the only place on the flight deck that seemed safe, while others were carried there by buddies and strangers. Men were tending to others in the crash-crew shack at the island, on the open deck amid the bombs stacked there, and in the battle-dressing station forward in the island structure. The battle-dressing station was the designated first-aid station, but it was quickly overwhelmed by the dozens of injured men.
Men did what they could for the fallen sailors, but in the early moments of the fire, there was not enough help to go around. The injured were being taken to the sick bay belowdecks as fast as possible, and medical corpsmen were rushing up top to help, but the sheer numbers overwhelmed the first-aid efforts. There were horrible sights all over the flight deck—men with their faces or entire heads blown off by the explosions, limbs missing, bones protruding, severely burned, covered in blood. The victims often were not recognizable even to the men they worked with every day; sometimes only the stenciled name or rank on a man’s clothing would give a clue. Some, like Shaver, screamed out in agony, utterly unable to control themselves as they endured the waves of pain and looked at their mangled bodies. Others were too stricken to even speak, and the lucky ones were unconscious.
Shaver was one of the first to be scooped up and carried down to the sick bay. Sailors and aviators did what they could for their fallen friends, using anything handy to try to stanch the bleeding wounds. In lieu of bandages, some were grabbing big fistfuls of coarse brown paper towels and trying to stop some of the worst bleeding. Another ripped off his T-shirt and placed it over a man’s exposed intestines, pouring a jug of water over the shirt to keep the wound moist. Their efforts sometimes had little effect on the terrible wounds from the explosions. The deck in that area was covered with a half-inch of blood.
This was the scene that awaited Gary Pritchard and his buddy Frenchie as they made their way out of their berthing area just beneath the flight deck and were fighting the crowds of sailors to get to their GQ stations topside. They still had no idea what was going on, other than that it seemed the ship was under attack. If planes were to be launched in response to the attack, they thought, it was important for them to get to that fuel station on the flight deck and do their jobs. None of the usual paths to the flight deck were passable, so Pritchard decided they should make their way to the island structure on the right side of the ship and go up to the flight deck there.
When they came up into the daylight, they were staring at a small piece of hell. Fire everywhere, smoke, blood, wounded men, screams, alarms. They thought they were looking at how they would die.
“Jesus, goddamn,” Pritchard muttered, transfixed by the scene in front of him. “Christ, it’s all over. Man, is it all over.”
Pritchard’s thoughts immediately went to his young wife of only two years, and how she would fare without him. In that split second of thought, he comforted himself with the knowledge that they had no children yet and he had kept up the payments on his life insurance.
Well, at least she’ll be all right with the life insurance.
Quickly, though, Pritchard’s attention was diverted to the many injured and dying men who had gathered behind the island structure. Men with serious injuries were lying all over, and Pritchard didn’t know what to do first. One glance at the flight deck told him that he was not needed at his usual GQ station because they sure as hell wouldn’t be pumping any fuel to the flight deck. As he looked around and tried to decide what to do, Pritchard’s eyes fell upon a young sailor sitting on the deck and holding a gravely wounded buddy in his arms. Pritchard still recalls the youthful look of the “kid” holding his bloodied and burned friend in his arms, cradling the man’s head in his lap. The kid was crying.
“Help me! Help me!” the kid shouted at Pritchard, his teary eyes looking directly up into Pritchard’s. So Pritchard turned to Frenchie and said, “Shit, we gotta help this guy!” The two buddies snapped out of their initial shock and swung into action.
As Pritchard bent down to help lift the wounded man off his sobbing friend, Frenchie ran for a wire stretcher. They lifted the man onto the stretcher, and as they did, Pritchard could see that the man was bleeding profusely. Most likely, the man was dead, but he and Frenchie took him anyway.
“It’s all right, we got him,” Pritchard told the sobbing sailor. “We’ll take care of him.”
Pritchard and Frenchie took the dead man down to the sick bay, which was already crowded and filling with the sickening smells of blood, burned flesh, and jet fuel. Then they hustled back up to the flight deck.
There, they could see that the injured men who had made it to the island structure were starting to get more help. But all across the flight deck, more men had not made it that far and many were still fending for themselves amid the fire. That’s what happened to Airman Charles Price, the fellow who had climbed up the ladder to the flight deck just as the fire initially broke out. After helping in the first minute of the fire, Price found himself among those seriously injured in the big explosions.
He had been knocked unconscious during the first, and when he came to, he was lying facedown. He tried to get up and run, but he could not lift himself off the deck. When he looked down at his legs, he could see that the remains of his left pant leg were lying flat on the deck from the knee down. The left boot was still there, attached by something, but there was almost nothing left between the knee and the foot. He managed to crawl on his hands and one leg a little farther up the deck away from the fire, where he threw himself into the catwalk on the edge of the ship, just below the edge of the flight deck. Hoping this would be a safe place to take cover until help arrived, Price looked around and realized that it wasn’t. He was right next to a fuel-pumping station. The catwalk already had been hit hard by the explosions, the metal railings twisted and torn. Fuel and fog-foam solution were pouring off the flight deck onto the catwalk.
Price tried to pull himself back up the ladder, but he didn’t have the strength. The pain was terrible, and he had already lost a great deal of blood, making him weak and light-headed. In addition, he had a number of other shrapnel wounds all over his body that he was only beginning to notice. Realizing that he was very badly injured, Price fell back onto the catwalk and started yelling for help. He soon understood that no one would hear him. Shouting took too much effort anyway, he thought, so he just lay back on the catwalk and breathed heavily. He was worried about the blood loss from his shredded left leg, so he found the strength to pull off what was left of his belt and tried to apply it as a tourniquet. Price was becoming too dizzy to fumble with the pieces of the belt, so he pulled off his T-shirt, which was torn and bloodied already. He managed to wrap it around the remains of his left thigh but was unable to cinch it tightly enough to cut off the blood flow.
Price lay there on the mangled catwalk, rapidly losing strength and unable to do much more for himself. He could see through the perforated surface of the catwalk to the ocean below, and as he began to lose consciousness, he could see a big destroyer maneuvering in close to the ship. He slipped closer to sleep as he lay there looking down through the catwalk, the destroyer slipping in underneath him in a hazy image that might as well have been a dream. The last thing he saw before fading out was his own blood pouring beneath him and dropping into the ocean.
Suddenly, Price heard someone else jump onto the catwalk. He managed to yell for help and look up. As he did, he locked eyes with the other sailor approaching through the smoke. The other man was so startled by what he saw that he immediately turned and ran away, yelling for help. Price’s torn body was that much of a shock.
Before long, the man returned with a medical corpsman and a wire basket stretcher. They tried to get the stretcher down to Price, but the catwalk was too mangled, so they decided to lift Price back up to the flight deck first. That was difficult without Price able to help himself, so they improvised by using a two-by-four board underneath Price. The two men lifted Price with the board underneath, hoisting him up to the flight deck and onto the stretcher.
Belowdecks, Ken Killmeyer still was trying to get to his GQ station, but with the warning from the repair crew, he realized he could not make it. He looked back toward the rear of the ship, into a crew berthing compartment, and saw smoke for the first time. It wasn’t thick black smoke like what was pouring off the flight deck, but a gray smoke making its way through the berthing area and to the passageway where he stood with the repair crew. Someone closed a hatch to the berthing area, sealing off the smoke, at about the time the explosions stopped overhead.
Soon after the pause in the overhead noise, Killmeyer heard an announcement on the 1MC that anyone not trapped by smoke or assigned to a repair party should move to a forward portion of the ship, away from the danger in the rear of the ship. With about ten other men, Killmeyer made his way forward on the starboard side of the ship and as he approached the sick-bay area, he could see blood on the deck. As he got closer, he saw a buzz of activity with people bringing injured men down from the flight deck and in from other portions of the ship.
He continued to move forward, making slow progress because he and the sailors accompanying him had to stop and open hatches that had been sealed for the GQ alarm.
At one point, Killmeyer stepped aside to let a sailor emerge from the sick-bay area. As the sailor climbed a ladder ahead, Killmeyer noticed that he was carrying a bucket full of blood.
My God, how bad is this thing?
Killmeyer and the other sailors making their way to safety continued forward and up to the second deck, one deck directly above his own berthing compartment where he’d started. At that point, they encountered an officer who ordered them to stay in that area.
At 10:59 A.M., bosun’s mate W.T. Burgess came back on the 1MC and called for the ship to set condition Zebra, the most extreme of status conditions for a carrier. Even for those who had no idea what was going on topside, which was most of the thousands of men on board, that was another signal of something very serious.
With condition Zebra, the ship was to be secured as tightly as possible to combat fires and other damage. Hatches were sealed all over the ship and that meant that passing from one area to another was not easy, and in some cases impossible. Crew members would allow others to pass in an emergency, and certainly to allow someone out of harm’s way, but otherwise the ship was to be kept tightly compartmentalized. Setting the ship at Zebra made it more difficult for latecomers to access their general-quarters station because, once the ship was locked down, an officer or leading petty officer had to approve opening the hatch to allow a sailor to pass. If an officer wasn’t around to approve, the sailor might not make it to his station. That was one reason the crew hauled ass when the general-quarters alarm sounded.
Killmeyer found himself with about forty other men waiting where the officer had told them to stay. They talked about what they had seen already and what they thought might be going on, all of them excited and trying not to look scared. At one point, they heard tapping on a nearby hatch that led up to the hangar deck.
Killmeyer went over to the hatch and he could hear men yelling. The hatch had been sealed from Killmeyer’s side as part of the Condition Zebra lockdown. He yelled back to ask if the men were okay up there. They said they were, and asked how Killmeyer and the others were doing in that compartment.
“We’re fine. We’re not doing anything down here, though. We want to help!” someone yelled. “Let us up!”
“Yeah, hey, let us up!” someone else yelled. “Open the damn hatch!”
Someone waiting with Killmeyer realized he could open the hatch and talk to the men above. Killmeyer could hear the reply.
“I can’t let you guys up here,” someone from the hangar-deck group yelled. “I’ll get my ass in trouble by letting you up. I’m not allowed to. You’re going to have to just wait. That’s all we’re doing up here too.”
The hatch was closed again. Soon someone new came into the crowd and told them he had heard the gun mounts were gone and the fantail was seriously damaged. Soon after that, the group of men was allowed into the hangar deck above. What they found was a real mess.
The hangar bays were huge open areas running the width of the entire ship and very nearly the entire length. They were almost directly underneath the flight deck, with only one level between—the level where so many men had been sleeping when the fire started. When the bombs blasted through that level, the inferno poured right down into the hangar bays packed with aircraft, various other equipment, and pallets stacked with bombs. When the fire started, Ronald Williams was at his station in Conflag 3, one of several small control rooms overlooking the hangar bays. His duty was to watch for any fire hazards in the hangar bay and react quickly to prevent or stop the fire, as well as to keep an eye on things in the hangar bay. If you were playing football with some buddies in the big hangar bay, Williams was the booming voice that came over the loudspeakers, warning you to keep your long passes away from that helicopter. Someone was always in the conflag centers, twenty-four hours a day, keeping watch over the hangar bays.
When the fire alarms had first sounded, Williams perked up and prepared for any signs of fire in the hangar bays. He didn’t have to wait long for the first explosion to send shrapnel firing down, and that’s when he called damage control to report blast damage in the hangar bays. He asked for orders, and damage control told him to activate the sprinkler system and close all hangar-bay doors. The doors were a primary safety feature on the Forrestal: mammoth sliding steel slabs more than a foot thick that could be closed to divide the large, open hangar bay into three smaller compartments.
With just a few buttons and switches, Williams initiated emergency measures that would prove vital to saving the Forrestal. Within seconds, a heavy rain was falling in the hangar bays, suppressing any fires that had already started and preventing any new fires from taking hold. At the same time, the huge hangar-bay doors started sliding shut, sealing off the different hangar bays from one another so that any fires, smoke, or blast damage could be isolated. The massive doors slid out quickly, accompanied by a loud alarm warning people to clear the way. In less than fifteen seconds the doors had sealed off the hangar bays.
By the time Killmeyer and the other men entered Hangar Bay 1, there was no fire. Others already on the scene, however, told the men that Hangar Bay 2 was full of smoke and Hangar Bay 3, closer to the origin of the fire, was ablaze. The sprinkler system probably had extinguished the fire in Hangar Bay 3 by that time, but nevertheless, Killmeyer could tell that he was now in the middle of the ship’s crisis. The hangar bay was filled with the acrid odor of smoke mixed with fog-foam solution, explosives, and burning fuel, plastics, and wiring. An officer soon started yelling for the men to start moving planes out of the hangar bay to get them out of harm’s way. Oddly enough, the planes were to be moved onto the elevators and then up to the flight deck. Though the rear of the flight deck was the site of the original fire, the blaze was moving downward at this point, to the hangar bay. The forward end of the flight deck was a safer spot to stow the planes.
Killmeyer joined with a number of other sailors moving planes by hand because there was only one tractor available and operable in the hangar bay. The planes normally would have been very carefully towed by a small tractor attached to the front wheel, but it was necessary to move them quickly and however possible. So Killmeyer and the others grabbed whatever part of the plane they could reach, and started pushing. There was plenty of help, so the planes started moving fairly easily. They found that stopping them was harder, and many planes were damaged when they ran into one another. At that moment, however, minor damage to a plane did not concern anyone.
Indeed, damage to planes and loss of aircraft was becoming an increasingly minor concern. Up on the flight deck, the firefighting effort had resumed with a new vigor, the sailors charging back into the inferno now that the worst of the explosions seemed to have subsided. As crews gathered up the remains of shredded fire hoses and others strung up new ones, the fire finally was being hit with substantial volumes of seawater and fog-foam solution. One of the first priorities was to lay a thick blanket of foam between the island and the fire line, creating a buffer that would protect the all-important command structure and leaving the men a safe zone from which to attack the fire. The deck became a slippery mess as the soaplike fog foam built up in shallow pools. In some areas, the fog foam reached nearly knee-high.
The overall firefighting effort was directed by Merv Rowland in damage control, but on the flight deck, it sometimes seemed like every man for himself. Officers on the deck were trying to organize repair parties and direct a controlled response to the fire, but in the fog of battle, many sailors never saw an officer give orders to anyone. The damage-control and repair-party personnel were not easily identified by appearance, so they had difficulty getting the attention of other crew when giving orders and trying to organize a response. This was particularly true in the hangar bays, where men were working feverishly to control fires and prevent further explosions. In the hangar bays and up on the flight deck, men acted on their own to do the best they could in fighting the fire, manning a hose whenever possible and doing whatever seemed like a good response. Some of those self-directed efforts would turn out to be the best response possible, and others would not.
In the effort to fight the fire, for instance, sailors made the mistake of using both water hoses and fog-foam hoses on the same fire site. In retrospect, many would see this as a major failing of the ship’s crew, because the combination greatly impeded the effort to extinguish the blaze. Though the crew thought they were doing their best by pouring as much water and foam on the fire as possible, they were actually making a serious mistake that the Forrestal’s trained crash-crew firefighters would not have made if they had survived the first bomb blast. The fog foam is intended to create a blanket over the fire and spilled fuel, smothering it and preventing further combustion. When used by itself, the fog foam can be an extremely effective response to aircraft fires.
But when one firefighting team sprays foam and another sprays water on the same fire, the water simply washes away the foam, leaving only the far less effective water to extinguish the jet fuel. The crew would be criticized harshly for this firefighting mistake, but Frank Eurice understood the sailors’ dilemma. Unlike him, many of the sailors had no firefighting training and could not resist when they found themselves standing in front of a huge fire with a water hose. He knew they were trying to do their best.
And besides, the firefighting foam alone does nothing to cool the weapons that heated up in the fire. Some of the crew looked at the devastation wrought by the initial bomb blasts and decided that water had to be applied to the other bombs and rockets to cool them off, no matter what effect it had on the foam.
Eurice had stayed at his station until smoke started coming into the tiny compartment, forced in through the ventilation system that normally pumped fresh air into the otherwise stuffy room. When the smoke started, Eurice called damage control and asked what he should do. It took fifteen minutes for them to get back to him and say he could leave his post. By then, Eurice had breathed a lot of smoke and was glad to get out, to go anywhere else.
Damage control had also given orders to abandon the ammunition magazines directly above Eurice’s station for fear they would explode. He did not know at the time that that was the reason so many men were running like hell, just ahead of him, as he abandoned his own station. As he brought up the rear, Eurice sealed every hatch behind him.
When Eurice and the others got to the mess decks, they found the ship was shut down tight for Condition Zebra, and they were not sure where they should go next. Because Eurice had firefighting training, he decided to organize the men into an impromptu repair party and go looking for some work to do. He found a stash of oxygen-breathing apparatus, known as OBAs, and passed them out. He gave the men a quick lesson in how to use the devices: The mask fits over your face and you pull the straps to create a snug fit. A canister hangs around your neck and sits on your chest. When you insert the activator cartridge, you’ve got thirty minutes of air. When the bell goes off, get out, because you’ve only got three minutes left.
Eurice led two of the men—he never learned their names—on a path toward the flight deck. When he got to the level just beneath the flight deck, and in the rear portion of the ship, they could see fire damage and feel the heat coming off of the flight deck above. Smoke was everywhere, so Eurice looked for a way out of that compartment and up to the open air. He opened a hatch that he knew led to a walkway that could take them to the flight deck.
But when he opened the door, all he found was a hole where an entire working space was supposed to be. Eurice was looking out at the ocean and a beautiful blue sky instead of the ship interior he expected. Dazzled by the sudden sight of a beautiful Tonkin Gulf morning, Eurice stood for a moment and just stared. Then he slammed the door and moved on.
They were very close to the fire at that point, so Eurice told the other two men to energize their OBAs and he did the same. They found a fire hose on the wall nearby and unrolled it, and the three men started moving forward into the blackness. Breathing heavily in their OBAs, they crept forward with the hose and could feel the heat growing more intense as their sight grew blacker and blacker. Their faces covered by the black masks with the big round eyepieces, rubber hoses dangling from the bottom and attached to the oxygen generators hanging on their chests, they looked like a trio of slow-moving insects merging with the darkness. Finally, they were feeling their way along the passageway, totally blinded by the smoke.
Suddenly they saw a big red glow ahead of them. Oh boy, looks like we found it, Eurice thought. Welcome to Hell: Population 3.
Eurice opened the nozzle on the fire hose and hit the red glow with a spray of water that immediately turned to steam and rushed back toward the men, searing their skin. Shouting through his OBA mask, he urged the men to keep low, to stay under the heat and steam as much as possible. Before long, Eurice heard the bell go off on one of the other men’s OBA, and almost immediately after, Eurice heard his own bell go off and then the other man’s. They had to abandon their fight and back out of the fire area, leaving the red glow almost as red as they had found it.
The three of them headed back down to where they had left the rest of the men, showing up drenched with sweat and water, and with black soot all over. After getting a new canister for his OBA, Eurice decided to go off by himself to find a fire to fight. Rather than go back to the fire they had just fought, which seemed too big for a small crew, Eurice decided to head aft, to the rear of the ship, an area he knew well because he worked and lived there. After passing through compartments already blackened by fire, he found himself on the port quarter, the rear corner of the ship on the left side. This was directly beneath some of the worst fires and explosions, and Eurice could see that he’d found the fire. He looked for firefighting gear to use, but all he found was a hose that had been blown apart by the explosions. Ammunition and planes were still exploding just overhead on the flight deck, and a combination of fuel, water, and foam was pouring off the deck right where he stood. With all sorts of debris and God-knows-what raining down on his head, this was not a good place to be. He could see a destroyer coming in close alongside to render aid, but he was not sure what he should do. The hatch he had just come through now had smoke pouring from it, so going back was not really an option. He had backed himself into a corner.
Eurice started thinking about what was around him. He knew that the ship’s post office was on one side overhead and on the other side was a magnesium-flare locker. Magnesium flares—the same thing that had caused the devastating fire on the carrier Oriskany. Once they’re ignited, they burn white hot and can’t be extinguished. Desperate to do something, Eurice picked up the shredded fire hose and bent it over itself so that some of the water sprayed out one of the biggest holes. He pointed the spray up at the overhead, toward the magnesium flare locker.
Well, this is a waste of time. I’m not accomplishing a goddamn thing.
Eurice dropped the shredded hose and looked over at the hatch again, trying to calculate his chances if he forced his way back into the smoke. He had used part of another OBA coming to that area, so he figured he had maybe a good seven minutes left on that thing.
I don’t know how far I’ll get in seven minutes. That’s not long.
He had to do something. He definitely couldn’t stay where he was. Eurice looked up at one of the gun mounts on the side of the ship and saw some sailors working there. That’s not too far a trek from here, so maybe I can make it on this OBA. He wasn’t at all sure, though. Feeling trapped and knowing the danger of running into a smoke-filled passageway without a full OBA, Eurice considered jumping overboard. But he looked over at the destroyer pulling alongside and realized they would not be able to pick him up; the destroyer was keeping pace with the carrier and both would be long gone after Eurice hit the water. He looked aft and could not see any other ships in the carrier’s wake. Eurice was trapped between water and fire.
Okay, if I jump over here and nobody sees me, who’s going to know? I don’t want to just drown out there by myself. He stared at the water for a minute and tried to make a rational decision. Water or fire?
Eurice didn’t like his choices, but he figured he had a slightly better chance with the fire. He put on his oxygen mask again and knelt down in front of the hatch with black smoke pouring out. After taking one last glance at the bright blue sky, he plunged into the pitch-black hatch and started feeling his way along.