In late March the Navy decommissioned the USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67), leaving the Kitty Hawk (CV-63) as the only oil-fueled aircraft carrier on the active list. That the JFK, known as “Big John” to her crew, was not nuclear powered was a legacy from the reign of cost-conscious Robert McNamara as secretary of Defense in the 1960s. That, of course, was an era when oil cost far less than it does these days, but certainly the Navy and the nation got their money’s worth out of the ship that was commissioned in September 1968 and remained in active service for 38½ years.
The news of the ship’s departure evoked a host of memories for me, because I had visited her in 1976, when she was much younger. The only arrested landing in my life came when I went aboard the John F. Kennedy via a carrier on-board delivery (COD) plane. That left me 999 short of Commander Dwight Timm, who was then commander of Carrier Air Wing One. While I was there, the ship honored Timm’s 1,000 traps with a ceremony on the hangar deck. Included among his presents was a gag gift—a crying towel that was supposedly wet with the tears of junior officers whom Timm had knocked out of hops so he could reach his milestone.
Another senior officer I met during the visit with the ship’s skipper, Captain John Mitchell. I remember him as a tall, lean man in khakis, genial and welcoming. The shipboard bio provided a synopsis of the captain’s career, but it was only years later that I learned of his exploits as a young pilot. The late Vice Admiral William Lawrence told of Mitchell in his memoir Tennessee Patriot (Naval Institute Press, 2006). In the 1950s Lawrence and Mitchell flew F2H Banshees in Fighter Squadron 193 on board the Oriskany (CVA-34). The two, along with future astronaut Alan Shepard, were part of a quartet that did aerial acrobatics, à la the Blue Angels; this group adopted the nickname “Mangy Angels.”
One night Mitchell almost became a real angel. As he made his final approach to come aboard, his Banshee smacked into the stern of the carrier, below the flight deck level, and broke apart. The bottom half the plane fell into the water, and the top hurtled forward, spewing fuel onto the hangar deck. As Lawrence remembered, the rescue crew dashed to the plane and found the cockpit empty. Mitchell’s squadron mates learned of the crash and presumed that he had perished. Then the phone rang in the ready room, and the duty officer recognized Mitchell’s voice. Incredulous, he asked, “Where are you calling from, John?” It wasn’t heaven after all. The answer, it turned out, was sickbay, where Mitchell had gone for an exam once he survived the crash and left his plane without being noticed. Thus it was that he lived to command the John F. Kennedy some 20 years later.
My time on board was a cram-course lesson on the operations of a floating air base. From Pri-Fly (primary flight control station) I saw arrested landings and catapult shots—fortunately, accident free. In ready rooms I met members of various squadrons—F-14s, A-6s, A-7s, S-3s, SH-3 helos, and E-2Cs—all of them touting theirs as the best on board. One evening I was in the galley as the cooks were serving dinner for the Sailors who had come off day-shift duty and breakfast for those who would be on the night shift. A huge vat contained the contents of perhaps 100 dozen eggs with the yolks swimming atop the glop. Cooks ladled them onto a griddle to make scrambled eggs for the men. Some enterprising crew members apparently hit both lines in succession to satiate their hunger.
Since the JFK was indeed an oil-burning carrier, I was able to visit the engineering spaces, which would have been off-limits in a nuclear-powered ship. The firerooms and engine rooms were remarkably clean. In one space was a periscope that ran all the way to the ship’s island structure so the engineers could see the color of the smoke from the boilers. The tour also included some spaces that were a reminder of a horrible experience the John F. Kennedy had gone through the previous November when the cruiser Belknap (CG-26) collided with her in the Mediterranean. Ruptured fuel lines had led to fires in both ships. Six months later, the smell of fire still lingered in some of the carrier’s compartments. A crewman told me that rubber tires and Styrofoam had made for quite a blaze.
Topside, I was fitted with a helmet and ear protectors and guided to a spot in the middle of the forward part of the flight deck so I could watch planes being shot off. I saw flight-deck crew members scurrying about in their color-coded shirts to perform their various functions. It was hard, dangerous work. The young men charged ahead nonetheless, emboldened by the same spirit as the aviators—that if something bad were going to happen, it would happen to someone else.
Something else struck me in going through that vast steel city. Uniformity is the norm in the Navy—in clothing, procedures, safety regulations, terminology, and many other aspects of shipboard life. But people also have an understandable desire to express their individuality. In one of the engineering spaces on board the JFK an artistic crew member—or perhaps more than one—had painted a large mural that depicted Jesus Christ. More than 30 years later, as courts have decreed increased separation of church and state, and as bulkheads have periodically required repainting, I wonder how long that mural lasted.