by James Scott
In the hours since the attack, Kiepfer and his medical corpsmen had performed a tracheotomy, cut open a sailor’s chest to relieve pressure on a collapsed lung, and stopped the bleeding from dozens of gunshot and shrapnel wounds. All this time Kiepfer’s own lacerated stomach was protected by a cinched life jacket that held his bandages in place. Nearly one hundred injured sailors crowded the mess hall, though the doctor suspected the total wounded was much higher since many of the able bodied continued to work. Two dozen sailors remained missing, most likely sealed inside the flooded compartments. Much of what Kiepfer saw as he made his rounds was unsettling, even with his Columbia University medical training. When he pulled back a piece of torn scalp on one sailor’s head, he stared down at the man’s brain. To combat shock, Kiepfer recruited volunteers to distribute water, salt pills, and bicarbonate of soda to hydrate the wounded. As the afternoon faded to evening—and anxiety levels rose—the crew switched to brandy.
The Liberty was not prepared to handle mass casualties. Ships its size lacked comprehensive medical facilities because the vessels normally traveled as part of a larger fleet. In any other situation, injured sailors would have been transferred to an accompanying aircraft carrier complete with an operating room, intensive-care ward, and a generous sick bay staffed by as many as sixty people. The larger ships carried stocked pharmacies, laboratories, and x-ray machines. Dental officers even performed the occasional oral surgery. Before the attack, Kiepfer’s most complicated procedure had been to cauterize a leaky blood vessel in McGonagle’s nose. Most days he froze off warts, iced fingers jammed from tossing a football on deck, or removed errant fishing hooks.
It was only by chance that Kiepfer had landed on the Liberty instead of in Vietnam. The Navy had assigned Kiepfer to the spy ship because his mother had been diagnosed with end-stage cancer. Because of the Liberty’s four-month assignment, Kiepfer would return home in time to see his mother before she passed away. To keep from dwelling on that painful fact, the thirty-year-old New Yorker had busied himself during cruises. He started a program to remove faded tattoos from sailors who now regretted the drunken body art. Even though he was a medical officer and excluded from many of the mundane chores, Kiepfer volunteered to stand deck watch, often taking the dreaded midnight-to-4 A.M. shift.
Now, in the absence of medical staff, surgical gear, and even drugs, the doctor had to be creative. Intravenous fluid bags dangled from overhead lights and transfusions were given arm to arm. Uninjured sailors were given surgical soap and taught to wash wounds while others learned to sew stitches in the wounded. To stretch the ship’s limited supply of penicillin, Kiepfer diluted it with sterile water. Record keeping wasn’t an option, so to prevent an accidental overdose of morphine, the medical corpsmen threaded used needles, like a lapel pin, through each wounded man’s shirt, pants, and even boxer shorts to signify the men had received the drug. When he ran out of surgical tubing, Kiepfer inserted his finger into one man’s chest wall and rolled him on his side to drain the blood.
Standing over Seaman Gary Blanchard at 1:30 A.M. on June 9, Kiepfer realized he needed more than creativity to save the Kansas sailor. Blanchard typified many of the Liberty’s enlisted men. Barely out of his teens, the burly sailor sported a sandy crew cut and thick arms. The son of a mechanic—his father was “Mechanic of the Year” several years running at Bob Moore Oldsmobile in Wichita—Blanchard grew up building and racing model cars. Shortly after turning seventeen, he told his parents he wanted to enlist. Because of his age, the Navy required his parents to sign a waiver. His father, an Army veteran, agreed. Blanchard’s mother refused to sign. She was particularly close with her son and wanted him to wait a year. Blanchard and his father persuaded her that it was the right decision. He was doing something he felt he needed to do. In the end, she relented. He left his junior year of high school, anxious for chance to see the world.
Over the past several years, Blanchard had pinballed around the world, scrubbing decks and chipping paint. On visits home he loved to describe for his family the unexplainable phenomena—the mysterious lights, brilliant stars, and even fire—he saw in the empty oceans. It made him stop and think of God Almighty. He reveled in the countries he had visited and despaired over the poverty he saw. “You wouldn’t believe how fortunate we are to live where we live,” he often told his family. But after several years, the novelty had faded. During card games in the Liberty’s sleeping quarters or over glasses of his favorite Johnnie Walker Black Label in foreign ports, he told his shipmates that he planned to finish his tour in the coming months and return home to Wichita. He had another motive: his girlfriend was pregnant.
Blanchard had been on deck when the fighter jets first strafed the Liberty. He had darted for cover when an explosion steps away knocked him facedown. Shrapnel riddled his lower back. He writhed in pain before sailors dragged him to the mess deck below. There men hoisted him onto a table covered by a mattress. The corpsmen gave him morphine to ease his pain. Kiepfer determined during an exam that Blanchard might need surgery, but he and his senior corpsman agreed to hold off until help arrived. The afternoon turned to evening. Blanchard’s abdomen swelled like a balloon from internal bleeding. Blood soaked through his mattress.
“I’m on my way out,” he groaned when Kiepfer checked on him again at approximately 1:30 A.M.
Kiepfer knew he was right. The doctor’s efforts to stabilize Blanchard had failed. His injuries were too severe. Despite repeated radio requests for help, no helicopters, planes, or ships had materialized in the nearly twelve hours since the attack. Blanchard’s blood pressure plummeted. His skin, normally tanned from scrubbing decks under the hot sun, drained of color. The sailor stared at the lights above and appeared disoriented and confused. Kiepfer recognized the signs of shock. Stabilization was no longer an option.
To open Blanchard up and stop the bleeding, Kiepfer needed at least two more doctors, several nurses, and a crash team. He had no operating room, no anesthesiologist, and no skilled help. Kiepfer was terrified.
“If I don’t do the surgery, you will die,” the doctor said, leveling with him. “If I do the surgery, you may still die.”
“Take your best shot,” Blanchard whispered.
Kiepfer recruited several volunteers to help move Blanchard from the crowded mess deck to the wardroom above, which the Navy doubled as a makeshift operating room in emergencies. With the doctor’s guidance, the sailors rolled Blanchard onto his side and slipped a stretcher beneath him. Kiepfer cinched canvas straps around Blanchard’s calves, waist, and torso, careful not to exacerbate his injuries. Wounded sailors on the floor cleared a path for the men to pass. At the far end of the mess deck, the men maneuvered through the door frame and hoisted the injured sailor up the narrow ladder, struggling to keep his stretcher level. Despite a heavy dose of morphine, Blanchard groaned.
A rectangular table stood in the center of the wardroom where the ship’s officers dined using china, silverware, and cloth napkins. In one corner sat a red vinyl couch and a glass-top table with a couple of aluminum ashtrays, normally filled with Lucky Strikes. Portholes with blue curtains dotted the wood-paneled walls. A carved African mask stared down from one wall and a painting of a man cane-poling in a river at sunset hung on another, both mementos from previous ports of call. On any other night, McGonagle might have entertained a local dignitary, if the Liberty was in port, or retired alone to enjoy one of his favorite Doris Day movies on the ship’s projector.
Kiepfer drew two pints of blood from volunteers in the mess deck. He then gathered as many sterile gauzes and bandages as he could carry. A battle lantern served as his surgical lamp. Because the Liberty was not outfitted for surgery, it carried no ether, meaning Kiepfer could offer only a spinal anesthetic to numb Blanchard’s pain. Unless the injured sailor passed out, he would be awake during surgery. The doctor ordered his impromptu surgical team to roll Blanchard onto his side so he could insert a needle into his back between his vertebrae. Kiepfer felt a slight
pop as the needle penetrated the protective sack covering Blanchard’s spinal column. A touch of fluid emerged, his cue that he had hit the mark. He slowly injected the anesthetic. He removed the needle and the men rolled Blanchard onto his back.
Lieutenant Painter and Ensign Scott held Blanchard down as Kiepfer made his first incision into the patient’s abdomen. The doctor discovered what appeared to be several liters of blood in the abdominal cavity. Without equipment to suction the wound, Kiepfer could only use large surgical sponges to soak up the blood. The process was slow and arduous. The doctor wiped the wound and within moments the sponge saturated. Tom Van Cleave, the senior corpsman, handed him another sponge. Then another and another. Blanchard stared at the ceiling and occasionally rolled his head to the side. “Mama,” he repeated. “Mama.”
It took nearly an hour to soak up most of the blood. When Kiepfer finally was able to see inside Blanchard’s abdomen, he noted with despair that shrapnel had punctured his liver and right kidney. The injuries appeared massive. Even more concerning, the doctor discovered fresh bleeding. Some of the blood appeared bright red, meaning it was oxygen-rich and likely coming from Blanchard’s aorta. He also observed oxygen-depleted dark blood, returning to the heart from Blanchard’s vena cava. Both the aorta and the vena cava, two of the body’s most important blood vessels, had been either injured or torn. With each heartbeat, more blood flowed into the cavity.
Kiepfer sank in defeat. There was nothing he could do to save Blanchard from bleeding to death. The doctor pressed packs over the open ends of Blanchard’s major blood vessels to slow the bleeding, then he and his assistant stitched up the incision. The men gave him a final dose of anesthetic to ease his suffering. Blanchard’s blood pressure dropped. The men gathered around to watch as the twenty-year-old sailor stared at the lights above. His breathing grew labored. At approximately 3 A.M., he died.
Kiepfer pulled off his surgical gloves and ordered the corpsman to retrieve a body bag and haul Blanchard’s remains to the ship’s refrigerator. The doctor collapsed on the red vinyl couch in the corner of the wardroom. Thirteen hours had passed since the attack. He wondered where the helicopters and the extra doctors were. Why had no one arrived to help? How had he, an inexperienced doctor who had never completed a surgical residency, been left alone to tackle such an operation?
The doctor felt the throb of his own injury return, a pain he had forgotten during the surgery. He unfastened his life jacket to find his bandage and shirt soaked with blood. Kiepfer peeled off the soiled bandage and replaced it with a fresh one. He pulled on a new shirt and cinched up his life jacket. He paused long enough to devour a ham sandwich for energy as he returned to the mess deck.
It was time to go back to work.
An uneasy calm settled over the Liberty’s bridge that night as the injured ship steamed northwest at ten knots to rendezvous with the Sixth Fleet. The bridge had been one of the most dangerous spots during the attack as jet fighters and torpedo boats repeatedly targeted the command hub to kill senior officers and spark chaos among the crew. The barrage of rockets, cannons, and machine gun rounds had shattered portholes and left bowling-ball-sized gashes in the metal walls. The fire from napalm and burning fuel barrels charred the exterior walls and ladders and the acrid smell of burnt paint still hung in the air. Machine gun rounds, .50 caliber, fired from the Israeli torpedo boats littered the deck, mixed with shards of broken glass that crunched as the officers paced. The decks, once slippery with blood, were now sticky.
The ship’s engineers had restored limited power. Lights flickered and the two boilers generated enough steam to power the turbines, but teams of sailors had to crank the rudder manually to steer the ship, leaving a sinuous wake that trailed for miles. Complicating the challenge, the attack had destroyed most of the Liberty’s navigational systems. Both the radar and gyrocompass were fried and the officers distrusted the magnetic compass. The fathometer was the only operable piece of equipment—despite having stopped working briefly right after the attack—but the depth finder could do little to guide the injured Liberty. The sophisticated spy ship, designed to sniff out radio communications of foreign countries, now operated at the same navigational capacity as an eighteenth-century ship.
Ensign Lucas had remained on the bridge since moments after the attack began. He had become a crutch for the injured captain, even loaning him his belt to use as a tourniquet. “He was so weak and had lost so much blood that several times he almost passed out. He gave me orders as to what course to steer in case he did pass out. He never blacked out, but for a while he was lying on the deck being given medical aid and yet was still giving orders and was in full command,” Lucas would later write to his wife. “How he managed to keep going is beyond me. He kept his head and his cool the entire time and if it hadn’t been for his outstanding leadership we all might not have been able to live. He is the greatest in my book.”
Despite the severity of his injuries, McGonagle refused to relinquish his command. Kiepfer gave the skipper a saline solution to help hydrate him during an exam soon after the attack and fixed his poorly cinched tourniquet to slow blood loss. The ship’s doctor would later tell the Navy’s investigating board that he would have insulted McGonagle had he suggested he go below for medical care. The skipper’s presence on the bridge proved therapeutic for the crew. “The Commanding Officer at that time was like a rock upon which the rest of the men supported themselves,” the doctor would later testify. “To know that he was on the bridge grievously wounded, yet having the conn and the helm and through the night calling every change of course, was the thing that told the men, ‘we’re going to live.’”
Lucas watched the skipper’s strength return as the hours slipped past. McGonagle chased salt tablets with endless cups of black coffee. His injuries made it difficult to get comfortable. The skipper alternated between stretching out on the deck and reclining in a mounted chair on the port-side wing. When the temperature dropped that evening, he traded his life jacket for a Windbreaker. He left the bridge only to go below to the restroom. Even then, he often chose instead to urinate in a coffee can on the bridge that someone retrieved for him. The two officers spent much of the night in silence. McGonagle appeared deep in concentration. His few comments to Lucas focused on the Liberty’s course. That afternoon, the skipper had guided the ship by studying the wake and ordering turns of the rudder. Now in the dark, he periodically stretched out and gazed at the heavens, navigating by the North Star.
Another officer relieved Lucas in the middle of the night, allowing him to retreat below to his stateroom for a few minutes of rest. He found the quarters he shared there with Ensign Scott uninhabitable. A shell had ripped through the ceiling. Blast holes riddled the metal walls. Six inches of salty firefighting water now sloshed on the deck. Lucas spied his roommate’s new Polaroid camera, now submerged. The young officer had quit smoking a few weeks earlier, but he opened the drawer beneath his bunk and salvaged a half carton of Marlboros. Miraculously the cigarettes were dry. Lucas collapsed in an empty stateroom on the deck above and lit a cigarette. He closed his eyes but found sleep impossible. The attack played out in his mind as he stubbed out a cigarette and lit another.
Lucas had seen some of the worst carnage that afternoon. He had felt the warm air of a round zip past his head as he fished his battle helmet out of a locker and crawled into the bridge. The wounded were sprawled all over the deck. Smoke had made breathing difficult. Deafening blasts of rockets and cannons had reverberated. During the torpedo boat attack, Lucas had seen the ship’s quartermaster killed just steps away from him. One moment, the sailor stood at the helm. The next, a round zinged through the bridge and hit him from behind. Lucas heard the man gasp and watched him drop to the floor dead. Lucas wasn’t spared. Shrapnel scraped his forearm and hand and another piece dug into the back of his head. A sliver of metal lodged beneath his right eye, so hot it sliced the skin as it entered so that he didn’t feel it. Only after McGonagle pointed out blood o
n his cheek did Lucas realize he had been hit. Every time he moved his jaw, he could feel it.
The trauma had not stopped when the attack ended. Lucas helped put out fires and haul the injured to the mess decks. There he had seen the two dozen tables covered with bloodied men and scores of others stretched out on mattresses below. The makeshift hospital smelled of fuel oil, smoke, and blood. Injured sailors occasionally moaned. Lucas had comforted his friend Lieutenant Jim O’Connor, who bled through his mattress on the floor and would later lose a kidney. Lieutenant Commander Dave Lewis, who had been about ten feet from where the torpedo exploded, lay silently, his face charred. On another table, Lucas spotted a man from the deck force stripped completely naked, his body covered with bloody shrapnel wounds.
Alone in the stateroom, Lucas worried that the battered ship might sink. Many uninjured sailors napped in lifejackets topside, just in case. How would he get off the ship? he wondered. His thoughts turned to his daughter, born the day after the Liberty sailed for Africa. Her birth announcement had consisted of a telegram from his mother-in-law that rattled off the ship’s teletype at 6 P.M. on May 3. He knew his five-week-old daughter only through photographs his wife mailed, which he had proudly shown the other officers and crew as he handed out fifty cigars. More recently, Lucas had missed her baptism, held in a Maryland church four days before the attack. He lit another cigarette. The edginess of the adrenaline and nicotine pumped through him. Like many on the ship, he felt alone and scared, but also fortunate. He had lived. “The night was one of the longest I ever spent,” he would write to his wife two days later. “I consider all of us who made it through this to be extremely lucky.”