Troubled Water

by Gregory A. Freeman

  “The Marines were never called out by me in this incident. They were on the scene and armed, without the direct order of the CO, XO, or the Marine CO. That was one of the things that caused the problems in the after mess deck,” Townsend said. He avoided answering whether he would send them in for a similar situation. Townsend explained that his masters-at-arms were now better trained and more focused on responding to such incidents. At the first sign of any disturbance by a group of sailors, a master-at-arms is to call his superior and report it, which will result in more masters-at-arms being dispatched right away, Townsend explained.

  “We will at that time, in the early stages, the very earliest possible stages, go to GQ,” Townsend said, conceding to the committee what they wanted to hear. “I have worked out plans for flooding the space with khaki, showing a lot of chiefs and officers’ attention, and have written even an instruction to that effect.”

  Then Townsend went on—unprompted by any follow-up question— to make a startling statement about the response plan he had just outlined.

  “But to be honest, it is flawed against a determined uprising. If this is displayed several times, they will kill the key people and you will lose control of the ship. That is not beyond the realm of possibility, in my opinion, in these days.”

  Clearly the events of October 12 and 13 had made an impression on Townsend. He didn’t want to call this event a mutiny, and he thanked God that no one had been killed, but he was warning the congressmen that a far worse outcome was possible.

  Next it was Cloud’s turn to face the committee. As they had been with the captain, the committee members were cordial but direct in their questioning, first giving Cloud a chance to explain his background and how he came to be XO of the Kitty Hawk. The committee members complimented Cloud on an outstanding career up to that point but then moved on. What did he find when he reported for duty on the Kitty Hawk? Cloud explained that he was mostly pleased with what he found, and he recognized immediately that the ship had a good system in place, the human resources staff, to address grievances from minorities. But he also told the committee that the crew was wary of Townsend, finding him more aloof and strict than the previous captain. Many of the black crew also hadn’t liked the old captain much either, accusing him of promoting racial inequities. They had hoped that Townsend would change that when he took over, but the black crew was disappointed that Townsend had not addressed their problems, Cloud said. So did they welcome a new black XO with open arms? he was asked. Not exactly. Cloud explained that the black crew was highly suspicious of any black man who climbed the ranks in the Navy. He told the committee members that “among the black community on the ship there is this open and vehement, in many cases, distrust of anyone that is older and more senior and who has more experience. Because here again, ‘they got that way by practicing Tomism’ or something else which would closely—”

  “Practicing what?” Pirnie asked.

  “Uncle Tomism.”

  “Well, is that term going to apply to everybody who is successful?”

  “It generally does.”

  “Isn’t that a fundamental weakness in our endeavor to try and create an equal society?”

  “Yes, sir. I believe it is. Let me say this: I think it is generally presumed by the young blacks that we are talking about here, the eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds, that anybody that is black and that is successful got that way basically by compromising their principles of blackness, if I may use that term.”

  Cloud went on to say that he considered himself a successful black man who was “very, very proud of my heritage,” and he did not think he had compromised his black heritage in order to get where he was. But he knew from the start that the black crew of the Kitty Hawk saw him as “a token success” who was put in the XO position only to show black sailors that the Navy does not discriminate. Some sailors saw his appointment to XO as “tokenism in its truest form,” he said.

  “Who is telling them that?” Pirnie asked. “He wouldn’t think it otherwise.”

  “It is his mother and father in the community he comes from,” Cloud said. “It comes from the ghetto, from the street.”

  Correcting that attitude would be key to preventing a recurrence of the Kitty Hawk violence, Cloud told the committee, and its members agreed with him. Cloud also echoed some of the same calls for improvement that the committee had heard from Townsend—being more honest in recruiting efforts and avoiding the induction of men who were simply incapable of advancing beyond the lowest ranks of the Navy.

  Then the committee moved on to what they really wanted to hear from Cloud: why he had done what he did. Cloud recounted the entire event as he recalled it, providing details about his involvement with the various incidents throughout the ship and his understanding, after the fact, of why the violence lasted so long. He often reiterated that his decisions and his actions were driven in part by what he understood of the black crew’s impression of him. He knew that he was starting from a point of skepticism and distrust; therefore, he had to find ways to get the rioting sailors to trust him. The committee members listened patiently, but the nature of their questions clearly implied that some thought Cloud had been more interested in appeasing the rioters than in stopping them. However, even those who were skeptical of his actions were caught up by Cloud’s testimony as he sat and talked nearly without interruption, telling the dramatic story of the Kitty Hawk riot. The committee members knew the basic story and were waiting for Cloud to explain himself, especially as he got to the part of the story in which he tore off his shirt and challenged the crew to beat him if they did not believe he was a true black man. They had read the reports of this extraordinary speech and the black power salutes, and more than a few felt Cloud needed to explain himself. The XO could only try to justify his actions for those who clearly disapproved of how both he and Townsend had responded to the crisis.

  Cloud did his best to explain, but he wasn’t backing down from what he had done.

  “Later on, sir, as the evening wore on … there were serious doubts as to my credibility, as to what I had said, as to whether or not I could effectively convey the wishes and desires of the command … It was a situation which I recognized at that time deserved drastic and nonmilitary means to quiet.”

  After telling the committee about his dramatic speech on the forecastle, Cloud explained why he had taken such a brazen step. He said he had realized that “drastic non-military means of controlling this crowd were necessary.” He also explained that he knew he had lost all credibility with the black rioters when the Marines confronted them after he told them they would not be harmed.

  “The methods that I used admittedly were unorthodox, and I will admit unmilitary,” he told the committee members who would pass judgment on him. “But I felt, and as I feel right now, sir, they were absolutely necessary to prevent loss of life and extreme destruction to the Kitty Hawk. And in retrospect I must say that looking back on that situation, the tempo and tenor of the situation at that time, and knowing what would be at stake, I would do it again.”

  Cloud knew exactly what was at stake, and he didn’t shy away from owning his actions in the early morning hours of October 13, 1972.

  “And if for the sake of my career, it was deemed that my conduct at that time was drastically nonmilitary, and not in keeping with the tenets of what is expected of me as a naval officer, then I am willing to sacrifice this career, full well knowing that what I did then in my own mind prevented death and destruction on the Kitty Hawk.”

  EPILOGUE

  After the subcommittee completed its hearing, Chairman Hicks announced that they had found no instances of racial discrimination that could have justified either the Kitty Hawk riot or the Constellation strike. Hicks said, “[T]he riot on Kitty Hawk consisted of unprovoked assaults by a very few men, most of whom were below-average mental capacity, most of whom had been aboard for less than one year, and all of whom were black.” The subcommittee concluded that “perm
issiveness exists in the Navy today” and that the permissiveness contributed to the problems on both carriers.

  The “Command History” of the Kitty Hawk for 1972, an official summary of deployments and notable events for the ship over the course of a year, was filed with the Chief of Naval Operations on February 27, 1973. The report describes the riot succinctly: “A brief but well publicized disturbance occurred onboard on the night of 12 October but operation of the ship was not affected.”

  Though both Townsend and especially Cloud could be credited with ending a mutiny and race riot with minimal bloodshed and disruption of the carrier’s effort in the war, the Navy did not see it that way. They were in control of the Kitty Hawk during what some would call one of the most embarrassing and shameful chapters in Navy history, and they would pay the price. Townsend became the first Vietnam War carrier commander to be passed up for admiral—a development that, considering his outstanding record, can be explained only by his being at the helm during the Kitty Hawk riot. Townsend says the riot was “a career buster for me.” The Pentagon removed him from his position as captain of the Kitty Hawk almost immediately and transferred him to a desk job in Washington, DC, where he stayed until his retirement a few years later. A long and accomplished career in the Navy came to a quiet, disappointing end. Townsend then began the second stage of his life as mayor of a California city and a successful businessman. He regrets the way his Navy career ended, but he says he is over any wounded feelings and has enjoyed his post-Navy life. Many of Townsend’s colleagues and those who served with him agree that the Navy lost a good officer when they let him go.

  Cloud’s star also took a tumble, but he stayed on as XO of the Kitty Hawk for more than a year after the riot, going to sea on another deployment with a new captain. His career would never be the same, however. The riot still hung heavy over him and cast a pall over his personnel jacket. He was deeply disappointed when, in 1974, the Navy transferred him to Prairie View A&M University, a predominantly black university in Texas, to run its ROTC program—honorable work for a Navy officer but clearly a big step down for the XO of a carrier. The message was clear. After several years there, he was transferred to Naples, Italy, where he commanded the Naval Support Activity, and then he was sent to his final assignment as an aviation detailer in Washington, DC, in which he watched over the careers of all Navy captains going into aviation. Cloud retired in 1984 with the rank of captain. There is no denying that the riot on the Kitty Hawk changed the course of his life. Instead of a long career as a senior Navy officer and perhaps command of an aircraft carrier, his Navy career ended on shore.

  Although their time serving together on the Kitty Hawk was brief, Townsend and Cloud share a unique bond—a bond formed not on the night of October 12 and 13, 1972, but in the months and years afterward when they could look back and better understand what happened on the ship. They butted heads at the time and attacked the problem from different directions, but each man now has a better understanding of what his counterpart was trying to do and why some decisions were made. They still disagree on tactics, with each man saying he was, for the most part, correct in handling the situation as he did, but they say they have no ill will toward each other.

  Cloud describes Townsend as a gifted and talented officer, “a hell of a leader” who had all the attributes of someone who should have become a flag officer. He admits to some hurt feelings over the fact that, even after so many years, Townsend has never expressed directly to him an appreciation for what the XO did to stop the riot. Townsend does state readily that his views on Cloud’s actions have changed significantly over the years. He was on the record in 1972 as sharply criticizing his XO’s methods, but now he is much more conciliatory. Where he first saw a renegade officer who was badly mishandling a crisis, Townsend now looks back and sees a good officer using unorthodox but ultimately successful techniques to help put down a rebellion.

  “I admire Ben very, very much. He’s a fine officer,” Townsend told this author. “He did what he felt was right at the time and I continue to support him. The ship would not have been able to do what it did without the cooperation of both of us working together. Unfortunately, he had been aboard ship for a very short period of time when this happened and the expectations of the black sailors were beyond anything Ben could do anything about. He’s a very fine officer and I consider him a good friend.”

  Townsend acknowledges that both he and Cloud could have acted differently during the crisis. In particular, Townsend says he wishes he had seen the trouble coming and prevented the violence.

  “Did I make mistakes? Yes. I won’t say I’m not guilty of that, but I’m proud of my crew and that ship,” Townsend says. “Ben and I had to resolve some differences but in the end I think we both did a fine job. No one was killed, there was no real damage to the ship, no sorties interrupted. I would hope that I would have been a little bit wiser in seeing this thing coming on the Kitty Hawk but I didn’t. The fact that we still met our sorties at eight o’clock in the morning just as we were supposed to is a testament to the fact that the crew was behind us, not against us.”

  TOWNSEND’S AND CLOUD’S CAREERS were the most directly affected by the Kitty Hawk riot, but they were not alone in seeing their lives pivot on October 12, 1972; the riot changed the lives of many men.

  Robert Keel, who went on to a successful career in business, feels strongly that what happened on the Kitty Hawk was a mutiny. The way he sees it, the fact that the rioters never made it to the bridge and didn’t seize control of the carrier doesn’t mean they didn’t want to or that they wouldn’t have if Cloud hadn’t stopped them.

  “I don’t know of anyone except the Navy who does not think this was a mutiny,” Keel says. “Is it really a mutiny if a handful of people with no hope whatsoever of taking over the ship rebel against authority? Is that really a mutiny? I guess that is semantics and history will decide, I’m sure, that there has never been a mutiny in the United States Navy and there will never be a mutiny in the United States Navy.”

  That does seem to be the more or less official Navy position. Navy records and historical accounts produced under the auspices of the Navy never refer to the Kitty Hawk incident as a mutiny. They adhere to the same interpretation put forth by Townsend and Cloud: what happened was a disturbance, a violent uprising that was serious in both scope and potential for escalation, but not a mutiny because the rebels did not make any serious effort to take control of the bridge or seize the captain. The Navy also points out that the disturbance was relatively small, saying that if an aircraft carrier is like a city at sea, the riot took place only on a few city blocks. Keel and many other sailors who were there react with anger and indignation at such comments and say the Navy is just covering for itself by downplaying the severity of the incident. Keel is particularly incensed by the claim that the riot was small. “It was small only because the ship was so huge. You had hundreds of sailors terrorizing thousands of others. The idea that this was some small thing is just a lie.”

  In the years after his Navy service, Garland Young was troubled at least as much by his memories of the riot’s aftermath as by the violence itself. He was called to testify during the prosecution of sailors after the riot but received death threats from the Black Panthers, and once he took the stand he was accused by defense attorneys of being a racist. After being disturbed by the experience for many years, Young applied for disability benefits with the Department of Veterans Affairs, citing depression stemming from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by the Kitty Hawk experience. Young’s request was denied, and he says he received a letter explaining the main reason: Young had called the Kitty Hawk riot a “mutiny” in his application. “‘There has never been and there never will be a mutiny on an American man of war,’” Young recalls the rejection letter stating.

  Like many others, Young still thinks he survived a mutiny. “In my opinion, any time you try to take control of a ship and change its course from one place to an
other, that’s a mutiny,” Young says. In 1999, he received full disability benefits for a combination of PTSD and other health issues.

  Many other sailors on board the Kitty Hawk that day still live with the memories of what they went through, terrible images and fears made all the worse because the Navy hardly acknowledged what happened to them. Robert Keel and John Travers, Perry Pettus, Chris Mason, and Garland Young still struggle to understand what happened to them and to make sense of it all. Travers still has nightmares about the rioters finding him up above the flight deck, where he had escaped from a mob, and throwing him overboard. He feels himself being thrown off the ship and landing in the dark waters, then watching the Kitty Hawk sail on. Perry Pettus still thinks often about seeing the man beaten with the fog foam nozzle and still feels guilt for his role in inciting the crowd. John Callahan, the sailor who was attacked in the shower, ended up getting conscientious objector status and was discharged soon after the riot. His terrifying experience was one reason he became a counselor specializing in the treatment of people who have suffered emotional and physical trauma. He says his experience in being attacked on the Kitty Hawk helps him understand his patients. G. Kirk Allen, the corpsman who treated wounded men in the sick bay while fighting off attackers, says images from that night are permanently fixed in his mind. “They will never go away, the rage on those guys’ faces as they broke in and the absolute hatred that was bearing down on us,” Allen says.

  The ringleaders of the riot, including Terry Avinger, went on to more trouble and criminal activity after being discharged from the Navy, but some managed to straighten out their lives as they got older. After charges against Avinger related to the Kitty Hawk were dropped and he was court-martialed for a different assault charge, he was discharged in 1973. For several years, his life continued to swing wildly from promising to disappointing, just as it had before and during his time on the Kitty Hawk. He got his high school diploma after leaving the Navy, but he also began taking drugs, then spent time in jail, where he took college classes. He continued his studies after leaving jail, but before long he was serving a two-year sentence for drug trafficking. In 1984 Avinger finally found his footing for good and began what would be nineteen months of drug rehabilitation. After more education and an increasingly solid job history, he became an employee assistance counselor for Amtrak. Avinger is, by all accounts, an upstanding citizen whose goal now is to help those facing the same struggles that led him astray earlier and to show his grandchildren that it is never too late to do the right thing. Looking back on that period of his life with the perspective that comes with maturity and with his training in mental health, Avinger says he recognizes that his behavior was driven by unresolved grief issues related to the deaths of his brother and father. “That grief led to my behavioral responses, my aggressive behavior, my having a noncaring attitude about life in general,” he says. “I was angry at God, and with some of the racial issues going on at the time, I was able to transfer my anger at God into racial hatred.”