TROUBLED WATER
ALSO BY GREGORY A. FREEMAN
Fixing Hell: An Army Psychologist Confronts Abu Ghraib
(with Col. [Ret.] Larry C. James, PhD)
The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II
Sailors to the End: The Deadly Fire on the USS Forrestal and the Heroes Who Fought It
Lay This Body Down: The 1921 Murders of Eleven Plantation Slaves
TROUBLED WATER
RACE, MUTINY, AND BRAVERY ON THE USS KITTY HAWK
GREGORY A. FREEMAN
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This book is dedicated to the thousands of
men and women who served on the
USS Kitty Hawk in her forty-seven years
of service to the United States.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Author’s Note x
Introduction xi
Principal Characters xviii
1. Seal the Hatch 1
2. A New Captain 7
3. A New XO 17
4. America at Sea 31
5. A Long, Difficult Journey 47
6. The Dap Fight 77
7. Sailing into Troubled Water 91
8. A Raised Fist 107
9. “They Are Going to Kill Us All!” 123
10. “It’s Really Happening” 139
11. “This Is Mutiny!” 157
12. “Captain, I Am Scared to Death” 175
13. “He Is a Brother!” 189
14. “By a Higher Authority” 199
15. “Plain Criminals?” 207
Epilogue 223
Bibliography 231
Notes 234
Index 241
Eight pages of photographs appear between pages 122 and 123.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this project by corresponding with and granting interviews to a writer who approached you out of the blue and asked you to share your stories, including memories that were sometimes difficult and painful to recount. In particular, I thank Marland Townsend, Ben Cloud, Robert Keel, John Travers, Perry Pettus, Terry Avinger, Tom Dysart, Chris Mason, Garland Young, G. Kirk Allen, and John Callahan. This book would not have been possible without your cooperation, and I trust you will find it is an honorable telling of an important event in your lives.
Drew Mosley was responsible for obtaining a key document in my research. Thank you for your assistance. I also thank the staff and research assistants at the Library of Congress and the National Archives.
Every writer needs a good agent, and I have the best in Mel Berger. Thank you for all you do, Mel. And every writer depends on an astute editor like Jake Klisivitch at Palgrave Macmillan to make his work the best it can be. Thank you, Jake.
I thank Caroline and Nicholas for making every day important to me.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of nonfiction. All dialogue, thoughts, and emotions are based on either historical records or the subjects’ statements to the author and others. See the notes section for further explanation of the origin of some material.
INTRODUCTION
An aircraft carrier at sea is about the size and population of a small city, it is often said, and the similarities go beyond just the numbers. These cities at sea can face some of the same difficulties as a community back home, and in 1972, the USS Kitty Hawk was going through the same social upheaval that was troubling the rest of America. Racial tensions were high, and disaffected young black men were struggling to get by in a society that claimed to welcome them with open arms but in fact regularly threw up roadblocks and then expressed shock that the men couldn’t get around them. Those frustrated young men sometimes lashed out in ways that were ill-advised and ultimately counterproductive, often influenced by opportunists who used the cries of social injustice as a cover for crimes. Authority figures struggled to determine how much to negotiate and how much to respond with force.
In 1972, this was America, and in 1972, this was the Kitty Hawk.
The long-simmering racial tensions on board were prompted by some of the same everyday discrimination that black men faced back home, the occasional insult from a white sailor or officer, and the institutional procedures that, intentional or not, often thwarted the black sailors’ efforts to move up in the ranks and succeed in the Navy. Add to that the unpopular war in Vietnam, economic difficulties back home that prompted many decidedly nonmilitary types to join the Navy, and one of the longest deployments in the history of American warships, and this crew was ripe for trouble.
The Kitty Hawk was the first in a class of three supercarriers and the second Navy ship named after the North Carolina town where the Wright brothers flew their first airplane. Built by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation at Camden, New Jersey, the keel was laid on December 27, 1956, and the ship was commissioned on April 29, 1961. The 82,000-ton carrier departed her home port of San Diego on her first deployment in 1962 and continued to serve the United States until she was decommissioned in January 2009. In those forty-seven years, approximately 92,000 people served on the ship. The Kitty Hawk and a variety of Carrier Air Wings completed eighteen deployments in support of operations including Vietnam, the Iranian hostage crisis, Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, and air strikes against Iraq. The ship saw extensive action as a key player in Operation Linebacker, the bombing campaign against North Vietnam that began on May 10, 1972. During the five and a half months of that operation, Navy planes were responsible for more than 60 percent of the total sorties in North Vietnam. The July-to-September quarter was the most intense, with 12,865 naval sorties flown, about a quarter of them at night. In addition to the Kitty Hawk, the carriers Constellation, Coral Sea, Hancock, Midway, Saratoga, Oriskany, and America also participated in the operation. Three or four of the carriers were kept on Yankee Station, the strategic point off the coast of South Vietnam where Navy operations were based, throughout the offensive.
By any measure, the Kitty Hawk was a shining star in the U.S. Navy fleet throughout her storied career. But the ship also was the site of one of the most difficult moments in recent Navy history, a crisis that could have been far worse if not for the actions of the ship’s two top officers—but also a crisis that might have been minimized if those officers had responded differently.
The Kitty Hawk hit troubled water during its long stay in Vietnam for Operation Linebacker. By October 1972, the Vietnam War had dragged on for seven years, and President Richard Nixon was counting on the bombing campaign to stall the advance of North Vietnamese forces and make possible an honorable U.S. exit from the war. Key to that bombing campaign was the Kitty Hawk, one of the world’s most powerful aircraft carriers. She was among the most important and most highly visible parts of the American war effort. The carrier’s deployment had been extraordinarily stressful to the crew from the very start, when she departed San Diego in February 1972, a week earlier than planned and with very little notice. They then went into a combat zone and had to perform at top speed and full capacity most of the time. The workload on a carrier is always heavy, but on this deployment, many of the Kitty Hawk crew worked cycles of eight hours on and four hours off, every day—for an astounding 247 days. Some men in the engineering department, one of the busiest, received only six days off during the entire cruise.
The sailors longed to go home, and they were repeatedly teased with the prospect of endi
ng their tour and heading back to San Diego. Captain Marland Townsend, a highly respected and experienced Navy officer, was sympathetic but determined to carry out his orders. Several times the crew believed they were heading home, but then the plans were changed at the last minute. Each time this happened, the men became more restless and every tension was magnified. The stresses were especially difficult for some of the young black sailors, many of whom were recruited under a new Navy initiative designed to increase the ranks and open up more positions to men who might previously have been turned down. To do this, the Navy eased the requirements for test scores, intelligence, and criminal histories—a change that resulted in significantly more recruits for the Navy. But many were inner-city youths whose attitudes and worldviews were formed by their experiences on the streets of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, where some had been in violent gangs, and who felt more allegiance to the radical black power leaders of the day than they did to anyone wearing a uniform. They joined the Navy because it was a job and because it kept them from being drafted into the jungles of Vietnam.
When these headstrong young men found themselves on an aircraft carrier halfway around the world, assigned to menial tasks and subjected to some of the same insults and degradations that happen to any sailor, they couldn’t help but assume it was because of their color. Numbering only 295 among a total crew of about 5,000, the black sailors on the Kitty Hawk were a minority in every sense.
The white sailors working alongside them, and the mostly all-white officers who supervised them, were for the most part ignorant about these issues, more concerned with the enormous tasks before them and assuming that the black sailors saw life on the Kitty Hawk the same as any white sailor. They were terribly mistaken.
What happened on the Kitty Hawk in October 1972 was a pivotal point in race relations for the Navy. Most people have no idea how close it came to becoming so much more.
TROUBLED WATER IS NOT the story the Navy would tell about the incident on the Kitty Hawk. The race riot is no secret; with so many people involved and the media coverage at the time, it would have been impossible to completely hide the incident even if Navy brass were so inclined. Instead, the Navy dealt with the Kitty Hawk incident quickly and decisively, then allowed it to fade from memory. The Navy was content to let the unpleasant, some would say embarrassing, episode molder in the little-seen files of the Pentagon, never actively denying that the riot took place but always downplaying its significance and scope if the subject arose—and it arose very infrequently. The reason for downplaying the incident is clear: This was an ugly episode involving brutal, vicious attacks on innocent young men who were in the care of the U.S. Navy, and it all hinged on the ever-sensitive, always inflammatory subject of race. Whether the Navy held any responsibility for what happened on the Kitty Hawk, and the extent of that responsibility, can be debated to this day, but it is clear that for more than thirty years, the Navy considered the Kitty Hawk incident a dark episode that must be described in carefully chosen words, when forced to discuss it at all.
References to the Kitty Hawk riot are scarce in any official Navy publication or Internet site. For most of the time since the incident, little information was available beyond a few lines noting a “disturbance” on the ship. More light was shed on the event in 2007, when the Kitty Hawk riot was described in the book Black Sailor, White Navy: Racial Unrest in the Fleet During the Vietnam War Era by historian John Darrell Sherwood of the U.S. Naval Historical Center, but restraint and caution is evident in that official version of the story. Sherwood’s book is a valuable, well-documented analysis of the extensive racial strife that plagued the Navy during the turbulent years of the Vietnam War. In the course of documenting various race-related problems of the era, he provides a factual outline of what happened on the Kitty Hawk. That alone represents progress in the Navy’s willingness to discuss this incident openly. Sherwood provides useful insight into how the bigger picture of race relations in the Navy played a role in the Kitty Hawk incident, but his account of the actual violence downplays the scope of what happened on the carrier. The disturbance was terrible for those involved, Sherwood says, but the incident involved only a small number of crew members.
From the first days of researching this story, I perceived that the prevailing attitude in the Navy was along the lines of “yes, it happened, but it really wasn’t that big a deal.” This struck me as disingenuous. For the average person who knows little of the details or has heard only that there was a brief disturbance on the ship, that summary can seem legitimate. But once you know the facts of what happened on the Kitty Hawk, it is clear that this was a significant episode in the history of the Navy and the country. And for those involved—far more than just the handful suggested by the Navy—the riot on the Kitty Hawk had lasting effects. For some, it changed their lives forever.
I first came to the story of the Kitty Hawk as an offshoot of my work on a book about another carrier, the Forrestal. Reading more about the history of aircraft carriers, I came across references to the sit-down strike on the carrier Constellation on November 3, 1972, a strike that is well documented by the Navy. As intriguing and significant as that strike was, it was a peaceful protest. Many accounts described it as the worst incident of racial strife in the Navy during that period, so I was surprised to find sketchy, brief mentions of a race riot on the Kitty Hawk that included a series of violent attacks and even a possible attempt to seize control of the ship by force. If that had happened on the Kitty Hawk, how could the Constellation incident be considered the worst of the racial disturbances in the era?
The answer, I concluded, lay in the fact that the Constellation strike, while serious, was nonviolent, so that story could be told without having to acknowledge some ugliness within the ranks of the Navy. Even if the men of the Constellation were insubordinate, and even if their philosophy and their tactics were misguided, they didn’t hurt anyone. They used the nonviolent form of protest that had gained respect in Middle America. That story can be told far more easily than one in which men from the ranks went on a vicious rampage against their fellow sailors.
Throughout my research, the Navy followed a pattern of not denying any facts about the Kitty Hawk incident but also not making any effort to shine a light on what happened. Most of the original documents related to the investigations after the riot, the Navy told me, have been destroyed. When I contacted members of the crew who were aboard during the riot, the full extent of the violence and its effect on those involved became clear. Thirty-five years after the incident, the night of October 12, 1972, was still with them, and they vividly remembered the terror, the uncertainty, the confusion. For them, the riot was not a minor event, not something trivial to be swept under the rug, not just a brief disturbance.
And many of these veterans disagreed vehemently with the Navy position—and with that of the two senior officers on the Kitty Hawk—about one of the most contentious words in this story: mutiny. The word has grave meaning within the Navy, signifying a rebellion of the first order, a complete failure of the command structure. It is a word that is not tossed around lightly or applied easily to a set of facts. The Navy and the officers involved have strong motivation to avoid the word, to find a way to say that no matter how serious an insurrection, it did not constitute a mutiny. To declare a mutiny is to admit that you have lost control of your ship, and no officer wants to accept defeat by his own men.
The Navy says there has never been a mutiny on a U.S. warship. The captain and executive officer of the Kitty Hawk maintain they were not facing a mutiny, though it is clear from testimony soon after the riot that they feared the incident could take a turn in that direction if they did not stop the violence. The crew of the Kitty Hawk, however, have nothing to lose by embracing the word. From their perspective, from the viewpoint of the sailor trapped in a work space belowdecks and fearing the next attack by an angry mob of fellow sailors, this was a mutiny or at least a mutiny attempt. They do not have to parse the wo
rd to preserve their careers or the Navy’s historical record. They know what they saw, what they experienced on the carrier, and many of them will tell you that they lived through a mutinous attempt to take over one of the world’s most powerful warships.
Troubled Water is the story of those men and the two officers who led them through to calmer seas.
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
MARLAND TOWNSEND. Captain of the Kitty Hawk. At the pinnacle of a stellar career, the white officer commands one of the most active, battle-proven aircraft carriers in the U.S. fleet.
BEN CLOUD. Executive officer (XO) of the Kitty Hawk. Second in command. A black senior officer, Cloud is a rarity on a Navy ship in 1972 but is highly qualified.
NICHOLAS F. CARLUCCI. The commanding officer of the seventy-man Marine detachment on board the Kitty Hawk. Carlucci is a true Marine who believes in doing things by the book.
CHARLES M. JOHNSON. The lead criminal investigator on the Kitty Hawk, Johnson works closely with XO Cloud in matters concerning crew discipline.
PERRY PETTUS. A black sailor who is mostly satisfied with his Kitty Hawk experience until the day the rioting begins.
TERRY AVINGER. A black sailor who grew up poor on the streets of Philadelphia. Initially enthusiastic about joining the Navy, he becomes disgruntled while serving on the Kitty Hawk.
ROBERT KEEL. The son of a career Navy officer, Keel is a white sailor who works in damage control, making him privy to some inside information.
JOHN TRAVERS. An electronics technician on the Kitty Hawk, this California native had spent little time with black people before joining the Navy and is somewhat naive about race relations.
CHAPTER ONE
SEAL THE HATCH
Troubled Water Page 1