After his tour in Southeast Asia, Cloud left the reconnaissance team and returned to Washington, DC, where he was assigned to the Bureau of Naval Personnel and the White House, as an aide to President Lyndon Johnson. He described his job in the White House as putting on a uniform and standing around trying to look sharp until someone needed something from him. It was a radical change from flying death-defying missions over Laos in 1964, but Cloud knew it was temporary and considered an honor. He didn’t spend all of his time standing around the White House, however. Cloud also represented the Navy in many community service programs around the country, making sure that minority youth, in particular, saw that a black man could be a successful Navy officer. These activities and his White House contacts put Cloud in touch with many black leaders of the day, including the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., whom Cloud admired but never openly supported. He didn’t feel it was his place as a prominent Navy officer to take a stand on the race debates going on in the country and especially on the controversial tactics used by some to raise awareness. Even King’s nonviolent protests were illegal in many cases; Cloud felt that he could not align himself too closely with any such activities without risking his career or damaging the Navy’s image. Better to lead by example. Cloud figured that a young black child seeing him in uniform and shaking hands with dignitaries probably accomplished more than anything he could say.
In 1966, he was assigned to a fighter squadron in Oceana, California, flying F–4 Phantoms. That tour lasted four years, including time flying Phantoms in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. From there, Cloud was assigned as the XO of VFP–63, his first squadron back in San Diego, and then he became commander of that unit— one of the first black officers to command a squadron. Cloud knew full well that this position put him squarely on the path toward becoming an admiral some day. He was honored and took his duties at the desk every bit as seriously as he did flying Phantoms over enemy territory.
As Cloud’s Navy career flourished and he progressed on a track that promised even more prestigious assignments, he never once looked at himself as a “black officer” or a “black aviator,” and he certainly didn’t see himself as blazing any new trails for the black community. If others wanted to find some meaning in a black man—more accurately, a black and American Indian man—reaching the levels of success that he was enjoying, so be it. He didn’t mind being a role model for anyone who wanted to follow the same path, black or white, but he knew that he had done it all through hard work; he hadn’t had anything handed to him because of the color of his skin. When anyone ever asked him what effect his race had on his advancement in the Navy—and the question did come up—he was quick to answer “Zero. Absolutely none.” And he made it clear that he meant it went both ways. The color of his skin had offered him no advantages over anyone else; neither had it posed any real obstacles. He gave credit to the Navy for not treating him any differently than his white counterparts when it came to training and advancement, and he damn sure didn’t want anyone to think that his success was the result of anything but hard work and perseverance. He was one of the top officers in the Navy, not one of the top minority officers, and it was insulting to him to suggest—to even inquire about—the possibility that the Navy had moved him to choice assignments as some sort of ad hoc affirmative action. His father had told him that his race shouldn’t be a concern as he pursued his goals, and he felt he was living proof that his father was right. He was quick to anger if anyone suggested otherwise.
Despite Cloud’s justifiable pride in his own accomplishments, there was no denying that others noticed his success not just as an individual but also as a black man. This was, after all, 1972, and race relations were a prominent concern throughout the country. When Cloud was assigned as XO on the Kitty Hawk, no one seriously thought it was because he was black, yet it was still noteworthy in a Navy that was only beginning to accept the idea of blacks in senior leadership positions.
His assignment as XO came when Cloud was a student at the Navy War College in Newport, Rhode Island, awaiting his next assignment. Admiral Bernard A. Clarey, deputy commander in chief of the Pacific (CINCPAC), was a guest speaker at the college one day. Cloud had met Clarey earlier while being debriefed after photo reconnaissance flights over Vietnam, and apparently the younger flier’s accomplishments and attitude had impressed the admiral. Seeing that Cloud was up for assignment after completing his studies, Admiral Clarey asked Cloud if he would be interested in coming to work as his aide. Cloud was flattered and interested in the position, but he had to be honest about one potential problem.
“Sir, I know that an officer in your position and his deputy are involved in a great deal of social activities and that one’s wife gets heavily involved in the CINCPAC life,” Cloud told Clarey. “Admiral, I don’t have a wife and I really do not anticipate getting one in the foreseeable future.”
Clarey agreed that a single man might not be the best choice for his aide, and asked Cloud what other assignment he was interested in. Cloud told him that he had been thinking about becoming XO of a major ship. With his seniority, he should be a fine candidate for such a position, he told the admiral. Clarey agreed and got the ball rolling, eventually asking Townsend about assigning Cloud as his new second in command. Townsend pointed out that there were two other officers on the ship who were senior to Cloud and should be considered. After more discussions, Clarey and Townsend agreed that Cloud was the right man for the job. A ship’s captain has ultimate approval over the XO, and Townsend indicated that he would welcome Cloud aboard.
Cloud was extremely pleased with the assignment to the Kitty Hawk, which almost felt like home to him. His first experience on the carrier had been as an ensign, when he was detailed to the Kitty Hawk as it was being built in Camden, New Jersey, responsible for installing some advanced photographic equipment in the ship’s photo labs. Cloud had made five cruises aboard the Kitty Hawk as an air squadron member, and it had been the platform for many of his flights over Vietnam. The Kitty Hawk was only one of several carriers that Cloud had flown from throughout his career, but he had spent enough time on the great ship to get to know her well. He felt a special affinity for the carrier.
When Cloud joined the Kitty Hawk in August 1972, he found a carrier that was operating at top speed, meeting goals that would daunt lesser carriers and crews. This was the kind of ship on which a hard-charging, ambitious officer like Cloud wanted to serve. The day he took on his role as XO and settled into his quarters, Cloud knew that he was taking a bold step forward in his Navy career, and he was eager to get to work.
The carrier that Cloud boarded showcased the best and the worst of the Navy in 1972. The crew was hardworking and dedicated— most of them anyway—but the Kitty Hawk wasn’t without difficulties. Like any Navy ship then or now, the crew had their own personal issues to deal with while they performed their duties, and the more men you put together in one big tin can on the ocean, the more those personal issues grow into something much more onerous. Racial issues were a prime concern in the United States in 1972, and there were reports of incidents on Navy ships and bases around the world—everything from minor fistfights among sailors to substantial vandalism against ships. But for the most part, the Navy was avoiding the topic and simply declared that race would not be an issue on its ships. Sailors sometimes disagreed.
Cloud saw some signs right away that suggested black sailors were struggling with what they perceived as racial discrimination on board, and he noted that their concerns bore watching. Real or imagined, he knew that their perception of racism on the Kitty Hawk could become a problem. It was evident right away that the sailors naturally grouped themselves by the same racial, ethnic, and socio-demographic differences that separated them back home in the States. Latinos from Texas or California tended to congregate with each other, as did black sailors from Chicago or Los Angeles. Cloud also could see that the officers on the Kitty Hawk tended to take a very hands-off approach to the sailors’ time away fr
om work, interfering little with how the men associated and not enforcing much discipline in berthing areas. Some such areas were totally black, some all Latino, some strictly white—all segregated by the sailors themselves. There also were areas of the ship where Kitty Hawk officers—mostly white—did not go because they knew they were not welcome. Some areas, regardless of the occupants’ race, were filthy because the sailors were allowed to live however they wanted. Some of this disturbed Cloud right off the bat, but he knew it was not unique to the Kitty Hawk. It all reflected the Navy of 1972. Many senior officers recognized the existence of such problems but did not know how to address them.
Cloud and Townsend meshed well from the start, though they had somewhat different styles: the captain was more reserved and formal, while the XO was more gregarious. Townsend was pleased right away with the new guy. After Cloud spent some time with the outgoing XO to learn the ropes, the captain felt that he was entirely capable of providing the kind of leadership the crew needed and he expected. Their initial impressions of each other were favorable. Everything bode well for a good working relationship, possibly even a good friendship.
Townsend was pleased to see that, as he expected, Cloud clearly thought of himself as the XO, not the “black XO” or the “first black XO.” The black sailors noticed that there now was a black man on the bridge, and Cloud encouraged them to come to him with concerns, but he never did so in a way that undermined junior officers or made it appear that black sailors had a special conduit to the top because he was of the same race.
Early on, Cloud got word from other senior officers that the black sailors were known for griping about mistreatment, spending a lot of time sitting around their berthing areas bitching and moaning about what the Navy was doing to them. Nothing but bellyaching and whining all the time, always something the white man was doing to them. “They piss on their shoe and somehow it’s whitey’s fault” was how one officer put it.
The description took Cloud back to his childhood. Even after the family moved to the white community of El Cajon, the family owned property in a black neighborhood in San Diego, including a small barbershop that was popular with local black men. Cloud, his father, and his brother went there regularly on Saturday mornings in the late 1930s and early 1940s for their own haircuts. As a child, particularly one who was growing up in a white community and whose father taught him not to dwell on race, Cloud was always intrigued by the conversations of the men in the inner-city barbershop. Half of them weren’t even there for a haircut; they just enjoyed hanging out and socializing with the other men. The conversation was always about what the white man was doing, how they were being oppressed by the white man, the latest injustice perpetrated by the white man. Rarely was there any talk about the kind of things Cloud heard adults talking about in other settings—their jobs, their families, what their children were doing in school, the latest sports scores. No, it was always about the white man—what the white man did to keep them down and what they did to thwart the white man. Cloud noticed that they seemed to enjoy the interchange, in a sense, even when they were complaining. The men fed off each other’s sense of righteous indignation, whipping each other into more resentment and anger about white discrimination. Cloud realized, with some amusement, that the black men usually tried to best each other with their tales, each one trying to top the last story with a little more injustice, a little more outrage. “You think that’s bad? Let me tell you what a white man said to me at the bus stop yesterday!”
Listening to the black men tell their stories gave Cloud a better understanding of how some were living lives very different from his, both in terms of how they were treated and how they focused their energy. But he also realized that it was their way of coping, a strategy for dealing with the inequities that they faced every day. It wasn’t the way Cloud was raised, but as he looked back on it years later, he realized it was a coping strategy that was deeply ingrained in the male black culture, a traditional way to blow off steam and deal with the stress of being a black man in a mostly white world. The young black men on the Kitty Hawk had probably grown up sitting around barbershops or gas stations or on front porches listening to their fathers and other men gripe and groan about how hard it is to be a black man in a white world. They brought that culture to the carrier and used the same coping technique when they felt stressed and put upon. Cloud figured the gripe sessions on the Kitty Hawk served the same purpose, and he hoped they were just as harmless.
It would take some time for Cloud to get a good handle on the culture of this floating city, and he was being assessed at the same time. The men on board took their time to size up Cloud, and the black sailors were some of the most wary. Rather than welcoming the black XO with open arms, some of them wanted to wait and see if he really was a black man like them or just another officer. An even more important relationship for Cloud was with Townsend, his new boss. Though it was off to a good start, they didn’t really know each other.
CHAPTER FOUR
AMERICA AT SEA
The crew of the Kitty Hawk was a microcosm of America in 1972: mostly young men, with the same interests, vices, and problems as any other eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds back home. But these young people also were thrown into a claustrophobic warship a long way from home, with danger at every turn and extremely demanding work schedules.
The ship’s crew members were diverse in as many ways as they were similar. Robert Keel grew up in San Diego, the son of a career Navy officer, which largely accounted for how he ended up in the Navy. He had been in JROTC in high school in 1966 when, at seventeen and pumped full of testosterone and bravado, he asked his father to sign the papers that would allow him to join the Army. Keel excitedly told his father that he had his heart set on joining the Army’s Special Forces. Keel’s father, who had served in the Navy during World War II and had seen plenty of action, looked at his son like he was out of his mind.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” the elder Keel said. “I’m not signing anything.”
So Keel had to put off his gung-ho plans, and over the next few years he lost interest, beginning to focus more on his new wife and finding a path for his future. The military option came up again one evening in 1968, when the nineteen-year-old Keel was talking with his father, who pointed out that the war in Southeast Asia was heating up and more young men were being drafted. “If you don’t do something yourself, you may not have a choice,” he told his son. “You need to think about joining the Navy.”
Fathers and sons were having that conversation all over the country. The older men, especially those who had been through World War II or the Korean War and knew the brutal reality of ground warfare, urged their sons to consider joining the Navy before they got drafted into the infantry. The Navy was a fine way to serve your country, they said, and though it certainly was no easy ride, at least you could be pretty sure you weren’t going to die in some godforsaken jungle. Keel took his father’s advice and was accepted into the Navy’s nuclear submarine school, a prestigious appointment that would assure the young man of specialized duty, and which could lead to a technical career after his military service. But then Keel learned that he hadn’t passed the Navy’s rigorous moral tests because he had followed his recruiter’s advice to be totally honest on his induction questionnaire and recount every single encounter he had ever had with a policeman—every traffic stop, every meaningless scolding from a cop. The Navy decided that was too many police contacts and tagged Keel with a history of delinquency. They rejected him for nuke school, and Keel felt like a fool for detailing what were really nothing more than typical teen antics. From there, he went through the motions of requesting the assignment he wanted, a destroyer, but he was assigned to the Kitty Hawk instead. An aircraft carrier needs lots of warm bodies to make it go, so plenty of the men assigned to it didn’t necessarily want to be there. Keel had entered the Navy with a fine attitude, but being rejected for nuke school had left him disillusioned. Hi
s early months on the Kitty Hawk were rough, as they are for most sailors, but Keel’s attitude kept spiraling down until one day he found himself sitting on the beach watching the ship sail out of Puget Sound without him. He was absent without leave, a criminal. The ship was pulling out after repairs and headed back to its home port of San Diego, after which it would go to sea for weeks and then months at a time. Keel didn’t want to go with it. The twenty-year-old was so fed up with the Navy that he was toying with the idea of running away to Canada; not reporting for duty had felt like the right decision.
Until he saw his ship sailing out of port without him. The image shook him, and he knew he had screwed up. Big time.
Shit . . .what have I done?
Keel realized, with sudden clarity, that this was a turning point for him. The Navy offered opportunities, and he had responsibilities to his shipmates and to his family that he couldn’t shirk just because he was feeling sorry for himself. This was the moment when Keel felt he had to be a man and do the right thing. He left town that night and made sure he was in San Diego when the Kitty Hawk docked. He went aboard and turned himself in, receiving twenty days in the brig. Oddly enough, his time in the brig helped turn around his attitude toward the Navy. It was easy time—none of the hard work that makes up most of a sailor’s day, three meals and no waiting in the chow line, and he got to be good buddies with his Marine guards. Keel’s only responsibility was to keep the brig spotless, just the way Marines like things. Keel spent his eighteen days in the brig, earning two days for good behavior, and came out with a much healthier attitude toward the Navy and life in general. The only bad part was that he had missed a couple weekends with his wife and baby daughter. To celebrate his release, Keel had the Marine guards over to his house for a party.
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