Troubled Water

by Gregory A. Freeman

  “If anyone gives you trouble, get his name. If he refuses to give you his name, take his ID card or ask for it. If he completely refuses, then you should apprehend him and use common sense in your response. If the situation is such that you need to use force, then use some. But also request assistance. Blow the whistle.”

  Carlucci’s Marines understood their orders. They put on their green utility uniforms, grabbed their nightsticks and whistles, and set out in three-man patrols to the flight deck and the hangar deck, leaving the reaction force behind in the berthing compartment.

  AFTER LEAVING THE MESS deck, which was truly a mess by this point, Cloud continued talking with a number of the black sailors and suggested that they go to his cabin and discuss the issues they had brought up. Ever since he had arrived on the Kitty Hawk, Cloud had told the crew that they were welcome to talk to him at any time, in part because he had heard that they previously felt they didn’t have ready access to the top command on the ship. His office had a pair ofred and green lights outside the door and a sign: “Executive Officer: If light is green, knock any time day or night, then open the door and come in.” A red light meant the XO was having a private conversation with someone. Cloud was always careful to make sure the crew had followed the proper channels before coming to him with a problem, but he wanted the sailors to know that he was available. So it was natural for him to invite the sailors to his cabin after the mess deck fight.

  About a dozen of them agreed, and they were joined by the ship’s legal officer and a few other white officers, with the men crammed into Cloud’s office and taking up every available chair and spots on the floor and desk. The meeting was productive. Cloud continued the themes he had discussed in the mess deck, assuring the men that their concerns were being taken seriously, and countered some skepticism voiced by Avinger, Rowe, and the others who had doubted the XO’s credentials as a real black man. The black sailors continued voicing their complaints and challenging the XO’s sincerity, and Cloud felt that he was making progress simply by having the men talk to him calmly and rationally about their grievances. They still weren’t completely buying what he was selling, but they were amiable, even pleasant with one another. They were having a real conversation. Cloud was pleased.

  Suddenly the calm was broken as a young black sailor burst into Cloud’s office, blood pouring from a gash across his head. The wound had been bleeding profusely for some time, as the man’s white T-shirt was drenched and his face was crisscrossed with rivers of blood. The young man was panic stricken, in tears, nearly hysterical with fear.

  “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” the sailor cried as the others stared, shocked by the sight. Then he looked up at the men in Cloud’s stateroom and his voice rose to a terrified scream. “They’re at it again. They are going to kill us all!”

  The black sailors erupted, scrambling to get out of the stateroom as fast as they could, screaming that they never should have trusted the XO. They raced into the passageway and back toward the mess deck, leaving the XO and the white officers standing there, helpless.

  The fire that had been tamped down to smoldering embers by Cloud’s work was stoked into a full-fledged blaze again, the violence prompted by a series of miscommunications among the captain, the executive officer, and the Marines. Cloud and Townsend had told the black sailors to leave the mess deck through the hangar bay, but at the same time the captain ordered the Marine commander to make preventing sabotage a top priority, and that meant protecting the hangar deck. Though Townsend wasn’t privy to Carlucci’s specific orders, and they may not have met with his approval, Carlucci was following Marine protocol for riots when he told his men not to let sailors congregate in groups of three. After their experience battling the black sailors in the mess deck, the Marines could hardly be faulted for assuming the order was aimed at black sailors, and especially the black sailors from the group that had taken over the mess deck. So everyone was doing as they were instructed when the black sailors still on the mess deck—those who didn’t go with Cloud to his office—left through the hangar bay and when the Marines showed up there with orders to prevent congregating. The outcome was inevitable.

  The black sailors were still pumped from their apparent victory in the mess deck but feeling satisfied enough to follow the orders to disperse. The Marines were still feeling indignant about being chased out of the mess deck, and they had clear orders from their captain.

  When the two groups came together in the hangar bay outside the mess deck at about 11 P.M., it was like two rival gangs meeting in the street. The black sailors started insulting the Marines, and the Marines responded by telling the sailors to disperse.

  “You can’t be in groups of more than two,” one Marine told them. “You need to break it up and get out of here.”

  That prompted more jeers and threats from the black sailors, who were doing exactly as they had been instructed by the captain and the XO. They told the Marines to fuck off. The exchange escalated until someone pushed someone else, then both sides went at it. The Marines were outnumbered from the start, but the fight wasn’t exactly equal because the Marines were armed and trained in hand-to-hand combat and riot control. No matter how experienced some of the black sailors were from the hard streets of America, the deciding factor usually was the Marine’s nightstick, wielded by men who had plenty of time on the Kitty Hawk to lift weights. A nightstick across the head had caused the bloody wound on the sailor who had run to Cloud’s stateroom.

  The six Marines who had been patrolling the hangar deck were blowing their whistles furiously as they fought the black sailors, now numbering about fifty after more joined the group from the mess deck fight. One Marine managed to get to a phone and call down to the Marine berthing area.

  “Trouble on the hangar deck!” was all he had time to scream before fending off more attackers. That call alerted the twelve-man reaction force, who charged out of their compartment. When the reaction force arrived, led by First Sergeant Willie A. Binkley, they found the Marines and the sailors going toe to toe, the sailors using any makeshift weapons they could find in the hangar bay to counter the nightsticks, and there were plenty of them—tie down chains, wrenches, hammers, crow bars. The reaction force waded into the crowd, swinging nightsticks at anyone who wasn’t wearing Marine green. In the brawl, one Marine, Corporal Robert L. Anderson, tried to come to the aid of another but was surrounded by sailors and beaten to the deck. As he struggled to get back on his feet, he tried to get a good look at the men’s faces so he could apprehend them later. But there were too many fists flying in his direction, too many people moving around frantically, so Anderson took another tack. He crawled over to the man who was swinging a broken broomstick, a man he knew had landed at least one good punch on him, and lifted up the man’s pants leg. Then he sank his teeth into the man’s flesh as hard as he could and held on.

  “He’s biting me!” the man screamed. “He’s biting me!”

  Sailors nearby came to the man’s aid and Anderson fell away, satisfied that he’d left a good mark on the man.

  Soon the reaction force gained ground on the rioters. The show of force caused the melee to break up, the black sailors retreating to the aft portion of hangar bay 2 near the number 3 elevator, unchastened but temporarily beaten back. They were still screaming and threatening to kill the Marines, and they made no effort to leave the hangar bay. Instead, they formed a rough line across it, a show of strength and of their intention to do battle again. The Marines, on the opposite end of the hangar bay, also formed a scrimmage line, ready to advance. It was an old-fashioned showdown, with both sides waiting for their leaders to give the order to charge.

  Townsend was making his way back to the bridge from the mess deck when he heard men shouting and got sketchy reports that there was a disturbance on the hangar deck. At first he thought the men might be referring to the fight he had just come from, that he was hearing old news. But as others ran by shouting about problems on the hangar deck, the ca
ptain figured he should investigate. He was near Cloud’s office at the time, so he went by there to see if the XO knew anything. The room was empty, and there was blood on the floor.

  Townsend hightailed it to the hangar bay, where he found the two groups facing off. Not again. What the hell is going on here? He also saw that the Marines had four black sailors detained already. Townsend stepped into the hangar bay between the two lines of men, shouting at them to knock it off. First Sergeant Binkley, in charge of the reaction force, quickly stepped to the captain’s side to protect him.

  Townsend spoke urgently to both groups.

  “No more of this! This is the end!” he shouted, his anger evident. “You blacks disperse! And I’m going to put the Marines away right now!”

  The black sailors started screaming at the captain, demanding to know why they couldn’t gather in groups. Townsend told them he had never given such an order. The black sailors roared, taking the captain’s statement as evidence that the Marines were just hassling them, and continued hurling insults, screaming that the Marines were nothing but the pigs of the Navy. Suddenly a stancheon, a heavy piece of metal railing from a work stand, came sailing through the air and narrowly missed the captain, hitting First Sergeant Binkley in the leg. The Marines instinctively moved forward to react, but Townsend cut them off.

  “No! Stand back!” he told the Marines.

  He then turned to the black sailors and tried to calm them. “There was no order to stop you being together. That is an error, a mistake on the part of the Marines. There is no intent on my part to ever have you broken up in groups of three. Now get about your business. We have solved the problems for the night.”

  The men weren’t satisfied and they made no pretense of being respectful to the captain, screaming insults and accusing him of being just another honky trying to run them down. Trying to dispel the potential for a more violent confrontation, Townsend told First Sergeant Binkley to release the black sailors they had in custody and to take his Marines forward and away from the hangar bay. The Marines complied, reluctantly but immediately, double-timing it out of the cavernous room. They passed Cloud as he was making his way inside. Cloud stood at the doorway to the hangar bay and sized up the situation. The captain was surrounded by a crowd of about twenty black sailors, all angry and shouting and standing way too close to the boss. There was a lot of screaming and gesturing, profanities and name calling, complete disrespect for the captain. Another thirty or so black sailors were hanging back, but obviously agitated.

  Cloud was concerned for the captain’s safety. He thought Townsend looked in control, but just barely. If just one of the hotheads was crazy enough to throw a punch at the captain, that could lead to a full-fledged beat-down on Townsend, and that was a scary prospect. The Marines had been sent away, so it was just Townsend there with a bunch of angry men screaming in his face and jabbing accusatory fingers in his direction.

  As Cloud approached, the black sailors soon started peppering him with insults too. Avinger and Rowe led the chorus of jeers.

  “Oh yeah, here comes the XO now, the captain’s house nigger!”

  “I told you we couldn’t trust that Uncle Tom!”

  “Man, you ain’t nothing but the white man’s dog!”

  The invectives stung, but Cloud understood where they were coming from. The blacks felt that either Cloud had betrayed them or he didn’t really have any authority and the whites called all the shots. They had listened to the XO, and look what it got them: Marines bashing their heads in just for walking together.

  Still on the periphery of the crowd, Cloud made eye contact with the captain, who was gamely trying to talk to the incensed sailors. Townsend wasn’t so sure that he wanted the XO interfering. After what he’d seen on the mess deck, he didn’t know what Cloud would do. Another black power salute? Yeah, that’s just what he needed right now. So he waved the XO off, indicating that he could handle this situation. The XO wasn’t at all sure about that, but he didn’t have much time to worry about it. At 11:15 P.M., a sailor rushed up to Cloud and told him that there was big trouble in the sick bay.

  “They’re fighting down there, sir! It’s real bad!”

  In the sick bay? Why would they be fighting in the sick bay? Cloud took off running.

  TOWNSEND SOON GOT THE men calmed down enough to follow his orders to disperse. At this point he just wanted them to break up and go separate ways, and he wanted them out of the hangar bay. As the men turned to leave, not satisfied and not calm but nonetheless complying with the captain’s orders, Townsend took a moment to survey the scene, looking for any signs of sabotage, finding only the tools and equipment that the sailors had thrown in the confrontation with the Marines. Relieved, he proceeded out of the hangar bay with the intention of making his way back to the bridge.

  Meanwhile, the officers standing watch didn’t know what was going on with the captain or the disturbance he had gone to investigate. They were getting reports of violence in several parts of the ship now, and the lack of information was starting to trouble them. The captain and the XO were both belowdecks, in the middle of whatever was going on, and it was highly unusual to have the captain off the bridge when anything was out of order on the ship.

  Townsend and Cloud were both trying to manage the riot mostly independently, because they had little ability to communicate with each other. Since neither man was on the bridge, it was nearly impossible for either one to keep up with where the other was at any given moment. They did not carry radios, relying instead on wall phones throughout the ship. No one knew who, if anyone, was coordinating the response to the riots. They couldn’t keep track of what each other was doing, so it was impossible to present a unified face to the crew. If they had taken five minutes to discuss the situation calmly, if they had had a chance to put their pieces of the puzzle together, they might have found a more effective way to end the disturbance. And they might have avoided much of the distrust between them that the lack of communication was causing. Cloud was worried that Townsend either wouldn’t do anything to stop the riot or would let Carlucci take charge, which would mean a lot of black sailors beaten down and then facing criminal charges. Townsend was worried that Cloud wasn’t handling the black sailors correctly, that he was treating them as equals and encouraging them, which also could lead to forcing the Marines’ hand. And the black power salutes … good god!

  Both Townsend and Cloud wanted the uprising to end without having to use force to crush the black sailors, but still they saw the situation differently. Townsend viewed the problem as primarily a threat to the ship’s operations, a specific effort to impair the functioning of the ship and not necessarily anything more grandiose. He wanted the discord put down quickly, but not in a violent, overly punitive way that would engender more hard feelings down the road. Besides, he felt genuine sympathy for those men who were getting a raw deal in the Navy, particularly the ones who didn’t understand the contract they had signed. He was trying hard to balance the need for order with his reluctance to use violence against a group of disadvantaged black men. He kept thinking about all the scenes of civil disturbances that had wracked American cities in recent years. Police had used dogs and fire hoses against black protestors, and in the infamous prison riot in Attica, New York, just a year earlier, an armed response by the authorities resulted in the deaths of nine hostages and twenty-eight inmates, most of them black.

  I don’t want to be the man who does that to these black sailors. I could send the Marines in and be done with this, and nobody in the Navy would criticize me for it. But I don’t want to do that to these men.

  Cloud also wanted to avoid that outcome. On that point, the captain and the XO were in agreement. But Cloud felt he had a deeper understanding of the black sailors and knew that this already bad situation could get much, much worse. Most of the rioters probably had no specific goals about what they wanted to achieve beyond causing a ruckus and getting someone to hear their complaints. A few, though— the more
extreme among them who were heavily invested in the black power, antiwar movement—might have more on their mind. That worried Cloud. It was hard to imagine sailors actually trying to seize control of a U.S. aircraft carrier, even more difficult to imagine them pulling it off, but it was his job as the XO to worry about such things, no matter how improbable.

  As he made his way back to the bridge, Townsend kept hearing reports of violence elsewhere on the ship. Just as he would turn to check out a report in one area, another sailor would come racing by, screaming about something elsewhere. Sometimes it was white sailors running for their lives, some with bloody noses and busted lips, and other times it was black sailors screaming that the whites were killing them. How much was real? How much was just men trying to stir something up? Townsend had no way of knowing. At one point the captain encountered a black sailor he recognized as one of the ringleaders from the hangar bay dustup running down a passageway screaming “They’re killing our brothers! They’re killing our brothers!” The man seemed more angry than scared; clearly he was trying to get black sailors worked up, encouraging them to come out and join the fight.

  Townsend stopped him and shouted, “Show me somebody being killed! Show me!”

  The man had no answer and continued on his way like the town crier.

  Townsend considered calling general quarters, the order that would send all 5,000 sailors racing to their combat positions. Generally that order broke up any violence. But he feared that calling GQ would disrupt the ship’s operations and might even cause more violence, as black and white sailors encountered each other in passageways on their way to their positions. Townsend decided that the situation wasn’t bad enough to call GQ—a decision that he would have to explain to his critics later.

  By this point the riot was spreading throughout the ship as more of the black sailors heard that the uprising had begun. Black sailors told bewildered whites that they wouldn’t live through the night, that the blacks were taking over the ship and taking it home to San Diego. Some sailors were beginning to realize that the violence on the Kitty Hawk may not have been entirely spontaneous.