220708 At Sea

That is me in the center of the picture. Ken Vaughn left and Doug Cullwell on the right. We spent a lot of time together during the early years of the navy.

We were frequently involved in an Underway Replenishment. But most days we were working on airplanes so they could fly off of the ship and go bombing people we didn’t even know. 1966 was a good year for that. Underway replenishment was a big part of our lives onboard ship. We had a regular schedule during operations against the Republic of North Vietnam. You may have seen dramatizations of the space shuttle docking in outer space, well lining up an 80,000-ton whale alongside a 20,000-ton supply vessel in open seas is similar, the ships line up miles away and slowly creep alongside until course, speed and distance apart is perfect. You only get one chance and if you goof, the ships bang together and make a mess. It’s weird, the collision alarm goes off, the ships ever so slowly move toward each other until the big bang bounces them apart, meanwhile tearing apart masts, guard rails, antennas, and even planes parked on the flight deck. It’s a hazardous event.

One day we would have a tanker pull up alongside and the deck crew on the oil tanker would shoot their lines across to the Kitty Hawk and our deck crew would drag progressively larger lines until they were pulling the huge eight inch diameter hoses that refueled the ship and brought aboard jet fuel for the air group. There would be a crew in each of the three hangar bay openings and once the hoses were attached, the tanker would fill us up.

The next day or so the grocery store would line up alongside and after the initial routine of connecting overhead lines was complete, the lines would be used transferring cargo nets full of food to the carrier. This operation would go on for hours, just like the refueling did. But the groceries required forklift trucks to move the supplies to the conveyors and elevators down to the galley. That meant sailors were involved in working parties, hauling the food to the galley. I don’t know why the operations were called parties, because they were never fun.

Some days our Destroyer Escorts would come alongside and we would refuel them, just as the tankers did for us. It was always great fun for signalmen to practice their semaphore techniques. Those guys would be atop the highest available point on the ship with their flags waving some coded signals back and forth. Some things never die in the Navy. I suppose if all electricity failed the ships could communicate as long as they did it in the daytime.

The final reps were ammunition and those working parties were no fun at all! Once the lines were connected, the nets would be loaded with pallets full of bombs and fins for the bombs.

This story is about one of those parties. I was lucky enough to have wrangled an invitation to join in on the working party on a nice warm sunny afternoon in the Gulf of Tonkin. Each of the 500-pound bombs was loaded on its own little four-wheeled steel cart that made them resemble small sports cars. There was a handle that was attached to maneuver the bomb to where it needed to go, and then removed when it was parked. We party goers were each given a handle and given a nice bomb to push from the hangar bay pallet area to the elevators.

The elevators were for bombs only, no passengers; so we would push our bomb over to the elevator, park it and then we had to climb down the extremely narrow ladders, straight down below decks to the magazines, (not Cosmo or Playboy but the bomb parking lots deep in the bowels of the mighty Kitty Hawk.) The ladders went through hatch openings so small a person would bang his elbows and backsides trying to squeeze through. We were down to the sixth deck, five below the waterline and the elevator opened with the bombs we had placed in the elevator on the hangar deck. We each grabbed the handles on the bomb carts and were pushing them into their parking spots when one of the ships generators burned out. Lucky for me, it was the one supplying power to the forward elevator and magazines where I was working. So there I was, in an area totally unfamiliar to me, surrounded by thousands of pounds of high explosives in a total blackout! Now I don’t mean like a moonless night darkness where your eyes adjust and you can almost see enough to navigate; I’m talking absolute pitch blackness where even a half an hour later I couldn’t see the outline of my hand in front of my face kind of darkness. I fumbled for a place to sit down and wait. I knew the electric had gone out, there was no loudspeaker system working to warn me of a fire if the generator had started burning when it went out. There was no way to use the elevator, and while I thought I could feel my way in the darkness to the ladder I had come down, it was hazardous to try and climb up through such narrow hatches in darkness, of course if the fire were to reach close enough to light my escape, it would also light up a few tons of high explosives, sending me heaven bound in pieces no larger than a bottle cap, spraying bits and pieces of me here and there on bulkheads along the way. I of course wouldn’t need a body in heaven anyway. So I just had to sit there, contemplating my life so far and whatever future there may or may not have been. It did make me want to light up a cigarette (I still smoked back in the sixties,) but there were big no smoking signs all over the walls down there and I was pretty sure those rules were still in force even in the dark. Conditions down there made me long for the previous bomb party when I dropped a carton with a bomb fin inside (about 10 pounds on my big toe) and spent the rest of the party in sickbay with my foot placed in a huge pan of ice water by some maniacal corpsman.

It didn’t occur to me then, but it’s a good thing I wasn’t claustrophobic. Going down through those tiny hatch openings and then being in such a small dark place was somewhat like being in a coffin and not knowing if or when someone was going to open it for me.

Lucky for me, the generator was repaired soon enough and I was able to finish pushing all the bombs into their parking places to await their eventual use over North Vietnam. It was a good day.