Globall War of Terror: Hangar Bay

Global War of Terror - US Navy 'Press Release' Entries

Ringside Seat | Raid 17 | Hangar Bay | Direct Commission | Intercept | Coastal Action

Things have quieted down. The Chinese have nothing left to throw at us. I type up my stories and file them. (We are not bothering with EMCON, the Chinese know where we are.) Then, after briefly confirming that Los Angeles is in fact still there, I take a three hour nap.

Coffee, a Danish from the enlisted mess, and back to work. I have been dreading this.

Sick bay.

The rooms are half full. When you ask a bunch of teens and twenty-somethings to play on a heaving deck with heavy objects, fuel and explosives, people get hurt.

Then have a nuclear weapon detonate within line of sight.

One sailor is dead. When the armored plexiglas protecting PriFly shattered in the blast, fragments tore out his neck and he bled to death in seconds.

Everyone else in that compartment, and on the nav bridge, was blinded.

Fortunately, the blindness is temporary, the harried corpsman explained. Some have already returned to duty. But can I sit with them, and get their stories? This I can do. This calms them somewhat. The cure for their condition is time, covered eyes and patience.

I am writing down names and hometowns, letting each tell their story, when the ship is rocked up and down, slamming us all into the floor and then back up again.

This is a nuclear powered aircraft carrier weighing many, many tons.

The 1MC, the loudspeaker system, confirms my worst fears. A shudder runs through all of us in the room.

"NOW HEAR THIS! NOW HEAR THIS! FIRE ON THE FLIGHT DECK! FIRE ON THE FLIGHT DECK!"

Everyone who can see and move who is not medical personnel, and half of them, rush out of the room -- the medics grabbing equipment on their way out.

Then the lights go out and we are slammed into first the ceiling and then the floor. The lights stay out until emergency lights come up, dimly.

"ALL HANDS, ALL HANDS. FIRE IN THE HANGAR BAY! FIRE IN THE HANGAR BAY! ALL HANDS, FIRE AND RESCUE PARTY! ALL HANDS! ALL HANDS!"

I struggle to the wall where I had seen emergency flashlights racked, and pass them out, keeping one for myself. Two of the blinded sailors lift their blindfolds, discover that they can see, and make their way with several of the medics out the corridor.

All hands.

We are left with several blinded sailors, two corpsmen and a physican's assistant ... absolutely minimum staff when patients are in sick bay.

Then the room is suddenly and completely full of horribly wounded sailors, some still screaming.

"YOU!" the corpsman commands me. "Take over first aid. Anyone we push at you, stop the bleeding and get them out of the way! Bandage chest is there!"

I barely have time to put on gloves before the first battle casualty is shoved my way. Broken leg, exposed bone, cuts on his face. I put a pressure dressing on his leg, make sure I have controlled his bleeding and the bearers carry him to a bed. Then they rush out.

Meanwhile the PA is going from sailor to sailor with the crash cart, intubating and placing oral and nasal airways and jerking a thumb downwards. The last group is carried into another room. Expectant. As in expected to die and can't waste time on them. Not even for morphine.

The room blurs and my hands are covered in people's blood. I am bandaging and assessing, sixty seconds per casualty and go to the next. I am trained in first aid and any one -- any one! -- of these casualties would take up the full attention of a civilian emergency room. But they keep coming. And coming. And coming.

Some of the sailors I have given first aid are now helping me. The one with the broken leg is tying a tourniquet on another sailor's horribly ruined arm. He is mewling in agony but he is doing it.

The lights still have not yet come back up. This is horror, nightmare in the dark, a house of horrors no Halloween would dare attempt.

Hot blood sprays in our faces as a damaged artery goes. The sailor slumps, the PA jerks his thumb down, and the expectant casualty is carried out of the way and gently dumped to die.

Then a third, much stronger explosion. I hit my head. I blink, wipe the salty fluid out of my eyes, find my flashlight. Turn it on. Reddish from the blood on the lens.

"NOW HEAR THIS. NOW HEAR THIS. THE AMMUNITION ON THE HANGAR DECK IS ON FIRE. ALL HANDS, ALL HANDS, TURN TO, TURN TO. THROW ALL AMMUNITION OVERBOARD IMMEDIATELY. ALL HANDS INCLUDING MEDICAL PERSONNEL TO THE HANGAR BAY!"

The two corpsmen and PA look at each other in horror in the dim lights. They leave the sick bay.

I follow as they go to the nearest DC locker and put on smoke hoods and self rescue masks and put on firefighting gloves.

They leave me there, in the sick bay, surrounded by groaning and crying wounded sailors. They go to the hangar bay.

They are followed by every sailor who can still walk. Burned, broken arms, fragmentation. They tighten their bandages and they follow.

The sailor with the broken leg has bitten his lip from the pain, but still moves endlessly from casualty to casualty, dragging himself as he checks bandages and hisses words of comfort.

I have legs.

I follow the sailors. The medical staff are like Pied Pipers, any sailor they pass follows them, like sleepwalkers in a dream.

"PPE!" the cry goes up. Some men have masks, some have helmets. All too few have gloves. I have none.

As I reach the entrance to the flight deck, I see Dante's Inferno.

Sheets of flame, burning aircraft, pallets. A sudden explosion. A fire hose flopping uselessly thirty feet in the air of the cavernous hangar bay, the sailors manning it killed or disabled. The bottom half of a female sailor cut in half by the emergency fire doors.

A forklift on fire. The sailor driving it is on fire too. It is picking up pallets of ammunition and driving them to the open edge facing the sea. He is screaming as I see him jam the pedal forward and drive the forklift off the edge into the sea. Below us, the pallet cooks off, another explosion, before the remnants of the forklift have time to hit the water.

I see bodies in silver firefighting suits here and there. The trained firefighters of the ship. All dead.

I see bodies of sailors everywhere. Not all dead.

The sailors with me rush the hose. They secure it, dragging it down against water pressure, playing it on the ammunition, trying to cool it.

More lines are rigged. More water flows.

Sirens sound. Water starts flowing again from the sprinklers above, which had been dripping and are now gushing seawater.

The 1MC is still bellowing but none of us can understand what it says.

A sailor wearing portable phones starts running from sailor to sailor. A survivor of Damage Control.

"Attack the flames!" he is saying, over and over again. There are pallets of ammunition in the flame and while it is rated for exposure to heat, eventually it will cook off.

A sailor strips a silver firefighting suit from a dead sailor, puts it on and grabs a manually operated pallet jack. He runs to the nearest hose crew. "Hose me down! Hose me down!" he shouts, then puts on his SCBA - Self Contained Breathing Apparatus.

With the hose playing on him, he runs into the flames, jacks up a pallet and starts dragging it clear. The hose crew knocks him down a time or two with the force of the seawater, but he gets up each time.

Others start following his example.

(Later, he would be awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor.)

I start dragging the wounded-but-not-dead away from the flames. A useless task. Then I realize what I can do to actually help. I start stripping the dead of their silver firefighting suits and SCBA and laying their gear neatly by their bodies for other sailors to put on.

They do.

There are more pallet jacks than hose crews.

A grisly game begins: trying to keep up with the flames by playing the hose first on one pallet jack mover, then another.

A plane mover -- a low slung tractor -- is fitted with a forward bar attachment. It starts pushing ammo pallets overboard.

The fire door between our third of the hangar bay and the other two thirds starts to open.

A roar of flame flicks out of it.

The hose lines attack. Someone has rigged up a foam system and is laying down fire foam, creating a buffer over the spilled loose ammunition and the spurts of jet fuel. Someone finds a valve and the spurts stop.

The fire door inches open, the crews advance, and a decision is made. Somewhere among the sailors wearing portable phones, a decision has been made to bet the ship.

The fire door sirens sound and the fire door suddenly, majestically lurches all the way open at eye blurring speed.

The inferno is back. But we are ready to fight her, to wrestle the very flames of Satan.

More hose lines, portable pumps. The sprinklers overhead start to shut down as water is diverted into the center bay.

I am shoved and pushed onto a hose crew. I am wearing torn khakis covered in blood, there is nothing to show that I am a reporter.

I help control the back of the hose while the front sailor advances.

Every sailor is a firefighter, they told me. Every sailor learned to fight ship fires in basic training, I read. Now I saw.

I see several sailors, known to me to be blind, led by the hand up to the flight deck. One by one, they are led to the hose crews. They don't need eyes to hold a hose. Others can lead, all they need is muscle.

The PA shakes himself, extracts himself from a hose crew, and starts triaging wounded. All too many get turned face down on the deck.

I realize that I can't hear. Somewhere between the explosions and the 1MC, I am deaf.

I don't need ears to be on a hose crew.

"All gave some, some gave all."

###

Congressional Medal of Honor (posthumous)

"... at great risk to himself, used a hand operated pallet jack to move pallets of burning ammunition out of the fire ... inspired others by his calm example ... killed when a pallet he was moving exploded ..."

Freedom Medal

"... treated and helped triage battle casualties in the sick bay ... when 'All Hands' was called, reported to the hangar bay ... at great personal risk, assisted sailors in donning personal protective equipment and assisted a hose crew ... when the sailor leading the crew was killed, took over the hose and advanced fearlessly into the flames ... inspiring sailors by his example ... setting the highest possible standard for a war correspondent with disregard for his own safety and reflecting great credit on him, his organization and the great press traditions of our nation ..."