by Bryan Hurt
Roy when he’d seen the plumb line hadn’t said anything but then had mentioned later that this back and forth was just like when you bent a wire back and forth and back and forth: sooner or later the wire was going to snap. It was a mess, all right, was all Gordon managed to say in response. Together they worked out the order of evacuation if it came down to just the lifeboats, though they both understood that in a storm trying to lower those boats would be suicide. If they were going to get off the tower they had to do it before any storm was even over the horizon. Gordon put himself in the last boat and Roy in the first, and Roy rewrote the list and put himself in the last boat as well. He could always tell when Gordon was making the best of a bad situation because whatever he was doing, he started humming.
Louie told Jeannette that now in any kind of wind or seas no one could sleep for the clanging and grinding coming from the legs. She asked hadn’t they been checked and he told her that civilian contractors had come out any number of times and always said when they left that the new fix was the one that was going to work. Now whenever he talked to her she was crying. He told her he’d written a letter to the president-elect asking him to override the brass at Otis and get them off the tower. She asked what the president-elect was supposed to do and he reminded her that Kennedy was a Massachusetts guy like him. He said he’d written that he had to get off because his presence here was affecting his wife so much. That made her cry even harder. “Why did you even report when they told you to report?” she wanted to know, but he had to say good-bye because his time was up and all twenty-eight guys were calling home.
The weekend weather forecast for January 14 and 15 was not so good: sixty-knot winds and possibly more. The Air Force ordered Captain Mangual’s AKL-17 to head for the tower, take on equipment, and stand by for a possible full evacuation. Saturday the fourteenth the sky stayed dark but the winds were manageable and the crane operators on the tower off-loaded twenty-two tons of radar equipment. And Louie traded cigarettes and some of Frankie’s homemade hooch for a spot in the front of the line for the phone and called Jeannette back with the happy news that they were taking the equipment off and there’d be nothing left for him to guard and so he figured everyone would be off the tower by the next day. Late that afternoon Roy found Gordon at the edge of the platform staring off to the south at a black wall of clouds that lifted from the horizon to the top of the sky. Wilbur and Louie had pulled maintenance duty and were repainting the two lifeboats on the deck and stopped what they were doing to look as well.
“Maybe it’s just a local depression,” Roy told him. They could already hear the wakes of the tower’s legs in the increasing currents.
Captain Mangual on the AKL-17’s bridge read his weather forecast from the merchant marine, and it was bad—extreme weather conditions within twelve hours—and radioed his friend Gordon it was time to get everyone off. And Gordon reported Captain Mangual’s recommendation to his superiors at Otis, who reported back that the Air Force’s forecast was not nearly so dire and that the storm was going to swing wide of them and that Captain Mangual had already been ordered back to port.
But Captain Mangual refused to leave. Gordon stayed up all night checking in with him on the radio and at 0400 went out onto the platform and looked out over the sea. It was blowing hard enough that he slopped some of the coffee he’d brought with him onto his wrist. The wind was already seventy knots and building fast. The seas were already thirty feet. The lights of the AKL-17 turtled along in the distance off in the blackness and the rain, disappearing behind the wave crests. Sometimes he couldn’t even see the green light atop its radar mast. Farther out, the red lights of the Russian trawlers appeared here and there in the troughs. Because he couldn’t think of anything else to do he spent an hour rigging safety lines over the upper platform so there’d be something to clip onto if they had to do some emergency troubleshooting or get to the boats.
The next morning the northeaster hit. He climbed up to the helipad deck and opened the hatch just enough to confirm that waves bigger than any he’d ever seen were concussing spray even onto the radomes. Everything was already sheathed in ice. He had to brace himself against the railing because the staircase was swaying.
In the mess near the phone the guys in line gave up their place to him and Ellie picked up on the first ring and asked if they were going to be evacuated. She said the weather was already awful where she was. He told her he kept requesting evacuation and that his requests had been denied. She told him she’d call instead and he told her to go ahead. She shouted that his tour was almost over and he told her he knew that and that she was going to wake Larry up, and that he’d never wanted to be out here in the first place. “Are you saying it’s my fault?” she asked, and he said that as soon as the weather let up he’d be off this thing for good, and that the poor sap assigned to take over was already at Otis.
At seven thirty the line at the phone had progressed far enough for Wilbur to call Edna. He had to shout over the awful clanging of metal on metal. “That’s outside,” he told her, as if to reassure her. She heard men screaming. “That’s inside,” he told her.
At ten thirty a huge bang knocked everyone standing off his feet. “I think I shit my pants,” Wilbur told Louie once he’d gotten back up off the floor. Gordon and Roy climbed into their survival suits and humped a hundred feet of nylon rope back up the staircase to the main deck and Gordon tied a square knot around his waist and tied the other end with a clove hitch to the railing inside the hatch. They popped it open just as a wave exploded over the deck and stripped the crane box of its welding equipment. They clipped into the safety lines and crawled forward on their hands and knees. In the wind and spray it took ten minutes to get to the platform’s edge and the safety netting. Their ropes whipped and spiraled behind them like they were hitched to furious animals. Roy belayed him and Gordon hung upside down over the safety netting and the gale blew him out to sea, but the knots held and after a minute or two Roy was able to haul him back in. They were both crying they were so scared. Once he got ahold of himself, Gordon lay out over the netting again to try to see what had happened below and the wind battered and spun and whirligigged him. Sleet whipped his face and while he tried to see down the waves erupted to meet him. The bigger ones propelled ice water into his suit and he could hear Roy shrieking along with him. Finally he signaled that they could go back and on the staircase they closed the hatch behind them and he gave Roy the bad news. Some of the X bracing had broken loose and was battering itself against the legs. The joints were failing and the braces buckling. Once the braces buckled the entire thing was standing on three spindly legs three hundred feet long.
Back in the mess the guys helped them out of their wet clothing and piled them with blankets and handed them hot coffees but they were both shaking so much they knocked the mugs off the tables where they were sitting. Roy lit a cigarette and it kept bobbing in his mouth. “What have you guys been up to?” Wilbur tried to joke. “Inspecting the X braces,” Roy finally managed to say. “Bad day for it,” Wilbur told them.
Once he’d warmed up, Roy kept radioing Otis for the weather updates. Whenever he got off, Gordon asked him if it was going to stay this bad and Roy said that it was going to get worse. Guys climbed into their berths and put blankets over their heads. They put their hands over their ears. The low-frequency beacon antenna blew away. The last wind-speed reading was 110 knots before the anemometer blew away. The ceiling on the upper floors bowed and the light fixtures popped loose and swung free. The outer walls flexed from the air pressure. The dome covering the windward radar collapsed and tore itself to pieces and blew away. Gordon recorded it in the log.
Captain Mangual radioed that the AKL-17 was now registering wind speeds of 130 knots and the seas were even uglier. He said the good news was that the wind was so hard it was blowing the tops off the waves.
Afterward Ellie and Betty and Edna and Jeannette, in the face of reporters’ questions on the subject
, could not themselves recall a moment when alone at their kitchen tables or back windows, in the best tradition of military wives, they refused to give up hope. But each of them remembered thinking some version of What about me?
At 1:00 p.m. when Ellie got Gordon’s next call he told her the tower was gyrating and she registered it as a word he’d never used before. She said she’d called and called the numbers at Otis but she couldn’t get through to anybody. He said he wasn’t surprised and that everyone’s families were probably calling. She asked if the tower would float if it went over and he told her that it would go down fast and that no one could be saved. He told her that he was worried about Captain Mangual, whose ship was overloaded and getting swamped. He’d ordered him back to port but the guy had refused the order. He said the last time he’d looked he’d seen the ship’s entire bow come out of the water with one wave. “How did everyone let things get to this point?” Ellie shouted at him, and he answered that he could barely understand her and that she had to try to calm down for Larry’s sake. She asked if the people on the ship could help him. He said he doubted they could even help themselves.
When Louie called Jeannette there was no answer so he dialed again and again and then had to go all the way to the back of the line, and when he finally did get through he shouted at her about where she’d been, and she said “I’m sorry,” and he told her that he’d had to tie himself into his bunk, and that he’d listened to his buddies crying themselves to sleep, and that he wanted her to find someone good to take care of her. And she said, “I don’t want to find someone else,” and he said that he had to get off because other guys needed the phone. She said, “You can’t just say that and hang up,” but another guy had the phone by then and yelled for her to get off the line.
Betty’s phone rang and she snatched it up and Roy told her that their relief ship was in and out of radio contact but was reporting that it was being lifted off the crests and thrown sideways into the troughs. The ship was just going to keep motoring to leeward and try to stay within range. He said that he and Captain Phelan had tried to go back out on the safety lines but between the whiteouts from the spray and the force of the water and wind they couldn’t make it to the netting to see what was going on below. The deck’s steel plates were vibrating. The lower storage areas were awash. But they were all hanging in there. “My one-man morale officer,” Betty told him, and they’d both been surprised by her rage. But she hadn’t been able to make herself apologize. Otis had agreed to try for an evacuation at the earliest lull, which the forecasters were predicting for 0300, he told her. Copters were already on high alert and ready to go. The aircraft carrier Wasp and its entire battle group had been diverted to their location. They just had to hang on. “For twelve more hours,” Betty shouted. He told her that because the weather was a little better over New York, the coast guard had already dispatched the cutter Agassiz, so it was already on its way.
A half hour later Ellie’s phone rang again and when she answered it Gordon told her that the tower was breaking up. She wailed and he told her that he’d never known he had so many religious men in his crew and that even the welders were praying. He said he kept thinking that maybe if this shitbox could last another hour the storm might blow itself out. He told her that to give everyone something to do he’d ordered them into their survival suits and all hands on deck to keep the helipad clear. He told her he had to get back up there because guys were skidding around into the nettings. He told her that she’d been the best thing that had ever happened to him. He told her to wish them all luck. She was still crying and he was helping Wilbur keep his feet an hour later when eighteen miles southeast of the tower the Wasp’s captain reported having turned his bow just in time to negotiate a single and monstrously large rogue wave. The crest was sixty feet higher than the ship’s bridge, so he estimated the wave at 120 feet high. The helicopters strapped to the deck had been smashed into one another but the ship had careened safely down the back end of the wave, which when he’d last seen it had been heading off in the direction of the tower.
Jeannette was trying to call Louie back when Captain Mangual’s helmsman was knocked unconscious and he had to take over. The seas were like one cliff after another tipping at him from all directions and between crises all he could do was observe the blip of the tower on his radar screen. At seven thirty on Ellie’s clock as she sat by the phone unable to respond to her son, the blip vanished. Captain Mangual abandoned the helm and knocked aside his radar operator and watched the wand as its line of light swept through two full revolutions before he grabbed the radio and shouted, “Tower 4! Tower 4!” until his executive officer grabbed his shoulders and brought him back to the situation at hand.
Betty Bakke was trying to get rid of a worried neighbor when her husband Roy was ordered to stay with the radio in case of an update about either the weather or an evacuation and so left the deck. He’d just cinched the top of his survival suit tighter for warmth when everything lurched as though the A-B side of the tower had pitched down a gigantic stairstep and everything loose or not lashed down in the room was swept into the wall. There was a high-pitched rending of metal like train or subway brakes and he impacted the door near the ceiling. And then there was another crash and he felt the shock of being underwater and the suction of the sinking platform even inside the room. The lights flashed out and in the darkness and bitter cold he rose up on waves to the ceiling, and his head surfaced into a pocket of air.
At 2:00 a.m. when Ellie’s phone rang she ripped it from its cradle on its second ring. She was still in the foyer and Larry was curled at her feet wrapped in the quilt from his bed. The call didn’t wake him but his mother’s screaming did. When he couldn’t calm her down he fled to his room and under his bed, but then scrambled out again and found their family doctor’s number in the address book, and it wasn’t until the doctor arrived and Ellie was sedated that all of the screaming stopped.
Jeannette was pulled out of bed by a call from her father, who told her that a New York newspaper had called him at two thirty in the morning to ask if he was aware that the Texas Tower with his son-in-law aboard had sunk. Her father sounded put out, and when she started shrieking he was so taken aback he said he’d call her again when she was more ready to talk.
Edna dreamt of a pounding on her door and woke to realize it was happening and with her housecoat on turned on her porch light to find a man who identified himself as a reporter for Life magazine. He wanted her reaction to the tragedy. She made him repeat what he was talking about before she told him to get off her property as a way of not collapsing right there in front of him.
THEY WERE ALL still awake in the wee hours when the senior sonar operator for the destroyer McCaffery, part of the Wasp’s battle group, reported rhythmic tapping noises emanating from the wreckage on the bottom, as well as what the operator said sounded to him like a human voice, and the ship’s captain reported that despite the conditions and the water’s depth it was attempting to send down divers and requesting all possible emergency salvage assistance. Some divers had already reached the site on the bottom but had failed to make contact in the limited time they had to search. More help was on its way from multiple shore bases, but by 0330 the tapping and the other noises had stopped.
Four days after the collapse Betty was notified that divers had found Roy’s body floating on the ceiling of Captain Phelan’s office. He’d been still holding the radio mike. A day after that they found the body of a technician a few miles south. A copter had spotted the yellow of his survival suit. No one else had been recovered. Six months later, on a humid night in June, Edna came in from her screened porch and took a call from a man who identified himself as a fisherman out of Montauk. The man asked if she was the Edna Kovarick whose husband had been on the Texas Tower, and she was about to hang up when he said he had something for her. He had her husband’s billfold. It had been dredged up inside a giant sea scallop’s shell three miles from where the tower went down
. He was looking at her photograph as he talked to her.
The report by the Senate Committee on Armed Services on the Inquiry into the Collapse of Texas Tower No. 4 ran to 288 pages and ended with the acknowledgment that the tower had represented a spectacular achievement but that due to various factors it had never really approached its intended design strength, and stipulated that the committee was not so much attempting to assess blame as to follow up on the dollars that Congress had drawn from taxpayers to pay for programs such as this and others deemed vital to national defense. The committee sought to protect all individuals involved, whether contractors or service personnel, where protection was justified, and in its uncovering of the facts had, it felt, afforded a proper and necessary background against which any individual who might have charges preferred against him could be tried properly. But the report in its conclusion wanted to stress that those twenty-eight men in and out of the service who had sacrificed their lives deserved the same recognition as those who had died in combat, since it had certainly been a battle station to which they’d been assigned. And the committee wanted to make clear to one and all that those men had been patriots in every sense of the word.
Ellie read the committee’s report and then took it out into the backyard with Larry and set it on fire. Jeannette read it once and stored it after that in a trunk with the rest of her husband’s papers. And Edna found that every time she read it she lost her Wilbur again, and so after the fifth or sixth time she stopped.
