The horror continued on the flight deck, but the men were beginning to make progress in fighting the fire. Sailors were manning hoses as best they could, pouring seawater and fog foam onto the burning jet fuel and the wreckage of the planes. It often took a dozen men to man a fog-foam hose, with several holding the hose on the fire and another group manning a water wand, a pipe several feet long with a diffuser on the end to create a fine water spray. The water team held the wand over the heads of the fog-foam team, soaking them as they worked and protecting them from the searing heat of the fire just ahead. (This combination of foam and water was proper firefighting technique because the water did not wash away the foam.)
With the Forrestal’s firefighting team wiped out in the first moments of the fire, the sailors had to take over and learn on the job. Some of them had been trained in firefighting techniques but had no real experience, while others had no training whatsoever. As the blazes roared so close it made them flinch from the heat, the men with a little training tried to take the lead. They provided impromptu lessons on how to use the fog foam and the water wands, and they showed the others how to use the oxygen breathing apparatus, the OBAs that allowed the men to get close to the deck fire and some of the burning compartments below. The OBAs were a crucial tool if the men were going to fight the fires anywhere belowdecks, and more was involved than just pulling the mask over your face. Some actually had to sit down and read the instructions that came with the device, while the fires roared nearby and their buddies needed help.
Everywhere they looked on the rear portion of the flight deck, planes were burning furiously and churning heavy black smoke into the air. The entire rear of the flight deck was ablaze, and their first goal was to stop the blaze from moving any farther forward on the deck.
The big explosions during the fire’s first moments had spread the fire far beyond its original site at McCain’s plane, and smaller blasts of ammunition, fuel tanks, and other items continued for a long time. Ejection seats in the burning planes were firing, sending the remains of a pilot’s seat skyward in a weak imitation of their real purpose. Missiles and rockets cooked off periodically, exploding where they lay or their propellant igniting and sending the projectile across the deck at low level, a lightning-fast killer that took out anyone in the way. The warhead on the rocket or missile might then explode with all the explosive power that was intended for ground targets in Vietnam. Every time a bit of red-hot shrapnel made its way to another plane, there was the chance of setting off a whole new fuel spill, fire, and major explosions from the ordnance. Every plane sitting on the deck represented a target for the willy-nilly ways of flying debris. At any moment, the tiniest bit of metal could find a target that could spread the fire much, much farther forward on the flight deck.
There were dozens of vulnerable planes, but none posed more danger than the KA-3B Skywarrior parked on the elevator just behind the island. The Skywarrior was a tanker plane, already loaded with twenty-eight thousand pounds of jet fuel. It was unmanned, having just recently been brought up from the hangar bay below. The plane was to be part of the scheduled air strike, flying off with the attack planes to provide midair refueling. Now it sat on the starboard side of the deck, only yards away from the critical island structure on one side and the roaring fire. If the tanker’s fuel exploded, it would probably wipe out everyone on the deck and pour hundreds of gallons of burning fuel down onto the men working in the hangar bays directly below. The fuel tanker was a huge hazard, just sitting there with no protection.
On the bridge, Captain Beling realized the danger posed by all the remaining planes on the deck—and in particular by the Skywarrior and the A-6 Intruders parked just aft of the fuel tanker behind the island.
“Damn it, they’re parked right near the uptakes from the boiler rooms,” Beling commented, thinking out loud about the dangers to the chimneylike structures that provided ventilation for the ship’s vital engine room. “Those planes are armed and loaded, aren’t they? If one of those bombs goes, it’s going to ruin the draft of the fires”—meaning the boiler fires in the engine room. “We won’t have any power.”
Losing power would be a major downturn in the ship’s effort to survive, preventing it from continuing forward to keep the fire blown back aft and making it impossible to maneuver in cooperation with other ships coming to her aid. Clearly the planes on deck had to be moved, so orders started going out to get them moved in any way possible. Normally the aircraft would be moved either under their own power or by small, low-profile tractors that would attach a tow bar to the front wheel, but that wasn’t possible in this critical state.
They had to move the planes by hand, with the sheer muscle power of young men pumped full of adrenaline. All over the deck, they joined together to wrestle planes out of danger and take them much farther forward on the flight-deck, a more frantic and improvised version of the carefully choreographed ballet that was the usual flight-deck scene. The Skywarrior was one of the first concerns, but it could not be moved until a lot of other equipment was first moved out of the way. The tanker plane was parked on the elevator, on the very edge of the deck starboard, and in front of it were two helicopters, a big stack of heavy tow bars, and various other equipment. This area was referred to as “the junkyard” for good reason. Dozens of men set about moving all of this equipment first so they could get to the dangerous fuel tanker. Every minute mattered.
After a while, the path was clear and the men could begin to push the tanker forward. Even with dozens of men pushing hard, they had to find a tractor to take most of the weight. They managed to push the tanker to the center of the flight deck and then turn it right so it could be forced up toward Catapult 1 on the right side of the deck far forward. There they parked the plane as far away from the blaze as they could.
Some planes could not be moved forward, however, no matter how much muscle was applied. Either they were damaged in some way from the blasts, or they already were on fire or were leaking fuel. There was no way to stop a fuel leak in a plane, and they certainly didn’t want to move it into the relatively safe area. Some planes ignited from the wheels up, as the magnesium in their brake systems heated from the surrounding flames and the hot deck. Once the magnesium began to burn with its unique ferocity, the plane was a goner no matter what you did. And when the magnesium heated up sufficiently, it could explode like a bomb.
The bombs and missiles loaded on the planes posed their own explosive hazard, of course, and it was not feasible to remove the ordnance in such a crisis. The hazardous planes had to be dealt with, and there was neither the time nor the means to do it delicately. The solution was a fairly universal one on an aircraft carrier: if there’s something you don’t want on an aircraft carrier anymore, you throw it overboard.
Word of this spread across the deck, from officers trying to organize the men and from orders given by the bridge and by damage control over radio headsets. But mostly the men came to the decision themselves, and it was reinforced when they saw the first plane pushed overboard. Ed Roberts jumped right into the effort to move planes because this was his main job anyway. He joined others who had started forming work parties around individual aircraft, bunching up around the big machines and grabbing whatever they could find to start pushing and pulling. Most of the aircraft were already parked on the rim of the carrier deck, so getting them overboard was just a matter of giving them a good push to get some momentum and then watching the huge aircraft slip over the side of the ship. But others made Roberts curse and scream while he pushed with all his might. The catwalks and various other structures off the ship’s edge sometimes made it hard to get the planes overboard in one easy swoop because they got caught, leaving the plane dangling over the edge. Once that happened, it was a tricky proposition to keep pushing it manually because you never knew when the plane or the catwalk would give way and suddenly plummet into the ocean.
Roberts saw that planes and wreckage were being pushed overboard all over the flight deck, but especially at the rear closest to the main fire. That’s where the planes were most at risk, and where most of them were already damaged and leaking fuel. While some sailors faced the fire directly with water hoses and fog foam, others worked nearby to manhandle the planes toward the deck edge and over into the sea. Roberts and the other sailors improvised whatever means they could to get the planes overboard quickly, and without taking anyone with them. Much of the deck equipment was burning already or damaged from the explosions, but the men found a few small tractors, a forklift, and, most luckily, the big apparatus known as the “Tillie.”
The Tillie, also known as the crash crane, was a big four-wheeled monster that could lift just about any plane, or anything else you stuck in its claws. The Tillie was used to clear out crash wreckage, damaged aircraft, or anything else too big and heavy to be moved easily. Though the Tillie was normally used to lift and carry a load, sometimes without even damaging an airplane, it was also very effective at brutish work. This was a day for getting things done quick and dirty, so the Tillie just ran up to big planes on the deck and forced them right over the side.
But most of the planes were jettisoned with nothing more than muscles and determination. At one point, Clark Chisum, the Forrestal’s weapons officer, was on deck helping coordinate some of the plane movement, including throwing some overboard. He was with a group of men pushing a plane toward the edge of the deck, straining to move the heavy machine, when he noticed that one of the men was just walking alongside and making no effort to push.
Chisum was about to ask him why the hell he wasn’t pushing when he saw the reason. The man was walking alongside the plane with his index finger jammed into a hole in the fuel tank, stopping a fuel leak that could cause the plane to burst into flames at any moment. Chisum decided the young man was doing a pretty good job.
At one point, Ed Roberts spotted serious trouble with a plane being moved by one of the small tractors on board. The driver of the cart had backed the plane up to the edge of the deck, intending to release it at the right moment and let the plane continue off the edge. But the tow bar did not release, and the plane’s weight was pulling the cart and driver back with it. The driver was frantically pushing on the brakes, but the cart was sliding backward in the fog-foam solution. The plane was getting close to the edge, and from the look on the cart driver’s face, Roberts wasn’t at all certain that the guy would have the presence of mind to jump off in time. He knew from his experience in moving planes that the tractor brakes weren’t enough to stop the plane once it got momentum, but he suspected the guy on the tractor didn’t. Roberts grabbed a wheel chock and walked alongside the plane as it moved backward, just as he normally would, and tossed the chock into place behind the wheel. The plane was moving too fast and the deck was too slippery; the wheel just spit the chock back out. He kicked it back into place and it came out again.
Roberts kicked it back into place again, and this time he jammed his foot against the chock to hold it in. He had to lean back on his arms and crab-walk backward as the plane continued to move, the chock skipping along as he tried to hold it in. He could see the deck edge getting closer and closer, and then finally the plane stopped six feet from the edge. The tractor driver gunned the engine to get traction as Roberts eased his foot off the chock, and then when it seemed it would hold, Roberts ran up and released the tow bar from the plane. With the tractor freed, he ran back and yanked the chock away from the wheel. With the deck tilted slightly and slippery, the plane began to move on its own and soon crashed over the side, flopping onto its back in the water. Roberts lay panting on the deck from the effort.
One plane aft of the island, a big Vigilante, which was much larger than the Skyhawks and Phantoms, was parked right on the edge of the starboard side when the fire started, just to the rear of where the big tanker plane had been parked and between the two elevators there. The plane clearly was in danger of igniting because of its proximity to the fire; the crew could see that flying debris had already opened the plane’s skin in a lot of places. More than a dozen men pushed on the plane and got it rolling backward off the flight deck, but then the wheels got hung up in the catwalk just below the deck. The plane sat there, firmly stuck with its nose pointing up at a forty-five-degree angle, still posing the same explosive hazard but now in a position that made it very difficult for the men to push it. And even if they could, the wheels were caught up in a tangle of metal that would be hard to break.
Quickly, a sailor came rushing up to the big plane in a heavy-duty forklift normally used to move around pallets of bombs and other materials on the flight deck. Wasting no time, he drove the big forklift up to the plane and raised the forks slightly, shoving them hard up under the fuselage. Then he raised the forks higher, forcing the plane into even more of a vertical position, and gunned the engine on the forklift, pushing forward on the plane as hard as he could. The other sailors stood back for the most part and tried to stay out of the way as the determined sailor pushed hard on the plane, the forklift’s wheels slipping in the slippery fog-foam solution on the deck. With the forks raised as high as they would go, the sailor kept pushing hard on the plane, the slipping of the truck causing it to rock back and forth into the plane. The sailors nearby were doing all they could to help by pushing wherever they could grab it, but the fight had really come down to one guy in a forklift trying to shove this damn plane off the ship. In doing so, the sailor was risking his own life, because the forks easily could become jammed in the plane’s fuselage and be pulled overboard as well.
At one point, another sailor drove up in one of the squat little tow tractors and rammed it up against the rear of the forklift, trying to keep the bigger truck from slipping so much on the soapy deck. After a long struggle, about fifteen minutes of pushing and wiggling, something finally gave way. Whatever parts of the ship and the plane had commingled on the edge of the deck came loose and the Vigilante finally fell into the ocean. The big plane slipped over the side and hit the water hard, floating for just a minute or so as the ship moved on, then sank out of sight in the ship’s wake. The crew eventually pushed over three intact RA-5C Vigilantes and one A-4E Skyhawk, not counting other plane wreckage that had been burned and eventually was pushed overboard.
Those planes posed a major risk to the crew, but not nearly as much as all the ordnance stowed on the ship for that morning’s aborted air strike. Tons of bombs were sitting all over, some stacked neatly on pallets in the bomb farm on the flight deck, behind the island where everyone was gathering, and others sitting where they were left on the deck as the fire broke out. Below, more bombs were in the hangar bays, and still more in the magazines belowdecks. In addition, there were hundreds of missiles and rockets on the flight deck and in the hangar bay, each one loaded with fuel and something nasty in the nose that was intended to knock out ground installations, blow planes out of the sky, or wipe out ground troops by the dozens. The rockets and missiles already loaded on the planes were going off as they burned in the big fire, and the crew was worried that the blaze would spread to the others.
And the bombs, of course, had proven to be very sensitive to the heat. Plenty of the old thousand-pound bombs were still left on the ship, not to mention the comparatively smaller ones, and just a handful of explosions from those fat boys had nearly crippled the Forrestal. If the crew didn’t get rid of the bombs, the fire could set off even more massive explosions, taking more men and threatening the ship’s survival.
Beling considered just ordering that the bombs be put on the big elevators and lowered to a safer area of the ship, but the elevators couldn’t rapidly handle enormous quantities of ordnance like what was stored on deck. It would be a slow process to get all the bombs belowdecks, and they couldn’t risk that delay.
So just as it had with the planes, word spread that the bombs and other ordnance were to be jettisoned as quickly as possible. There was no time to make careful, measured decisions about which bomb was at risk of exploding and which ones could safely be left alone. Officers on the flight deck and in the hangar bays started giving orders to shove it all overboard, now, and the crew got the idea fast. Everywhere, men started wrestling the big bombs to the edge of the carrier, sometimes rolling them along the deck, sometimes joining together and straining to lift the heavy weapons. Missiles and rockets were picked up by impromptu teams, sometimes of as many as ten men, drenched from the torrent of seawater falling in the hangar bays, and carried to the big open elevator doors. There they were heaved overboard and lost to the ocean.
This stuff was killing the men, and everybody wanted it off the damn ship. They were willing to do whatever it took to get it off.
John McCain had hustled off the flight deck and, after determining that his injuries were not serious, he headed down to the hangar-bay level. There he saw some sailors heaving bombs off of one of the elevators and over the side of the ship. He pitched in.
On the bridge, Captain Beling was concerned that his men would be beaten down by the ongoing fight against the fire and the everyday heat of the Tonkin Gulf. More than an hour had passed and he still didn’t have a reliable count of the injured and wounded, but the initial reports indicated the toll would be high. And he could see that men were dropping all over the flight deck from exhaustion. They had to keep fighting, and Beling thought maybe a pep talk would help. He picked up the mike for the 1MC, the public-address system that reached all parts of the ship.
“Men of Forrestal, this is the captain. The forward progress of the fire on the flight deck has been stopped. We’ve got some good confidence in our ability to get these under control. Keep up your very good work.”
Beling’s words were welcomed. Ed Roberts just wanted some information—any information—and he liked hearing Beling’s calm voice.
Well, okay then. At least he didn’t tell us to find life jackets. I guess we’re beating this thing.
Beling’s encouraging words spurred the men in the hangar bay to get rid of more of the bombs. McCain worked with the group of men on the elevator, two or three of them at a time grabbing a bomb and lugging it over to the deck edge. Some sailors found “bomb carts,” resembling a hand truck, to move the heavy bombs, but most of the work was done by energetic, highly motivated young men putting their hands on the bombs. McCain saw that the crew was doing their best to use the equipment at hand, whatever they could find, but sometimes throwing things off a ship isn’t as easy as it sounds.
One sailor in the hangar bay, for instance, was using a forklift to pick up a big pallet of bombs and carry them to the open elevator door. With the forklift, he was able to move a lot more bombs at once than the sailors could move by hand, but then he had the problem of actually throwing them off when he got close enough. A forklift isn’t designed to actually toss something off it, so the sailor couldn’t figure out how to dump the bombs off. He could get close to the edge, but then the big stack of bombs just sat there on his forks. He considered dropping them on the deck and pushing the whole stack off, but there was no clean edge on the deck; the pallet would just get hung up.
But like so many other men on the Forrestal that day, the sailor decided to do whatever it took. He drove the forklift, with the bomb pallet still raised high overhead, as close to the edge as he could and stopped. Then he put the forklift in gear, let go of the clutch, and jumped off the truck as fast as he could. As the sailor tumbled to the deck, not far from falling overboard himself, the forklift and its dangerous load flew forward and into the sea.
Extraordinary effort was becoming commonplace on the carrier. Men like Otis Kight stepped up and did whatever they had to do. He was one of the older guys on board, and the day of the fire was, in fact, his forty-third birthday. Kight had been on the carrier USS Yorktown when it was sunk during the Battle of Midway, and he had been shot down in a bomber over the Philippine Sea. In 1954, he survived an explosion aboard the carrier USS Bennington, which killed more than one hundred sailors. So when fire broke out on the Forrestal, Kight knew that dogged determination could mean the difference between living and dying. Joining in the effort with men less than half his age, Kight wrestled and heaved the big heavy bombs overboard with a ferocity that amazed those who saw him. Kight weighed only 140 pounds, but he single-handedly lifted 250-pound bombs, carried them to the elevator doors, and threw them overboard.
Those responsible for the ordnance were doing their best to prevent more explosions, but often that just meant directing the effort to throw bombs overboard and lending their own muscle to the effort. In the hangar bays, however, Chief Ordnanceman Thomas Lawler was trying to put his skills to work on some missiles he knew were dangerous. Lawler had been in his maintenance shop nearby when the fire first started. He had thought the ship was under attack, and when the ceiling of his shop started to glow red in a matter of minutes, he and his assistant fled into the hangar bays. Then he remembered that there were some F4 Phantom jets parked in Hangar Bay 3, already loaded with missiles. Plenty of men were running around already trying to jettison bombs and other ordnance, but missiles loaded on a plane can’t just be yanked off by unfamiliar hands. So Lawler ran to Hangar Bay 3 and found the Phantoms parked in the darkness and under a torrent of water. The lights were out and a thick smoke was gathering, so Lawler couldn’t see a thing except for the shadows and familiar forms of the planes. With his assistant at his side, he groped from one plane to another, feeling for the missiles and disengaging them from memory alone, unable to see anything they were doing. They felt for the various attachments, and once the missile was free from the plane, they would lower it to the deck and carry it to the edge of the ship.
Like Beling, Merv Rowland was starting to worry that the long fight might get the best of his men. The crew in damage control was performing well, but he knew that the initial adrenaline rush would wear off and then a man’s attention could wander. He couldn’t have any of that.
“This damn thing’s not over yet!” Rowland called out in damage control. “Stay focused on your job and don’t get slack on me. We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
Rowland also used the 1MC system to update the crew and give orders, his gravelly voice tinged with a sense of urgency that contrasted with Captain Beling’s ever-calm tone. Rowland sometimes hesitated as he gave instructions to the crew, and in the background, his damage-control crew could be heard feeding him information to pass on, such as where to find needed equipment and electrical controls.
“Repair parties two, three, and four report to your repair party if not needed elsewhere. Do not, I repeat, do not flood out the magazines until directed by the captain!
“All repair parties, this is control. There are two major fires on the fantail, port and starboard one, two, and three levels.
“Order: Make every effort to jettison the fuel drums on the port quarter. On the starboard fantail. I repeat, repair parties fighting the fire on the port quarter, make every effort to jettison the gasoline drums on the starboard fantail! A quick-release will run through the bulkhead, right by the access going to the carpenter shop.”
After helping throw bombs overboard in the hangar bay, John McCain made his way to the pilots’ “ready room,” where they often gathered for briefings and other meetings. Several other pilots were there already, and McCain joined them in watching the flight-deck action on a television monitor. The stationary camera was still transmitting the scene from above, though the operator had long since fled from the danger.
The pilots were impressed with the Forrestal’s crew.
“We’re professional military men, and I suppose it’s our war,” McCain said after the fire. “And yet, here were enlisted men who earn a hundred and fifty dollars a month and work eighteen to twenty hours a day—and I mean manual labor—and they certainly would have survived had they not stayed to help the pilots and fight the fire.”
The crew was mobilizing to do whatever they could, but they needed help. Fortunately, the ships nearby had sensed the urgency of the situation immediately and sprang into action. Some of the other ships on Yankee Station were within sight of the Forrestal, and the moment the fire first started, the sailors standing watch on those ships called in the emergency to their commanding officers. From miles away, the sailors on the other ships could see that something terrible was happening to the Forrestal. The ship in the distance suddenly sprouted an ugly black smoke plume that rose high into the morning sun, and they could see debris blown into the air and the splashes made by planes, debris, and people hitting the water.
Even without knowing what was going on, they radioed for help from any U.S. vessels in the area. Soon, messages from the Forrestal itself made it clear that the ship was in a desperate fight to survive. The USS Oriskany and the USS Bon Homme Richard, two aircraft carriers, immediately ceased their own flight-deck preparations and turned their attention to the Forrestal. With a fellow flattop in such dire trouble, the crews of the nearby carriers knew that their resources could make the difference in the ship’s surviving the fire. At 10:56 A.M., the destroyers Mackenzie, Rupertus, and Tucker also turned toward the Forrestal and awaited orders for coordinating a rescue effort with the other ships. Less than five minutes after the fire started, help was on the way.
Unlike the carriers, the destroyers would be able to maneuver in close and directly aid in fighting the fire. All three ships sounded general quarters and turned toward the Forrestal. They poured on the engines to nearly full throttle, rushing to close the distance. By 11:02 A.M., eleven minutes after the fire started, the Rupertus was close enough to drop its relatively small “motor whale boat” in the water and start assisting in the rescue of men in the water. The Rupertus started maneuvering in close to the Forrestal’s left rear, all the time watching closely for men and debris in the water, dodging left and right to avoid them.
The aircraft carriers were launching all of their helicopters to aid in the rescue, and the men already in the water were a primary concern. Some had been blown into the water by the first bomb explosions, and others were still jumping into the sea to escape the fires. A total of forty-seven men went overboard. Up above, Angel 20, the helicopter crew that had been on plane-guard duty and saw the fire start, was the first helicopter on the scene, approaching the Forrestal from the right side and crossing in front of the bridge before curving around to the rear of the ship on the left side. As David Clement positioned the helicopter to follow the carrier’s wake and look for men overboard, one of the big bomb explosions rocked his craft violently. Clement righted the helicopter and looked in awe at how bad the fire was, then he repeatedly radioed for assistance. His calls for help broke up as his helicopter was buffeted by the shock waves from explosions on the deck, shaking the craft hard and causing it to bounce wildly through the air with Clement struggling to maintain control.
“We have multiple men in the water, repeat, multiple men in the water!” Clement radioed. “Angel twenty requesting assistance!”
The pilot considered pulling away from the stricken carrier because of the danger from the concussions and flying debris, any one bit of shrapnel capable of hitting a soft spot in the fuselage or shearing off a rotor blade. But almost immediately, Leonard Eiland spotted one of several men in the water. He pointed him out and Clement headed in that direction.
Though they had trained extensively for picking up downed pilots and the occasional man overboard, Clement and one of the rescue swimmers, Albert Barrows, had never participated in a real rescue. Eiland and the other swimmer, James O. James, each had one rescue under their belts. Clement dumped seven hundred pounds of fuel in the ocean to make the helicopter lighter and more maneuverable during the rescue. Then he put Angel 20 right over the man in the water and Barrows jumped in with a “fish pole” used to reach the rescue sling lowered from the helicopter and push it toward the victim, who could be panicky. James, the other swimmer, stayed aboard to direct the pilots and operate the winch that would haul the man in once he was in the sling. Barrows used the fish pole to help the first man get in the sling, making the first water rescue only four minutes after the fire started.
James helped the burned man into the helicopter and then the pilots maneuvered over to another man in the water. They picked up two more men in the next ten minutes, both of them badly burned. But after the first rescue, Barrows realized the victims were nearly helpless and stopped using the fish pole, instead swimming directly to the injured men so he could put the rescue sling around them. The swimmer had a hard time hanging on to the victims because their burned skin kept coming off in his hands. The helicopter crews weren’t used to seeing so much trauma on the men they pulled out of the water. The men coming off the ship were badly wounded and a great many of them were severely burned over most of their bodies. Many were in shock, unable to help in their rescue, and their clothes had been blown off in the explosions.
As on all the other helicopters working to rescue men from the sea, the crew of Angel 20 was working at a feverish pace, pushing their aircraft to the limit. The helicopters flew at top speed back to the carriers once they had wounded men on board and hovered for long periods while the swimmers tried to save the injured. The prolonged hovering put a strain on the aircraft. As Angel 20 approached a fourth victim in the water, Clement saw that the engine was seriously overheating.
Clement reported back to his flight controllers on the Oriskany that he was redlining the engine, and they ordered him back to the carrier. He acknowledged the order, but then he couldn’t bring himself to pull away from the men in the water. He kept looking at the instrument gauges and then back at the men in the water. He couldn’t do it.
I can’t leave them. We’ve got to get those men.
Clement ordered his swimmer back in the water and he hovered for another long while, watching the temperature gauge creep a little higher every minute. Clement knew he was risking his own life and that of his crew, but he knew they didn’t want to leave either.
The fourth man was brought aboard, burned like the others, and then Angel 20 hustled back to the Oriskany. They off-loaded the injured men while undergoing a “hot fuel,” in which the craft is refueled with the engine running and the rotors turning, ready to jump off the deck as soon as the fuel hose is pulled back. By 11:12 A.M., Angel 20 was in the air again and heading back to the Forrestal. Clement was relieved to see the engine temp drop once they stopped hovering so much.
Clement and his crew made one more rescue and then landed on the Forrestal’s deck to unload the man, using a spot far forward of the fire. With more helicopters on site for water rescues, they headed back to the Oriskany to start shuttling supplies between the carriers.
All around the Forrestal, surface and air ships were closing in like friends and family eager to help in a crisis. On the other carriers, sailors were hauling their own firefighting gear to the flight deck for transfer, filling big cargo nets with fire hoses, fog-foam solution, and air masks, as well as medical equipment. The air swarmed with helicopters, and a half-dozen ships and smaller boats were coming into sight.
The destroyers were the hard-charging friends rushing in to help the stricken carrier as directly as possible, able to move in remarkably close to the big carrier. The other aircraft carriers nearby could provide much-needed assistance in the way of helicopters and supplies, but they could not maneuver closely enough to actually aid in the firefighting. The destroyers, though not small ships at all, were highly maneuverable and so they were able to rush right to the Forrestal’s side.
Captain Beling radioed from the Forrestal bridge that the destroyers had permission to move in as close as possible, but he also emphasized that he was not ordering the destroyers to do so. Realizing how dangerous such maneuvering would be to the destroyers, he made it clear that the destroyers should move in only at their own discretion.
The skippers of the destroyers did not hesitate to move in close. They steered close in to the big carrier, carefully matching the big ship’s speed and diligently keeping a steady course in the uneven water so they could get close enough to direct their own firefighting hoses on the carrier’s fires. The destroyers had men stationed on their decks with charged fire hoses, ready to fight the fires visible on the carrier, and when they got within range, the sailors opened the hoses and started pouring water on hot spots that were inaccessible to the carrier’s crew. The destroyer crews also stood on the deck tossing life jackets and inflatable life rafts overboard to the men in the water.
In an extreme exaggeration of the supply-ship maneuvering that the carrier experienced all the time, the destroyers maneuvered to within twenty feet of the huge carrier for long stretches, hugging her heaving bulk in a delicate operation that required the very best of the destroyer’s crews. At one point, the Mackenzie’s upper mast was only five feet away from the Forrestal’s elevator deck. Impressive ships in their own right, the destroyers nonetheless were dwarfed by the huge carrier, their tall masts barely reaching the level of the flight deck. With the destroyers at general quarters, the best of the best were manning the bridges, but still, the operation was a tense, extremely demanding exercise in close-quarter steering and propulsion. The young men on the bridges of the destroyers could see nothing but the looming hull of the carrier as they looked out the windows, and at times the clouds of thick black smoke from the Forrestal blinded everyone on the destroyers. It took all the concentration they could muster to maintain a steady course without crashing into the side of the bigger ship. Sailors on the bridge and on watch on the bow kept an eye out for men and debris in the water, and periodically they called out for a sudden course change. And as the Forrestal crew worked to jettison burning planes and bombs, the destroyers had to zig in and out to avoid them. The crews watched for items being pushed over the carrier’s flight deck, and suddenly the destroyer would heave out to avoid the falling debris and move around the plane as it slowly sank in the carrier’s wake. Then the destroyer moved back in close again, once again carefully calculating its speed and course to match the carrier’s. The destroyers needed to be as close as possible, but all the while, the destroyer crews knew they could be crushed almost instantly by a sudden movement of the carrier. And at the same time, the destroyers had to counter the bigger ship’s natural tendency to suck in anything nearby as its huge hulk cut through the water. Steering a straight course with the carrier wasn’t enough; the destroyers had to constantly pull away from the carrier just enough to counter the pull toward the carrier. With only twenty feet between the ships, there was absolutely no room for error. Any lurch to the left or right by the carrier could be devastating to the destroyers alongside. Such maneuvering is delicate enough when both ships are in good shape, but it became even more risky when the huge carrier’s control was compromised. They had no idea whether the Forrestal’s steering and propulsion were damaged, praying only that the carrier could maintain a steady course as they cruised alongside. This tense scene would continue for three hours.
The Forrestal was surrounded by friendly ships, but there also were a few that weren’t necessarily interested in helping the stricken ship. The big black cloud pouring off the Forrestal’s deck had attracted the attention of everyone on the water for miles around, and that included a number of Vietnamese or Chinese boats in the area. It had not been unusual for the Forrestal’s crew to see local boats in the water, often the wooden junks or sampans with big sails that were common to the waters off Vietnam. The officers knew that many of them were enemy boats watching the American ships and sending reports back to the mainland by radio. Normally, the boats stayed a fair distance away, even though the open water allowed them a clear view of the carrier’s operations. The crew noticed a couple of boats in the area that morning before the fire, but nobody cared much. They were tiny and far away.
But with the Forrestal on fire, some of those junks started moving in closer. By 11:10 A.M., about twenty minutes into the fire, crews on several ships reported seeing the local boats as close as two thousand yards away. With men in the water awaiting rescue, and with the carrier clearly in a vulnerable state, the appearance of the junks was not a welcome sight.
While he was on the flight deck helping with the firefighting, Ed Roberts looked out and noticed that suddenly boats were everywhere. He hadn’t noticed any local boats at all before the fire, and now suddenly there were dozens.
“What the hell is that all about?” Roberts asked someone nearby. “They just out here to gawk at us?”
“It’s more than that,” the other man said. “They get thirty-five dollars if they bring in an American body or an American ID card.”
“Motherfuckers…” Roberts muttered, shaking his head. The two men forgot about the boats until they heard a thunderous boom from the water nearby. They turned to look and saw that one of the destroyers had fired its big guns on a local boat. The boat disintegrated, bits of wood raining down like confetti. Within minutes, the swarm of boats disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.
As the other ships in the area closed in to help, the Diamond Head could only hang back and watch the fire from afar. Still in the area after supplying the Forrestal with the faulty ordnance the night before, it could not maneuver close to provide any hands-on help because no one wants an ammunition ship anywhere near a fire. The best it could do was to follow behind at a distance of several miles, the last in a long line of ships following in the carrier’s wake. The Diamond Head sailors scanned for any men left in the water, but they found only debris. The crew eventually transferred some firefighting gear to the Forrestal later in the day.
Not knowing much about what was going on except a fire on a carrier, the Diamond Head crew were left to wonder how bad the situation was. The black smoke and the buzz of activity around the ship told them it was serious. Even at a distance, they could see explosions on the flight deck. When word first spread that the Forrestal was on fire, the Diamond Head crew dropped whatever they were doing and went to the upper deck to see. There they stood, men who had grown accustomed to the daily fear that their own ship might blow up underneath them. They were watching a navy carrier fight for its life, and the explosions on the flight deck were coming from the ordnance they had provided just hours earlier.
As they stood in the bright sun of the Tonkin Gulf, the crew of the Diamond Head felt they were watching their own worst nightmare befall someone else, and there was nothing they could do to help. The men were completely silent as they watched the Forrestal burn, imagining the horrors that must be happening there, and more than a few cried.