Think of the
decisions we make in life as forks in a road we’re only dimly aware of
traveling.
Decisions made in
the heat of the moment or with due deliberation. Decisions made for good or
frivolous or no reason at all. Decisions whose consequences come to us at
midnight, long after the dust has settled, to make us wonder what might have
been.
Other decisions are
made for us--we often have no idea they’re being made at all--by bean
counters and bureaucrats behind closed doors, by politicians whose loyalties
are to party and policy, not to people.
These decisions are
also forks in the road. For some they’re just the end of the road.
This is the story
of two decisions made half a century ago.
William Lee and the
USS Forrestal
On July 29, 1967,
134 sailors died on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal in the Gulf of
Tonkin, when eight 1,000-pound bombs which had no business being on
board--bombs which everyone who’d seen and handled knew to be
defective--exploded catastrophically on Forrestal’s flight deck.
One of the dead was
a Chesterton boy, Aviation Boatswain’s Mate William Lee (CHS 1965). Lee had
been performing his primary duties, assisting in the catapult launch of A-4
Skyhawk fighter/bombers, when a fluke fire ignited on the flight deck. Lee
was the first to grab a hose, the first to step into the breach, and
probably the first to die, when the first of the defective bombs cooked off
in the heat of the fire and detonated, raining shrapnel on him, killing him
instantly.
Lee was 19. He left
behind a widow and a newborn, his parents, and one other: his identical twin
and Forrestal shipmate, Tom.
Bill, as always,
was serving the aft catapults that day, Tom the forward cats, and in the
normal course of things--under U.S. Navy policy--the twins wouldn’t even
have been assigned to the same ship. Not since the five Sullivan Brothers
all went down on the light cruiser USS Juneau, torpedoed by a
Japanese submarine in the Pacific on Nov. 13, 1942. “Bill and I were always
close,” Tom says. “We wanted to serve together. We had to sign a form so
that we could get on the same ship.”
The last time Tom
saw his brother alive was early on the morning of July 29. “I didn’t see him
every day, sometimes we’d go a week,” Tom recalls. “But I saw him that
morning in his apartment before we had to go launch. We talked about our
families, him and his wife, Kathy, me and Diane, what we were going to do
when we got out of the service, what we were going to do when we got to the
next port, just the normal stuff sailors talk about.”
The next time Tom
saw Bill was in the morgue.
The First Decision
The first decision
was made at the highest levels of the Defense Department, no name
specifically attaches to it, but it was executed through the HQ of the
Commander In Chief, Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC): to replace Forrestal’s
supply of the 1,000-pound Mark 83 bomb--drastically depleted by a relentless
naval bombing campaign on North Vietnam--with a shipment of ordnance which
included 16 1,000-pound AN/M65A1 bombs. Those 16 were obsolete, at least
some of them had been produced as early as 1953, and all of them had been
stored in substandard conditions in an open-air dump at Subic Bay Naval
Base, exposed to tropical heat and humidity.
That wasn’t the
least of it, though. The AN/M65A1 bombs had thinner skins and were
chemically less stable than the Mark 83s, the latter of which were rated
capable of withstanding the direct heat of a jet-fuel fire for a full 10
minutes without cooking off.
Subics Bay’s
ordnance officer wanted nothing to do with the AN/M65A1s, recognized them
for what they were--clear and present dangers--and absolutely refused to
authorize their onloading to the resupply ship USS Diamond Head.
CINCPAC was unimpressed by the officer’s concerns and teleprinted to Subic
Bay an explicit written countermand ordering the bombs put on board and
releasing him from responsibility.
Forrestal’s
ordnance officers wanted nothing to do with the AN/M65A1s either, on taking
delivery of them from Diamond Head on July 28. The bombs were
befouled and rusted and quite clearly leaking, and the suggestion was
seriously made to dump them immediately overboard. That suggestion went up
the chain of command to Forrestal’s commander, Capt. John Beling, who
asked Diamond Head to exchange the AN/M65A1s with Mark 82s. Beling
was told none of the latter was available and in the end he accepted the
AN/M65A1s, because to refuse them would have jeopardized the upcoming
bombing mission.
The catastrophe was
set in motion at 10:50 a.m. the next day--50 years ago tomorrow--when an
electrical malfunction caused an underwing rocket on an F-4B Phantom being
prepared for launch to fire. That rocket flew across the flight deck, hit
the fuel tank on a Skyhawk, and ignited a fire which instantly began
spreading across the deck and involve other aircraft, including the Skyhawk
then occupied by Lt. Com. John McCain. McCain was able to escape to safety.
Not all of his fellow pilots were.
Ninety-six seconds
after the fire had begun, the first AN/M65A1 detonated. Seven more followed
in quick succession--as did a newer model 500-pound bomb in a sympathetic
explosion--in blasts which breached the flight deck in multiple places and
allowed burning jet fuel to cascade into the Forrestal’s interior
decks and living quarters. In addition to the 134 dead, 161 were injured, in
the U.S. Navy’s worst carrier fire since World War II.
For the record: all
of Forrestal’s remaining Mark 82 bombs performed as rated, none
cooked off.
The Second Decision
The second decision
was made by Tom Lee himself: to tell a lie, just a simple white lie, the
sort any sailor might tell to get out of KP duty. It was this: while still
in basic training, Tom listed typing as one of his skills. He couldn’t, not
a word, but it went on his official record anyway.
“I lied,” Tom says.
“I figured if I said I could type they’d put me in supply.”
They did. Tom was
duly made a clerk on the Forrestal. The job lasted only a short time,
--only as long as it took a petty officer to recognize his uselessness on an
Underwood--and the mistake was subsequently rectified by assigning Tom to
the forward catapults.
Bill, in the
meantime, had arrived on Forrestal later than Tom did--Kathy had just
given birth--and he’d been assigned to the aft cats.
And Tom still
wonders about that fork in the road. “If I hadn’t screwed up in boot camp
and lied about being able to type, if they hadn’t put me in supply, I
probably would’ve ended up on the aft cats too. Bill and I might have been
assigned to the same catapult.”
But it was from the
forward cats instead that Tom watched the Forrestal burn. “I knew
where Bill was. I knew he was one of the first ones there attacking the fire
on the fire hose, trying to put it out and save the pilots. And that’s when
the bombs started to go off.”
Tom has heard
stories of the eerie--almost telepathic--closeness some identical twins are
supposed to share. And he frankly admits that he and Bill had no such
connection. Except on that day. “I knew Bill was dead.”
“Everyone not
essential to firefighting had to go to the hangar bay,” Tom says. “We were
preparing to abandon ship. They started handing out life vests. If one of
those bombs had gone down one level lower, it would have hit the munitions
bunkers and blown up the ship.”
“I was running
around looking for Bill in the hangar bay,” Tom remembers. “I found his
chief but he didn’t know where Bill was. I went everywhere. I went to sick
bay. When they began bringing bodies into the hangar bay, they wouldn’t let
me look for him. I didn’t know until 10 o’clock that night. His division
officer told me.”
There was one other
thing the Navy couldn’t get right. “They told my parents Bill was dead,” Tom
says. “And they told them that I was missing in action. My folks didn’t know
for three weeks I was alive. My mom took it real bad, real real bad.”
Tom’s Letter to
Bill
On being discharged
in 1969, Tom returned to Chesterton and to the job he’d had--the job he’d
had with Bill--before enlisting: as a laborer on the EJ&E. “I started out as
a painter, then I was a carpenter, then carpenter foreman, then pipefitter,
and I retired as a pipefitter foreman.” Bill, Tom figures, almost certainly
would have joined him on The J. “Bill was a lot smarter than I was. He
would’ve ended up a supervisor, where I was a foreman.”
Today Tom’s in
Washington, D.C., where tomorrow, with his former shipmates, he’ll mark the
50th anniversary of the Forrestal disaster, honoring the 134 who
perished because a man behind a desk in an office on the other side of the
world made a decision. To this day Tom blames Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara. “He was the one pushing the heavy bombing. It was his decision to
use the old ordnance. And he never took the blame for it.”
In the course of
tomorrow’s events, Tom will visit the Vietnam War Memorial and there he’ll
leave a letter for his brother in which, as best he can, he’ll try to make
sense of the decisions men make, of the ones made for them, and of the forks
in the road.
“I don’t know why
Bill died and I didn’t,” Tom says. “I really don’t. My life turned out
great, a fantastic wife, three great kids, four great grandchildren. How
much luckier can a man get? And I think I did good in my life. I did
everything I could. I tried to make my life valuable. I don’t think I wasted
it. But it’s going to be hard for me to explain to him. I feel bad it was
Bill, not me. He was a damn nice guy. He would’ve done anything for
anybody.”