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Carrier "On the Line"

By James May

From the sea, other ships like ours look like high, flat black islands. Our ship cruises above and below Vietnam's Demilitarized Zone, ironically perhaps the most heavily-militarized zone in history. Every night, those of us on the flight deck can see strings of bright flares in the sky, drifting slowly down over Vietnam to illuminate targets. The ordnance we bring flows through our great ship like blood. It is pumped into the ship from out of the night in underway replenishment operations, in swinging cargo nets and on forklift pallets. Like steel corpuscles, a stream of bombs and explosives courses through our ship night and day, rolled on low-slung, yellow carts. Olive green two-fifties and five-hundred pounders, and rusted, squat, round thousand-pounders, are trundled along passageways to bomb assembly areas on the mess deck, where we dine to the rrrrrrap-rrrap of air tools manned by ceaselessly working sailors and marines. Ordnancemen in blood-red shirts manhandle the load up and into place on white pylons under wings. A constant stream of "birds" screams on the flight deck, vibrating the ribs in one's body. They lift the iron in spurt after spurt up off the catapults, to spatter it on sunny fields or rainy hills and at the vaguely dreadful nightly strings of falling flares. All to spill the blood of unknown Vietnamese.

Many of the air wing or "airedale" sailors slave away for this great destruction machine whenever there are flight operations, nineteen to twenty hours a day. On the line, those of us without much rank also work every fourth day around the clock, on "working parties" slinging the endless ordnance, heavy bomb straps round our necks like horse harness. On the line it is mission first and safety second; the work is dangerous, the more so when one is exhausted, and one is always exhausted. To survive one must stay hyperalert and cultivate a certain level of fear. On the line there is always that "acceptable" level of casualties, dismissed by those who are not themselves subject to this lifestyle as "accidents." Our first merely loses a leg below the knee. Another man is sucked into the prop of a Skyraider, flipped into the air, and lands ten meters away. He loses one shoulder and all of his face but for one eye. "Corpsman on the flight deck!" again.

Twice I watch other ships like ours, other flat black islands, seem to explode. The flight deck of a carrier at war is wall to wall with fused ordnance, cluster bombs, rockets, napalm, tanks of jet fuel and aviation gas, and liquid oxygen. Twice I see all of it explode in a hellish chain reaction, throwing up a great, greasy black column of smoke like a volcano, a long black streak across the sky. Our captain brings us close beside these sister ships, why I do not know, as we can only watch helplessly as our tiny brother sailors dance and burn among the continuing detonations. Twice. The Forrestal and the Saratoga. There is no effort to save those who leap into the sea.

Our ship returns to Subic base in the Philippines every six to eight weeks for repairs and resupply, and the crew goes "liberty" for a few hours. Outside the gate (and across "Shit River"), Subic becomes Olongapo town, where we are restricted to one long street lined mainly by bar/whorehouses run by ruthless gangs, the middle class. A ten year old boy was shot dead with a .45 in this muddy street for pickpocketing forty bucks in Military Payment Certificates. Another shooting, by a sailor so young his helmet made him look like a mushroom, was of a very old man who charged our aircraft carrier clutching a poorly-crafted satchel charge. What was there in his life that would make a very old man do this?

On liberty in Manila, I accidentally direct my taxi into a suburb where a sea of little doghouses made of trash stretches - as it does still - all the way to the horizon in all directions. Crooked, flyblown paths glisten gray with sewage. The driver and I have to keep the children at bay by leaning out the doors and thwacking them with broomsticks, as some try to thrust a nail or a shard of glass under a tire of the moving car, in the hope of getting a small tip for fixing a flat. A small boy wearing only the ragged last vestige of a T shirt stares up at me through the flies. A shipmate informs me that at the posh hotel downtown, where the whores are beautiful and officers enjoy porterhouse steaks and Mateus wine, the chief pimp drives a white Lamborghini.

Back at the pier there is a huge steel cage into which some gentlemen returning from liberty are violently pitched, some covered in blood and vomit and roaring unintelligibly. In Japan some sailors set a row of folding chairs on one of the elevators overlooking a similar cage, to laugh at the staggering drunks. Japanese dockworkers began to laugh contemptuously at the spectators, and our officers furiously ordered the chairs taken away.

Back on the line, after many months of go-for-broke ground-support missions, many of our Phantom II fighter interceptors no longer have operational missile control systems. Maintenance cannot keep up. Curiously, I find that maintenance of the Phantom II's fire control computer is utterly dependent upon the availability of a tiny number 4 Bristol wrench, the size of a sewing needle. I carry our only remaining one stuck in the business card of a Hong Kong gangster named Lee Fat. All efforts fail to procure another, either through supply, or from friends in low places at the Phantom II squadrons at Da Nang. My girlfriend in Arkansas gets her father to drive seventy miles to purchase another, and sends it in a letter. It seems incredible that effective fighter air cover for our whole sector should depend upon that letter.

At one point our losses are so great that we take the test bench that we use to repair all others and put it into an aircraft and mail it into the sky. Now our ship has no fire control maintenance capability left at all for the fighter interceptors - the most desperate situation possible. A sailor from New York and myself, working round-the-clock for three days, manage to cobble together another test bench for the Phantom II computers by modifying an antique fire control system (from a Korean War era Demon) that we find long abandonded in a cabinet. We use handfuls of variable components and test and modify, over and over, until we get a functioning jury rig. Here we are working with 500 volts instead of the usual 40, and I come literally within a hair's breadth of getting killed, "by accident."

On the line increasingly often all five thousand crew members race to battle stations when the bosun's pipe shrills attention to "general quarters, general quarters..." On one occasion GQ is called because our E2A Hawkeye "spy in the sky" detects five MIGs on a direct approach from Hainan, at about 60,000 feet. Like previous MIG probes, however, this attack is understood only by "those personnel concerned" which include some airedale fire controlmen.

There is still a "barrier" of two Phantom IIs at 20,000 feet above our ship, and a third interceptor sitting armed and fueled on the catapult, the "cat bird," ready to launch in a last-ditch emergency. The very few Marine Corps interceptors still operational for fire control at the airbases at Da Nang and Chu Lai take off to help us but they are far away, in a fight that is happening within seconds and at speeds around Mach 2. We launch the cat bird, but it has a long way to climb. Our lead fighter, at 40,000 feet, launches two Sparrow radar-guided missiles in a head-on "snap-up" attack, but both missiles are sent astray by enemy electronic countermeasures. The second of our two fighters turns out to have a semi-qualified civilian tech-rep joy-riding in the radar intercept officer's back seat, and the pilot decides to turn tail and run. Four of the attacking MIGs break away as well, possibly upon detecting the Marine reinforcement coming up from the south. The remaining MIG decides, however, to continue the attack. In the last seconds, the cat bird comes up behind him and fires Sidewinder heat seekers. The enemy pilot ejects seconds before his MIG is destroyed.

The cat bird comes screaming in almost at wavetop level and shoots suddenly up into the sky doing victory rolls. There are, however, civilian war correspondents aboard who want to know just why he is doing this. The pilot gets a severe reprimand when he lands instead of an award, and is assured that his victory did not happen.

In the dawn following this three day round-the-clock effort I am way beyond exhaustion. It is a very rough sea, there are no aircraft on the flight deck, and alone on the catwalk I look up over my shoulder to see our little underway United States flag high on a mast above the "island." It is sooty, torn, and fluttering with incredible speed against the scudding, roiling, storm clouds.