She was the largest, mightiest, most futuristic aircraft carrier ever built. When the USS Forrestal was launched in December 1954, the age of the supercarrier was launched along with her. She was the avatar of the new class, dwarfing her World War II forebears in firepower, fuel capacity, speed, and sheer size. All of the lessons that had been learned in carrier design had been incorporated into her creation, and the 1,046-foot Forrestal was the embodiment of many firsts: the first carrier built specifically with jet aircraft in mind and the first to launch with an angled flight deck (with which older carriers were then being refitted), steam catapults, landing lights, nuclear-payload capabilities, air-conditioned quarters—the list goes on. Her very presence symbolized America’s power and global reach. The supership was named for FDR’s secretary of the Navy (and the first-ever secretary of defense), James V. Forrestal, who committed suicide in 1949 by jumping from a sixteenth-story window at the Bethesda Naval Hospital (though conspiracy-minded historians to this day suspect foul play). It has been said that the Forrestal was to aircraft carriers what HMS Dreadnought had been to battleships—the apotheosis of a type. Another comparison might be to say that the Forrestal was to aircraft carriers what the Titanic had been to ocean liners.
For twelve years the Forrestal went to sea on numerous show-the-flag missions and served as an important springboard for naval technology experimentation, but she had yet to be deployed for actual combat. The Vietnam War provided the opportunity, and in June 1967 she departed Norfolk for the Tonkin Gulf, where she would help step up the aerial assault on the enemy headquartered at Hanoi. By July 25 she was on Yankee Station in the waters off North Vietnam and enjoined with other ships in Aircraft Carrier Air Wing 17 in launching multiple daily bombing raids in heavy rotation. The group flew 150 bomb-delivering missions in four days. Running short of good modern bombs, the Forrestal was forced to accept decrepit old World War II–vintage Composition B bombs from the supply ship.
The Forrestal was preparing to let fly the morning’s second wave of strikes on July 29 when a power surge unleashed a 5-inch rocket from the pod of an F-4 Phantom II parked on the starboard stern. The rocket shot across the deck and struck a wing-mounted fuel tank on an A-4 Skyhawk waiting to launch. Fuel spurted like arterial blood and the flight deck erupted in flames. Pilots lined up for takeoff were cooked in their cockpits, and each plane that burned fed more fuel to the fire, begetting an ever-higher mountain of flames and black smoke. Bombs were heating to the bursting point as the fire emergency crew rushed to contain them. But because they were the volatile, more heat-sensitive old hand-me-down Composition B bombs, the firefighters had less time, and the old bombs exploded, taking out the all-important fire team within the first two minutes of the catastrophe.
A future senator and presidential candidate named Lt. Cdr. John McCain leapt from his A-4 cockpit and climbed down the nose of his burning plane with all the speed he could muster, clearing it just before its bombs fell to the deck and exploded. Other A-4s in the line burned and blew up in the escalating chain reaction, and great gaping craters cracked open in the rupturing flight deck. Fire shot down through lower decks, incinerating sailors in their quarters and trapping men behind walls of flame and deadly smoke. More and more Composition B bombs exploded, and the smoke-choked air was alive with shrapnel as jet fuel continued to spread across the deck like a widening lake of fire. For sixteen hours the exhausted crew battled the flames that dominated topside and coursed through the ship’s lower reaches. When it all was over, 134 sailors were dead and 161 were severely injured. The Forrestal had come perilously close to sinking and had suffered $72 million worth of damage—the most powerful, most modern aircraft carrier in the world laid low by a combination of second-rate, out-of-date bombs and plain bad luck.
The Forrestal fire was one of the worst accidents in U.S. naval history, and the ship sustained the worst loss of life on a U.S. Navy vessel since World War II. Seven months’ worth of repairs would have the Forrestal ready again for action, but her role in the Vietnam War had ended, curtailed after four and a half days. The mighty supercarrier would spend the rest of her career on Mediterranean and Indian Ocean deployments and stationed at various eastern seaboard ports. Fire-prevention training videos of the tragedy became required viewing throughout the fleet. Others might apply mordant and disparaging nicknames to her—the USS Forrest Fire, the USS Firestal—but those who served on her still referred to her proudly by her more positive moniker, “the Mighty FID” (the acronym indicating “First in Defense,” as in the ship’s namesake and the slogan on her insignia patch). And whenever two veterans of service aboard the Mighty FID chanced to run into each other somewhere, a standard remark would be, “So I wonder how old George is these days.”
All Forrestal sailors knew who George was.
“George” is as serviceable and innocuously pleasant a name as any for a ship’s resident ghost, but as is often the case with a highly haunted vessel, the designation undoubtedly is a convenient umbrella for numerous spirits. That the Forrestal carried abundant spectral presences is understandable. Even a skeptic would be hard-pressed not to feel an unpleasant chill putting head to pillow in berthing quarters where many sailors were incinerated in their bunks. The ghostly pall hangs heavy in this area below the flight deck, where squadron members in the post-1967 era continued to be assigned to sleep (or try to sleep). “I would hear voices in the night crying for help,” an air wing crewman recalled of his 1982 stay in the haunted berth. “On numerous occasions I would see a sailor . . . walk into an area that was just a plain old bulkhead. He would completely disappear.”
Here and in other belowdecks spaces on the Forrestal where fires had raced through from the flame-engulfed flight deck, ghostly sightings were common. Strange noises, doors locking and unlocking, the clasping grip of invisible hands—reports of such strange doings were rife; more often than not the phenomena were accompanied by the fleeting glimpse of a man in khaki. And sometimes, those who got more than a passing look at the elusive figure wished they hadn’t, for what remained of his face appeared to have “melted features.”
By 1988, some sailors were flatly disobeying direct orders to proceed into certain parts of the ship, more terrified of what lurked there than they were of officers’ punitive measures. Central to their fears was a storage area that had once been the morgue. “I’ve got one guy working for me . . . who refuses to go down there alone,” P.O. Daniel Balboa reported. “Our last chief petty officer in charge, who has since transferred, refused to go down there at all.”
P.O. James Hillard was one of those who ventured into the ghostly zones and emerged with the adamant conviction that he would never go down there again. Curious about the source of strange footsteps he was hearing, he went to investigate and found himself fast on the heels of an apparition. “He was wearing a khaki uniform, like an officer or chief would wear.” Hillard pursued the phantom into a dead-end hold, but “there was nobody in there, and I swear that’s where he went.” Another crewman watched a khaki-clad wraith descending a ladder, and it is probably for the best that the crewman did not follow; the hunter might have found himself the hunted. For it was in just such a ladder-sharing situation that a sailor was grabbed by his legs so tightly, by something powerful yet unseen, that one of his shipmates had to tug desperately to pull him free.
In 1993, after the Forrestal was decommissioned and laid up in the Philadelphia Navy Yard, a welder was dismantling food storage equipment when he started hearing a loud clanging. The welder grabbed a wrench and returned the clang signal. After a pause, his clangs were answered by more clangs. Curious now, he investigated the source of the communication, and experienced an electric jolt of terror when he saw “a chief petty officer horribly burned just staring at me. And then he slowly fades away. . . . Needless to say I got out of there real fast!”
That last reported ghost sighting on the Forrestal to date was graphic, gruesome, the stuff of nightmares. But perhaps the most heart-rending and bizarre paranormal manifestation on the supercarrier was experienced, again, by Petty Officer Hillard. It started with the peal of a telephone. “The phone rang and I answered it. . . . There was a faint voice calling, ‘Help! Help! I’m on the sixth deck!’”
The strangest thing about the plaintive call?
It came in on a phone that was disconnected.
Desperate hands groping for a lifeline; scurrying, sadly disfigured officer ghosts; earnest pleas for help from a voice trapped in a time and place where no help can come—the nature of the Forrestal’s ghosts bespeak tragedy of a historic degree. In raging fire on the Tonkin Gulf, 134 sailors joined the eternal crew, a crew whose roll call will continue to grow as long as there are ships and seas and stalwart souls yearning for the horizon.