The men battled the fires and their own fears for the entire morning and much of the afternoon. The flight deck had become a terrible mess, a remarkable contrast to its usually pristine order. After the fire spread across most of the flight deck to the rear of the island structure, it consumed everything that could not be tossed overboard. The sailors made slow but steady progress in extinguishing the blaze. They were encouraged by the white smoke that signaled a fire under control, and then alarmed when the smoke turned black again and roiled into the sky with a new ferocity.
Every few minutes, the 1MC address system crackled to life, sometimes with a whistle tone to alert the crew and then orders from Merv Rowland or someone else directing the firefighting effort.
“You are reminded that the emergency is not over,” Rowland’s gravelly voice boomed throughout the ship. “There are still fires. Re-man your GQ stations and stand fast until you are directed to do something! Do not go wandering about the ship! Re-man your GQ stations and stand fast until directed to secure.”
The fire played a cat-and-mouse game with the sailors, roaring up in one spot and then another, then hiding in the many compartments belowdecks. Even when the biggest of the infernos died down, sometimes only because they had consumed nearly everything that would burn, there was still smoldering debris everywhere, pockets of intense heat trapped between the many layers of the ship’s steel structure. The fire would not die easily or quickly, and it was taking a toll even on those who had survived the explosions, the searing flames, the deadly gases, and the sea below.
Exhaustion was hitting the men hard. In the initial hours, men had been fueled by adrenaline and the instinct to survive. But by early afternoon, they were losing steam. They had been working feverishly for hours, some with injuries they’d ignored or hadn’t even noticed until there was a pause in the action. The combined heat of the fires and the Tonkin Gulf afternoon was wearing them down. All over the ship, men were collapsing in heaps, soaked with sweat, seawater, fog-foam solution, fuel oil, and God knows what else. They were a mess from head to toe, black from the smoke or seared a bright red, their clothes ripped or blown off. Often, they had no idea if the rest of the ship was being saved or not. They knew only that their area, the one problem they were fighting at the moment, wouldn’t kill them right away and so they could take a minute to rest. For most of the men, the best they could hope for was a moment to sit down and catch their breath while someone else took a turn on the hose. Maybe they would even find a soft drink to choke down.
A few of the key officers found another way to keep going. As the day wore on and Rowland began to feel fatigued, he could see that more coffee wouldn’t be enough to keep him going. He could not leave his post, and he probably wouldn’t be able to do so for more than a day. Rowland had to be alert and capable if he were going to help keep the ship alive, so he sent word to the sick bay that he needed some Benzedrine. Known to the rest of the world in 1967 as “uppers” or “speed,” Benzedrine was pure energy in a pill. It could keep a man alert and active for days, but eventually at a cost.
When Dr. G. Gary Kirchner got Rowland’s request, he didn’t even think about it before agreeing. Military doctors often had Benzedrine on hand and it was not extraordinary to administer it in such an emergency situation. Kirchner didn’t hand the stuff out like candy, but for someone like Rowland, he knew it was necessary and that Rowland could be trusted with it. Rowland wasn’t the only officer who used speed to stay alert for a long period during the fire and its aftermath.
Kirchner dispatched a runner to damage control with enough Benzedrine to keep Rowland alert for a while.
Kirchner’s post in the sick bay was the center of the Forrestal’s pain. The fire had not reached that portion of the ship, but all of the wounded were being funneled to the small medical department and immediately the magnitude of the disaster had overwhelmed the medical staff. Kirchner was one of four doctors on board, in addition to a couple of “flight surgeons” who worked specifically with the aviators and were attached to their squadrons. There also were sixty-five corpsmen who provided first aid throughout the ship and helped get the wounded to sick bay.
Kirchner had been working on a patient that morning. The young man had been on one of the nearby destroyers when he crushed his hand, so he had been transferred by helicopter to the Forrestal for medical care. The injury was serious, more than the usual stomachache and lacerations that the doctor saw on a typical morning. Kirchner had just finished injecting the man’s hand with Xylocaine, an anesthetic, in preparation for reducing and casting the hand. That’s when they heard the first fire-alarm calls; Kirchner paused, but he was not concerned until he heard the call for general quarters, almost instantly followed by the first explosion. They were two decks below the flight deck and about in the middle lengthwise, but even so, the explosion rattled the tray of instruments at his side and the cabinets full of medicine and gear.
“Damn, that’s gotta be a plane striking the deck,” Kirchner said to his patient. Both of them were staring up at the sick bay’s ceiling as if it would somehow explain the tremendous shaking. Kirchner was already starting to think ahead, realizing that if a plane had crashed he should prepare to receive serious trauma patients.
As he paused and thought about what to do, more explosions caused the lights to flicker and knocked items off the walls all around Kirchner and the patient, both of them reaching out to steady themselves on a nearby counter. The kid with the broken hand looked at Kirchner expectantly, and the doctor realized he couldn’t continue treating him.
“Get the hell out of here!” Kirchner yelled at the young man. “Come back when this thing settles down and we’re no longer at general quarters! Your hand won’t hurt for a while because of the medicine. Just don’t do anything with it.”
The kid took off running with his injured hand cradled against his chest, and Kirchner headed out of the operating room toward the sick bay’s central receiving area. They called it the emergency room, but it was just a small compartment with two beds and some equipment for treating trauma. He had been there for less than a minute, preparing to receive patients, when he felt another huge explosion. Before the noise died down, Kirchner caught sight of his first patient, the first of many.
Several men were dragging a limp body down the corridor, screaming for help. As they carried him through the door, Kirchner’s heart sank at the sight but he quickly shifted into the high gear of a trauma surgeon. The young sailor had taken a hit directly in the face and wasn’t breathing. His face and neck were a bloody mess, ripped apart by an explosion. Kirchner started an emergency tracheotomy, cutting a hole through the man’s neck directly into his windpipe so he could breathe again. Hunched over the patient and working quickly, he inserted a breathing tube through the hole. Only then did he pause to talk to the men who had brought in the patient.
“What the hell is going on out there? What crashed?”
The men started talking over one another, screaming because everyone’s ears were ringing from the explosions. All Kirchner could understand was that a fire had broken out on the flight deck and bombs were exploding. That’s all he would know for a long time, because within minutes, he was faced with so many patients that he barely had time to think of anything at all.
Patients were pouring into the sick bay, almost all of them gravely wounded, and more help was coming to sick bay too. Explosions still were going off overhead and he was surrounded by bloody, dying men. The sick bay was becoming crowded with the injured, their buddies, and the medical corpsmen who would help Kirchner. Everyone was screaming “Doc!” and “Medic!” and for the moment, that meant Kirchner. The scene in the sick bay was completely chaotic. Dozens of men were dragged in, bleeding profusely, their clothes still smoldering from their flames, charred flesh hanging off their bodies, mangled and fleshy stumps waving where limbs had been blown off. Men arrived with parts of airplanes and bomb fragments still jammed in their flesh, and their buddies sometimes followed behind them, carrying the severed limbs they found on the flight deck. Kirchner regretted that most of the men, even those horribly mutilated in the explosions, were still conscious. With young, healthy men like those on the Forrestal, even severe trauma doesn’t always knock a man unconscious. What a shame, Kirchner thought. It would have been a blessing for most of them.
The smell was overpowering, and something that the men present would not forget for the rest of their lives: the unique stomach-churning stench of burned flesh mixed with the fumes from jet fuel that soaked many of the men, plus the sickly sweet smells of the fog-foam solution and blood—which was everywhere.
And the sounds that filled the sick bay—these were the sounds of young men in terrible pain, young men terrified and afraid to die in that place, alone in a frenzy. Many lay silently despite horrible burns: third-degree burns can destroy the nerve endings that transmit pain. But others, the ones torn apart by the explosions or the ones who felt their bodies continue to burn, screamed in ways that bore into Kirchner’s soul. They moaned and begged for help. And when the pain and the fear became too much, when they overcame the men’s minds and there was nothing else in their world, they cried, tears running down their bloodied and burned cheeks. In desperate moments, twenty-year-old men screamed out for their mothers when the pain was too much, when they looked down and saw what had happened to their bodies and knew they would die.
Gary Shaver was still out of his mind with pain when he arrived in the sick bay on a wire stretcher. His left arm still was wrapped around his neck; his rescuers had been too scared to touch it, fearing the whole thing might come off his shoulder. Shaver screamed and cried uncontrollably, even though he had been given morphine before being taken to the sick bay. The morphine had made no difference whatsoever to his pain. The men who brought Shaver down put him in one of the bottom bunks and ran back out.
Kirchner was clearly in a triage situation. In mass casualty incidents, the doctors and others on the scene have to prioritize patients according to their need, as well as the likelihood that medical care will actually save the patient. When the number of patients overwhelms the medical care available, it is necessary to avoid spending time and supplies on patients who are likely to die anyway. Those patients must be triaged as such and left to die while the doctors work on patients who might be saved.
Triage is a familiar concept in military medicine, so Kirchner immediately started this system in the sick bay, aided by the corpsmen and the other ship physicians who were arriving. One of the first tasks was to clear the area as much as possible. The small compartment was clogged with people who had brought patients in and were hanging around to comfort them, but Kirchner started ordering out everyone who wasn’t seriously injured. The rest were triaged with tags marking them as needing immediate attention, dying and not to be treated unless there was time, or “walking wounded” without life-threatening injuries. Kirchner tried to ensure that the men tagged as too far gone to treat received adequate pain relief. He could not save their lives or even take the time to try, but he could not entirely turn his back on them either. He instructed the corpsmen to start intravenous lines in those men and provide ample doses of morphine. The corpsmen and doctors also were administering morphine to those being treated, and even to the occasional sailor who got hysterical with emotional trauma, which meant that many of the men were doped up on the powerful narcotic.
Robert Zwerlein was dragged to the sick-bay area, and Kirchner went to work on him immediately. The boy was burned severely over most of his body after being caught up in the fuel spill outside McCain’s plane. Kirchner made sure Zwerlein got an intravenous line and a good dose of morphine, but the young man from the ice-cream shop in Port Washington, New York, was too far gone for him to do much else. Zwerlein lay quietly on a stretcher in the sick bay, covered with a blanket to keep him from getting too cold and going into shock. The morphine relieved his pain, but he was in very bad shape.
Kirchner soon went to Shaver’s side, and even in his pain, Shaver recognized the doctor as the same one who had set his broken hand weeks earlier. Kirchner told Shaver that he was bleeding badly inside and that the pressure had to be relieved. The injured man looked down and watched as Kirchner cut a hole in his side and inserted a tube, leaving the end hanging off the side of the bed. Bright red blood poured out of the tube and onto the floor of the sick bay.
Paul Friedman also made his way there and was shocked by what he saw. When he was carried in and deposited on a couch, he couldn’t believe the type of injuries he saw all around him. And instantly he felt he shouldn’t be there with his relatively minor foot wound. As he looked around, he realized that he knew the man sitting next to him. They had been to a navy school together.
“Howard, hey buddy. You okay? What the hell is going on?”
Friedman poked the man on the arm to get his attention, but Howard never responded, just staring forward with a dazed look in his eyes. Then Friedman looked down and saw that the man had a compound fracture of the leg, with the bone jutting out of his pants leg at a severe angle. Friedman looked down at his own wound and felt lucky.
A corpsman came over to Friedman and offered him some morphine.
“No, I don’t need it. I think all I need is a battle dressing and I can get out of here,” Friedman said. “But this guy here can probably use it. Give him the morphine.”
The corpsman took a look at Howard, still dazed and unresponsive, and never replied to Friedman. He turned to another patient. Friedman sat on the couch dumbstruck by what was going on around him, watching as victim after victim was carried into the sick bay. On the floor in front of him, he saw one man so horribly burned that Friedman could not tell if he was black or white. The man seemed to be conscious, so Friedman was wondering why he did not seem to be in pain. The man was just lying there quietly, his flesh blackened and the features wiped off his face, his eyes open and looking around. Another man was brought in on a stretcher and looked startlingly clean and uninjured, but he was unconscious. The man lay in the wire stretcher in his neat khaki uniform, with no sign of blood or trauma. Soon, Kirchner came over and declared the man dead.
John McCain also visited the sick bay, when he realized he was still bleeding from his chest wounds after helping the crew jettison bombs from the hangar bay. When he walked in, McCain heard a voice calling him over, and though he could not make out the young man’s face because of his burns, he suspected the man was part of his air wing’s support crew because he called him “Mr. McCain.” The charred man asked McCain about a chief petty officer in their squadron and McCain assured him that the man was fine, he had seen him just recently.
“Thank God he’s okay,” the man said. And then as McCain stood there and watched, the man died.
Overcome with emotion, McCain quickly left the sick bay without being treated.
Kirchner and his staff were so overwhelmed by the severity of the injuries and the number of injured, more than three hundred before the day was out, that he quickly realized they could do little to help the men in the Forrestal’s own sick bay. Though the bridge was sending information to him, it was not at all clear how long the emergency would last and how much damage the ship would take. Only minutes after the patients started flooding his sick bay, Kirchner knew there were too many.
I can’t handle the patients I have in here right now, and who knows when they’ll stop coming? I’ve got to get them out of here.
Aside from the need to get them out of harm’s way and in the hands of more doctors, space was at a premium. There were forty-eight beds available for patients, but half of those were top bunks. And with the volume of patients coming in, Kirchner and the other doctors only had time to stabilize patients by stopping the flow of blood and helping them breathe. They didn’t even have time to suture wounds. Sophisticated first aid was all he could provide. The wounded needed to be taken off the Forrestal as fast as possible. Luckily, the other carriers in the area had their own sick bays and physicians, ready to help. Kirchner sent word to the bridge that he wanted to transfer all the severely injured patients to the carriers Oriskany and Bon Homme Richard, both positioned nearby and already helping out with their helicopters and other equipment. The bridge informed Kirchner that the other carriers were ready to take the wounded, and they passed on another bit of good news. The U.S. hospital ship Repose was leaving Da Nang, where it had been stationed to treat soldiers from the jungle war, and would rendezvous with the Forrestal the next day.
Soon after the decision to send the Forrestal’s wounded to the other carriers, a familiar face appeared to Kirchner in the sick bay. It was a surgeon from the aircraft carrier Bon Homme Richard who had trained with Kirchner in the civilian world. He had caught a helicopter ride over to offer his help.
“Gary, what can I do?” the doctor asked as soon as he walked in the sick bay.
Kirchner was glad to have help, but not here.
“Get the hell out of here!” he yelled at his friend. “Go back to your ship! I’ll send as many of these people back as I possibly can. You see what this ship is like now. We’re on fire and we’re at general quarters and this whole situation is just unstable!”
The surgeon followed Kirchner’s orders and assisted in transferring some of the most seriously wounded patients back to his ship. By now stressed and unable to waste time with niceties, Kirchner grabbed a corpsman walking by and pulled him close. He put his face close to the corpsman’s and talked quietly but firmly.
“What are you doing with a life jacket on?” he asked the scared young man.
“Uh, it looks real bad out there, sir. We’re in real bad trouble.”
“Take it off. Take it off right now, dammit!” Kirchner ordered. “These men are wounded already and I can’t let them see you walking around with a life jacket like the ship’s about to sink!”
The fires burned well into the afternoon, but after the crew gained a foothold on the flight deck, Captain Beling decided that the forward portion was safe enough to land helicopters. The rescue helicopters used the free space immediately to return sailors plucked out of the water, and then Beling forwarded Kirchner’s request to send all the seriously injured patients to the other two aircraft carriers. They were ready on the other ships. They knew, just from looking at the smoking ship in the distance, that the Forrestal could not handle all her injured.
Beling sent word to Kirchner that the transfers could proceed, and from that point, the doctor’s main objective was to keep the patients moving. Stabilize them, and then get them off the ship as fast as possible. Before long, the helicopters were landing on the forward portion of the flight deck every few minutes while the fires still burned on the rear, bringing with them as much cargo as they could carry. The helos were stuffed with canisters of firefighting foam, fire hoses, oxygen-breathing apparatus, and first-aid supplies, sometimes with even more carried below the craft in a big cargo net. When the helicopters landed, crew from the Forrestal rushed to unload all the supplies and, with the helicopter still idling at high speed, they loaded stretchers with wounded men and a few who could walk. The helicopters sprang off the deck again and made their way to one of the other carriers.
Gary Shaver, Robert Zwerlein, and Paul Friedman were transferred before too long. Zwerlein was still lying quietly in the wire stretcher basket, calmed by the morphine and mercifully relieved of most pain by the extent of his burns. Two men picked up Zwerlein’s stretcher and carried him to the hangar bay, where one of the big airplane elevators was being used to carry the injured to the flight deck forward of the island structure. Once they were moved off the elevator, Zwerlein waited with several other badly injured men until the next helicopter arrived and was unloaded. As it came in, the men carrying Zwerlein leaned over him and used their bodies to protect him from the debris blowing in the downdraft of the rotors. They didn’t know Zwerlein, and they probably would not have recognized him if they did, and they weren’t even medical corpsmen. They were volunteers who had offered to help with transferring the injured. All they knew was that this badly burned man was a fellow crew member, and they were going to protect him until they put him on that helo.
Shaver regained consciousness while he was lying on the flight deck waiting to be loaded onto a helicopter. He opened his eyes and saw the fires still raging on the other end, and then he looked down at his body. All he saw was a sheet covering him, almost completely red from his blood. The sight terrified him. His vision blurred and he felt his eyes closing. He knew he was dying. As he lost consciousness again, he was sure it was the last time.
They landed on the Oriskany in a buzz of activity that mirrored what they had just left behind, except without all the imminent danger.
The carrier had ceased its planned operations for the day and was concentrating solely on helping the Forrestal. Indeed, all operations on Yankee Station had come to a halt, and even some “in-country” helicopter units were mobilizing to fly out to the stricken carrier if needed. The Oriskany’s crew felt a special urge to help, because it had been only nine months since their own onboard fire that killed forty-four men. They knew from firsthand experience the terror of being trapped on a burning ship.
Lenny Julius, the twenty-five-year-old medical administration officer on the Oriskany, had been conducting a fairly mundane task when the Forrestal fire started. He was touring the ship with a corpsman trained as the sanitation officer, inspecting all the coffee stations because some of the men had gotten sick from curdled milk. They were in the hangar bay when they saw men running over to one of the open elevator doors, dozens of men gathering to look at something. Curiosity surpassing their need to look for spoiled milk, Julius and the corpsman trotted over to see what was causing all the commotion. As soon as they stepped up to the doorway, they could see the Forrestal a few miles away, spewing an ugly plume of rich black smoke. They stood with their jaws dropped open as explosions erupted on the Forrestal’s deck, sending bright flaming debris in every direction, and then after a second or two, a loud boom arrived at the Oriskany.
“Oh my God! The Chinese!” Julius shouted. “The Chinese are hitting the Forrestal! We’d better get back to sick bay!”
Julius and the corpsman took off at full speed for the sick bay, both of them anticipating that the Forrestal would very shortly send injured their way. As the medical administration officer, Julius was not a doctor but was charged with keeping the clinic operational while the doctors and corpsmen did their work on patients. In addition, he was trained the same as the medical corpsmen to provide advanced first aid. It was not uncommon for him to provide hands-on care in the sick bay in addition to keeping track of paperwork and supplies.
The Oriskany’s four doctors soon showed up, alerted by the 1MC announcement that the Forrestal was in dire trouble. Dozens of corpsmen were also arriving to wait for assignments, as were the ship’s dentists. Everyone was working fast to get the sick bay ready for the wounded, breaking out supplies to have them within reach and quickly organizing a system of on-site triage so that patients could be channeled in the right direction once they arrived. One surgeon went to the operating room and waited for his first patient, eventually staying there for most of the day without a break.
Julius was concerned that his sick bay run smoothly in this time of utmost need, so he was organizing some of the corpsmen to support the others providing actual treatment to patients. He grabbed one corpsman in the sick bay and gave him an assignment.
“Al, look here. I don’t want anybody to suffer because we don’t have enough of our supplies,” he said. “So your job is not to take care of patients. Your job is to go back and forth and make sure we have everything we need. The minute the doctor sticks his hand out for something, I want it to be right there.”
Julius gave the young man a list of items to retrieve from storage and sent him running off.
It didn’t seem like much time passed before the wounded arrived. And once they started coming, there was a flood. The Oriskany’s medical crew pounced on the first to arrive as soon as they were brought into the sick-bay area, and then the numbers started overwhelming them. With more and more badly injured men arriving every minute, the doctors and corpsmen could not immediately tend to each one as they arrived. Dozens of men were lying in stretchers all over the sick-bay area, quickly turning it into a copy of the frenetic, grisly scene in the Forrestal’s own sick bay. All over, men lay with a red “M” scrawled on their foreheads in grease pencil, indicating that they had received a dose of morphine. The red “M,” often applied after wiping off enough blood to make a clean spot, served as a warning to others not to overdose the patient. Though the Oriskany crew later prided themselves on knowing that every patient left their sick bay with a complete medical chart, there was no time for paperwork while the doctors were trying to save so many lives.
For the Oriskany crew who had been through this less than a year earlier, the sight of horribly burned men was distressingly familiar. The Forrestal’s injured men, however, included a number who had severe trauma from the bomb explosions, upping the ante in terms of gruesomeness.
Julius was making his way through the sick bay, monitoring everything that made a difference in caring for the wounded. He came upon two Forrestal sailors who had just been plucked out of the ocean by a destroyer, then delivered by helicopter to the Oriskany. The two young men had no signs of serious injury, though they were covered head to toe in fuel oil. They had swallowed a lot of seawater when they were blown off the Forrestal, but they would live. The Oriskany crew had told them to sit out of the way and wait until they could be seen, but they grabbed Julius as he was walking by. Their eyes were wide with excitement.
“We’ve got to get back to our ship!” one of the men said. “Our ship’s on fire! We’ve got to go back to our ship!”
Julius was impressed with their determination to go back and help after barely surviving themselves, but he couldn’t let them go.
“You don’t need to go back anywhere,” he told the men. “They have enough people to take care of themselves. Just stay here.”
The men were frantic and Julius’s words did not reassure them. A few minutes later, he looked back in their direction and they were gone. He heard later that they had caught a ride on a helicopter back to the Forrestal.
Admiral Lanham jumped on one of the helicopters delivering wounded to the Oriskany and visited the sick bay to see the Forrestal sailors. He went from bed to bed, speaking with the wounded and unable to hide his own shock and sadness. He could not believe what had happened on his flagship.
Gary Shaver regained consciousness and opened his eyes, but he saw nothing but blackness around him. But then he noted a light above that was getting smaller and smaller and smaller. He felt the pain again as soon as he opened his eyes, and along with whatever medication he had been given, it made his mind fuzzy, almost dreamlike. He remembered the explosion, then lying on the flight deck waiting for the helicopter, and he remembered falling asleep for the last time. That was the last thing he remembered. He remembered dying.
He looked again at the light above him. It kept getting smaller, as if it were moving away. No, he was moving away. He became aware of a falling sensation, moving downward steadily, slowly. And he could hear machinery grinding away—gears clacking and chains clink-clink-clinking. He couldn’t move. And it was dark. All except for that light, now getting so small above him.
In a flash, Shaver realized what was happening. He was dead and on his descent to hell. And the pain was still with him. Oh my God. His mind suddenly became clear. He was dead, he was on his journey to hell, and perhaps the worst part was that he was taking the pain with him. He began to thrash about, screaming in an all-consuming panic.
No! No! Please, no! Oh God, please, please!
The journey continued and Shaver had time to contemplate his eternity in hell—an eternity of pain—before he passed out again.
It would be a long time before he found out that he had woken up on a dark ammunition elevator on the Oriskany, which was being used to move the large numbers of wounded down to the sick bay. At that moment, and for quite a while after, Shaver’s trip to hell was absolutely real.
Shaver joined a crowd of seriously injured men in the Oriskany’s sick bay. By then, his world was a fuzzy place that came and went, always overwhelmed by pain. He would pass out for a moment and then wake up screaming in agony. Even when he was given morphine or other painkillers, the powerful drugs took the edge off only for a moment. Then the pain would come roaring back. His nightmare worsened a little more when Shaver lost his sight soon after arriving in the sick bay, a temporary effect from trauma and medications.
Shaver lay there wondering how long it would be before he died, wishing it would come soon but still terrified that he would resume the journey to hell—he had not yet realized he’d been on the ammunition elevator. When a dental technician came by to check on him, Shaver pleaded with him for relief.
“Please shoot me,” he begged, barely able to make the words come out. He had been crying nonstop and his mouth was desperately dry. The request was sincere. Shaver preferred dying over spending one more minute with the pain. “Please. Please. Go get a gun and shoot me.”
The man assured him he would be okay, that they would get him more pain medication. Shaver cried harder when he realized he had to live, that he would have to endure the pain. He looked at the dental tech and made another request.
“Water.”
Once again, the man had to say no. Shaver’s internal injuries were too severe for him to have any water, no matter how thirsty he was. Shaver begged for just a tiny bit of water, but the answer had to be no. Trying to help, the corpsman went away and quickly returned with a wet washcloth, wiping it over Shaver’s face as it contorted in pain. The wet cloth felt good on his face. As it brushed near his lips, Shaver desperately tried to suck the cloth into his mouth to get water.
As Shaver looked around him, he noticed a man lying in a stretcher on the floor nearby. The man’s severed legs had been placed across his chest. It looked like the man was staring right at him. And then Shaver saw Lonnie Hudson, his friend whom he had last seen driving his tractor back so he could switch places with Shaver. Shaver had gone forward of where the fire would be, and Hudson had gone back to where the fire would be the worst. It wasn’t Shaver’s decision, but switching places with his friend would haunt him forever.
Hudson had been trapped behind the fire at the very rear of the ship, and he was soon manning a fire hose with another sailor. It hadn’t taken long for them both to realize the fire was too hot and too close, so they retreated down a ladder on the side of the ship. As they did, Hudson’s clothing caught fire from the burning fuel and he had nowhere to go. The other man pushed him off the ship, then jumped in after him.
Shaver stared at his friend’s terribly burned and swelling body. Shaver thought that Hudson was dying, and he was right. He turned his face away as the pain surged through him again, and then Shaver finally, mercifully, passed out. Hudson died soon after, along with the man who had jumped overboard with him.
Lenny Julius was aiding patients as much as he could. So many patients were needing attention, and like others in the sick bay, he was working hard to make sure no one suffered without being noticed. As he passed by one of the most seriously injured men awaiting care, Julius wanted to be sure he was not in too much pain. There was no “M” on his forehead or anywhere else because there was nowhere to put it, but Julius assumed that the man had received a dose already. The young man was burned terribly, his flesh charred completely in every visible area. The burns were so extensive, and so deep, that Julius could not tell if the man was white or black. He had no identifying features, the fire’s damage having turned him into an everyman for the Forrestal’s wounded. The man was lying very quietly, his eyes open and looking around, the whites contrasting with the blackened skin so much that they seemed to gleam. Julius knew right away that the man would die, and that was why the doctors were not treating him yet.
Julius leaned over to speak to him, working hard to suppress the horror he felt at seeing, and smelling, the man up close.
“Do you need any morphine?” Julius asked. “I can get you some if you need it.”
The man looked up at Julius and said no, he didn’t need it. With a startling grace, as if they were discussing something much more banal, he thanked Julius for offering. The words did not come easily, because the man’s throat had been seared from inhaling the flames and smoke, and his lips were mostly gone. Julius nodded and turned to walk away, but then the injured man spoke again.
“Doc?”
Julius turned back to the man. He leaned over so the man wouldn’t have to work too hard at speaking loud enough.
“Doc, there is something. I…I can’t urinate.”
Julius understood immediately. Because of his injuries, the man was unable to pass urine and his full bladder was becoming painful. That was a common problem among the injured and ill, and the common response was for a physician to insert a catheter to relieve the pressure. The physicians had no time for that task at the moment, but Julius knew he could do it. He had worked on a urology ward at one point in his medical training, so he found a catheter and proceeded to insert it for the injured man.
Julius started to think that maybe the man was southern, maybe black, because his voice had an accent that came through even though the injuries made his speech difficult. Julius offered him some words of encouragement as he completed the catheter setup, but the patient didn’t say anything else for a while.
After a few moments, the man’s pain was eased. He was very grateful.
“Thanks, Doc. That feels a lot better.”
Before leaving him, Julius asked the man if there was anything else he needed.
The man looked up and then looked away, just staring. Julius stayed, sensing that the man wanted to say something. Finally, he did.
“I’m going to die.”
Julius swallowed hard and paused before saying anything. Then he tried to come up with something that might cheer the man up.
“Oh, nobody knows when they’re going to die,” Julius said, trying his best to sound like he meant it. “None of us knows how long we’ll live. Hell, I may die before you.”
The man lay there listening to Julius, quiet and not moving. Julius couldn’t think of anything else to say. He knew the man would die soon, and it weighed heavily on him that he could not help him pass more easily. He wanted to say the right thing, anything that would make the man suffer just a little bit less. But he couldn’t, so he stood there looking down at the dying man and, despite all his efforts, his feelings showed.
When the dying man looked up at Julius’s face and saw how sad he was, their roles suddenly reversed.
“That’s okay, you don’t have to feel bad,” he murmured. “I haven’t done anything that I’m ashamed of. I’m ready to go.”
Julius was overwhelmed by the man’s generosity, his ability to think of someone else even as he waited for his last moment. There was little Julius could say in return, but he wished the man well and turned to leave, holding himself together until he could make it outside into a hallway. That’s where he fell apart.