Free Abandoned: MIA in Vietnam by Bill Yancey Page A

step. The three men climbed the ladder on the outside of the ship to a sponson several feet below the flight deck. Catching his breath, Higgins, another lowly blueshirt, asked Byrnes, “What’s up? Why the rush?”
    Silently, Byrnes pointed to the starboard horizon. A funnel of black smoke ascended from a large ship about five miles away. After they fixed the ship in their gaze, Byrnes said, “ Forrestal may be dying.” Pointing next to the rolls of fire hose on the sponson, he added, “When I give you the word I want each of you to carry a fire hose to the helo after it lands. Keep your heads down. The rotor blades dip occasionally. There will be injured men from Forrestal on the chopper. We’ll take them off the helo. Four of us to each stretcher. We’ll carry them down to sick bay. Got it?”
    Wolfe nodded, staring in the distance. He had heard stories about Oriskany’s fire. It seemed unreal that Forrestal would repeat the disaster less than a year later. More men joined their group, and another crowd of sailors watched them from the other side of the flight deck, the Landing Signal Officer’s station. If they stood upright, their shoulders were even with the flight deck. “Down!” Byrnes shouted. They squatted and the blast of prop wash from the chopper’s rotors and its jet exhaust blew over their heads.
    “Go!” Byrnes ordered. Wolfe climbed the last ten steps on the ladder to the flight deck, arms around the coil of canvas hose. In a crouching run, he ran as fast as he could toward the helicopter and tripped, landing on the roll of hose. V-2 division had set up the arresting cables used to stop aircraft by their tail hooks. The cables stretched across the deck from port to starboard and about six inches in the air. Wolfe’s foot had caught one of the cables. Scrambling to his feet, he completed his mission in time to grab the fourth handhold on a stretcher.
    “Oh, and mind the arresting gear,” Byrnes said to Wolfe, no trace of sarcasm in his voice.
    The man on the stretcher howled in pain. Only shreds of his shirt remained, the rest burned away. From the waist up, his skin peeled in large sheets. A medic poured water over gauze on his face and chest as the four men struggled to carry him down to the hangar deck and then to sick bay.
    Over the next two hours, Wolfe, Higgins, and Byrnes made four such journeys. The injuries looked worse with each trip. Finally, they ran out of firefighting equipment to load onto the helos. They made three more trips to sickbay. Exhausted the men climbed again to the flight deck. A large man in a yellowshirt waited for them to gather around him on the sponson. “ Forrestal feels she can continue air operations after the fire is out. She needs men to take the place of her injured flight deck crew. I’m looking for  volunteers.”
    Wolfe never hesitated. He raised his hand. Ten other sailors did the same. “Never volunteer, Wolfe,” Byrnes said.
    The flight deck chief took the men’s names. “Okay. Back to your duty stations. We don’t expect any more casualties to come here. Bonny Dick is taking them now,” he referred to the USS Bon Homme Richard, another World War II era aircraft carrier nearby. “I’ll contact you if you are indeed needed.”
    The Air Boss or the admiral canceled flight operations for the day. Wolfe spent an hour under several aircraft moving them for the mechanics. Byrnes got into an argument with an aviation mechanic because the man refused to tie down his aircraft jacks securely. The yellowshirts and blueshirts constantly moved the jacks to avoid hitting them with an aircraft. Dinging an aircraft on a jack, another aircraft, or part of the ship earned a yellowshirt director or his safetyman the ire of the hangar deck chief. Too many dings and a yellowshirt might find himself reduced to blueshirt status, as a driver or nose wheel tiller man. If the chief was angry enough or the damage serious enough, he might even be demoted to tying down