Battle Field Angels (29 page)

America’s longest war abroad to that point produced numerous acts of medical corps valor as well as several military medicine advancements. Army medical rescue helicopter missions had evacuated three hundred thousand wounded soldiers to aid stations and hospitals. By the end of war, it took only nine minutes for an evacuation helicopter to launch from the time a request was received from the battlefield. On average a wounded soldier was treated within an hour of being shot, compared with four to six hours in Korea.

But Army medevac teams and Navy corpsmen paid a steep price for near-immediate treatment and evacuation of the wounded in battle. Two hundred eight pilots and crew were killed, 545 were wounded, and 199 medevac helicopters were shot down. That amounted to about one in three helicopter crewmen who were wounded or killed in Vietnam. All told, 638 corpsmen were killed and 4,563 were wounded. The Army and Navy medical corps earned 21 Medals of Honor. Navy corpsmen were awarded 30 Navy Crosses, 127 Silver Stars, and 290 Bronze Stars for valor.

Another major milestone was the widespread availability of whole blood transfusions for the first time in war. The Military Blood Program established in the Far East produced as many as thirty-eight thousand units of whole blood per month.

Rapid evacuation and battlefield transfusions were key to warding off shock and delivering more critically wounded soldiers alive to military hospitals than in past wars. The hospital mortality rate in Vietnam was 2.6 percent, slightly higher than in Korea even though soldier wounds in Vietnam often were far more extensive and life threatening. The injury rate from land mines in Vietnam, for example, was three times as high as in Korea.

The permanent nature of many military hospitals in Vietnam also led to medical advances. Neurosurgeons developed techniques to tunnel through tissue surrounding a wound and install temporary blood vessel grafts to keep a limb viable until the wound healed and a permanent vascular graft could be inserted. Hospital personnel also tested new respiratory equipment that minimized the risk of bacterial infections in combat conditions. And the Army experimented with an aerosol-based antibiotic treatment that its medics used on the battlefield.

As a result of these advancements, of 3.4 million men and women who served in Vietnam, 47,000 were killed in combat, a mortality rate of 1.4 percent.

Sometimes in war, sailors and soldiers become involuntary corpsmen and medics for a few hours or days when the mass casualties are overwhelming. One day off the coast of Vietnam, an aircraft carrier’s bakers, boiler tenders, electricians, dentists, signalmen, and supply clerks were threatened by a catastrophe that swallowed nearly the entire flight deck crew. The survival of hundreds aboard the USS
Forrestal
depended upon a ship full of heroes.

Vietnam War

B
y mid-1967, more than 450,000 American troops were in Vietnam. As the war escalated, senior military officers asked President Lyndon Johnson to authorize an additional 200,000. On June 6, the aircraft carrier USS
Forrestal
departed Norfolk, Virginia, bound for Vietnam.

Combat operations required a well-trained and cohesive crew. Sailors new to the ship had to learn the layout of about two thousand compartments and a bewildering array of departments and activities. There was a newspaper, radio station, television station, convenience stores, and dry cleaning aboard. Church services, basketball tournaments, and movies broke up the monotonous routine of life at sea. Yet most sailors never saw more than 20 percent of the ship. If a sailor had no business in a particular department, he had no business being there, including the flight deck. Much of the crew often went a week or more without seeing daylight. They lived on a twenty-four-hour clock, and no one took weekends off at sea.

The ship quieted at night when
Forrestal
’s lights were dimmed. The steady hum of exhaust fans and intake vents sounded as though the carrier was breathing. The rhythmic vibration from the power plant and the massive propellers pulsed through the steel decks.

For weeks the crew conducted drills as the aircraft carrier approached the coast of Vietnam. As the first day of combat neared, anxiety grew. Personnel in the medical department, called “sick bay” by most of the crew, reacted in different ways to the imminence of war. Some corpsmen fidgeted. Others found reasons to recheck their supplies or return to their bunks for an overlooked item. Most of the men on board were new to war.

Early on July 25,
Forrestal
launched its first air strikes against North Vietnam. More than five thousand sailors waited and wondered if all the pilots and their aircraft would return intact. Corpsmen assigned to sick bay and the flight deck emergency crew stood by nervously as the carrier launched multiple air strikes almost daily.

Forrestal
was commanded by Captain John Beling. Short and thin, Beling flew bombers in World War II and studied nuclear physics at MIT. One of the largest departments on the ship was engineering, which was headed by Merv Rowland. Engineering was responsible for the massive power plant, the ship’s maintenance, and emergency response, called damage control.

More than sixty corpsmen and four doctors, including Medical Officer Gary Kirchner, comprised the medical department. Kirchner was working at the Mayo Clinic when he was drafted into the military in 1967. He came aboard
Forrestal
shortly before it left Norfolk. He tended to be gruff and was called “Cranky” by some of the corpsmen.

Kirchner had a difficult time adjusting to the realities of
Forrestal
’s medical department after his experience at the Mayo Clinic. Most of the corpsmen had been drafted into the military, and few had any interest in making healthcare a career. Many had graduated from high school only a few years earlier. “I’m at sea with a bunch of sixth graders,” Kirchner complained to his wife.
⁸⁷

He was unimpressed particularly with
Forrestal
’s capability for at-sea surgery. He didn’t have the surgical specialists he was accustomed to. His corpsmen had about twelve weeks of basic training, and some had an additional year’s worth of specialty training, such as pharmacy or laboratory. But a single specialty aboard an aircraft carrier was a luxury. Each corpsman on board
Forrestal
underwent long hours of on-the-job crosstraining in other specialties so he could serve as a back-up assistant.

Kirchner also thought
Forrestal
’s surgical equipment was inadequate. He noted that sick bay was comprised of forty beds stacked two high, making it difficult to closely monitor a critically ill or injured sailor in the top bunk. He quickly devised a plan to stabilize seriously wounded sailors and fly them to a hospital ashore for advanced surgery.

Chief petty officers, usually fifteen- or twenty-year Navy veterans, directly supervised the corpsmen. Sam Walker was typical. The World War II veteran had a square jaw and faded tattoos on both arms. He ran the pharmacy and told corpsmen that if he could grab their hair, it was too long.

Most days at sea were filled with routine. Corpsmen ate breakfast at 0600 hours and then prepared for the day’s activities. Starting at 0900, they administered the first of two daily sick call sessions. They gave vaccinations, saw sailors who had health complaints, took vital signs, and notified a doctor when necessary. Following sick call, they conducted weekly galley and barbershop inspections, administered hearing tests, checked for radiation, and scrutinized sleeping quarters. Every fourth day, a corpsman was on call as part of the emergency medical response team. Comprised of four corpsmen and a physician’s assistant, the team stood ready to respond to trauma incidents. Its job was to assess injured sailors and prepare them for transport on stretchers down ladders and bomb elevators to sick bay.

Privacy was practically unknown on
Forrestal
. Corpsmen slept in compartments filled with bunks, not far from sick bay. In some places on the ship, more than one hundred bunks were housed in a single compartment, three high, and separated by three-foot-wide passageways. Corpsmen with the least seniority typically were assigned a bottom bunk just off the deck at the compartment’s entrance, where it was the noisiest and most difficult to sleep.

The dental offices were next to sick bay. Both were located nearly in the center of the ship with multiple access routes in case of an emergency or mass casualties. One of the dentists was Samuel Mowad. He was a quiet man with a long, thin face accented by thick, heavy eyebrows. Born in Philadelphia, Mowad graduated from Seton Hall University in New Jersey and was on his first cruise in the Navy. He had three sons under the age of four back home.

Nearly everyone participated in drills. Each corpsman was assigned to a specific battle dressing station or repair locker in an emergency when “general quarters” was announced. They were joined by dental technicians and dentists at battle dressing stations located throughout the aircraft carrier, which was more than three football fields long. Corpsmen would triage injured sailors first before they were taken to sick bay or the flight deck for evacuation.

Some questioned the authenticity of the drills. Others resented standing around for what seemed like hours after they reached their emergency gear. Yet most knew an emergency could happen at any moment. A year earlier, the USS
Oriskany
was operating off Vietnam when a sailor mistakenly placed a lit magnesium flare into a flare locker. He closed the hatch tightly, thinking the flare would burn out. He was wrong. The flair ignited five hundred others. It became so hot that the steel hatches were welded shut just before the locker exploded. More than forty sailors were killed, most from the fireball that rolled through nearby sleeping quarters and sucked out the oxygen.

By July 29, combat flight operations on
Forrestal
were routine. Every sixty seconds beginning at 0700, an attack jet thundered off the bow in the first launch of the day. Three hours later, flight deck activity increased as crews reorganized, took their positions, and prepared for the second launch at 1100. Pilots checked their gear one last time as they left their squadron ready rooms and climbed into their aircraft. By then, the tropical heat and humidity were intense.

Nearly thirty jets were designated for an air strike on a rail line north of Hanoi. Facing inward toward the carrier’s centerline, the planes were parked wing tip to wing tip along the edge of the flight deck, from just behind the island back to and across the stern and then forward along the port side edge. The large semicircle of aircraft were fueled and loaded with seventy bombs plus rockets, missiles, and ammunition as
Forrestal
turned into the wind for launch. About one hundred flight deck, ordnance, fuel, launch, safety, emergency, flight deck control, and aircraft readiness specialists focused on preparing the aircraft and staging them for launch off the bow. Four corpsmen were stationed at a battle dressing station just off the flight deck, and two others were on the flight deck.

When pilot Jim Bangert started his aircraft and switched from an auxiliary power unit to internal power at 1052, a Zuni rocket on his aircraft accidentally fired. It streaked across the flight deck and through a sailor’s shoulder, severing his arm. The rocket punctured the fuel tank of Lieutenant Commander John McCain’s jet without exploding and continued into the ocean. A moment’s shock was replaced with alarm and fear. McCain’s jet began leaking fuel that pooled on the flight deck. When burning embers from the rocket fell into the jet fuel, a giant fireball erupted on the flight deck. McCain scrambled out of the cockpit, jumped off the nose of his plane, and escaped unharmed. Sailors standing nearby were swallowed by flames.

“Fire! Fire! Fire on the flight deck aft!” blared the 1MC public-address system, followed by the sixteen-bell code for general quarters. Captain Beling ordered “emergency full back” to immediately put the carrier into reverse. That reduced the thirty-knot wind down the flight deck that threatened to spread the fire faster than it could be contained.

The day before,
Forrestal
had taken aboard several tons of ordnance from the supply ship USS
Diamond Head
. Some of the bombs were more than thirty years old because the Navy faced a critical shortage at that time. The old “Comb B” bombs were unstable and known to detonate from heat or vibrations. Despite this, they were loaded onto an aircraft carrier sailing in the tropics only eighteen degrees north of the equator.

About ninety seconds after the rocket misfired, a bomb exploded on
Forrestal
’s flight deck almost directly above sick bay. The blast incinerated
Forrestal
’s primary firefighting team in a split second. Pilots who remained in their aircraft were burned alive. Blackened body parts littered the flight deck. Some men were blown as far as fifty feet away as shrapnel tore into their abdomens, legs, and arms. Sailors’ faces were shaved off; others were beheaded. Some were thrown off the aircraft carrier and fell sixty feet into the sea.