As a 3rd Class Petty Officer I served aboard the USS Oriskany CVA34 from July 73 to July 76. Working mainly with the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) I was also cryptographic receivers and transmitters qualified, HF receivers qualified and Tactical Air navigation System (TACAN) qualified.
Time is cruel to the body, but some memories never fade. I will forever be 21 years old, standing on the flight deck of the USS Oriskany - CVA34, watching the sun set over a calm sea. The smell of JP5 aviation fuel in the air, sea salt taste in my mouth, the feel of hard steel beneath my feet and an eager anticipation in my heart as I looked out across the sea to my newest adventure. With the coming of the next morning's horizon and the dawn of each passing day I felt like it was a given that I would be there to see it through with each rising sun.
Now I lay my head down at night in anticipation of the next adventure that my dream will create from the gallant stories of that young man. For my body can no longer sail the seas, but my heart, mind and soul will forever be aboard the rolling deck of a ship of war headed for the battle line. There is something about the adventure, camaraderie, danger and personal risk of service aboard a Navy warship that stays with you and gets intertwined with your very being and it never leaves.
The orders also stated that before reporting aboard I would spend a few weeks in a "C" school learning something called NTDS (Naval Tactical Data System) SRC-16 radio transmitter - receiver system (one of the Navy's first all digital data communications networks) at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, somewhere close to San Francisco.
When I got to Mare Island and started the school, I also started asking around if anyone knew anything about this "Oriskany" ship. I found one old instructor that knew about her. He broke out into a huge laugh when I mentioned I was going to the Oriskany. He asked me who I pissed off. He said she was the OLDEST THING AFLOAT! Her SRC-16 system was serial number XN1 #1. That meant it was experimental model number 1 and was nothing like the machine I learned in school. Well, at least I now knew something about this thing called "Oriskany."
On the 17th of April 1973, I stood at the head of a pier in Alameda California. On my port side stood the USS Enterprise. Pride of the Navy, Queen of all the seas. She was all decked out to start her sea tour tomorrow. Today she stood tall sleek and shinny. A necklace of aircraft around her island, She looked like an Ensign standing inspection, not a scratch or bruise on her skin, wrinkle in her uniform, and not a hair out of place. So beautiful and "sexy" - A sailor's "dream boat". I could almost feel her tugging at me, whispering a sweet beautiful sea chantey in my ear, trying to lure me away from my destination on the opposite side of the pier.
On the starboard side, stood the Old Bitch of the Sea - Oriskany. Just back from her sea tour yesterday. There she stood, Her uniform of grey: dirty, torn, wrinkled and tattered. Her skin scratched, bruised, covered in soot, salt and seagull crap. As I walked up her after-brow I could smell her sweat. Sweat from hundreds of miles in scorching sun and rough stormy seas, sweat from dozens of weeks at Yankee Station with flight ops sometimes going 24 hours a day. She was old, ugly and decrepit and she smelled of death.
At the head of her brow I stopped, turned and saluted her ensign. As I turned a 180, grabbed my packet of papers to hand to the Brow Watch, I thought: What the hell am I doing here? Did I piss off God? Why couldn't I be ridding that sleek young thing across the pier? The world knew her name and who's girl she was. Why am I, just turning 20 years old, why do I have to ride this lonely Old Bitch of the Sea that no one knew, and from the looks of her, no one cared about?
On 14 June 1976, I stepped out on her flight deck for the last time. Slated for decommissioning instead of being cleaned up primed and painted, she was being stripped of all of her equipment. As I looked around I saw Her uniform of grey, still dirty, torn, wrinkled, tattered and Her skin scratched, bruised, covered in soot, salt and seagull crap from Her last Westpac. She was older and probably a bit uglier, but she wasn't the old bitch of the sea that I thought she would be. Once you got to know her she became a Fighting Lady. "The Mighty 'O' "is what we called her. A bitch to her enemy, but a Mighty Fighting Lady to her crew. She was the last of her kind, the last Essex Class Carrier, the last of the mighty fighting ships that took back the Pacific from the Japanese. From Alaska in the north to all the little islands that dot her south, the Essex Class Carriers fought and won the Pacific war. No, Oriskany wasn't the old bitch of the sea, She was the proud mother of the modern carrier, the first "SUPER CARRIER." Without the Essex Class Carriers like Oriskany, we would not have the sassy, sleek and sexy carriers of today.
As I walked down her after-brow for the last time, I walked slowly so that I could savor her sweet sweat from missions to Korea and Vietnam, all the flight-ops involved in those wars along with the storms and typhoons we weathered. Along with her sweat is the always welcoming aroma of Subic bay with just a hint of Olongapo bar-maid perfume mixed with the breeze off shit-river.
...Sorry, I just couldn't help a little Westpac reminiscing.
 |
"I
can imagine no more rewarding a career. And any man who may be asked in
this century what he did to make his life worthwhile, I think can
respond with a good deal of pride and satisfaction, 'I served in the
United States Navy'." - John F. Kennedy at the commissioning ceremony of the USS Oriskany in 1950 (my first ship). |
ETN3 Harbit - Proud to say "I served on the USS Oriskany CVA 34" - Relatively unknown to most Americans but highly feared by America's enemy's.
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For more information visit:
The Agony of the Oriskany
Although we were surrounded by all that water, fire is what we feared the most.
Time Magazine
Posted Friday, Nov. 4, 1966
Agony of the Oriskany
Amid gentle swells off the coast of North Viet Nam, the aircraft
carrier U.S.S. Oriskany swung north ward into the wind. Four A-4E
Skyhawk jet bombers soared gracefully off the flight deck. At 7:38 a.m.,
four more were being readied in a hangar bay far below, when a
shouting sailor burst from a 15-ft.-square locker near by. Be hind him
was an ominously hissing stack of 700 Mark-24 magnesium parachute
flares. He barely had time to dog down the hatch on the locker and race
for a phone when the flares began to explode. Fire bells clanged;
klaxons sounded the call to general quarters. Loudspeakers shrilled:
"This is no drill! This is no drill!"
Helpless Horror.
Superbly trained fire crews dragged hoses toward the burning locker.
Other crewmen fought desperately to roll four planes to the far end of
the hangar deck: three of them were already laden with bombs; the
fourth, a tanker, carried 900 gal. of JP5 jet fuel. The fire fighters
watched in helpless horror as the steel bulkheads of the flare locker
started ballooning under the 7,000° heat inside. The steel hatch
blasted open with a great gout of flame that engulfed the hangar and
sent fire balls rocketing down every passageway, igniting two
helicopters. Five sailors were burned alive.
The automatic
sprinkler system opened up, spraying curtains of water into the
lower-deck compartments. But the magnesium-fed fire continued to burn,
turning sections of the flight deck above into a sizzling skillet.
Choking clouds of dense, dirty-grey smoke poured through seven decks of
the Oriskany's forward sections. Two more blasts sent flames belching
along the flight deck, where red-shirted ordnance experts worked
feverishly to jettison 500-lb., 1,000-lb.and 2,000-lb. bombs they
dumped dozens overboard into the sea.
The fire caught
hundreds of the Oriskany's 3,400-man crew below deck. Worst hit was
"officers' country" in the forecastle, where many men had not yet
climbed out of their bunks. As the choking fumes billowed into their
compartments, they tried to escape, only to be forced back by the deadly
smoke and heat in the passageways. Lieut. Commander Marvin Reynolds
opened his porthole and managed to alert some hands on the top deck;
they handed down a hose and an oxygen mask. Then Reynolds spent three
hours spraying water around his oven-hot compartment. Commander Richard
M. Bellinger, a 205-lb. jet pilot who was awarded the Silver Star last
month, ripped out an air conditioner, wriggled naked through the tiny
opening to a burning catwalk and escape. Others were not so lucky.
Flag-Draped Coffins. Again and again, volunteers donned oxygen
equipment to go below into the stupefying heat in search of trapped
shipmates. Some had to don scuba gear and swim through inky water that
rose over their heads in the darkened passageways. They hauled to safety
many men who were horribly injured, unconscious or so broken by shock
that they could not comprehend where they were. Not until after 3 p.m.,
more than seven hours after the flares first began their still
unexplained sputtering, was the last small smoldering fire extinguished.
That night, looking as if she had taken a direct hit in
battle, the 42,000-ton Oriskany limped across the South China Sea, bound
for Subic Bay in the Philippines. Shortly after she docked there,
honor guards from her crew carried away a seemingly endless line of
flag-draped coffins. Thus, only two weeks before she was due to finish
her second tour of duty off Viet Nam, the Oriskany suffered in one day
the Navy's worst disaster of the Viet Nam War: 35 officers (24 of them
combat-conditioned pilots) and eight enlisted men had died, all but six
of suffocation. In two years at war, the carrier had previously lost
eleven pilots.
It was more valor than luck that kept the
Oriskany from going to the bottom of the Gulf of Tonkin. "There were
just too many acts of heroism to count," said Skipper John Iarrobino.
"There were literally hundreds. If there hadn't been, God only knows
what the toll and the damage might have been." Almost everyone aboard
performed with distinction, but the kids, the teen-aged sailors of the
Oriskany, got particular acclaim for keeping her afloat. Said one
seasoned chief: "Those crazy rock-'n'-roll jitterbuggers, they saved
this ship today. Getting into that fire and pushing those bombs over the
side and volunteering for rescue parties—those kids were everywhere
doing everything."
The following officers and men of ORISKANY
died in or as a result of the fires that swept her forward compartments
on 26 October 1966:
Their names are listed on panel 11e on the Vietnam memorial in Washington DC.
"They are not gone as long as someone remembers their name"
CDR Jack H. Harris
CDR Richard E. Donahue
CDR Harry W. Juntilla
LCDR William J. Garrity Jr.
LCDR Walter F. Merrick
LCDR Omar R. Ford
LT Frank M. Gardner
LTJG Dewey L. Alexander
LTJG Ramon A. Copple
LTJG James B. Hudis
LTJG James A. Kelly Jr.
LTJG Franklin M. Tunick
BM3 Donald W. Shanks
BM3 Alvin M. Shifflett Jr.
SN Robert L. Dyke
SN James K. Gray
SN James A. Lee
FN William Walling
CDR Rodney B. Carter
AA Greg E. Hart
LT Lloyd P. Hyde
LTJG William R. Clements
CDR George K. Farris
LCDR James A. Smith
LT John F. Francis
CDR John J. Nussbaumer
AZAN David A. Liste
LCDR Clement J. Morisette
LT Clarence D. Miller
LTJG Thomas E. Spitzer
ENS Ronald E. Tardio
CDR Clyde R. Welch
LCDR Daniel L. Strong
LTJG James L. Brewer
LTJG William A. Johnson
LCDR Norman S. Levy
LTJG Cody A. Balisteri
LTJG William G. McWilliams, III
ENS Charles W. Boggs
LT Josslyn F. Blakely, Jr.
LT Julian D. Hammond, Jr.
LTJG Gerald W. Siebe
LTJG James R. Welsh
ENS Daniel O. Kern
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