Keel went back to duty as a 4.0 sailor, squared away, the model of a good seaman, and kept that attitude up as he focused on his work in interior communications (IC). He and his fellow IC men were responsible for the operation and upkeep of the carrier’s telephones, intercoms, equipment control, and telemetry systems. Keel had been on board the Kitty Hawk more than three years in 1972, and he enjoyed the overseas travel. Along the way he made a lot of friends on board, and learned to play poker. After he got over his initial disillusionment about Navy life, Keel thought life on the Kitty Hawk wasn’t so bad. He could see the racial tension on board, however. Keel was like many white sailors who paid little attention to race and didn’t let something as simple as skin color guide their impressions of other sailors, but he recognized that other white sailors had very different thoughts. One white man in Keel’s department was from Texas and tried to explain to him how blacks were different.
“They’re a different species, man. Can’t you understand that?” the man said to Keel, incredulous that he even had to explain this to another white man. “Their bones are different, their muscles are different, they’re put together different. They are not human.”
Fuck, this guy is out of his mind, Keel thought. But he didn’t try to argue, and Keel got along fine with most everyone on board. The ship had its share of extremist nut jobs, both black and white; the best strategy was to just steer clear of them. Most of the white sailors felt that way.
JOHN TRAVERS, ANOTHER white sailor from California, agreed that the Kitty Hawk was a decent way to serve your stint in the military. He went aboard the ship in July 1972 and spent the first two weeks belowdeck, so busy trying to settle into life on a carrier that he hardly realized he hadn’t seen the sun for so long. When he got his first chance to step up on deck for a breather, the bright sun felt like ice picks in his eyes. Travers also learned to be careful with the ship’s drinking water; if the crew didn’t properly purge the lines when filling the water tanks, sometimes it became polluted with jet fuel. At times the water was so foul that you could light it on fire.
Daily hardships aside, Travers was pleased to be on a ship with a reputation like the Kitty Hawk’s. It was pretty badass. The carrier USS Enterprise might get all the glory, the crew often said, but we get the dirty jobs and we get the job done. He was satisfied with what he saw of the captain too. Townsend’s reputation went up a few notches with a number of sailors one day when the ship was cruising in winds that were blowing like hell and kicking up waves that looked big even against a massive aircraft carrier. Travers was in the chow line on the hangar deck, one of dozens of hungry sailors. Captain Townsend came onto the deck trailed by his ever-present Marine escort, whom the crew referred to—mostly good-naturedly—as the “the captain’s dog.” Like all the Marines on board, but especially one who walked alongside the sharply dressed skipper all day, the captain’s dog’s uniform was always impeccable. All the sailors were watching as Townsend and the Marine stopped in the big elevator doors on the side of the carrier—huge open portals, wide enough for two jets side by side—to look at the swells. They should have noticed that the deck there was very wet. Suddenly a wave hit the ship broadside, splashing high up onto the sponson jutting out over the elevator door and right into the open portal, hitting the captain and his dog full force with what must have been a hundred gallons of seawater. The Marine instinctively jumped back. The captain, however, just stood there in his dark brown leather flight jacket and got drenched, taking the full brunt of the wave, hands on his hips, staring out to sea like Leif Ericson. The sailors could have laughed as the captain stood there with water pouring off of him, but instead they roared with admiration and applauded the sight of Doc taking it like a real sailor. They did laugh a bit at the Marine for flinching.
THE CAPTAIN’S CONFIDENCE also reassured Chris Mason, a young white sailor from Gadsden, Alabama, who came to the Kitty Hawk by way of the Navy Reserves, trying like so many of his fellow sailors to avoid the draft. When he graduated high school in 1968, as the Tet offensive was dealing a hard blow to U.S. troops, he listened to the warnings from friends who had already served their times in the jungles of Southeast Asia. To a man, every one of them told Mason, “Don’t go.” Running from duty was never an option, so, to avoid being drafted, Mason joined the Reserves and then went on to active duty on the Kitty Hawk. Even before he sailed for Vietnam, Mason realized that he was in the middle of something momentous. Many of his fellow sailors were caught up in the antiwar tumult of the time. Though Mason put more value on military service than many of them, he couldn’t help but be fascinated by seeing servicemen openly defying their orders, refusing to report for duty, and participating in antiwar protests. Mason felt like he was watching history unfold in front of him, an unexpected development for a small-town Alabama boy. Assigned to the captain’s mail room, Mason was way too busy learning the ropes to be concerned with issues of race, which had never bothered him much anyway. His best buddy on the carrier ended up being a black guy from San Pedro, whom he worked with, and they spent their rare downtime shooting the breeze with hardly any acknowledgment of their differences beyond the kinds that make for idle chitchat and some harmless ribbing. Mason actually felt a sort of reverse discrimination on the Kitty Hawk; upon hearing his Southern accent and learning he was from Alabama, black sailors, and even some whites, automatically assumed he was some stereotypical racist. The epithets “redneck” and “cracker” came flying at Mason with some regularity, but he tried to let them just roll off. Once people got to know him, they realized he was just a good old boy with no grudge against anyone for their skin color. But one problem on all ships of this size was that it was hard for 5,000 men to get to know each other. And the more the sailors self-segregated, the more the black sailors could imagine the worst of the whites.
Mason’s eyes were opened a little to the differences in how black and white sailors perceived the racial issues on the Kitty Hawk when the carrier had a “tiger cruise”—an opportunity for sailors’ relatives and close friends to join them for a short cruise to see the ship’s inner workings and gain some appreciation for how the crew lives and what their jobs entail. One afternoon Mason was in the chow hall and had just gotten his food when he spotted his black buddy at a table with his family. Without giving it a second thought, Mason took his tray over and sat down at the table with his buddy, greeting his friend’s family in that Southern drawl and welcoming them aboard. His friend looked at him with surprise, as if Mason had just committed some obvious faux pas, but went through the motions of introducing his family. Mason didn’t understand the tension and ate quickly before excusing himself. Over the next months, as the racial tension on the Kitty Hawk came to the surface, he came to realize that his friend felt Mason had put him in an awkward situation, not only with his own family but with the other black sailors who saw them together. It was one thing for them to hang out when it was just the two of them, Mason found out, but the presence of his friend’s family and the other black guests on board made his socializing with the Alabama white boy something much more.
“Didn’t you feel uncomfortable?” his friend asked soon after the incident.
“No way. We’re work mates, man. We always hang out,” Mason replied. His friend shook his head like Mason just didn’t get it. And he didn’t.
“Man …” His buddy started and stopped, looking for a way to explain. “People were looking.”
GARLAND YOUNG GREW UP in Hamilton, Ohio, just outside Cincinnati, living in the projects after his father, a World War II veteran who became the town drunk as he continued fighting the war in his mind, lost yet another job. Living there meant Young had to learn to cope with being a white kid in a nearly all-black neighborhood. He was in the third grade when he moved to the projects, so he was largely ignorant of the racial issues involved, though he did come to think that his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Flowers, didn’t like him because he was white and that was why she beat him so much. He also notice
d that his sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Gallagher, a black man, was such a whiz with rocketry that he was woefully underemployed as a school teacher and should have been working for NASA. Young’s father left home when Garland was eleven years old, leaving his wife to raise five sons. The war in Southeast Asia was heating up at just about the same time Young was old enough to be drafted. At that time, Ping-Pong balls with birth dates were picked out of a little wire cage to determine the order in which men would be drafted. Men with Young’s birth date were number two in line. Unless the United States made a sudden turnaround and started pulling soldiers out of Southeast Asia, Young knew that it was only a matter of time—and probably not much time—before he was drafted. He considered signing up for a longer stint than the two years that came with being drafted, but his preacher reminded Young that they had seen his Sunday school teacher come home from Vietnam in a box.
The preacher urged Young not to go to war, to obtain a hardship deferment and stay home to help his mother. He’d vouch for the hardship, the preacher told him. But Young refused, saying his family never shirked military duty.
“At least go to the Navy,” the man told Young. “Stay out of the infantry.”
Young promised he’d think about it. The preacher’s pleas were on his mind the next time he ran into the two Navy recruiters on his paper route. He ended up chatting with them, and one, Chief Robey, persuaded Young that he could serve his country with honor by joining the Navy. Robey made a good pitch for the Navy—travel, see the world, spend your days on the glorious high seas, meet plenty of women, learn a skill, build a career—and he included many promises about what kind of assignment Young could get, where we would be stationed, anything that Young needed to hear before signing the papers. Robey left Hamilton before Young actually signed the papers to enlist, so he was not listed on the forms as the recruiter.
By the time Young enlisted, was through boot camp, and transferred to the Kitty Hawk, he was already finding that some of those promises weren’t coming through. Young was just another warm body to be used however the Navy needed, and it didn’t seem to care what he preferred or what the recruiter had promised. Young asked for a carrier assignment, figuring that if he was going to sea, he might as well go all the way.
Soon after his arrival on the Kitty Hawk, Young had a break from his job as a mess cook—the crappy job nearly every enlisted man got when first aboard the ship, no matter what their normal assignment would be later—and spotted a familiar face: Chief Robey. Young walked up and said hello to the man who had promised so much. Robey’s face went white when he saw Young. Recruiters weren’t supposed to end up serving with anyone they had recruited— for exactly this reason. Young shook the man’s hand and told him not to worry, that he wasn’t angry.
And Young meant it. He was pleased to be on the big carrier, though he was finding out that life on the Kitty Hawk was going to be a long, hard ride. He would become an airman after his stint as a cook, and Young soon found out that the work—long and hard certainly— was only part of the challenge of this Navy assignment.
JOHN CALLAHAN WAS A white sailor who probably would not have exchanged pleasantries with his recruiter if he had seen him aboard the Kitty Hawk. Callahan also was spurred to join the Navy when he got a low draft number. Very much the all-American kid with a paper route and a quiet personality, Callahan came from a Navy family so he decided it would make sense to enlist in that branch when faced with a choice. He knew it offered relative safety during a time of war compared to the other military options. When Callahan talked to his local recruiter in the suburbs of Long Island, New York, he was assured that if he enlisted, he could be kept stateside and trained as a Navy journalist, which suited the young man’s career ambitions and his antiwar sentiment. As soon as he enlisted, however, those promises went out the window. He went to boot camp, then to radar school and directly to Vietnam on the Kitty Hawk. He was not happy, and it was more than just that the recruiter’s promises were broken, more than just not wanting to be at sea on a carrier working on radar. Callahan deeply opposed the Vietnam War, and he saw a real difference between serving in the Navy stateside and sitting on the carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin while it launched airplanes to bomb Vietnamese people. Callahan wasn’t on the ship long before he filed the paperwork requesting to be declared a conscientious objector (CO), which he hoped would get him pulled off the carrier. Such a request was not uncommon during the war, and Callahan’s superiors didn’t make a big deal out of it. The paperwork would take a while to be approved or denied, however. In the meantime, Callahan was put in a noncombat role on the mess deck, helping to feed the thousands of men on the ship. It was supposed to be a nonviolent role for the potential CO, but Callahan later would see the irony in that assignment.
NOT THAT YOUNG, CALLAHAN, or the other white sailors really saw trouble coming. Racial tensions surfaced on the ship every now and then, but that happened in any American city just as much and sometimes more. The black sailors on the carrier were no more homogenous than the whites. Perry Pettus was a black sailor who, unlike many of his fellow blacks on the Kitty Hawk, thought the Navy was treating him pretty well. He had grown up in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, part of a large family that worked his grandfather’s 600-acre farm. Pettus routinely worked on the farm after school, which had been segregated until he was in the eighth grade. He had tried a couple years of college, which yielded a lot of bills and not very good grades. Pettus’s draft number was 52, so he wasn’t in imminent danger of being drafted, but he decided that enlisting might be a better use of his time and would eliminate any future fears about the draft. Prompted in part by his memories of a first cousin home on leave, strutting down the street in his sharp Navy blues, Pettus decided to save his parents some money by quitting school and joining up. He studied aviation in the Navy and was thrilled to be assigned to the Kitty Hawk. His first night on the ship, he got an opportunity to go to the flight deck and see flight operations, where he would soon be working. The sight of planes taking off and landing in the dark, with just minimal red lights and men in danger everywhere he looked, scared him more than a little. This was serious business, he realized. People die on flight decks.
Pettus had already heard about the division officer who died a couple weeks earlier when he stepped just a hair too close to the jet intake of an A–7 Corsair. He was sucked into the blades of the jet engine in a heartbeat. Young had seen the same thing happen to a friend of his. For a nineteen-year-old farm boy from Kentucky like Pettus, the deck of the Kitty Hawk was like a different world—a scary but exciting place to be. Once he got over the inevitable shock of a first-timer, Pettus came to love the fast-paced, carefully choreographed action on the flight deck, where men communicated more with elaborate hand gestures than with words, where each man depended on the others to do their jobs well and keep everyone safe while fulfilling their combat missions. Pettus loved his job, and when he was working, the only colors that mattered were the color-coordinated jerseys worn on the flight deck to differentiate the men’s various duties—purple for fuel handlers, red for weapons specialists, blue for plane handlers. As long as he was on deck helping get planes on and off the ship, he didn’t feel like anybody gave a damn what his skin color was. Belowdecks was a different matter, but sometimes it seemed the black sailors cared more than the whites. Although Pettus was about as content as anyone on a carrier crew could be, it wouldn’t be long before he found himself victimized because of his skin color.
IN STARK CONTRAST TO most of the other sailors, and even Cloud and Townsend, were the Marines on the Kitty Hawk. Captain Nicholas F. Carlucci, commander of the seventy Marines who were in charge of securing the most sensitive areas of the ship, had joined the Corps in 1965 when he was twenty-one, as the draft loomed for him also. His college degree earned him a transfer to Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia. He served admirably in Vietnam in 1967, seeing extensive action and playing a key role in the rescue of a unit that had been ambushed. After comp
leting his tour, Carlucci was a Marine instructor for two years, itching to go back to combat. When the Marines didn’t have an appropriate assignment for him, he requested a ship detachment, figuring it would be a change of pace and a way to get back into the action in some way. The Marines assigned him to command the detachment on the Kitty Hawk and Carlucci tackled the job with his usual gusto, diving deeply into studies of every task he might be called on to perform on a carrier—everything from running a brig, to safeguarding nuclear weapons, to quelling a riot. Carlucci was a Marine, a damn good one by anyone’s estimation, and he did things the way Marines did everything: by the book.
Carlucci’s men followed his lead and had zero tolerance for what they considered the slack discipline of the modern Navy. The Navy in 1972 might let its sailors take a casual approach to uniforms and nearly every other aspect of military decorum and discipline, but not the Marines. Carlucci’s men were squared-away, ramrod-straight Marines with short, regulation haircuts, and they had no respect for slovenly sailors who looked more like hippies than military men. The Marines on the Kitty Hawk didn’t seem to care much whether you were white or black or Latino, but they openly disdained any sailors with scraggly beards and sloppy uniforms. And they didn’t have much tolerance for any kind of misbehavior. In an era in which even the Navy was affected by the Age of Aquarius, the Marines were from a different age altogether. They were an island of conservatism among 5,000 sailors who, despite their Navy uniforms, weren’t all that much different in attitude, interests, and activities from the typical nineteen year- olds back home.
THAT THE CREW of the Kitty Hawk were still young people in an increasingly youth-oriented, anything-goes society was clear to anyone who saw the sailors in their off time, either in the berthing areas and mess halls or when they left the ship for liberty calls. Just as they were for their counterparts back home, drugs were a frequent escape for those on board the Kitty Hawk and other Navy ships, with top-quality heroin, marijuana, hashish, and LSD picked up easily on shore in the Philippines and sold on the ship’s black market. In these days long before drug testing became commonplace, sailors found it easy to escape from the rigors and boredom of carrier life with their drug of choice. The many nooks and crannies of a vast aircraft carrier made it an easy feat to smoke pot or even inject heroin without being caught. Captain Townsend and XO Cloud were aware of the drug use, as was Carlucci and every other ranking officer on the ship, but stopping it was altogether another matter. Townsend was under the impression that the drug use was relatively uncommon, estimating that only 5 percent of his crew used drugs while at sea. But his sailors knew it was much more than that.
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