But even with all the anger raging inside him, Avinger still had enough insight to see that he was going nowhere fast. For the second time in his young life, he decided to make a dramatic turnaround. While many young men were finding ways to avoid military service altogether, Avinger went down to the local recruiting station one month after he turned seventeen and joined the Navy. He chose the Navy partly because the infantry just didn’t sound like a good experience, even if you didn’t go to Vietnam, and partly because he had always been fascinated with boats and ships. He also had an uncle and a cousin who had been in the Navy, and he loved the movies featuring Navy ships in World War II. Avinger, a true city boy, was fascinated by the idea of so many men living on a ship out on the ocean for months at a time. Carriers in particular captivated him because of their size and power. The recruiter told Avinger he could be a jet mechanic, which fit with his mechanical interests and could lead to a civilian career. Things were looking up.
And then another stumble. Avinger, like many of his fellow recruits, had minimized his drug and alcohol use before joining up. The hitch came when a boot camp instructor saw needle tracks on his arms, evidence of past heroin use. The Navy threatened to discharge him immediately, and Avinger had to wonder why he was being singled out. The young man convinced his superiors that he was turning his life around and that he was no longer using drugs. He was relieved when the Navy agreed to let him continue on to aviation school in Memphis before assignment to a squadron. It was there that Avinger started to see more examples of the racism that fueled the anger still simmering deep inside. A black man in Tennessee in 1971 couldn’t be surprised to find discrimination, but Avinger was frustrated, and more than a little disappointed, to find it institutionalized in the Navy just as it was in Girard College.
By the time Avinger arrived on the Kitty Hawk as an airman apprentice in 1972, he had lost much of his initial enthusiasm for the Navy and his optimism about creating a better life for himself. His inner turmoil had taken over again, and his experiences with racism were causing him to focus his anger on the white race. There were times when he could redirect his thinking and promise himself that he would do his best to succeed in the white man’s world, that if he just applied himself he could prevail despite all the obstacles put in his way. But most of the time he was a young black man with a chip on his shoulder, just waiting for someone to knock it off.
TOWNSEND REALIZED THAT THE Kitty Hawk crew was working hard, but he still thought the carrier could perform better. Drawing on his instinct for technical analysis and hard numbers, the captain looked at the situation and realized the carrier could be more productive without asking the crew to work any harder. In fact, he might be able to ease the workload at the same time he improved performance. The Kitty Hawk was there to win a war, and Townsend thought the carrier could improve flight operations by changing how the crew were scheduled. The standard for carriers at the time was for flight ops crew to work from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. for ten days, then switch to the noon-to-midnight shift for ten days, then on to the midnight-to-noon shift for ten days before starting the cycle all over again. These hours kicked the crew’s ass. Not only was the ship performing the incredibly complex and dangerous flight ops around the clock, but crew members could never settle into a daily pattern. It was hell on their minds and bodies. So Townsend convinced his admiral that the Kitty Hawk should have flight ops only from midnight to noon, with the rest of the day set aside for the aircraft maintenance. Townsend’s plan actually resulted in a significant increase in the number of sorties flown per hour.
This was the kind of captain Townsend was. Townsend couldn’t be out glad-handing with every sailor every day, but he always figured the men’s welfare into his calculations aimed at making the Kitty Hawk the best she could be. It was the kind of effort that the crew often had no idea was even going on, much less how much they were benefiting from it.
Crew members were more likely to take notice of the edicts from above regarding cleanliness of the ship and other requirements. Townsend was old school Navy in some ways, and like the Marines onboard, he had no tolerance for the Navy’s newly relaxed attitude on some issues. Just like the rest of American society, the Navy in 1972 was changing, and not all change was good. Mirroring the rest of America, the Navy let its hair down—both figuratively and literally. Sailors were allowed to have longish hair and beards, and uniform standards were relaxed to the point that many more seasoned Navy officers were disgusted by the sloppy appearance of some sailors— and their officers’ lack of interest in correcting them. The relaxed standards were officially sanctioned, part of Admiral Zumwalt’s many initiatives to respond to the changing face of young America, promote better treatment of minorities in the Navy, and avoid having the ranks dwindle because no one was willing to meet the past standards of Navy dress and decorum.
Townsend considered Zumwalt’s efforts well reasoned and well intended, but he could see that some of the initiatives weren’t working out as planned.
The same issues of cleanliness in berthing areas and throughout the ship that troubled Benjamin Cloud when he came aboard also grated on Townsend. The captain informed the crew early on that he would insist on a higher level of cleanliness, inside and out, than they might have been used to. In particular, he informed them that some men would get one of the most dreaded assignments for a young sailor.
“When we’re in port—you’re not going to like this—but we’re going to have side cleaners,” he told his senior staff. “We’re not going to have a rust bucket sitting out here with rust running down the side. And we’re not going to do it only on the starboard side either. We’re going to do it on the port side, the side people don’t see.”
That meant that while their buddies were ashore enjoying some R&R, some unlucky sailors were going to be hanging off the side of the carrier, scraping, washing, and painting. It was work that couldn’t be done while the ship was at sea. The crew hated the new policy, but Townsend was adamant: “We’re going to keep this ship clean. That’s just the way it’s going to be.”
That kind of attitude led to a scathing attack on the captain in the Kitty Litter newspaper published on board the carrier by anonymous crew members. The article was headlined “The New Captain, Another Queeg?” a reference to the paranoid, maniacal, and abusive captain portrayed in the 1951 Herman Wouk novel The Caine Mutiny and the 1954 movie of the same name starring Humphrey Bogart. The writer said: “Townsend has shown himself to be one of the original ‘law ‘n order’ kids” through the harsh punishment he handed out for “such tiny and meaningless ‘crimes’ as unauthorized absence.” The article went on to accuse the captain of outright racism in his handling of disciplinary matters and then mocked him for giving speeches in which he praised the crew’s accomplishments in carrying out bombing runs. “Probably the only person these actions are ‘good’ for is the Captain and other lifers who want feathers in their caps for murdering their fellow human beings,” the article said.
TOWNSEND WAS NOT NEARLY so draconian as the writer claimed, and he certainly was no Queeg. Much of that kind of ranting could be dismissed as sophomoric, the kind of name-calling that the bottom ranks aim at the top dog in any operation. But it does give insight into the general disdain some of the carrier’s crew felt for the war, the Navy, and their captain. The Kitty Hawk was not unique in facing crew resistance, and one captain like Townsend could not reverse the changes going on in the Navy. The lowered expectations for discipline and military protocol meshed in a dangerous way with the growing war resistance in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The antiwar movement was in full swing back home, and the young people in the military were not immune to its charms. In fact, sometimes they were the most fervent of antiwar protestors because it was they who would be going to Vietnam, either on the ground or on a ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Kitty Hawk, like any Navy ship with a large crew, had a mix of the same young men you could find back home: sailors who were proud to serve their country and d
espised the long-haired hippies who protested and called them names in port, and sailors who vehemently opposed the war and weren’t going to stop protesting just because the government forced them into a white uniform. There were plenty in the middle too. Combined with the growing black power movement and the prevalent dope culture, sailors in this period could be far from the disciplined and obedient ideal that the Navy sought. Like teenagers who think they’re smarter than their parents and too big to be spanked, sailors sometimes spoke their minds freely. Sometimes they paid a price for the insolence, and sometimes, perhaps too often, superiors just let it go.
Resistance was more than just vocal, however. By 1972, the Navy was well aware that some of its own men were interfering in the war effort by sabotaging equipment, organizing work strikes, and deliberately slowing down operations. At first, resistance within military ranks was instigated by those who had been active in the antiwar movement before entering the service, but then the movement began to grow and involve more service members. Many of the early incidents involved desertions and refusals to report for duty; then the resistors turned to violence. Sailors of all races participated, but black sailors often were motivated by a mixture of antiwar sentiment and black pride, in the same way those movements were deeply intertwined in the civilian world. The black power movement prominent in cities back home could be found on U.S. bases in Germany, the Philippines, and elsewhere. In the jungles of Vietnam, the Viet Cong (VC) enemy actively played on black soldiers’ disillusionment with the white establishment. VC propaganda suggested that blacks and Vietnamese were both being abused by the white man and should not fight each other. A popular phrase among disgruntled black soldiers was “No VC ever called me a nigger.”
Black pride and black power were prominent components of the growing resistance to the Vietnam War, and more militant factions of the black community called on black servicemen to rebel openly. For example, the Black Panther Party called on black soldiers, sailors, and airmen to fight the white system from within, to stop the American war machine from using more young black men as cannon fodder by any means necessary. “Either quit the Army now or start destroying it from the inside,” Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver told them in 1970. The message resonated with more than a few black servicemen. One poll found that 76 percent of black servicemen supported Cleaver and were in favor of the armed overthrow of the U.S. government. A publication of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, quoted one black Marine as explaining how some of his fellow black soldiers were smuggling mortars home from the battlefield to use on the streets of America. After showing a reporter how the men broke the mortars down into smaller components, the Marine pointed to one mortar and said, “Now, that’ll take out a police station for you.”
The flashpoints often came where military personnel were held on criminal charges. One of the most prominent uprisings was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on July 23, 1968. Prompted by the beating of a black inmate being held at the stockade, a group of black and white soldiers took over the detention center and held it for forty-eight hours before troops from the 82nd Airborne division forced them to surrender. Similar incidents occurred more often in 1969, many times in the stockades or brigs, but violent uprisings also took place that had nothing to do with prisoners. Military authorities usually labeled them race riots, partly because of the number of black servicemen involved but also because similar disturbances were going on in the civilian world at the time. A more accurate description would be that they were both racially motivated and anti-authoritarian, again a mirror of what was happening in American civilian communities. A great many of the incidents amounted to black servicemen going toe to toe with white military police (MPs) and officers. Another incident at Fort Bragg occurred on August 11, 1969, when about two hundred servicemen got into a fight at the base’s club for enlisted men. All but one of the MPs called to stop the fight were white. The arrival of armed white MPs caused the fight to escalate; before it was over, twenty-five soldiers were hospitalized. In another incident, two hundred soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, almost all of them black, took over a six-block area of the base and damaged many buildings, including the recruitment office. They fought with MPs for hours, and eventually forty soldiers were arrested. Just four days later, another major uprising took place at Fort Carson, Colorado, where a couple hundred black soldiers seized control of a portion of the base and held off MPs for hours by throwing rocks, bottles, and other debris at them.
Even the stalwart Marines could not avoid dissension within their ranks. A particularly bad uprising took place at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, on July 20, 1969. What began as a black versus white fistfight in the enlisted men’s club grew until eventually there was a huge brawl outside the barracks area of the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines. Fourteen men were injured, and one white Marine corporal died. After the riot, it was revealed that the base commander had been worried about growing racial tensions and had formed a commission to investigate. That board had issued its conclusions just before the melee occurred. According to the report: “[A]n explosive situation of major proportions” existed at Camp Lejeune, partly because “many white officers and NCOs retain prejudices and deliberately practice them.” The investigation concluded that MPs regularly harassed black Marines.
In the Navy, until 1971, resistance to the war and racially charged incidents were mostly minor: individual desertions or refusal to follow orders, or sabotage, such as throwing a wrench in the machinery of a ship to delay deployment—things that have always happened with some regularity. But in 1970, the antiwar, anti-authority, black power movement gained force in the Navy with the formation of the Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM), one of several organizations— many openly or more discreetly allied with the communist political movement in the United States—that stoked the fires of outrage among service members and encouraged them to resist. MDM, based in Southern California, was more closely allied with sailors than the other groups. With its locally published newspapers Duck Soup, Out Now! and Up Against the Bulkhead, MDM was militant and strident, arguing as much for black liberation as for ending the war in Vietnam. One of the group’s first shows of strength was on May 16, 1970, when it organized a demonstration outside the building where four black WAVES—females in the Navy—were being detained. While MPs were busy with the protest, other MDM supporters committed acts of sabotage throughout the base. Similar acts of defiance, sabotage, and work slowdowns occurred frequently at Navy bases and training stations. Townsend recognized that the growing movement was a coordinated, organized effort to subvert the military’s goals in Vietnam. He recognized the risk of such an uprising on his ship, but he felt that the best strategy was to run a tight ship, look after the crew as best he could, and not stir things up by overreacting to every incident on board.
THE NAVY WOULD RECORD a total of seventy-four incidents of sabotage to vessels in the Pacific Fleet in 1972, ranging from the creative and surreptitious to the plain old method of banging on some delicate instrumentation with a hammer when no one was looking. The techniques spanned the gamut: cutting electrical wires, putting sugar in oil supplies, throwing foreign objects in gears, causing oil spills, throwing equipment overboard, starting fires. Clearly any Navy ship in 1972 was at risk for sabotage, violent assaults, and, even worse, mutiny attempts. The carriers were more susceptible than smaller ships, simply because of the much larger number of crew forced to live and work under demanding conditions. Shortly after assuming command of the Kitty Hawk, Townsend had received classified messages to keep a sharp lookout for a growing risk of sabotage. A “Stop the Hawk” movement was expected to materialize during the deployment, in which a large number of sailors would sign a petition calling for a return to San Diego.
Townsend, and to a lesser extent Cloud, because he had only just arrived on the ship, overlooked or failed to act on some issues that fed the crew’s growing dissatisfaction, but the errors can be seen far more clearly in retrospect. Some factors that exa
cerbated racial tensions and could have been ameliorated by directives from the captain or XO were not so evident at the time. The segregated berthing on the Kitty Hawk is one example. The Navy had not officially segregated berthing of sailors since 1948, when President Harry S Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which required all branches of the military to treat service members equally without regard to race. As in the rest of society, however, a pledge of nondiscrimination was not enough to ensure that minorities actually received equal treatment. For many years after the order it was common to see black sailors relegated to stewards, cooks, and other jobs traditionally reserved for minorities. Segregated berthing continued as well, though it was at least nominally voluntary. By 1972, self-segregation in berthing areas was standard on many Navy ships, though the captains always had the option of ordering that work units or other groups of sailors bunk together without regard to race. The reason for the self-segregation on the Kitty Hawk was simple, on the surface at least: Black sailors typically liked to spend their off time together, as did whites, Latinos, and Asian Americans. There was some mingling, but it was common knowledge on the Kitty Hawk that some berthing areas—usually three spartan bunks on each side of a narrow cube that formed the sailor’s personal home when off duty—were all black or all white. Townsend had considered but decided against prohibiting this self-imposed segregation.
The first fifteen minutes on your watch, you don’t change anything. You just observe to see what’s going on, Townsend recalled from his early training as a naval officer. You don’t change anything that seems to be working until you fully understand why it is the way it is.
Townsend felt he was still in the first fifteen minutes of his watch. There had been no reports of trouble related to the segregated berthing. Rather than insist that the division officers desegregate the berthing, he let it go.
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