Troubled Water

by Gregory A. Freeman

  Pettus couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The other men were dumbstruck, even Avinger and the other hard-core black militants. Men instantly fell silent. Not a word was spoken. Not a single sound rose from the crowd. For the first time in a long while, Cloud could hear the hum of the carrier’s engines and the soft whoosh of the waves on the hull.

  Cloud stood there for a long moment, the weapon held high, his heart racing and lungs heaving, wondering if one of the sailors would suddenly charge. He knew that if one man attacked, the whole crowd was likely to follow and he would die an agonizing death, right there on the deck of the Kitty Hawk, at the hands of his own men.

  But the crowd remained silent, the men glancing around at each other, wondering what to do next. They still looked angry, but Cloud sensed that they were wavering, that he might have convinced them.

  My god, you have to believe me …

  Then one man in the crowd yelled “He is a brother!” And, slowly, it spread through the crowd. The other men took up the chant, all of them, shouting “He is a brother! He is a brother! He is a brother!” One of the ringleaders, the man Cloud thought might be the first to take him up on his offer to beat him, approached and calmly said, “Let’s do it your way.”

  With the crowd still chanting “He is a brother! He is a brother!” Cloud raised his fist in a black power salute, full of pride and relief.

  The men returned the salute as they continued chanting their support for Cloud, and one by one sailors began coming up to the XO and throwing their weapons at his feet. Cloud told the crowd he didn’t want their weapons and ordered them thrown over the side. Men by the dozens went to the railing and heaved their pipes, wrenches, chains, and knives into the sea.

  “We’re with you all the way,” one of the sailors told him. “Let’s do it your way.”

  Cloud was immensely relieved that he had ended the rebellion. It was 1:30 A.M. He put his shirt back on and mingled with the men for nearly an hour, talking to anyone who had a grievance and assuring them that they could also take their concerns to the captain, by way of the human relations staff. After he had spoken with everyone who seemed to want to say something to him, he got the group’s attention again and told them to return peacefully to their quarters or their assigned duties. With another raised fist salute and a shout of “Black power!” the crowd, relaxed now, began to disperse. Cloud could even see some of the men laughing and cutting up, a far cry from an hour earlier, when he thought these same men might rip him to shreds.

  As Cloud was about to leave the forecastle, a white master-at-arms came to him and looked concerned.

  “XO, there’s an injured man in a compartment over here and we can’t get him out,” the man told Cloud. “He’s near death, but every time we try to go in and get him, the blacks fight us.”

  Several of the black sailors, including a couple of the riot’s ringleaders, overheard the master-at-arms. Confident now that he had the crowd on his side, Cloud told the two ringleaders to go with him to the communications office, where the injured man was trapped, a short distance away. Four more black sailors joined them. On the way they passed the black sailors who had been fighting to keep the rescuers from the injured man, but seeing the ringleaders walking with the XO, they stood aside. Cloud and the other black sailors entered the compartment, where they found nearly a dozen white sailors holed up, trying in turns to get the injured man out and protecting him when the rioters tried to break in. They were relieved to see the XO enter the compartment with confidence, obviously in charge of the black sailors with him.

  The white sailors stepped aside. What Cloud saw saddened and repulsed him. Radioman Third Class Lynwood Patrick—the white sailor whose beating had so sickened Perry Pettus that he turned away from violence, the one Pettus had thought looked like a scared child playing dress-up—was lying unconscious on a canvas stretcher soaked with blood. Patrick’s skull was caved in, and he had deep lacerations on his forehead and defensive wounds on his hands.

  Without waiting for Cloud’s orders, two white sailors and two black sailors stepped over to the stretcher. The four men each took a handle and gently lifted Patrick. They silently carried the most seriously injured victim of the Kitty Hawk mutiny through the crowded compartment and out into the passageway, all sailors, both black and white, standing aside to let them pass. The stretcher bearers were given free access through the passages, down the escalator, all the way to the sick bay.

  After more than five hours, the worst of the violence on the Kitty Hawk was over.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “BY A HIGHER AUTHORITY”

  G.Kirk Allen, the corpsman, was still working in sick bay when the stretcher bearers arrived with Lynwood Patrick. The obvious head wound and the amount of blood instantly got everyone’s attention. Blood was still leaking from the man’s head, and the dark masses of congealing blood told them that the young sailor had been injured some time ago. Unfortunately, he was waking up. It would have been a blessing to stay unconscious. He was crying out in pain, begging someone to make it stop hurting.

  “Looks like a cranial skull fracture,” one of the corpsmen said. A doctor hurried over to the exam table and, after a quick look, ordered the corpsmen to take Patrick to the operating room.

  The doctor was in the OR with Radioman Patrick for only a few minutes before he came back out.

  “We’ve got to medevac him off,” he said to Allen and the other corpsmen nearby. “He’s got a bad skull fracture. We can’t treat it here.”

  Anything bad enough to require medevac from the carrier, which offered the best medical care in the fleet short of an actual hospital ship, was serious indeed. The corpsmen all looked at each other with concern.

  “We’re medevacing guys into Vietnam?” Allen said to another corpsman. “This is really serious.”

  The medics continued tending to Patrick and the other injured men. There were no more attacks on the sick bay, no more mobs of sailors trying to force their way in and assault the injured along with their caregivers. After a day full of tension and several hours of rioting, the corpsmen hoped the black sailors were ready to stand down and stop the violence.

  The corpsmen were right. Following Cloud’s speech in the forecastle, many of the black sailors dispersed. Some returned to their berthing areas or their assigned work stations, while others hung out in the common areas, talking over the events of the day. Others remained in the forecastle with Cloud, but they were peaceful. There were no more reports of violence other than the occasional shove in a passageway or a random punch thrown by some sailor who was still feeling angry.

  About 3:30 A.M., Townsend made his way to the forecastle and met with many of the black sailors. At this point, Townsend knew only that Cloud had managed to settle the rowdy crowd. He knew little about how Cloud had managed to do that. The sailors had plenty of complaints, and both the captain and the XO were willing to listen as long as the threat of violence was no longer an issue.

  With the black sailors brought under control by Cloud’s extraordinary speech, however, the captain and the XO both worried about the possibility of a retaliatory strike from the white sailors. They had been largely passive up to this point, reluctant to fight back even as they were being attacked. But Cloud and Townsend knew how the minds of young men worked, and they knew that the white Kitty Hawk sailors probably were pretty steamed up. The captain and the XO were both determined to head off any retaliation from the white crew.

  It wasn’t long before they got word that some white sailors had been preparing weapons and were planning a counterattack. Keel and his buddies were ready, having had plenty of time to fashion their weapons and steel themselves for what they thought had to be done. After many hours of being holed up, Keel and his buddies opened the hatch, took a look around, and determined that the worst of the violence seemed to be over. They didn’t feel trapped anymore; now they felt chagrined and were determined not to be hunted down on their own ship again. They had no way of kn
owing whether this was just a lull in the violence or if the mutiny was over, but they were ready to fight if there was going to be a next time. And it wasn’t just Keel’s friends. Plenty of other whites were feeling the same thing, ready to show that they wouldn’t cower on the Kitty Hawk a second time. Keel saw one confrontation in a passageway between an angry white sailor and a black man trying to pass by. The white sailor exchanged insults with the black sailor, and then the white man passed on the rumor that was floating around.

  “We’re ready for you this time,” he said. “If you want do this, you and your buddies meet us at 0700 on the aft mess deck and we’ll do it.”

  That kind of challenge was flying around all over the ship, and soon someone went to Cloud in the forecastle and told him a mob of white sailors appeared on the verge of violence. At 5 A.M. Cloud made his way to a berthing area adjacent to the forecastle and found about 150 white sailors who were growing increasingly enraged at the events of the past 12 hours. They were pissed off about the attacks, and some of them showed their wounds from being ripped out of their bunks and beaten. The rowdy bunch made it clear to the XO that they were entirely dissatisfied with the way he and the captain had let the violence go on for so long. This crowd of white sailors was nearly as rough on Cloud as the black sailors had been four hours earlier.

  “You’re nothing but a nigger!” one white sailor shouted. “You’re just like all the rest of them! How can you exercise any authority on this ship?”

  Cloud took the insults calmly and waited for the sailor to finish screaming. When he was done, Cloud spoke.

  “By a higher authority I was appointed as executive officer of this ship,” Cloud yelled, not even bothering to try to hide the passion in his voice. He wasn’t going to let this thing boil over again. “You men, as part of the Kitty Hawk along with the blacks, are crew members of one ship. You will obey the orders and edicts of the commanding officer. If you don’t do any better than the blacks did earlier, you will be criticized just as severely, and you will lose any respect you have at this point.”

  Cloud implored the crowd of whites to seek redress for their grievances through the proper channels and not to seek revenge. With the men still refusing his order to put down their weapons, the XO changed tactics and took a hard line. After everything that had happened, he was in no mood to mess around. Relying on a threat of punishment instead of the pleas for brotherhood that he used earlier with the black sailors, the XO explained how the situation was going to play out.

  “The choice, simply stated, is yours. Either you will do it the legal way and stay correct and proper, or you can take up your weapons as you are threatening to do right now and every one of you will be subject to a long prison term away from your wives, families, and loved ones. Now, what do you want to do?”

  The XO stood there waiting for a response, but even the biggest loudmouths in the bunch didn’t have anything more to say. He ordered the men to stay where they were and to put their weapons down. There shouldn’t be any more violence, he told them, but leave all the lights on just in case. The men grumbled and complained some, but Cloud was confident they weren’t going to look for trouble. He turned and left, back to the forecastle to talk with the captain about how they were going to get breakfast underway.

  It was nearly dawn, and the Kitty Hawk still had work to do.

  THE CREW MEDEVACED THREE crewmen off the Kitty Hawk in the early hours of October 13: Patrick with the cranial fracture, another with a pancreatic laceration, and one more with internal injuries. A total of fifty-two men were treated in the sick bay, and many more did not seek care for relatively minor injuries. Townsend visited the sick bay that morning, after the crisis was over, to thank the medics for their hard work. He spoke to the men as a group, thanking them for performing well in an extraordinary situation.

  Flight ops resumed as scheduled at 7:58 A.M. Townsend was immensely relieved, and proud, to see that his ship had weathered the crisis and never missed a beat. The events of the previous 24 hours had been challenging and difficult, but the Kitty Hawk came through and was ready for business as usual. Cloud also saw the importance of resuming flight operations that morning, on schedule, and many of the crew felt reassured by the sound of steam shots coursing through the pipes deep in the ship and the thump of aircraft landing on the flight deck. The tension was still thick, the animosity among some sailors just barely contained, but resumption of flight activities told the sailors that the Kitty Hawk had survived.

  As the crew cleaned up after the riot and got on with the business of bombing Vietnam, many were still wondering just what the hell had happened. Most had been told nothing of an official nature. Though the violence had ended, no one was quite sure that it wouldn’t resume without warning. The men were uneasy as they went about their duties, wondering what happened last night and what would happen next.

  Townsend and Cloud were both too busy with the day’s business, and too exhausted from being up all night, to debrief each other in any detail. It would be some time before they compared notes and understood some of the particulars of what had happened on October 12, what led up to it, and how their missteps and miscommunications sometimes made the problems worse. Townsend remained steadfast that he and most of the crew handled the crisis as best they could, but he was still coming to terms with how his XO had handled himself during the uprising. Clearly he had been instrumental in ending the riot, Townsend thought, but what he did was so … “unorthodox” would be the formal way to describe it. As he mulled over the day’s events, Townsend couldn’t get over the image of his XO raising his fist in a black power salute.

  Eventually, Townsend took Cloud aside for a private talk. The captain had plenty of praise for Cloud in some areas, particularly his rescue of Radioman Patrick after the showdown on the forecastle. But he also made it clear that he was surprised by Cloud’s demonstrations of brotherhood with the rioting sailors and what he saw as a panicky response when the men needed to see a calm, cool officer in control.

  “Look, you were very helpful in getting people under control,” the captain told Cloud. “But you used some very bad techniques, totally unacceptable techniques. That message on the 1MC nearly took this thing in another direction. That was a bad move.”

  Cloud acknowledged the captain and didn’t try to argue the point.

  “I know everything you did was in sincere good faith and goodwill, but some of it was just totally unacceptable,” Townsend told him. “We can’t have that on this ship.”

  Cloud thought that Townsend had made his point and they were finished, as both men needed to get back to work. But then Townsend looked him in the eye and spoke gravely.

  “Cloud, hear this. That black power salute and all that talk about being a brother … If you ever do anything like that again, any more black power salutes or anything like that, you’re off the boat. I can’t work with you.”

  Cloud took the criticism without complaint, neither surprised nor willing to debate his actions at that moment. But he also felt hurt that the captain did not give him enough credit for what he did to stop the violence. He wondered if Townsend realized that he had risked his life to calm the rioting sailors.

  Many of the crew on board, men like Pettus who had been witness to the most violent, pivotal moments of the prior night, had no doubt about Cloud’s contribution. From the moment he left the forecastle early that morning, Pettus was certain that the XO had saved lives, possibly even Pettus’s own life, with his dramatic speech calling for a peaceful resolution. The XO’s invitation to men full of rage, challenging them to beat him down if they didn’t believe he was truly a black man with their best interests at heart, was the bravest thing Pettus had ever seen. And it would remain so for many years to come.

  Townsend had not been in that crowd, he had not seen the way those black sailors looked at Cloud with a virulent hate that could have turned homicidal in an instant, and so on October 13 he did not fully appreciate what his XO had done to sav
e the Kitty Hawk. For weeks and months after the event, the captain continued to feel that he had had a good handle on the situation. His XO, however, felt that the uprising had been something different, something bigger, more complex, something scarier than just a fistfight among young sailors. He believed that he had been smack in the middle of the whole thing all night long, seeing firsthand the very worst of it all and understanding the gravity of the situation better than the captain, grasping the terrible potential of what could have happened. Townsend reassured himself and his officers that, though this had been an exceptionally violent disturbance, it was nothing more than that; it certainly was not a mutiny. But as the captain of a high-profile American warship, Townsend had a vested interest in parsing the definition of the word “mutiny,” and not everyone agreed with his description. Many of his crew members, especially those who were in the middle of the worst violence and heard the rebels’ plans to take the ship home, had no qualms about calling what happened a mutiny—albeit a disorganized and unsuccessful one.

  Definitions aside, there was no denying what happened on the USS Kitty Hawk on October 12 and 13, 1972. Call it a mutiny or call it an isolated incident of violence, the end result would be the same for Marland Townsend and Ben Cloud. As they oversaw flight ops and maintained order on the ship that day, the same thought kept running through their minds. Both men realized that they would be held responsible for the Kitty Hawk riot.

  There will be hell to pay for this, they thought.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “PLAIN CRIMINALS?”

  Planes flying off the Kitty Hawk the morning after the riot had been a welcome sight for Townsend and Cloud, and it reassured Townsend that the violence had been perpetrated by a relatively small group of black sailors. The captain knew most of the crew was still with him, that he could trust them to follow orders and do their jobs.