Troubled Water

by Gregory A. Freeman

  Townsend was waiting for the call that would give him the most responsibility and probably the most challenge he had ever faced, which was saying something for a man like him. He had been on the Seattle for about a year when that call came: Townsend was to command the Kitty Hawk, one of the world’s most powerful warships, a carrier whose years of service were already legendary. The transfer was made even easier by the fact that the carrier was nearly identical to the Constellation, which Townsend knew inside out, backward and forward. They were sister ships, the Kitty Hawk being the first in the class and the Constellation following a few months later in 1961. Both were great ships to command, Townsend thought, representing the very best that the Navy had at sea.

  Townsend took command of the Kitty Hawk from Captain Owen H. Oberg in June 1972, when the ship was on duty in the western Pacific. He expected a finely tuned instrument of war, but he found troubling problems right away—some material issues and some related to personnel. The Kitty Hawk had the best-equipped air wing in the Pacific Fleet, sporting the latest and greatest in airplanes, electronics, and weaponry. The ship had nearly everything a captain could ask for in terms of equipment and technology, but as Townsend inspected the ship over several days before relieving Captain Oberg, he found evidence of a ship not run to his standards. The engineering spaces, for one thing, were not maintained properly. Two boilers were overdue for inspection, one so neglected that Townsend feared the damn thing might burn up the ship. The ship was flying only 85 sorties a day; Townsend knew from his experience on the Constellation that 120 sorties should have been easily achievable.

  It didn’t take long for Townsend to identify the root cause of the Kitty Hawk’s troubles. Simply walking around and talking to the crew told him as much or more than he got from the reports of his senior officers. The crew had a bad attitude. They didn’t want to be there. They were angry that the ship had left San Diego earlier than expected, and they weren’t motivated to do anything more than the minimum required work. Townsend also took note of some of the other issues that would later concern the ship’s XO: the lax discipline and an informal, self-imposed segregation between black sailors and white ones. Townsend’s assessment of the Kitty Hawk helped confirm a trend he had noticed recently: There was a marked decline in the quality of some enlisted men coming into the Navy, the result of a new effort to increase the ranks by lowering minimum test scores on aptitude and intelligence tests.

  It wasn’t what Townsend had hoped to find when he took command of the carrier.

  Our job is to do the assigned task and do it well, Townsend thought at the time. How we got here is not the issue. The condition of this ship and this crew is a real shame, because the Kitty Hawk is a great ship. These men have been coddled for too long.

  A tough, seasoned Navy officer like Townsend didn’t have much sympathy for sailors moping and feeling sorry for themselves, but he did understand that being in the Navy in 1972 was no walk in the park. In addition to the plain old stress of hard work, being away from home, and risking your life every day, the antiwar sentiment made some sailors feel like pariahs when they walked the streets of San Diego in uniform. Antiwar protestors demonstrated when the ship departed or returned to port, and it was not uncommon for sailors to endure insults on the street or get into bar fights when some ignorant kid in love beads accused them of doing something heinous just because they were serving their country.

  Townsend knew the crew was skeptical about the war and many wondered why they were sacrificing so much for what sometimes seemed a pointless effort. It was no secret that many in the military— senior officers included—had the same misgivings about the Vietnam War, if not the same outright opposition, that could be found in the civilian population. These feelings certainly didn’t help the morale and work ethic on the Kitty Hawk. Although Townsend shared some of the crew’s concerns about the futility of the effort in Southeast Asia, prompted by his own experience as a pilot, he could never express those feelings to his crew. He had to walk a fine line with the sailors, presenting a strong, commanding presence while also trying to show concern for the issues that troubled them.

  Townsend reported back to the admiral that problems on the Kitty Hawk would delay the carrier being fully operational. The overdue inspections on the boilers were a particular worry for him. He feared they could create a fire aboard the Kitty Hawk, a hazard that haunted every Navy ship’s captain after several high-profile fires in the 1960s had killed hundreds of sailors and caused many millions of dollars of damage. Townsend told the admiral that he wouldn’t be getting 30 knots across the bow—the standard for launching aircraft and considered the sign that a carrier is operating normally—until he squared away the safety inspections on those boilers. A good wind would only fan the flames if a fire did occur, so Townsend opted for the safer choice of delaying full flight operations. The admiral didn’t argue with the new captain’s judgment.

  Townsend had every confidence in his ability to straighten out the Kitty Hawk, but commanding an aircraft carrier is not a one-man job. A captain depends on his executive officer, his second in command, to enact many of his directives and take responsibility for more of the hands-on administration while the captain determines the big picture for the ship. The XO’s primary duties are to oversee the department heads, keep the ship clean, and command the master-at-arms forces—the sailors who serve as sort of the police force of a Navy ship. The captain is responsible for the operational readiness of the ship, seamanship, actually ensuring that the carrier can perform its role. The current XO was being transferred off the Kitty Hawk. Considering the state of the ship, Townsend wasn’t going to shed any tears over the XO’s departure. He had high hopes for the new XO who was to arrive shortly, a black Navy flier named Ben Cloud. Townsend did not know Cloud personally, but he had studied the man’s record thoroughly and liked what he saw. If he hadn’t, he could have vetoed the assignment. From what Townsend could tell, Cloud was eminently qualified and came with the best recommendations. Townsend was going to have one of the Navy’s most senior black officers under his command, and the first black XO of a carrier, but he considered race a trivial issue. When Townsend approved Cloud’s assignment as XO, a superior officer tried to clarify that Townsend understood the situation.

  “You know, Doc, this guy is black. Is that going to be okay with you? Are you sure this is the right thing for the Hawk?”

  “I don’t give a damn what color he is,” Townsend replied. “I just want a good XO. That’s all that matters to me, and if the Navy wants to send him to me, I’ll take him.”

  He didn’t plan to make any fuss about Cloud breaking new ground or blazing trails, and as far as he could tell, neither did Cloud. The bottom line for Townsend was that he didn’t care much about Cloud’s skin color; he just wanted to see if the man would do a good job as XO. Townsend was sympathetic to the civil rights movement, but on the whole he expected all men, and certainly his sailors, to act appropriately, no matter what their race was. He did not realize, however, that some of the ship’s black sailors often were driven by past experience and cultural differences that he could not understand.

  Townsend, like all commanders, needed to depend on the XO to be his eyes and ears with the sailors, to have the more personal connection to the crew that he could not make without sacrificing his standing as the captain. But he only knew Cloud from his outstanding record; he didn’t know the man well enough to be certain where he would stand on some of the issues they would have to address on the Kitty Hawk. It would not take long for them both to realize that their personal styles were very different. That could be a hindrance, because Townsend already knew this crew was stressed and in disarray.

  And he knew that the way the captain and XO commanded a crew of 5,000 men at sea bore some similarity to the way a mom and dad parented a child. They might have different styles, but they had to be consistent and present a united front. That’s what he needed from this new XO. The crew of the Kitty Hawk would
need strong leadership from both of them.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A NEW XO

  August 1972

  The man who would save the Kitty Hawk arrived on the ship in August 1972. By December of the same year, he was testifying before the same congressional committee that had heard from Doc Townsend. Confident but not quite defiant, Benjamin Cloud told the congressmen that he had done what was necessary.

  “The methods that I used admittedly were unorthodox, and I will admit unmilitary,” he told the committee members who would pass judgment on him. “But I felt, and as I feel right now, sir, they were absolutely necessary to prevent loss of life and extreme destruction to the Kitty Hawk. And in retrospect I must say that looking back on that situation, the tempo and tenor of the situation at that time, and knowing what would be at stake, I would do it again.”

  IT HAD BEEN HARD to foresee the trouble coming when Cloud joined the Kitty Hawk in August, just three months after Townsend had taken command of the ship. By that time, Townsend had whipped the crew back into shape. The ship’s standards now matched those Cloud had seen earlier in his career, when the future XO had flown off the Kitty Hawk as a naval aviator. Under Doc Townsend’s command, the crew was performing at a much higher level, and those boilers were, by god, inspected regularly. Within seven days of taking command, Townsend had 30 knots of wind over the deck again. The new captain became a familiar face in the belly of the ship, way down deep in the engineering compartments where the crew hardly ever saw a top officer. Townsend was so pleased with how the crew had improved the material condition of the ship that he ordered a new sign placed at the aft entrance: “Home of the Best Engineers in the Navy.” The engineers appreciated the gesture because theirs was one of the least glamorous and most difficult jobs on the carrier. All the high drama, glory, and excitement takes place on the flight deck, but every carrier has thousands of men belowdecks who see none of that, or sunshine either.

  The crew soon came to realize that Townsend was a hands-on leader who liked to observe things for himself, and it was not unusual to see him off the bridge, meeting with department heads and getting into whatever was going on around the ship. He was seen, but he didn’t make a big deal out of sitting down with the crew to shoot the bull or eating with the enlisted men just to make a show of how he was a regular guy. He wasn’t a regular guy on the Kitty Hawk; he was the captain. Townsend was so focused on getting the ship back in order, in ways that he could see and understand and measure, that he didn’t realize that many personnel issues still simmered below the surface. He had some idea that morale on the ship still was subpar, especially among the lower ranks and minority crew members, but he felt that much of the cause of that bad morale was beyond his control, intertwined as it was with what was happening in the civilian world back home. He was focused on making the ship function at its best, and he put a higher priority on the logistics than the intangibles of crew morale. Whatever the personnel problems were, he hoped the arrival of his new XO might improve the situation.

  The arrival of Benjamin Cloud as the new XO on the Kitty Hawk caused many on board the aircraft carrier and throughout the Navy to take notice. As second in command of one of the world’s most powerful warships and one with a long, colorful history, the XO would be in a high-profile position and on the fast track to even greater glory in the Navy. Cloud fit the bill perfectly; his career was already fast moving and high achieving, having passed milestones at age forty that would make any naval aviator proud. He looked the part too—a handsome, trim man with a firm, steady look in his eyes that told you he was ready to tackle anything.

  Cloud had been born in San Diego, the home port of the aircraft carrier, on November 6, 1931, the son of a San Diego police officer who would retire in the late 1930s. In 1940, the family moved about 15 miles to El Cajon, California, in hopes that the drier climate would help Cloud’s chronic asthma. The family settled onto a 25-acre ranch, one of many in the area, where Cloud and his brother enjoyed the open lands and horses, plus the attention of his mother, a dedicated homemaker who was nearly always at home with her boys. Cloud was not the stereotypical jock who goes on to become a fighter pilot. He gravitated more toward the arts than athletics, taking up the violin as a child and playing with the State of California Youth Symphony.

  Cloud’s racial heritage was a mixture of black and American Indian on both sides. His family name could be traced back to a paternal grandfather who was a full-blooded Indian in Tennessee, and his mother’s family tree included Indians living in Oklahoma. Despite this rich and more complex ancestry, most people assumed the Clouds were entirely of black heritage. Racial issues did not pose significant hurdles in Cloud’s childhood, and he would come to realize later that his early years were very different from those of other black men and women of the same era. The Cloud family lived in a predominantly minority, upper-middle-class neighborhood in San Diego County, where racial issues were not at the forefront of daily life as much as they might be in, say, Birmingham, Atlanta, Chicago, or New York. There certainly was racial discrimination, and Cloud’s father experienced far more in his earlier life than his sons did, but Cloud’s experience in San Diego and El Cajon did not create childhood memories of oppression at every turn. In San Diego, young Cloud spent most of his time in a community made up of blacks and Latinos who were decidedly middle class and who did not focus much time and energy on complaining about racism. No one denied it existed, no one pretended that it didn’t matter, but it was not a reason to take your eye off the prize. When the family moved to the far more rural community of El Cajon, the distant neighbors were primarily white, with some Latinos but very few black families nearby. When he started grammar school, Cloud was among only three or four black children enrolled, and he was the only black student in the high school.

  Cloud’s family almost never discussed racial issues at home, not because it was taboo or too disturbing to bring up, but simply because the family had better things to talk about. Cloud’s father believed that you succeeded in this world on your own merits and that no amount of racism was going to stop you if you were determined.

  “If you’re good enough to do something, you’re going to succeed no matter what color your skin is,” Cloud’s father told the boys on many occasions. “You’re not only going to succeed, but other people are going to want to be a part of your life.”

  That attitude carried Cloud’s father through the harassment and discouragement that he encountered when he became the first minority police officer in San Diego. He didn’t use racism and the undeniable inequities it spawned as a reason to stop pursuing his goal, and he taught his sons that nothing should hinder the pursuit of their dreams.

  Cloud began studying civil engineering at San Diego State College, but before long, the growing war in Korea made men his age start wondering if they would be drafted. Rather than wait to see whether the draft would dictate how he served his country, Cloud decided to suspend his college studies and join the Navy to become a flier. He had flown a bit during high school, so he aimed at becoming a fighter pilot. It was during his training in Pensacola, Florida, in 1952 that Cloud got his first real experience with segregation. He was not welcome to get his hair cut in the same Navy Exchange barbershop his classmates used, and he was shocked to find that even as a naval officer candidate, he had to sit in the back of the bus when traveling around the base itself. He was reassured somewhat by the fact that some of his white friends insisted on sitting in the back with him.

  After excelling in his flight program, Cloud was assigned in 1954 to fighter reconnaissance program VC–61 (later designated as VFP–63) in San Diego, flying F9F Panthers, the same plane in which Townsend had so much experience. He welcomed the assignment because his widowed mother and his brother were still living nearby. He wasn’t home all that much, though, because his unit deployed to the Pacific several times on the carriers USS Boxer, Coral Sea, and Ticonderoga. Still determined to get his college degree, Cloud fought for ac
ceptance in the Navy’s “Five Term” program, which allowed junior college officers to go to school full time at any university that would guarantee a degree after the completion of five semesters, with the Navy paying for the education. The Navy granted his request, and Cloud was accepted at Stanford University, but then the program ended abruptly because of budget cuts. The decision greatly disappointed Cloud, and he even toyed with the idea of ending his Navy service much sooner than he had planned so he could continue his education on his own. Instead, Cloud consulted with several senior officers he considered mentors and they convinced him to stay, steering him toward another Navy program that paid for about half of his tuition. After being accepted in that program, in 1959 Cloud was transferred to a desk job at the Naval Photographic Center in Anacostia, Maryland, with the understanding that his primary duty was to get his degree at the University of Maryland. By 1963 he had received his degree in Chinese language and culture—the university had no civil engineering program to complete his earlier studies—and the Navy was ready to put him back to work. His superiors asked Cloud if he wanted to return to VC–61 in San Diego and become the team leader for a photo reconnaissance detachment scheduled to go to Southeast Asia. What would soon be known as the Vietnam War was just building steam that year, so Cloud saw no reason to consider the assignment particularly dangerous—not that that would have deterred him from taking what clearly was a good step up the career ladder. He welcomed the opportunity to lead a team of Navy pilots. His group deployed to Southeast Asia on the Kitty Hawk for what they all expected to be a relatively safe assignment, but they soon found that they were probing into dangerous territory just as the Vietnam conflict was beginning to heat up. Cloud’s team was charged with many top-secret missions over Laos and Vietnam, and they were in the middle of it all when the situation reached full boil. One of Cloud’s team, Charles Klausmann, was among the first to be wounded in the Vietnam War; captured after his plane went down on a reconnaissance mission, he subsequently escaped from a prisoner of war camp.