Abandoned: MIA in Vietnam (9 page)

CHAPTER 12

Byrnes woke to the sampan crew’s yelling and screaming. He could see land on the horizon to the west. Sitting in the shade inside the shelter amidships, he couldn’t see the sun. He assumed it was close to being directly overhead. Seagulls trailed the little boat looking for leftovers from the fishermen, unaware that they had only enough food for themselves. In the three days they spent being pushed westward through the calm seas by the little outboard engine, Byrnes had consumed a lot of sushi and rice. The fresh water had run out the night before and he could feel thirst beginning to gnaw at him. Between the shouts for joy, Byrnes recognized a quiet he hadn’t heard for a while. The little motor was silent.

The old man pulled back the remains of the curtain Byrnes had sacrificed to filter gasoline from water. He beckoned to Byrnes to come to the stern and look at the engine. “Con co,” he said, smiling. On his way, Byrnes picked up the gasoline cans and shook them, one after the other. As he suspected, they were absolutely empty.

Opening the top to the gas tank on the motor, Byrnes looked inside. The shiny interior of the empty tank reflected the overhead sun. Not only was the tank bare, it was dry. He pointed a finger inside the tank and shook his head. The old man nodded. Byrnes assumed the sampan crew had been aware of how low they had been on gas.

Over the next six hours the winds and currents pushed the little boat north and west, tantalizingly close to shore. They saw other sampans in the distance, but their crews did not acknowledge the waves and screams of his desperate boatmates. When the sun set, the wind died. The coastal current continued to push the small craft north. The crew took turns on watch.

Byrnes snuggled down in the bow, wearing his white T-shirt and the pair of cotton trousers lent to him by the crew. Although the waist fit him, the legs of the pants only reached to his mid-calf, since he was six inches taller than all of the other men. After Byrnes had donned the trousers for the first time, the old man had scraped a picture of a long legged bird on the wooden deck. He had pointed to it with his bony finger and then to Byrnes, “Con co,” he said. Touching Byrnes in the chest and then the image. “Con co.” The boat crew’s nickname for Byrnes was
Stork
.

The rocking of the boat and his dry mouth woke Byrnes in the middle of the night. He looked out over the calm sea, surprised he had fallen asleep on watch. With the moon high in the cloudless sky, Byrnes thought he saw a flashing red light in the distance. He went inside the shelter and woke the older man.

Once on deck the old man pointed to the light and nodded. He went back in the cabin and returned with a stick wrapped with rags at one end. Pulling a plastic tube of matches from his pocket, he extracted a single match. Scraping it on a dry, rough piece of the cabin, he fired it up and used it to ignite the rags. Standing on the bow, he waved the burning torch back and forth until it burned out. Dipping it into the ocean, he quenched the smoldering piece of wood and laid it on the deck. Slapping Byrnes on the shoulder, he shrugged his shoulders and returned to his mat inside the cabin. Byrnes returned to his watch. When the sun turned the horizon pink, he allowed himself to fall asleep again.

A powerful, throbbing, diesel engine woke him and the crew of the sampan. A patrol boat coasted alongside. Byrnes headed for the cabin and met the older man and two younger men exiting. They had big grins on their faces. Byrnes stayed inside the shelter while the crew jabbered with the crew of the patrol boat. He didn’t understand the language, but he appreciated the gasoline the patrol boat crew poured into the sampan’s gas cans. A ten-liter rectangular can of fresh water also made its way from the patrol boat to the sampan. The old man poured some of the gasoline into the tank on the engine. It sprang to life and purred like a kitten on the first pull of the starter rope.

As the crew waved good-bye to the patrol boat, Byrnes stuck his head out of the shelter. He took a long look at the machineguns fore and aft on the powerful boat. His gaze rested for the longest time on the ensign flown from its stern: a red flag with a yellow star in the center, the North Vietnamese maritime flag.

Pulling itself within a half mile of shore, the sampan journeyed slowly south. Byrnes saw small fishing villages every ten to twenty miles. It took two more days before the sampan reached its home waters and the fishing village from which the three men had left weeks before.

With consummate skill and care the older man handled the tiller and engine. He brought the boat up a small river and then onto a sandy beach next to several more sampans. On the sand stood nearly forty people waving and shouting. Byrnes saw women with tears in their eyes. Two held infants. Older children clung to the skirts of some elderly women. Everyone smiled and spoke at the same time. He understood only a few words of Vietnamese: nuoc – water, con co was stork, dung lai meant stop, and di di meant go go.

The crew of the sampan leapt to the ground, where the crowd mobbed them. They disappeared into the sea of black heads. Byrnes stood in the boat enjoying the reception but unable to understand most of the words, except Xomh Canh, the name of the hamlet.

Eventually, the crew remembered the American. They returned and pulled him from the boat, introducing him to each individual in the throng as Con co. Each villager bowed slightly to him, which he returned. Many took his hands in theirs briefly; others slapped him on the back. All had huge smiles on their faces, obviously overjoyed by the return of a sampan thought sunk and fishermen thought drowned.

That evening, Byrnes found himself feted by the hamlet’s inhabitants. Unable to understand the language he followed them from tiny house to tiny house. Some homes were brick; others constructed of coral, or wood. Some had tile roofs, most were thatched. There was no running water, except at a hand-pump-powered well in a central courtyard near the village banyan tree. Each home had an outbuilding, a latrine dug into the back yard. Electricity didn’t exist. Candles lit tables with pictures of relatives and relics.

Everyone gave Byrnes something to eat or drink. He recognized the sweet potatoes, cabbage, bananas, and corn, which he gobbled down, still starving after the ordeal at sea. Some of the fish tasted good. The fermented sauce he declined not having developed a taste for it and annoyed by the smell. Egg noodles, dried squid, and seaweed he recognized, but left untouched after finding the cooked pork.

Byrnes knew better than to purposefully drink the smallest amount of alcohol. He had inherited the Asian gene that led to the red alcoholic facial flush and rapid intoxication. As a boot on his first cruise, he had presented to sick call vomiting his guts up after two beers. The navy corpsman called it the Asian alcoholic flush syndrome. He advised Byrnes to give up alcohol. However, it wasn’t so easy deciding which drinks were weak wines and beer among the plain fruit juices and non-alcoholic drinks presented to him by the villagers.

The locals favored drinks with at least a small amount of alcohol for medical reasons. Alcohol killed bacteria in their liquids. There was no water sanitation plant in the province. Under the influence of the Vietnamese beverages, Byrnes soon staggered, woefully intoxicated. His face glowed red. Shortly thereafter he passed out in the home of the old man who owned the sampan.

Blinding sunlight streaming through a rudely opened door and a loud curse woke Byrnes the next morning. Briefly, he smelled his own vomit on the mat below his face. Then two men grabbed him by his arms and dragged him from the mat on which he had slept. Squinting into the bright sunlight, Byrnes saw more men in black pajama-like clothing standing in front of the old man’s house. The old man and his wife argued with another man dressed in a khaki uniform, who carried a leather pouch slug over one shoulder, and wore a pith helmet on his head. The uniformed man gestured to several men in black. They stepped forward and pushed the elderly couple back until they stood with a crowd of villagers.

The man in khaki then strutted back and forth in front of the villagers, speaking in a loud voice, lecturing in the tonal language Byrnes did not understand. As his eyes adjusted to the glare, Byrnes managed to get a better view of the hat the speaker wore. A medallion about the size of a silver dollar –  a gold star in a red background surrounded by a gold wreath –in the middle of a web band that circled the middle of the helmet. The man also had red patches on his collars. Byrnes’s morale sank. The man had to be either a North Vietnamese Army officer or Viet Cong military cadre.

Finished with the lecture to the villagers, the man waved his arm. The crowd dispersed slowly, looking occasionally over their shoulders at Byrnes and the older man and his wife.

The man in the khaki uniform stood in front of Byrnes. Two men in black held the sailor in a tight grip. He barked in four or five languages before Byrnes understood, “Parlez vous francais, Con co?”

“Un peu,” Byrnes said. It was quickly obvious that his two years of French in high school didn’t impress his interrogator. Aware of the Vietnamese hatred of the Japanese, following the occupation by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, Byrnes refused to respond in Japanese, which the man tried next.

Finally the man in khaki waved to one of the men in black, a thin, short man with half a left ear and a large horizontal scar across his left cheek. The uniformed man pointed at Byrnes. The second man spoke, “Do you speak English?”

Byrnes nodded, “Yes,” he said.

“Are you American?”

“Yes.”

Reaching out, the scarred man grasped the chain around Byrnes’s neck. He lifted the jade pendant from under the sailor’s T-shirt. Staring at the Buddhist icon, he said, “Mother of Quan. You are a Buddhist?”

“Yes.”

The scarred man then spoke to the uniformed man in what Byrnes assumed was a dialect of Vietnamese, although it sounded different than that spoken by the villagers. The uniformed man spoke for several minutes to the man with half an ear, who then turned to Byrnes. “Are you a pilot?”

“No.”

His interrogator paused. The officer spoke to him briefly. “A soldier?” he asked.

“No,” Byrnes said.

“A spy?”

“No. A sailor. I fell off a ship,” Byrnes said, pointing to the elderly man and his wife. “The old man and his crew found me in the ocean. They saved my life.”

“They say you saved their lives.”

Byrnes smiled. “We saved each other,” he said.

“You are our prisoner, then,” the man with the scar said. “Do not worry too much. The war will be over shortly. After our victory, we will exchange you for our comrades who the Americans and South Vietnamese traitors have captured.”

“The war will be over soon?” Byrnes asked, stunned by the revelation.

“Since you are our prisoner, I can tell you that it will end on Tet, our New Year. In the year of the Monkey, the whole of South Vietnam will rise up against all the foreigners and throw your army into the sea.” He nodded to the men behind Byrnes who tied his hands behind his back and pushed him down the road toward the edge of town and a small military camp. Geese owned by the villagers honked and scattered from the dirt road as the men marched through the hamlet.

Byrnes found himself in a tent, where he sat on the dirt floor, wrists bound behind him. Shortly thereafter, the men blindfolded him and led him on a long barefoot walk through the forest and into a cave. Inside the cave, he had his blindfold and restraints removed. Two men shoved him into a bamboo cage barely large enough to stand or lie in.

CHAPTER 13

Tied with its starboard side to the carrier pier in Subic Bay, many of
Forrestal’s
most serious wounds were not visible from shore. She still listed slightly to port, a consequence of all the water poured onto the massive fire that raged on her flight deck and below. Nine 1000-pound bombs, all the older variety called Comp B for their chemical explosive ingredients, had exploded on the flight deck. All had come from the ordinance depot on the Philippines.

An electrical short on an F-4 Phantom accidentally fired a Zuni rocket. It flew into a drop tank full of JP-5 jet fuel on future senator and presidential candidate John McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk. The resultant fire consumed a line of A-4s. McCain escaped by climbing out of the cockpit of his burning A-4 and dangling hand over hand along the refueling boom. He dropped to the deck and scampered away before the first bomb exploded. Pilots in other aircraft were not so lucky.

The 1000-pound bombs that fell from burning A-4s dropped onto a burning flight deck and cooked off in the heat of the jet fuel fire. They exploded, blowing holes in the deck, shredding firefighting equipment, and killing wave after wave of sailors trying to extinguish the fires with fire hoses. Newer bombs would not have been set off by the flames. Holes punched into the flight deck by exploding bombs allowed JP-5 jet fuel from the A-4’s tanks and an A-3 tanker aircraft to pour into compartments below the aft end of the flight deck. Burning fuel trapped men below decks, who died of burns or smoke inhalation.

The fires raged for two days, not completely extinguished until minutes before
Forrestal
docked in Subic Bay. From the pier, the acrid smell of burnt fuel, plastic, metal, and cordite was powerful enough to nauseate some observers on shore.
Forrestal’s
crew had become accustomed to the stench.

Byrnes and Wolfe stood at the edge of the pier staring at the terrible burned hulk. Visitors were not welcome onboard the crematorium. Behind the ship’s island – the carrier’s control tower – soot coated the side of the ship. The black discoloration ran from the flight deck to the waterline. Wolfe doubted he wanted to board her, anyway. “They won’t let us on board,” he told Byrnes, “but I’ve got to find Mike Crespi to make sure he’s okay.”

Oriskany
had followed
Forrestal
to Subic Bay from Vietnam, after trailing her to the hospital ship
Repose
. Doctors, corpsmen, and nurses on
Repose
took over the medical care of the injured. Both ships needed replenishment. The navy had decided to inspect
Forrestal
in Subic to see if she indeed could handle flight operations after a month’s refit in Japan, as her captain suggested. There still existed the possibility that the navy might transfer some of
Oriskany’s
crew to
Forrestal
to replace ship’s company killed or injured. Many of
Forrestal’s
aircraft had been incinerated or had been pushed overboard. Crews off-loaded by crane undamaged aircraft that had survived the fire. The navy planned to disperse these airplanes to squadrons on the remaining carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin on Yankee Station or Dixie Station in the South China Sea, if
Forrestal
went to Japan or to the States.

Glumly, Wolfe led Byrnes to the Martins’s house on the naval base. “At least you can meet the Martins,” Wolfe said. “Robert’s a great guy. And you’ll like his parents. His dad was in Europe with Patton in World War II. His mom is French, a war bride. Maybe they’ve heard from Mike.”

Robert Martin answered the door, the usual wide grin on his face. “Addy! Come in. You’ll never guess who’s here.”

Wolfe had already seen through the screen door. His tanned, heavy-set friend sat on the couch in the Martins’s living room, telephone pressed to his ear. Unaware of Wolfe’s presence, he talked quietly with his wife in Maryland. Another sailor sat next to Mike. Wolfe said, “Robert, this is Jimmy Byrnes, my work crew’s boss on
Oriskany
.”

The sailor sitting on the couch next to Mike stood and offered his hand to Wolfe and Byrnes. “I’m Arthur Anderson. Most folks call me Andy,” he said. “I work with Mike on the hangar deck.” Anderson stood more than six feet tall, his angular face had severe acne. Both men from the
Forrestal
were dressed in dungarees. Wolfe and Byrnes wore whites, a requirement for liberty. “I’m waiting to use the phone to call my folks in New York. Do you guys need to use the phone?”

Mr. and Mrs. Martin had allowed Mike and other sailors off
Forrestal
to use their telephone for free, absorbing the long distance charges. It was their way of contributing to the well-being of the crew. “Nah,” Byrnes said. “We’re from the
Mighty O
.”

Mike Crespi hung up the phone. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and silently wiped tears from his eyes. Wolfe noted the soot on the handkerchief. Anderson traded seats with Crespi who handed him the telephone. Anderson dialed the operator and soon conversed with his family.

Recognizing Wolfe for the first time, Crespi stood. His uniform did not fit well, chambray shirt bulging at the buttons, dungaree pants too long and rolled up at the ankles. He reached for Wolfe’s hand, pulled him to his chest, and squeezed Wolfe in a bear hug. “Buddy,” was all he said.

“God, I’m glad you’re all right, Mike,” Wolfe told his friend.

“Let’s step into the front yard,” Mike said. “I’m dying for a smoke, and I smell like burnt kerosene. Sorry we stunk up the house, Robert. Wish we had more than borrowed clothes to wear, too. Please thank your parents for letting me use the phone. There’s a six-hour wait at the enlisted men’s club to use a phone. The line wraps around the building twice. I’ll be happy to pay for the –”

“Dad said, ‘No’,” Robert said. “And don’t worry about the smell. It’ll be gone soon.” He followed Wolfe, Byrnes, and Crespi into the yard. The four young men sat in lawn chairs at a round table in the shade of an arboretum in the Martins’s side yard. A Filipino yardman knelt in the garden, pulling weeds and thinning flowers.

“I thought you gave up smoking,” Wolfe said, as Crespi tried to light a cigarette. The large sailor’s hands shook so much that Byrnes took the lighter and lit the cigarette as it dangled, wavering, from Crespi’s lips.

“I need one to calm down,” Crespi said. “Besides, we’ve all been breathing smoke for two days. What harm is another fifteen minutes worth of carcinogens?”

“Did you fight the fire?” Wolfe asked.

Crespi shook his head. He sat in silence for nearly five minutes, inhaling large drags from the cigarette and letting the smoke slowly exit his mouth and nose. Anderson left the house, found a bench to sit on, and pulled it closer to the table. “Thanks,” he said to Martin. The civilian nodded, eyes on Crespi.

“I almost died,” Crespi said. “Almost half of my division is dead. Everyone who was in the compartment, except me.”

“Flight deck crew?” Byrnes asked.

Crespi shook his head. “No. Hangar deck crew.”

“I thought flight operations were going on,” Wolfe said. “If we’re flying, our whole hangar deck division is working.”

“
Forrestal
is a supercarrier, Addy,” Byrnes explained. “They have more men, probably work in shifts. It’s enormous, much roomier. They can use the tractors and spotting dollies all the time, need fewer men to push aircraft.”

Mike nodded exhaling more smoke. “We work 12 on/12 off, 0700 hours to 1900 hours. Or we did,” he said. He looked into his lap and shook his head. “They’re all dead,” he said.

“Who?” Wolfe asked.

“V-3 on
Forrestal
sleeps in a compartment directly under the arresting gear. The guy on the top bunk can put his hand on the overhead above his bunk. That’s a very thick piece of steel plate. On the other side of that piece of metal is the flight deck. Aircraft land there, catching the arresting cables, maybe six inches away. Six inches between you and death.” Crespi ground his cigarette out on the sole of his shoe, and then tore the butt to shreds, scattering the remains in the yard under his chair. “It scared the hell out of me to sleep in that compartment with all the banging and thumping going on above me. Even though I was on the bottom of three bunks, it was noisy all the time. Everyone said I’d eventually get used to it. New guys get the bottom racks. And the 1900 hours to 0700 hours shift.”

“So why are they dead?” Wolfe asked, not understanding how Crespi survived and no one else did.

“They had all heard those noises before. They weren’t scared. I couldn’t sleep. I heard something that sounded like an explosion, something I had never heard before in my month on the ship. I sat up, pulled on my pants, and ran to the hangar deck. The only two places I had learned to get to by then were the hangar deck and chow,” he laughed, a hollow sound followed by a grimace and a shrug.

Anderson added to the tale for Crespi. “That first explosion was a 1000-pound bomb. The second went off right above our compartment making a large hole into it. A third bomb rolled into that hole, along with about a thousand gallons of burning JP-5. When it exploded, everyone still in the compartment died. That was everyone except Mike. The burning fuel ran through the compartments and corridors, down the ladders all the way to the engineering spaces below the hangar deck. The only reason I’m not dead is that I was working on the hangar deck along with the rest of the day crew.”

Crespi finished his story, “We, me and the daytime hangar crew, fought some small fires on the hangar deck. Mainly burning JP-5. There were no explosions there. And no aircraft on fire. We had to move aircraft around to make room for a temporary sick bay and a morgue.” He swallowed hard, looked at Wolfe. “The dead are stacked like firewood on the hangar deck, Addy. It’s gruesome.”

After an hour with Crespi and Anderson, Wolfe and Byrnes said good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Martin, and Robert. They turned down the invitation for a meal, not wanting to add to the Martins’s burdens. In silence they walked toward
Oriskany
, past
Forrestal
.

“What are you thinking, Addy?” Byrnes asked Wolfe.

“Was
Oriskany’s
fire last year like that?”

“Yes and no,” Byrnes said. “It was mainly a hangar deck fire. The forward bay filled rapidly with smoke. I took off running toward Bay 2, unable to see anything in the smoke. The bay fire doors slammed closed right behind me, caught the heel of my shoe and tore it off. If I had been a little slower, I would have been flat. Those doors are ten inches thick, weigh several tons.” He laughed, an empty sound reminiscent of Crespi’s laugh. “After we got the respirators on, hoses filled, and fought our way back into the bay, aircraft were on fire, along with all the flares. A lot of guys died.”

“We didn’t help much this time, did we?” Wolfe said.

“Sounds like all the hoses on their flight deck got shredded. They needed our equipment. We helped some. Maybe saved a life or two.”

“The blood and guts and burns didn’t bother me, although the screaming did. Maybe I should be a corpsman,” Wolfe said, remembering the howls of the injured.

“Hell, Addy, aim higher than that. Be a doctor,” Byrnes said, slapping him on the back.

“Okay,” Wolfe said. “When I get out of the navy, I’ll use the GI Bill to go to college. Then to medical school. Maybe then I’ll be of some use in a disaster. Tell you one thing, though. If they ever give me a chance to work on a supercarrier, with day and night crews and no more pushing aircraft by hand, I’m taking it.”

Byrnes grinned. “You and me both,” he said.

The navy investigators decided
Forrestal
could not continue air operations. Within days she left Subic for the Newport News shipyard, another trip around the southern tip of South America.
Forrestal
would not fit through the Panama Canal. That left moot Wolfe’s offer to join
Forrestal
as a flight deck crewman. The hangar deck chief did not have to report him AWOL.
Oriskany
returned to Yankee Station shortly thereafter.