Attention on Deck
Following reports of black crewmen attacking white shipmates, Commander Porter found half the black crew catching their collective breath on the aft mess decks. The men stood in random packs among the tables and chairs where they’d eaten every meal during this deployment. No one spoke when Porter walked in, but most of the guys tried to conceal weapons improvised from firefighting equipment and aircraft tie-down chains. There were easily a hundred and fifty black men—one hundred and fifty-one counting himself—amassed in various degrees of uniform; some bare-chested with blood smeared on their faces; some with dilated pupils from smoking, snorting, or shooting smack; many others high from the fog of marijuana in the air. Their fists were still clenched after feeding on the chaos of violence and aggression—after rebelling against the captain, the ship, the white crew, and the very oath they made to God and country.
Commander Porter’s eye twitched under the stress. This affliction began after he’d stopped flying and he hoped it wasn’t noticeable now. Just moments before, he’d persuaded the captain that dispatching the Marine unit stationed aboard ship would only escalate the violence and surely disrupt the ships operations off the coast of Da Nang. Instead, the captain had allowed Commander Porter—his Executive Officer, his XO, his second in command—to investigate and terminate any trouble he found.
It was Halloween, 1972, and many of these fearsome men had chosen the Navy over jail, or joined to avoid being drafted into the Army. For the past ten months, the ship had sailed back and forth across Yankee Station in the South China Sea launching aircraft around the clock in support of ground forces. Porter understood they were tired and angry and bitter. It was late. Anyone not on shift should have been sleeping.
Porter felt a pressure in his chest where wise words should have been. He was an educated man, had studied engineering in college and had become an exemplary pilot, but he never felt comfortable relating to people. His position as second in command demanded it and, to this point, had served as the training he needed for eligibility to have his own ship someday. That was all he wanted. Until now. Now, survival became his top priority.
He walked into the center of a room that buzzed with rage. The bulkheads vibrated with animosity. None of the men seemed to notice the icemaker along the far wall pulling water as it coughed a handful of cubes. They all stared at the XO, whose throat clamped, making it hard to swallow. He hadn’t been topside all day, but he’d give his next paycheck to be out on the bridge wing now, where it was undoubtedly seventy-eight degrees and the water was dark and shadows of clouds billowed in the brunette sky.
Instead, he stood on the enlisted men’s mess decks with the lingering smells of a decade’s worth of grease, old coffee, and this groups’ B.O. and bad breath assaulting his senses.
“It’s okay to be angry,” he said from the center of the room, his voice as authoritative as possible despite the dryness there. “And it’s okay to want better treatment, but this isn’t the way to get it.”
The energy in the room sizzled around each sailor. They shifted their weight side-to-side, opened and closed their fists. It was impossible to tell if this mob was calming down or just taking a break before their next wave of attack.
Someone from the crowd yelled, “He ain’t no brother!”
A dozen random voices repeated some variation of that sentiment.
“Hell no, he ain’t.”
“Not even close.”
Etc., etc., etc.
This rang an alarm in Porter’s head as real as any aboard ship. He spread his feet to give himself a stronger base if they attacked. There was no way to know what this disgruntled mob might do. Only moments ago, this group had stormed up and down the passageways of the USS Provenance inflicting pain on any white sailors unlucky enough to cross their path. Sick Bay had reported dozens of contusions and lacerations within the last twenty minutes. Reports on the bridge had indicated half a dozen white men had been ripped from sleep as splinter groups invaded white berthing compartments and yanked guys from their racks and beat them with anything they could grab. They’d kicked when their victims hit the deck and rolled into balls.
“Sheeeee-it,” said Rufus Applewhite, in faded dungarees and a T-shirt the same shade as his teeth. Not a large guy, but his voice filled the room. He held his fist up near his jaw and circled it around, perhaps threatening, perhaps cooling knuckles made sore during the riot. “Our man Mr. Porter here,” he continued, “knows he ain’t nothing more than a house nigga. Ain’t that right, Token Zero?”
The crewmen laughed in response.
Anger shot through Porter’s skull like heat lightning in the Sacramento sky. His fists hung at his sides, ready for anything. His father had called him a house nigger the day he’d left for Officer Candidate School. Now, he wanted to strangle this punk. Instead, he held his stance. He knew about Applewhite’s status with the black crew. Knew the rioting could recommence and this pissed off horde could tear him apart or injure other sailors. Either could compromise the ship’s mission, which would derail Porter’s goal of making captain and commanding his own carrier.
His devotion to his career had cost him a marriage and two daughters, but as much as that failure had hurt him, he considered it collateral damage on his way to achieving something of greater consequence. As far as the Navy was concerned, the five thousand men and officers aboard this ship were not husbands who kissed their wives on the pier the day they deployed; not devoted fathers who wouldn’t be home to help with their kids’ homework or to swap baby teeth for quarters beneath their pillows while they slept; not sons or boyfriends or brothers who would be missed; but rather one single unit with one single mission—launching aircraft into combat. The Navy never factored in the human condition, or that after two hundred fifty-eight days at sea even the biggest Boy Scout in the bunch would be disgruntled on numerous levels, for numerous reasons. This was true especially for these black crewmen, who watched the closed-circuit television broadcasts of Captain’s Masts where their brothers seemed to get slapped with harsher penalties than white crewmen.
Applewhite was the only one in the entire group who sat. He’d chosen the top of the table where, seven months prior, Commander Porter had eaten Easter dinner amongst the crew in an effort to provide a paternal presence on such a holy day. The food was much better in the Ward Room, and he assumed every enlisted sailor had appreciated the sacrifice.
Applewhite’s bloodshot eyes refracted the overhead lighting. He carried hate in his heart, and a chip on his shoulder. The guy tried to play off his hunched posture as a fuck you attitude, but he was no doubt worn out by the full workday combined with the effort of rioting. It also was obvious the guy was high and weighed down by having more clout with the other black sailors aboard ship than Porter had as the XO.
None of them knew at this point that five white crew members would need to be air-lifted to base hospitals in the region. If they had known, Rufus would likely dap all the way around the room—fist pounding, palm slapping, and giving some skin as a way to celebrate. This attitude repulsed Porter, but he understood it. Their complaints were valid, though their tactics were deplorable. One of the five critically injured would not survive, and none of the surviving four would ever return to the ship. The crew would go on to speculate disfigurement or lingering mental issues, but they’d never know for sure.
Applewhite had the same way of making a plain white T-shirt look as rebellious as the XO’s father. No matter what Porter did, his entire life a T-shirt on him remained simply an undergarment. He couldn’t help feeling his father and Applewhite would get along well. Maybe his father would even like Applewhite better than his own son. A man more like himself—a man like he’d wanted his son to be.
The similarities between his father and Applewhite went beyond clothing and skin color and facial features; they resided in the casual way they took charge. In that moment, Porter feared Applewhite’s power. It was the same feeling he’d felt as a boy when approaching his father.
The day Porter had told his father he was leaving for the Navy, his father had stood in the kitchen, brown pants, no shirt, and threw his pint of strawberry wine into the far kitchen wall. “Our people been trying to get free since the dawn of motherfucking time, man, and you’re going to give yourself over and let the white man own your ass? Are you out of your motherfucking mind?”
Young Porter’s rise from ensign to commander had come with his share of awkwardness along the way. Everywhere he’d been stationed, white officers and crew assumed his success was owed to tokenism or quotas and not because of his talents as a pilot and leader. Black guys, like Applewhite, dismissed him as an Uncle Tom—doing the white man’s bidding. Truth be told, Porter had never been sure which was the truth.
After he’d graduated Officer Candidate School and flight training, he’d gone home to visit his father and bragged about how he excelled and how well the Navy had been treating him.
“Yeah. Maybe. But they’ll only treat you nice as long as you’re dancing to their tune.” Then, for the first time, his father had opened up about having gotten drafted in ’45 and serving a year in the Army before discharging early for what he described as “some racist bullshit.” Maybe the memory of that line was the reason Porter looked past the hate and anger in Applewhite’s eyes to see a man who might’ve had a family to provide for. A family he’d been away from for so long his kids had advanced to the next grade in school, or maybe were held back. Plus, he’d been doing it on a quarter of a commander’s monthly income. The longer Porter stared at Applewhite, the more he recognized his father’s features in the angry face across from him.
Some of the men leaned on the tabletops, their hands splattered with blood, but no one moved. All eyes were on Applewhite. Porter got the sense that they all awaited Applewhite’s command—the signal he kept at his fingertips to make them heel or attack.
That hour of the night, no announcements were made over the loudspeakers and the impact of planes landing couldn’t be heard that far below deck. To a man, the crew had been expecting another carrier to show up any day now and take over, relieve them from the line so they could sail home to San Diego and reconnect with those they hadn’t seen in the better part of a year. But, the night before, the captain had informed them that Admiral Holloway had extended the ship’s deployment in the South China Sea by three to six weeks.
The XO stood as tall as he could in a display of superiority, but his rank meant less with every passing minute in the confines of the mess decks. This green and tan chow hall, where the horde of angry men ate shit-on-a-shingle in the mornings and watched movies in the evenings, reeked of grease, old ketchup, and popcorn which still failed to cover the acrid bite of jet fuel clinging to everyone’s uniforms and wafting through the ship’s passageways.
The problem had started here, twelve hours earlier, in the chow line when one of the white mess cooks refused to give a boatswain’s mate named Washington a second ham sandwich. The young man had proclaimed his hunger and didn’t take kindly to being denied. The white mess cook, according to the master-at-arms who intervened, stated over and over that no one was allowed more than one. The master-at-arms told Washington, “The Navy doesn’t give you what you want, just what you need,” and sent him on his way. Everyone would have let the matter go if that had been the end of it. Instead, the crowd of mostly black Sailors had heard the master-at-arms commend the mess cook for doing a good job and they used it as kindling to ignite all the repressed aggression built up over the better part of a year.
They’d long had the time and opportunity to plot this out. Most of the black crew worked in the galley or the ships laundry or in Deck Department and for reasons Porter never understood the black crew had gotten away with self-segregating their own berthing areas. As a rule, they didn’t allow white guys in. They spent their off duty hours amongst themselves. With a crew of five thousand to get lost in, this sizable minority group grew tighter.
Porter needed to find a phone and tell the captain he had everything under control, but he wasn’t sure he did. For this reason, he kept his face as neutral as he could despite the eye twitch, and tried to hide his fear.
“So, Porter,” Applewhite said. “You’re one of us or you’re against us. Which is it?”
Porter had never feared for his life this strongly, not even while landing F-8s on the deck of that very ship in foul weather as a junior officer. The yaw instability of that aircraft had kept his anus puckered on every inbound. The tight steering had made him grind the enamel off his molars. They called the planes “Ensign Killers” and he didn’t want to become another statistic. Every successful flight had built his confidence. The more dangerous the mission he survived, the higher his pride soared. His air wing had been attached to the Provenance in 1961 and ’62 when he flew Yankee Team recon missions. The only honor higher than being XO aboard that ship was the final step of having full command as captain. And if not the Provenance, than some other super-carrier. For that reason, Porter would do what he had to do to keep these sailors calm and have a peaceful end to this violent night—keep the captain from ordering thirty armed Marines to police the passageways.
“Air grievances through proper channels,” he said to the rows of expressionless black faces. “That’s how you address and correct them. Acting out will only damage your cause.”
Applewhite rested his scuffed boots on a chair and crossed his ankles. “We don’t give a lazy fuck what you think, black-honky motherfucker.”
On any other day, those words would get Applewhite, or any sailor, run up on a list of charges longer than the legs of his faded dungarees. Today though, in light of everything that came down in the middle of port and starboard watch stations and full flight ops, Porter had to let it wash over him like the smell of flatulence. He’d have to make it an unpleasant memory and move on in a way that would not agitate or threaten.
“No one in the Navy wants any group of sailors to be pissed off. Least of all myself. Let’s just take a moment to exhale and get real here.”
Applewhite kicked a heel into the chair. “You tell the captain to give every brother on this motherfucking ship his stripe back that he took in all his bullshit Masts and quit making us do all the shit work and we’ll think about it.”
Porter’s eye twitched. He covered his mouth with a fist to stifle a nervous cough. The captain’s policy explicitly prohibited negotiations in such a situation. He’d had no problem telling the XO so before they split up to try and handle this matter on their own. The captain had swung open his cabin door and kept his hand on the knob. “There’s only so much damage they can inflict by utilizing the element of surprise. White sailors outnumber the blacks sixteen-to-one. Nature will quickly take its course if it comes to that. If not, the Marines will.”
In that moment, Porter wondered if the captain had had to swallow the instinct to call the agitators uppity niggers or not. There was no way to know, but Porter had to give the man credit, he never said anything like that. He always referred to the black sailors as the men, the crew, and maybe, those sailors, but nothing truly offensive.
On the mess deck, the crowd closed ranks. Gaps between loose groups disappeared as they huddled closer around the XO. He felt the energy in the room ratchet up. The expanse of flesh and sinew before him seemed to expand and contract, as if their breathing patterns had synchronized. Porter feared being beaten, taken hostage—held as a bargaining chip.
If they got any closer, he’d feel their exhalations on his face and neck. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, three or four rows deep. All eyes on him. They could attack at any moment Applewhite snapped his fingers or dapped the air in front of him.
It made no sense to get stern with them. They could kill him as a group and all deny seeing anything and become notorious Navy-wide. His natural instinct inclined toward some sort of Knute Rockne speech, but he couldn’t stand on a chair because the overhead was too low with the cable runs and pipes—and because he didn’t know exactly what to say. None of the Naval officer training he’d received during his career had prepared him for this kind of moment. No one could have predicted the circumstances of a black XO having to neutralize rioting enlisted blacks. The only way he knew that he could make himself seen as well as heard across the mess decks involved figuring a way to get height somehow despite the low overhead.
The crowd’s impatience rumbled from their throats. They stared at him, eyes widened with rage or narrowed by suspicion. Jaws set. Ready to lunge.
His stomach grumbled—not from hunger, but rather an overabundance of adrenaline. He felt cornered and challenged like never before. He covered his stomach with one hand, and raised his fist in the air above his head in what he could only consider the solitary moment of his life that might make his father proud.
The crowd inhaled collectively, audibly.
Porter couldn’t help being a little proud, too. He didn’t smile. He didn’t speak. He let the fist do the talking for him.
Seaman Apprentice Nelson pointed at the XO and shouted, “He is one of us!”
Someone, Porter didn’t see who, yelled, “Attention on deck!”
Everyone in the room turned, saw the captain staring at the XO’s fist, still in the air.
His surprise at seeing the captain could only be surpassed by seeing his own father. But he’d been looking at that for the past few minutes in the face and attitude of Rufus Applewhite.
No one spoke. There was silence in the room except for the ice maker on the portside beverage line dripping into its deck drain.
By coming down here, this white man displayed either braveness or stupidity beyond measure. Applewhite could holler, “Get him!” and unleash all the anger and frustration that simmered beneath their ribs, taking it all out on one man—the only white man in sight. Random violence was one thing; directing it against the captain was mutiny. All of their lives would be changed as a result of such a thing.
Porter remained frozen in time like the famous photo of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the ’68 Olympics. He kept his fist in the air because taking it down might indicate that he was trying to hide it from the captain. He couldn’t risk anybody thinking that, especially the captain. So he left it up—strong and proud as he could.
Porter wanted to hold that stare, lock in some form of unspoken communication to tell the man and the crew that he had this under control the only way he knew how. And now, he felt a dirty sense of pride with the captain staring at him. There was no way to know if it was the darkest embarrassment or the biggest thrill. He kept his fist in the air.
The gold wings on the captain’s khaki shirt above his heart caught Porter’s eye. He felt light-headed, and just like the times he’d gotten drunker than he’d wanted to be, he bit a hole in his cheek as he forced himself back into coherence.
The captain’s eyes, sunken beneath the grey crest of eyebrows, stared straight at the XO. As the inside of his cheek bled into his mouth, it felt like every blood vessel in his body opened and flooded him with emotion, strong and unambiguous.
For reasons he couldn’t explain, Porter felt the gold wings over his own heart. There were other black pilots in the Navy, but as long as he’d been commissioned he’d seen only one. There might have been other high-ranking black Naval officers, but he was without a doubt the first XO of an aircraft carrier.
The captain turned and disappeared down the passageway. He hadn’t spoken a word, but the minute he left the crowd of enlisted black sailors erupted in a roar of cheers and applause and hoots and hollers and began chanting “X-O! X-O!”
Porter had no way of knowing that his raised fist would earn him not only the respect of the crew, but also a Navy Commendation Medal for displaying outstanding leadership in less than ideal circumstances and preventing further harm to the crew and to the ship’s mission.
Ordinarily, such a decoration would help a good officer’s chances of earning his own ship. The congressional hearing that followed would give the Chief of Naval Operations other ideas. Commander Porter would go on to make captain, but instead of skippering a super carrier, he would spend the rest of his career shuffling papers behind a desk at a mid-sized university in Texas as the director of a regional ROTC outfit.
Now, during inebriated moments, he allows himself to ball his fist…and feel.