Troubled Water

by Gregory A. Freeman

  The drug use was obvious to Tom Dysart, another white sailor whose journey to the Kitty Hawk was spurred by the looming draft. He joined the Navy Reserves while at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, and went on to serve his two years of active duty. He was assigned to the Kitty Hawk in the summer of 1971, serving his first three months as a trash-and-garbage guy before moving to the E division as an electrician. Like many of those on board, he was a typical child of the 1960s, smoking pot at every opportunity and just riding out his military service on the Hawk. In that respect, Dysart fit in just fine with the rest of the crew. There was no noticeable racial tension, as far as he could tell, though life on board the carrier tended to be just as segregated as it was in civilian life. There weren’t any hard-and-fast rules about where blacks and whites could be or any Navy-sanctioned separation of the races, but people just knew. Dysart could see that, especially when it came to berthing areas, some parts of the Kitty Hawk were the black neighborhoods, some were Latino, and most were white. People mixed sometimes, just as they might in the civilian world, but the unofficial demarcations were clear.

  The extent of the drug use on the carrier did surprise Dysart some. He met a sailor from Detroit who struck him as a nice guy, a typical fresh-faced young kid. Soon after joining the Kitty Hawk, the young man confided that he had scored a big stash of heroin and was hoping it would help him get through the long days at sea. Before long, the kid looked like a scarecrow.

  The extent of the drug use was obvious to others, too. John Travers, for instance, knew of pilots on the Kitty Hawk who were bringing in drugs from Thailand. He also knew that drugs were present throughout the military, easily found on any ship, on any base. On his way to his assignment on the Kitty Hawk, he and some other sailors stopped at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. They were informed that a helicopter had just come in and would ferry them closer to the carrier as soon as they unloaded the passengers and baggage. Travers overheard people at the base talking about how the helo had just brought in the Navy’s top brass—Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who was already becoming legendary for his leadership and innovative, sometimes controversial, policy decisions. Zumwalt and his family were returning from a trip to Southeast Asia.

  Travers and the other sailors got to work unloading the luggage, which looked like what a family might travel with, along with various duffel bags and other items that had been aboard the helo. As they tossed the items out, one bag fell and out spilled several large jars of white tablets. Travers and the other sailors stopped and stared at them, wondering what they were and what to do. Everyone figured out pretty quickly what they were, and they silently agreed that they didn’t want any trouble, no matter who those drugs belonged to. No one suspected that Zumwalt or his family members were transporting a duffel bag of heroin, but the fact that someone had put the shipment on the CNO’s helo said a lot about the brazenness of the drug trade in the Navy.

  The men stuffed the jars back into the duffel bag and sent it on its way.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A LONG, DIFFICULT JOURNEY

  Their backgrounds and motivations may have been varied, but there were many black men on the Kitty Hawk with a bad attitude. Many of the most unhappy black sailors on the Kitty Hawk were there because of Project 100,000, a Navy program that set out to recruit primarily inner-city youths who were previously considered ineligible for military service because of low test scores. Standards were lowered to help the Navy fill the need for more warm bodies during the war. Military applicants had been screened since 1950 with the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), which included verbal and math questions and was aimed at assessing recruits’ ability to be trained, which in turn predicted their likelihood of advancing, feeling satisfied with serving in the military, and completing the term of enlistment. Test scores placed applicants in categories 1 through 5, with 1 representing the highest scores. The armed services used the test scores, in conjunction with each applicant’s education, to screen all applicants and draftees.

  During the mid-1960s, it became apparent that up to a third of young men would be ineligible for military service because of their low test scores. A significant number of them came from disadvantaged backgrounds and had little education. Because a great many also were unemployed, some activists and political leaders called on the military to change the standards as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s ongoing War on Poverty. Secretary of Defense Robert Mc- Namara declared on August 23, 1966, that the military would help disadvantaged young men by establishing a sort of affirmative action policy for recruiting: “The poor of America have not had the opportunity to earn their fair share of this nation’s abundance, but they can be given an opportunity to serve in their country’s defense, and they can be given an opportunity to return to civilian life with skills and aptitudes which for them and their families will reverse the downward spiral of human decay.”

  Project 100,000 was launched on October 1, 1966, and the Department of Defense began accepting men who previously would not have qualified for military service. The stated goal was to enlist 40,000 men under the less stringent standards during the first year and 100,000 every year thereafter. Applicants with AFQT scores in category 5, the lowest, were still not eligible, but some in category 4, who scored between the tenth and thirtieth percentiles on the tests, were. Having a high school diploma helped a category 4 applicant be approved despite the low scores.

  Many of the Project 100,000 recruits, referred to as “New Standards Men” (NSMs), were assigned to what the military called softskill jobs that required little training or intelligence—food service and supply jobs, for instance. The project ended in December 1971 after 354,000 men had entered military service under its relaxed standards, so in 1972 the Navy still had many sailors who had been admitted through the program. And because an aircraft carrier requires a large crew, the Kitty Hawk was certain to have its share of Project 100,000 sailors. Just over half of all project sailors, 54 percent, were volunteers. The other 46 percent were draftees who otherwise would have gotten a free pass from serving because of their inability to be trained. According to Department of Defense statistics, Project 100,000 recruits had an average age of twenty. About half came from the South, and 41 percent were minorities. Their average reading ability was at a sixth-grade level, and 13 percent read below the fourth-grade level.

  Project 100,000 succeeded in opening the world of military service to more young men, and the influx of recruits helped keep the services staffed as the war continued in Vietnam. But its effects were decidedly mixed. One unexpected result—or some would say the entirely predictable result—was that many black sailors were finding themselves in the lowest-level assignments with virtually no chance of being able to work their way up because they didn’t have the necessary intelligence, education, or skills. Many felt their recruiters lied to them, making the same promises of career advancement and glorious assignments that they made to everyone else, despite knowing that the men’s low test scores would make it impossible for them to advance. These sailors were stuck at the bottom when it came to job assignments, and no amount of hard work was going to earn them a promotion.

  The Navy was finding that many Project 100,000 recruits also were not useful assets. A 1969 assessment of their performance concluded that the enlistees performed worse than other recruits and that the program “is not in the best interest of the Navy, unless dictated by a manpower shortage or other non-military considerations.” A 1990 analysis also determined that Project 100,000 did not bestow any long-term benefits on the men admitted to military service under the lowered standards. Contrary to McNamara’s hopes that the men would “return to civilian life with skills and aptitudes which for them and their families will reverse the downward spiral of human decay,” the 1990 analysis of the men’s experiences after serving in the military found no such results. “These data provide no evidence to support the hypothesis that military service offers a ‘
leg up’ to [low-aptitude] and disadvantaged youth as they seek to overcome their cognitive and skill deficits and compete successfully in the civilian world,” the report concluded.

  While the Navy positioned Project 100,000 as a progressive effort to open up the benefits of service to the inner-city youth who needed jobs, some critics said the project was a well-intentioned but misguided effort to use the military as a means of social change. Still others called it an intentional effort to trick young black men into the Navy and keep the rosters filled for the war in Vietnam. The antiwar movement, especially the most militant factions in the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, and other communist groups, openly derided the project as just a way of “using the nigger against the gook.”

  The true motivation for Project 100,000 was probably neither as noble as McNamara claimed nor as nefarious as the communists contended. Nevertheless, the project was one reason why the Kitty Hawk was staffed with plenty of disgruntled black sailors who had little to lose by disobeying orders or performing poorly. Marland Townsend had already seen the effects of the project when he served on the Constellation, and he saw the same problems as soon as he took command of the Kitty Hawk. After his initial refurbishment, the ship was in great shape logistically. He recognized, however, that some crew members seemed to be in over their heads. Whether they had good attitudes or not, enlisted men whose test scores indicated that their IQs were well below average were of limited use to Townsend on the Kitty Hawk. Without the most basic intelligence, they would never advance beyond the lowest-level grunt work, he realized. This troubled Townsend in two ways. First, he had a carrier to run, and his ship was operating at maximum capacity in a war zone. He couldn’t afford to have crew members of limited potential. And second, he worried that these New Standards Men were growing frustrated with their lot in the Navy.

  These guys could not have understood the contract they signed to get in the Navy, Townsend realized. There’s no way. They didn’t understand what they were doing.

  He was right on target, though he didn’t know how bad the problem was or what to do about it.

  CONTRARY TO SO MANY other young sailors on the Kitty Hawk, and ironically so as it would turn out, eighteen-year-old Terry Avinger actually wanted to be there. The young black man from Philadelphia volunteered to join the Navy as a means to escape not the draft but his troubled, violent life. In a moment of clarity, determined to make something better of himself, Avinger signed up for the Navy and joined the Kitty Hawk with a positive attitude. He knew that he was on a path to disaster if he continued with his life of drugs, crime, and violence back home; for him, the Kitty Hawk was a way out, a way to create a new life. Avinger soon found out, however, that his personal demons followed when he joined the carrier crew, and some of the same issues that frustrated and enraged black men back home could be found on the Kitty Hawk. Avinger’s optimism would not last.

  Terry Avinger shared many traits in common with the young sailors on the Kitty Hawk, particularly with the other young black men. He was born in 1954, the sixth of his mother’s eleven children. The Avinger family originally was from Savannah, Georgia, but his parents had moved to Philadelphia some years earlier because, as Avinger heard his mother and father say many times, “Too many of the men in our family were being killed down there.” Whether the deaths were at the hands of racist whites or from other causes, Avinger didn’t know. But he heard his parents talk of the pervasive racism in the Deep South.

  Avinger was raised from the age of two to ten years by his grandmother and great-aunt, who had previously lived under one roof with the extended family but decided to ease the crowding by getting their own place and taking the baby with them. They lived in a mostly white, middle-class neighborhood of Philadelphia, along with a cousin who was seventeen years older than Avinger. Then when Avinger was ten years old, his comfortable and calm life was interrupted: He was sent back to live with his mother and his ten brothers and sisters in a poor black section of Philadelphia. The family lived in a small townhouse with one bathroom. Avinger’s father was an Army veteran who worked as a barber but did not live with the family. Moving to the North Philadelphia neighborhood was a shock for the black boy who had grown up surrounded by whites and who felt comfortable in that environment. Suddenly he was among black people nearly all the time, and Avinger found himself enjoying a fellowship with blacks that he never knew he had been denied. His mother was well known in the community, which helped the youngster make friends. He attended a Baptist church with his family regularly, but it wasn’t long before Avinger found another aspect of the North Philly neighborhood that was more attractive. He began spending a lot of time with boys who seemed more streetwise than he felt, tougher and wiser in the ways of the world, brash in their black pride and in their defiance of anything they perceived as discrimination from whites. As Avinger grew older and started feeling the rebelliousness of a teenage boy, joining the local gang seemed the natural step. He became an enthusiastic member of 28th and Oxford, the violent gang named after the neighborhood corner they called home. Fights with other gangs were a regular part of Avinger’s life, sometimes organized on a schoolyard almost like formal boxing matches and sometimes random assaults. Though he often came home with cuts and bruises from vicious fights featuring any improvised weapons the gang members could find—bricks, car antennas wielded like steel whips, even the occasional handgun—Avinger mostly avoided serious injury. Despite being shot at on more than one occasion, Avinger felt the invincibility of youth and saw the gang as a second family. That satisfaction diminished when he was thirteen and playing a game of stickball with his fellow gang members. A moment of carefree play turned tragic when a rival gang member appeared and started shooting. A close friend of Avinger’s died that day, and he realized that the gang life was not just about bravado and bonding. For what would be the first in a series of attempts, Avinger decided to turn his life around. He joined a local youth club and soon quit the gang. Rather than attend the regular high school in the neighborhood, Avinger decided to go to a vocational school to study auto mechanics, figuring this would put him on a path toward a decent job. He was doing his best to do the right thing, to stay on the straight and narrow, and he was successful until a series of tragedies overwhelmed him and sent him on a downward spiral. First a younger brother died of spinal meningitis, a devastating blow to his family, and then a year later Avinger’s father was shot to death in a bar. Avinger fell into a deep depression, with no idea how to deal with his grief. His grades suffered so much that he was held back in school two years in a row. During this time, Avinger began using alcohol and marijuana on a regular basis and sometimes heroin—the same weakness that engulfed many men of his generation, but also a young man’s attempt to deal with what felt like all-encompassing grief.

  As Avinger neared adulthood, his tall and skinny frame beginning to fill out, he was mired in a lifestyle that promised nothing good. He was using drugs and alcohol frequently, and he attended school only sporadically. No longer was Avinger the essentially good kid who got into various scrapes. He was now moody, and prone to violence. Drugs and alcohol were his main focus and his main escape. He was quick to lash out at others, always likely to hit first. He was angry most of the time, angry at anyone and everyone, especially authority figures. He was angry at God. He was angry at the racial disparities he saw around him, in particular the segregation of Girard College, a private kindergarten- through-twelfth grade school in his own neighborhood, an allwhite boys’ school in an almost entirely black neighborhood. The school had been established in 1833 by a merchant seaman, before the neighborhood was mostly black, but it became a focal point for the community’s growing outrage over racism and segregation, the focus of frequent protests and demonstrations. Like the protestors, Avinger wasn’t upset because he wanted to attend the school. The cost of a private school was way beyond his family’s means. But the school was his introduction to institutional racism, and it became one of his most hated sym
bols of white America. This wasn’t just one ignorant white man saying something cruel, and it wasn’t just one shop owner who refused to serve blacks. It was an institution that was set up specifically to exclude blacks, and it was right in their community. It was in Avinger’s face every day, a glaring example of racism in America. For Avinger and many other young people in the community, the children going to the school, their parents, and the all-white teachers and administrators were practically the only white people they ever encountered. Despite years of protests and legal challenges, Girard College did not admit its first black student until 1968, and only grudgingly then. By Avinger’s late teens, the school was officially desegregated, but it remained an example of institutional racism to many black Philadelphians. He hated the school, and he felt pretty much the same way about white people in general.