The ship had become an inescapable scene of drama and desperation, the fire now having spread throughout much of the rear portion of the ship and down many levels. The explosions had ripped open the ship’s hull down past the waterline, causing compartments to flood with seawater. That flooding, combined with the seawater being pumped throughout the ship to fight the fires, was beginning to upset the ship’s balance and she started leaning to the left. That list was dangerous because it could cause equipment to shift suddenly and slide off the flight deck or across the hangar bay, and, if not controlled, could eventually lead to the ship capsizing.
The list scared the hell out of some of the crew. When they felt the big ship leaning to one side, some worried for the first time that they were going to sink. They were accustomed to the carrier being nearly as stable under their feet as the ground back home, but then they felt the huge ship tipping enough to make them lean hard for balance, and causing water and fog foam, plus any remaining jet fuel, to slosh over the side. They had no way of knowing if this was a temporary problem or the beginning of the end. One thing was certain—they didn’t have to be engineers to know that, if it continued, the list would cause the Forrestal to fall over on its side, and from there it wouldn’t be long before it sank to the bottom. Up on the flight deck, Ed Roberts wondered if the crew would have to abandon ship, and he started planning his own survival. He could see the Vietnamese coastline in the distance, and his mind raced with scenarios that involved him swimming to shore and having to fend for himself. With this in mind, he raced down to his bunk and got the big knife he had just recently bought. He strapped that onto his belt, thinking it would come in handy on shore, and then he grabbed a carton of cigarettes and headed back up to the flight deck. Somehow, in the terror of the moment, it all made sense to him.
But down in engineering, Merv Rowland was on top of the problem. Once the list began, he ordered his men to shift fuel oil from one storage tank to another, compensating for the seawater entering the ship on the other side. Before long, the ship righted itself.
The efforts to fight the fire were taking hold, but all over the ship men found themselves locked in their own individual struggles. Frank Eurice had plunged into the darkness of the smoky passageway to make his way off the fantail, where he had found himself trapped in the worst of the fire, groping his way through the darkness and hoping that the seven minutes of air on his breathing apparatus would be enough to get him out. He wasn’t at all sure it would be, and he was relieved to finally see sunlight breaking through the dark smoke. As he threw himself through the hatch and onto the gun mount on the side of the ship, Eurice realized that he had made small progress in saving himself. The gun-mount platform, a small deck jutting out from the side of the ship and holding one of the carrier’s big five-inch guns, was only a slightly better place to be than the fantail where he had been trapped. But now he had used most of his oxygen mask in getting here, which meant he was stuck.
Eurice found a few other men already on the gun mount, the ones he had seen from below on the fantail, but they barely acknowledged him as he threw himself out of the smoking passageway and onto the wet, slippery deck. Then one of them came over to help Eurice to his feet and he realized it was a friend from his same division. The other men were manning a hose, so Eurice and his buddy took positions in the rear, helping control the heavy, lurching fire hose. When some of the smoke cleared a bit, Eurice could see that they were cooling down the ammunition-loading assembly for one of the five-inch guns. One of the gun assemblies had exploded already or been torn apart by the explosions above, but the other one was intact. They aimed the hose at the gun to keep it cool, and also because they didn’t have much else to do until they could find a way off of the gun mount.
Over on the other side of the ship, the sailors on the identical gun-mount platform were in far more danger. Located directly under the place where the flight-deck fire originated, the gun-mount deck jutting out from the side of the ship was being drenched in flaming jet fuel and debris, and the situation was no better inside. When the fire first started, twenty-year-old Milt Crutchley was at his usual station in the control room that targeted the five-inch guns. The job usually didn’t promise much excitement because the carrier, by its very nature, rarely got close enough to a vessel or plane for its guns to be used in defense. Crutchley’s job mostly consisted of maintaining the systems and occasionally honing the crew’s tracking skills by using a friendly plane as a target for the radar systems.
Crutchley heard the first alarm for a fire on the flight deck, and as with most of the crew, it only piqued his curiosity. Not expecting much, he started to make his way from the gun-control room to the gun-mount structure nearby so he could take a look at the flight deck. But as he went through the hatch that led to the exposed gun mount, Crutchley heard the general-quarters alarm and turned back inside to man his gun-control station. At nearly the same moment, the first bomb blast rattled the ship and sent flaming debris all over the gun-mount structure.
Two of Crutchley’s crew stumbled into the compartment as the explosions continued just overhead, knocking them off their feet. The three of them were shouting and questioning one another about what was happening, but no one really knew. From the force of the explosions that continued, Crutchley assumed the worst.
Damn it, somebody’s snuck in and attacked us! We’re going to be the first aircraft carrier to take damage from the North Vietnamese!
The explosions were deafening and kept knocking the three men around the control room, making them work hard just to stay on their feet. Before long, the men could smell smoke nearby. And soon after that, they could see it entering their control room.
The other two crew members were about Crutchley’s age, but he was in charge of that control room, so they were his responsibility. He soon got on the phone and called the department that would direct the gun use during combat, but the sound-powered phones designed for combat use had gone dead. The regular phones, expected to go dead in combat, were still operational. Once he got through, the news was discouraging.
“There’s a major fire on the flight deck. The bombs are going off,” someone told Crutchley. “You might as well abandon your GQ station because we don’t have any gun mounts for you to control anyway. They’re in the fire.”
Crutchley hung up the phone and told the other men they were all going to abandon the space, a relief to the men until they started looking for a way out. In just minutes, they had become trapped by the fire all around them. The smoke was still coming in the room, even though they had closed the door and turned off the ventilation system. They had to get out somehow. They wouldn’t live long in this room.
They looked out onto the gun mount and decided that was a lousy place to be, already covered with flaming debris and right under some of the worst fires on the flight deck. The only other option, no matter how bad, was to try to make their way through the ship to a safer area. That meant leaving the smoke-filled room and venturing into the even smokier passageways. Crutchley thought about it for a minute and decided they had to go. But still, he was scared to death. The worst part was that he had to take responsibility for these other two men. At twenty years old, he had to save their lives.
Oh God, I hope this works. I don’t want to screw up and get somebody killed.
The men had no oxygen masks, so they had to just rush into the smoky passageway and hope to find clear air before long. They headed out and found that the passage was getting darker and smokier, until finally they reached Hangar Bay 3, the huge open area directly under the flight-deck fire at the rear of the ship. Unbeknownst to Crutchley, the big bay doors had been closed already to seal off the burning hangar space. Once they got to the hangar, the air was even heavier with smoke and there was no light at all. The fire-deluge system was pouring water down from the ceiling, but the water pipes were directly under the flight-deck fires, so the water was scalding hot. Crutchley told the other two men to link arms with him so that they could stay together in the pitch-black darkness, and they struggled along slowly trying to find something by touch, anything they might recognize and that would lead them to safety. They struggled along slowly, choking and hunched over to withstand the hot water pouring on them. Before long, Crutchley decided that this trek was futile.
We’re just going to stumble around here in the dark until we suffocate. We have to get out of here!
Still linked arm in arm, the three men snaked back the same way they came and eventually made it back to their starting point. They fell into the control room and slammed the door shut, but the room was filling with smoke nearly as bad as in the hangar bay. The three men were exhausted from their escape attempt, covered in soot and soaked from the water deluge in the hangar bay, choking and coughing up black phlegm. They lay there on the floor trying to breathe and wondering what the hell they were going to do next. Crutchley was starting to think they might die right there on the floor.
He tried calling combat control again, and surprisingly the phone still worked. Breathing heavily, he told them that their escape attempt had not worked and they were trapped. Combat control said they would send help if they could, but made it clear that Crutchley should not wait for rescue.
The three men lay there, feeling the heat seep in with the smoke, trying to stay as low as possible to find the little bit of air still in the room. They could hear the explosions and the fire all around them. Their sense of panic had been left behind in the hangar bay, but the fear stayed with them. Now they were just completely fatigued and concentrating on every breath. They lay there on the floor for an hour, terrified, holding wet rags across their faces and praying that the compartment would have just a little bit more air for them to breathe.
Crutchley’s responsibility to save the men in his charge kept him motivated to find a solution. He thought about the hatch that led to the gun-mount structure outside, but he was reluctant to open the armored, watertight door and let in everything that was coming off of the flight deck. Desperate for a way out, he called combat control once more to ask what they knew of the gun mount outside. The gun mount’s on fire, they told Crutchley, but we don’t know for sure how close it is to that hatch. You can take your chances if you want to.
Crutchley thought about the risk of opening that hatch and stepping right into the fire. He discussed the option with the other two men and they agreed they had to try. Things weren’t getting any better in that damn control room.
“We’re either going to die in here or we’re going out on that sponson,” Crutchley said to the other men. “It can’t be any worse out there. And even if it is, maybe it’ll be quick.”
The three men dragged themselves over toward the hatch leading to the gun-mount structure, and with a mixture of dread and hope, Crutchley slowly opened it. He peered out as he opened the hatch just a couple of inches, and the sunlight flooded into the dark compartment. Without opening the hatch too much, he tried to see what awaited them on the other side.
Fresh air!
Crutchley opened the hatch wider and saw that the gun mount was indeed a mess, but the fire was on the other end, away from the hatch. All three men scrambled over the lip of the hatch and fell onto the gun-mount platform, breathing heavily and coughing as they took in the clean sea air. The gun mount was far from a safe place to be, but it was a damned sight better than dying in that smoke-filled control room.
After getting their breath again, the men realized they still could not rest. The gun mount was right under the flight-deck fires, and periodically they had to dodge flaming fuel, debris, and molten metal. There was no other way off the gun-mount platform except the hatch they had just come through, so their only other option was jumping overboard. They started talking about that, but no one liked the idea much. The only good point was that they’d found a bunch of life jackets lying around. The gun-mount platform had a life-jacket-storage bin and one of the explosions had blown it open. Jackets were floating around in the water-and-foam swill that covered the platform, so they started looking for one that hadn’t been damaged.
They found three good jackets and put them over their heads, strapping the waist belts around. Then they went to the railing farthest from the fire and debated whether to jump. Nobody wanted to, but it didn’t take long for them to decide they had to go overboard, because the gun-mount structure was getting worse every minute. They were scared to death of going in the water, knowing how risky that would be, but Crutchley decided they had to.
The three men climbed over the railing and held on to the ship as they looked down at the sixty feet they would fall before hitting the water. From the railing, there was nothing between them and the water far below. They felt the wind on their faces and turned away as a gust of smoke choked them. They kept looking down at the sea and back at the fire, holding on tight to the railing. A destroyer was approaching from the rear, giving them some hope that they would be rescued after they hit the water. But they also worried that the destroyer would run over them.
All they had to do was let go. But they hesitated. And in that second, one of the men spoke.
“Milt, I’m not jumping.”
“Whaddya mean you’re not jumping? We have to!” he replied.
“I can’t swim. This vest isn’t going to be enough. I can’t swim.”
Crutchley realized that the man had come to the Forrestal through the navy reserve, which didn’t require its recruits to prove they could swim as the regular navy did. Crutchley didn’t feel like he could force the man to go overboard if he couldn’t swim, and they certainly weren’t going to leave him behind. Besides, Crutchley and the third man weren’t eager to jump overboard either.
So the three men climbed back over the railing and tried to think of another plan. They were arguing about whether there really could be any other plan, and still considering the idea of jumping, when the flaming tail section of an airplane came tumbling down from the flight deck and crashed onto the gun mount right near them.
The men crouched down to avoid the debris as much as possible, and then Crutchley spoke up. They could work their way underneath the railing of the gun-mount platform and then leap down to a little platform that jutted out underneath. It wouldn’t be easy, and it was quite a leap to the platform below. There still wouldn’t be anywhere to go once they got down there. But at least they’d be farther away from the fire, he told them.
The other men agreed, and they climbed over the railing again, this time close to the ship. They gingerly worked their way down the outside of the gun-mount platform, and when they could climb no lower, they let go and fell about fifteen feet to the other platform. They all made it safely and looked around for the next step. As they looked out, they saw that they were close to the big crane that was used to move airplanes and other large cargo on and off the ship. Its long arm was tucked alongside the ship’s body when not in use. Surveying the scene, they could not believe what they saw on the crane.
A man was hanging from the crane’s hook. He was in a safety harness but hanging limp as a rag doll. Crutchley supposed the man must have been doing some sort of maintenance work when the fire started, and then he was left hanging there, subject to every one of the explosions going off only thirty yards away. He must have had assistants with him when he was doing the work, but they had left him there, hanging out directly over the water and unable to bring himself back in. He seemed to be barely conscious, probably in shock, and unable to hold his head up.
Crutchley and his crew called to the man to wake him up, to see if he could be helped. After a moment, the man roused and looked over to them but he could not do much more than that. They had to shout encouragement to him for several minutes before he awoke enough to really respond, and then Crutchley took off his own life vest and tossed it to the man. Surprisingly, the man was able to catch it and put it on. Then he seemed to wake up more and, with the encouragement of the guys on the platform, was able to hoist himself up on the crane arm. He got himself on the arm of the crane and then just rested, clutching the steel supports until he could move further.
After helping that man, Crutchley and his crew returned to their own plight. They couldn’t stay on the platform because fuel, molten metal, and other material were still raining down on them. The more they thought about it, the more they realized the airplane crane was their best bet. The crane was roughly the shape of a triangle, with a vertical column attached to the side of the ship and a lifting arm that jutted out over the water. From the tip of the crane arm, a third support with cables ran back to the vertical column against the ship. That meant the upper support led right up to the flight-deck level, but it was an awkward path angled up at about forty-five degrees. Luckily, the crane was moved in close to the ship, rather than extended all the way over the water.
If they could get up on that crane support, Crutchley thought they would at least have more options for how to escape. But the crane was not close enough to jump to, and there was no easy way to get to it. Once they did get to it, it would still be a dicey operation. The crane had no walkway that went up the length of the support arm, so they would have to just inch their way along its round pipes.
It all seemed pretty iffy, but they realized that they had to get out on the crane to help the man who was trapped. He didn’t look like he was going to hold on much longer.
But how to get there?
There was one way, but no one was eager to suggest it. In all the mess that had been blown off the flight deck, one of the arresting cables, the big cables that snag the plane’s tail hook on landing, had been severed and one end was blown their way. The big heavy cable was hanging down off the flight deck and draped near their platform, out over the crane arm. It was strong enough to hold the men if it didn’t shift from their weight. They discussed it and decided once again that they had no better choice. They had to use the cable to get out on the crane.
Reluctantly, Crutchley and the other two men climbed up on the platform railing and grabbed the cable. One by one, they pulled themselves hand over hand along the cable until they could reach the platform. If their strength gave out or the cable dislodged, they would go right into the water, maybe after bouncing off some structure on the ship. Crutchley didn’t even have a life vest anymore, having given it to the injured man on the crane.
After a tense while, all four men were hugging the crane arm and looking down at the sea sixty feet below. They stayed there for a while, just trying to hang on and not to move too much for fear of falling off. They were about to start inching their way up when they saw the destroyer Rupertus moving in close to the ship, almost right underneath them. As the ship drew closer, they could see that the crewmen were on the deck with fire hoses aimed at the Forrestal. When they noticed Crutchley and his crew up above, they shouted at them to offer help.
“Are you going to jump?” they yelled from the destroyer.
The men looked at one another and considered the idea again, not sure if they would safely make it all the way up the crane arm. But then they realized that the prospect of going overboard was worse now than it was before. In addition to the long fall, the possibility of drowning, and being pulled into the carrier’s big propellers, now they might also be sucked under by the destroyer or even crushed between the two ships.
“Hell no! We’re not jumping!”
After waiting a while longer on the crane, just wondering what to do next, Crutchley decided they had to move. The longer they stayed there, the higher the risk that something would come flying off the deck and knock them off. So he and his crew decided that they had to make their way up the crane arm, inching along the little service walkway and then onto the round arm that led the rest of the way up to the flight-deck level. Crutchley’s crew climbed up the arm first, balancing on the piping and holding on to the control cables that ran down the arm. The climb was tricky, up a steep incline on a round pipe covered in slippery foam solution. Near the bottom, the control cables were too high for the men to grab for support, and then as they got closer to the top, the cable converged on the upper end of the piping and was too low to hang on to. After the first two made it most of the way up, Crutchley reached the man who had been hanging there, and helped him up. The guy was remaining conscious, but that was about all. Crutchley wasn’t at all sure the guy was going to be able to get up the crane arm and all the way to the flight deck, so he followed along close behind, ready to grab him if he slipped.
As they neared the top, Crutchley could see for the first time just what a mess the flight deck had become. Fires were still out of control, but Crutchley had no doubt that the flight deck still was their only escape. Just then, a fuel tank exploded on one of the planes, showering flaming fuel in Crutchley’s direction. The burning fuel and other debris flew past Crutchley, enough of it landing on him and the dazed man to make them wince with pain, the thunder of the explosion already making them duck down as much as they could without losing their grip on the crane.
Crutchley saw that his companions had reached the flight deck already, but the last steps seemed to take forever for him and the injured man. After pausing to shake off the hot debris that landed on them, burning through their uniforms, they inched their way along, slowly getting all the way up to the flight-deck level, where Crutchley’s two crew members were waiting, urging them on. They grabbed the injured man and pulled him up on the flight deck as he got close, and then they helped Crutchley up. The injured man collapsed as soon as he was safe, and crew members who had been fighting the fires rushed over to help the obviously exhausted group.
The men had come up on the flight deck near the spot where Jim Bangert’s plane had fired the rocket, now in the worst of the fire zone after the fire had spread. Even nearly two hours after the fire started, this still was not a good place to be. But it was a hell of a lot better than where they had been. Crutchley felt a huge sense of relief.
Thank God. I didn’t get anybody killed.
On the other side of the ship, Eurice and his friend started heaving overboard anything else on the sponson that could be moved. Crates used to store ammunition, as well as various other debris that had been blown off the flight deck, were burning all around them, so they cleared out the area as much as they could. Periodically, Eurice looked over toward the fantail where he had been trapped, and knew he had made the right decision. That area was now covered in flaming jet fuel and other material.
After about half an hour out on the gun-mount structure, Eurice noticed that the smoke billowing from the hatch was diminishing and turning from black to white, a sure sign that the fire was being extinguished. The smoke eventually diminished to nearly nothing, and the men on the gun-mount structure started thinking it might be safe to venture inside. As they were standing there debating whether to trek through the passageway without a breathing apparatus, a miraculous sight appeared. Out of the sooty, still-steaming hatch came a sailor carrying a tray of orange sodas. He had raided a nearby refrigerator and was passing out drinks to everyone fighting the fire.
It was a small delight that took on massive importance for the men. For the first time in the ordeal, Eurice and the other men on the gun-mount platform got the idea that maybe everything would turn out okay. They still didn’t know much about what was going on outside their line of sight, but nobody takes the time to pass out orange sodas when a ship is sinking.
After guzzling several orange sodas, the best he’d ever tasted, Eurice decided to leave the gun-mount platform in search of more fire hose. If they could get their hands on more fire hose to attach to the one they were using already, they might be able to do more firefighting than just cooling down the gun mount. A catwalk had been blown down onto the gun mount in such a way that it provided access to the flight deck, so the men searched for enough hose to go up and help out with the fires still raging topside.
Eurice made his way to Hangar Bay 3, by now a water-soaked mess, and started looking for fire hoses to scavenge. As he searched, he noticed that some of the men were gesturing in one direction, and turned around to see Captain Beling slogging through the hangar with his two marine orderlies close behind. True to his nature, Beling was taking a walk through the ship to see the damage for himself. He had already been to pri-fly and seen the shattered windows, the debris left when the staff there made a hasty retreat. Beling had access to more information than anyone else on the ship, but that wasn’t good enough. If his boys were fighting and dying nearby, he had to see it.
Eurice and many other sailors were shocked to see the captain off the bridge in the middle of such a crisis, astonished that he would put himself in harm’s way as the fires continued to burn and small explosions continued on the flight deck. His marine escorts were not at all happy to see the captain on the front line of the fire, and they were doing their best to dissuade him from entering some of the more dangerous areas.
Beling strolled through the hangar bay and assessed the damage from that vantage point, stopping to talk to several sailors about what they had seen. From there, he made his way through much of the ship not actively involved in the fires, reaching the conclusion that things weren’t nearly as bad as he expected from what he had seen on the flight deck. As he went through one of the big dining halls for the enlisted men, he could see that a meal had been under way when the general-quarters alarm sounded, with trays of food left on tables everywhere. Beling grabbed a couple of carrots as he walked by, and munched on them while he continued his tour.
One thing in particular reassured him that the ship was surviving the damage. Throughout the parts of the ship not actually burning or damaged by explosions, the air-conditioning was working just fine. The Forrestal was one of the first warships to have air-conditioning throughout most of the ship, and the cool air was always seen as a luxurious symbol of the ship’s bragging rights. Now, Beling found the system’s durability comforting in the midst of this disaster.
After Beling’s appearance, Eurice went back to searching for fire hose and eventually found enough to lug back to the gun mount. A few other men had brought some back also, so they coupled all the sections together and then headed to the flight deck by way of the catwalk hanging down on the gun mount. When they reached the flight deck, they were stunned. They knew that the situation was bad, but they were not prepared to see the flight deck covered in burning plane wreckage, fires still burning, injured men and bodies still lying where they had fallen. The entire flight deck was a steaming, hazy mess. The smell of burned plastic and explosives hung in the air, along with the stink of the jet fuel and fog foam.
Eurice and the other men surveyed the situation for a moment, brought to a halt by the shock of it all, and then started pulling their fire hose over to the rear portion of the flight deck where they could see that most of the work was being done. When they got closer, they could see that men were aiming fire hoses down into horrendous craters blown in the deck, and nearby, other teams were using an acetylene torch to cut holes in the deck. Compartments below the flight deck were still burning furiously, and the only way to get water in them was to make new holes in the flight deck and fight the fires from above. Black smoke burst out as soon as the torch broke through the armored deck, and a team poured water down the hole. Luckily, Rowland and Beling had authorized the purchase of a special acetylene torch just before departing for Vietnam. The Forrestal didn’t normally carry one capable of cutting through armored steel, and without it, the crew would have found it nearly impossible to get through the armor-plated flight deck.
As Eurice and his hose team started to pour water down a hole made from a bomb blast, one that didn’t have a hose team on it yet, they could see that the other men were yelling and gesturing to them.
“Pick up the hose! You gotta pick up your hose! The deck’s too hot!”
That’s when they first noticed that the other hose teams were hoisting the heavy hoses onto their shoulders and holding them there as they fought the fires. And that’s also when Eurice first noticed that he could feel the hot deck through his shoes, way too much actually. The fires in the compartments below were so hot that the flight deck was becoming unbearably hot to the touch, and several fire hoses had actually burned through as they lay on the deck.
Eurice and his hose team assumed the same position with the hose on their shoulders and fired water down into the hole, standing there for a while before the smoke cleared enough to reveal what they were soaking. As Eurice peered over the edge and into the hole, he could see an unexploded five-hundred-pound bomb about ten feet below.