Battle Field Angels (30 page)

Ten seconds later, a second bomb exploded. Below deck, momentary speculation that the first explosion might have been from a plane crash evaporated. JP5 jet fuel cascaded through two gaping holes in the flight deck into sleeping quarters filled with sailors who had worked the night before.

At the sound of general quarters, corpsmen scrambled around each other in the tight compartments, grabbing supplies and preparing for the casualties they knew would be coming. Some corpsmen and dental technicians ran out of sick bay to their assigned battle dressing stations.
Forrestal
’s medical department faced a mass casualty situation that threatened to overwhelm its capacity.

Mowad raced onto the flight deck to see how he could help. Dozens of others did the same, at first ignoring their assigned emergency stations in an instinctive desire to help at the scene of the disaster. A blast pelted Mowad with shrapnel, but he was far enough away that it only dented his helmet. He retreated to his station along with two corpsmen. The compartment was too small to accommodate a stretcher, making it useless for emergency treatment. Mowad received permission to move his battle dressing station to the fo’c’sle (“forecastle”) just below the bow where the ship’s anchoring mechanism was operated.

Portions of the flight deck became so hot from uncontrolled fires that sailors’ shoes melted. Several men volunteered to string the fire hoses across their shoulders to keep them from melting. Many were not trained as firefighters and were not assigned to the flight deck. Strangers stood shoulder to shoulder hosing down the raging flames.

About thirty minutes after the first two blasts, Chief Engineer Rowland became alarmed at damage control reports of temperatures in many compartments, including the weapons magazines. The bulkheads in the compartments that stored liquid oxygen became so hot that sailors devised a way to connect a garden hose to the oxygen tanks and drain more than five hundred gallons of the combustible material over the side.

Meanwhile, corpsmen had established a triage station near the island on the flight deck. As the intense heat detonated more bombs, fired ammunition, and triggered ejection seats, sailors with blackened faces and exposed craniums were being helped to the island. Some sucked air through a hole where their lips had melted away. One had lost his face, was missing an arm, and had a serious abdominal wound. His pants were smoldering.

The flight deck was slick with fuel, foam, and blood. Some of the injured were conscious. A few screamed and writhed. Others were as still as statues, staring up into the sky. Sailors tried to help the corpsmen. They packed open wounds with brown paper or their shirts because medical supplies were exhausted quickly. Some sat next to mangled sailors apparently unaware they were already dead.

Corpsmen and doctors had about thirty seconds to triage each patient. They used colored tags to mark the state and fate of the wounded. Category 1 patients (black tags) were likely to die. Pain control was all that mattered. Kirchner set aside one of the compartments in sick bay for Category 1 patients. A lone corpsman stayed with them, comforting them as best he could and administering morphine. Kirchner knew the patients screaming were fighting death. It seemed the quiet ones somehow knew they would die. Either way, Kirchner thought it was important that injured sailors who might survive be separated from those who had almost no chance. Category 2s (red tags) were the injured who required varying degrees of immediate care; Category 3s (green tags) were sailors with minor wounds who could wait for treatment.

After a quick assessment, the seriously injured were brought down to the mess deck where the crew normally ate their meals. Corpsmen could hear sailors screaming in pain as they were helped or carried down the passageways toward the mess deck and sick bay. Sometimes a sailor carried a wounded man’s severed arm or leg, in case it could be reattached.

Bloodied and burned men sat or lay on the deck near sick bay, waiting for a doctor. Some were being held by a friend or stranger who didn’t know how else to help. Others screamed “Doc!” because they had been deafened by the explosions. The clothing on several still smoldered, while some had airplane parts sticking out of their bodies. The first patient who entered sick bay had serious facial wounds and couldn’t breathe. A tracheotomy was performed immediately.

Seriously burned victims needed the most immediate and intensive care. The priorities were always the same—ABC: check the airway, monitor the breathing, and assess the quality of the pulse. Corpsmen paid careful attention to the airway. Singed nose hair or eyebrows often meant the patient had inhaled smoke, heat, and gases. A burned airway could become life threatening within hours. Corpsmen cleared the nose and throat of soot, started an IV, and inserted a tube, so a respirator could help the sailor breathe.
Forrestal
, though, had a limited number of respirators, and there weren’t enough corpsmen to manually help patients breathe.

Corpsmen next attended to a variety of burns. Treatment in the first hour was crucial. They removed sheets of burned skin, applied silver nitrate to raw flesh, and loosely wrapped burn sites. Facial burns were gruesome. Eyelids and lips tended to swell. A sailor with a burned penis required catheterization due to inflammation. Chest burns were critical. Traumatized internal organs could swell against a sailor’s burned chest, which if untreated, became rigid. Corpsmen kept each burned chest as pliable as possible with ointment to allow the lungs to expand. Burn treatment for a single patient could be extremely time-consuming.

Sailors with other serious physical injuries were not always given the same intensive, immediate care as burn victims. A sailor with a lacerated abdomen could be temporarily patched and be given an IV and morphine. He could wait for evacuation off
Forrestal
. If he developed a raging thirst, it could be a sign of internal bleeding.

Meanwhile in the fo’c’sle, Mowad faced a stream of wounded men. Just before
Forrestal
left Norfolk, he had taken a one-week class in triage. Other than that, the dentist relied on first-year medical school classes in gross anatomy and pharmacology. In less than half an hour, he performed two tracheotomies, the second on a man who was in critical condition.

“Doc, why are you doing that?” asked a corpsman. “It’s not going to help him.”

“Maybe, but I know it’s going to help you, and it’s going to help me because we’re trying, and the patient’s going to feel better seeing us try,” Mowad replied.
⁸⁸

Minutes later another sailor was carried into the fo’c’sle. A single sliver of tendon connected a foot to a knee. The rest of the man’s calf had been blown away. With one snip, the dentist performed his first amputation. A nearby chief petty officer fainted on the spot.

Several Navy ships turned and headed toward the black smoke that billowed from
Forrestal
. Although the hospital ship USS
Repose
was a day away, the USS
Bon Homme Richard
, USS
MacKenzie
, USS
Rupertus
, USS
Tucker
, and USS
Oriskany
ceased operations and turned to assist
Forrestal
. Within fifteen minutes the
Rupertus
began picking up sailors who had been blown overboard. Medical evacuation helicopter landing areas were designated on
Forrestal
’s undamaged bow. The helicopters carried firefighting equipment. As they were being unloaded, corpsmen accompanied the most seriously injured on stretchers and onto the flight deck. The wash of the helicopters almost knocked some over as they approached while monitoring their patients’ vital signs. They watched for a change in the color of the inside of a man’s mouth or his fingernails that might indicate a sudden deterioration. If a patient worsened, a corpsman called sick bay for instructions.

“Don’t get on that helicopter with your patient,” Kirchner told them. “No matter what, stay aboard.”
⁸⁹
He didn’t want any corpsmen suddenly deciding it was prudent to accompany a patient off
Forrestal
. None did.

Soon
Oriskany
’s sick bay overflowed with
Forrestal
patients.
Oriskany
sailors volunteered to sit with the injured and burned men. Even though most of them had a large “M” written with a grease pencil on their foreheads for the morphine they had been given, they lay in pain. Some were burned so completely there wasn’t any place for an “M.”

A fog of burning rubber, fuel, and other combustibles filled the hangar deck on
Forrestal
. Sparks periodically showered down from transformers bolted to bulkheads. By mid-afternoon, the majority of the wounded had been treated, and the dead were laid out in body bags on the hangar deck. Some were bizarre shapes because bodies had contorted into freakish positions and carbonized. Others corpses fell apart when sailors placed them in a body bag. Dazed men, faces streaked with tears and sweat, stepped over the dead, gently pulling back blankets and opening bags in search of their buddies. After a while, the Marines who provided security on
Forrestal
created a morgue by rigging some pipe with blue curtains around the dead and standing watch to keep sailors from looking through them.

Mowad and another dentist checked the pockets of the dead for clues to their identities if their dog tags had melted or been blown away. They also looked for names stenciled on sailors’ shirts if they hadn’t been burned. Sometimes a tattoo was enough to identify a man.

Holes were cut through the solid steel flight deck so that makeshift firefighting teams could reach the compartments where fires continued to burn more than four hours after the first bomb had detonated.

Captain Beling read a prayer over the 1MC that night:

Forrestal
was a shaken ship. Many sailors slept up in the fo’c’sle or on the catwalks next to the flight deck. The last fire was extinguished at 0400 the following morning. It had burned for seventeen hours, but the danger wasn’t over. Later that day, three sailors entered a battery locker to search for anyone who may have been trapped. All three suffocated when acid from broken batteries mixed with seawater to create chlorine gas.

Mowad flew by helicopter over to
Repose
with parachute bags filled with dental X-rays. He used them to identify the burned bodies that had been transferred to the hospital ship. He and two dental technicians worked in a walk-in cold storage unit, trying to match the burned bodies on the tables with more than four hundred sets of X-rays. In one case, Mowad didn’t need the X-rays. He recognized the three fillings he had put in the sailor’s mouth just two days before.

On July 29, 1967, the USS
Forrestal
endured more direct hits from bombs than any aircraft carrier since World War II. The accident resulted in the deaths of 134 sailors. That dwarfed the typical mass casualty on an aircraft carrier when fewer than 20 sailors might be injured in a particularly bad plane crash. Medical personnel treated more than 150 injured men. Scores more were assessed for minor shrapnel wounds, sprained shoulders, or twisted knees. Kirchner estimated sick bay saw more than 300 patients in 24 hours.

In the week after the disaster, sailors on
Forrestal
continued to discover the bodies of men who had been listed as missing. Some were found in inaccessible spaces that required extensive cutting to reach the corpses. In early August, the heavily damaged aircraft carrier off-loaded more than fifty bodies at the Navy’s Subic Bay base in the Philippines. After temporary repairs were made,
Forrestal
returned to Norfolk thirty-four days later. The carrier had lost twenty-one aircraft. Forty others had been damaged. Two years of comprehensive repairs cost $72 million (roughly $475 million in 2010 dollars).

The investigation into the tragedy started before the smoke had fully cleared from
Forrestal
’s compartments. It became evident that two shortcuts taken by flight deck personnel made the disaster possible. One group of sailors pulled the safety pins on rockets before the aircraft reached the catapult. Although that saved time on the launch cycle, they were supposed to pull the safety pins after the planes had reached the catapult. Another flight deck crew prematurely connected rockets to the jets’ electrical firing systems. That, too, saved time when the plan of the day called for multiple air strikes.

If a rocket was connected to the firing system, it was secure if the safety pin stayed in place. Similarly, if the safety pin was removed but the rocket wasn’t connected to the electrical system, it could not be fired. But two crews independently violated safety procedures. When the jet was started, a stray jolt of electricity fired the live Zuni rocket across the flight deck.

In addition to these procedural lapses, investigators were critical of the inadequate training of the firefighting and damage control crews, as well as the lack of respirators available on board.

Captain John Beling was reprimanded for poor judgment. After a stint at the Pentagon, he was transferred to a post in Iceland. Dr. Gary Kirchner left the Navy and became a county coroner in Pennsylvania. Sam Mowad, the dentist, made the Navy his career. So did chief petty officer Sam Walker, who ran the pharmacy. He was proud of the sick bays on his ships and the young corpsmen who answered to him. Lieutenant Commander John McCain later was shot down and became a prisoner of war in Vietnam. After leaving the Navy, he was elected to the U.S. Senate and was the Republican presidential nominee in 2008. Most of the corpsmen on
Forrestal
left the Navy when they fulfilled their military service obligation. Some went to college, and many reentered civilian life at a time when public opposition to Vietnam was mounting. Few outside the Navy acknowledged the ship of heroes.