Abandoned: MIA in Vietnam

by Bill Yancey

  Mournful eyes locked on Wolfe’s, pleading. Lillian resisted the pull of her grandmother. “But, Doc,” the child said.

  Wolfe laughed and patted the girl on her head. He said, “It’s okay. I’m one of the reading tutors at Ketterlinus Elementary.” Unwrapping Lillian’s arms from his leg, he knelt and placed his right arm all the way around the child. She smelled of a fresh bath and shampoo. “Are you practicing your reading this summer? You want to be ready for first grade in the fall, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes,” Lillian replied. “Grandma and I read the funnies in the paper every day after Mom drops me off at her house. And she takes me to the library every week.”

  “Oh,” the older woman said, hand to her mouth, “You’re that Doc. She talks about you all the time.” A crooked smile spread across her face and her chest puffed out with pride. “Lillian is reading third grade books from the library now, aren’t you Lillian? Why do the kids call you Doc?”

  “Well, I’m a retired physician,” Wolfe explained. “I didn’t want them to have to call me Dr. Wolfe. And the teachers didn’t want them to call me Addison. It was a compromise, I guess.” He stood. “High five,” he said to the child.

  She wound up as if she threw pitches for the Atlanta Braves and slapped Wolfe’s hand with a loud smack. Then she giggled when he said, “Ow! You’ve been practicing that, too.”

  Her grandmother took her by the hand and dragged her down the aisle. “Say goodbye, dear. Nice to meet you, Doc.” The child waved at Wolfe until she disappeared around the end of the aisle.

  “Nice to meet you, too, ma’am,” Wolfe said.

  “Cute little girl,” another customer said. “What’s her last name?”

  “I wish I could remember,” Wolfe said, turning to his shopping cart. He pulled out his cell phone and scanned a list of the groceries he needed to buy. At the same time the telephone rang. Wolfe puzzled over how to answer the phone without erasing the list, and then finally remembered. “Wolfe,” he said.

  “Dr. Wolfe, this is Amit Gadhavi,” the resident said. “How are you today?”

  Wolfe smiled. “Except for being reminded about how bad my memory is, Dr. Gadhavi, it’s been a pretty good day. How about you?”

  “Oh, fine,” the resident said. “You got back to Flagler Hospital without incident then?”

  “Well, no. I went directly home from the medical conference. Took an Uber,” Wolfe said. “Speaking of the conference, you guys sure rely on technology a lot. Do you ever talk to patients or touch them? One of my neighbors had groin pain. I told him it was probably a hernia. He saw four physicians and had normal x-rays, CT scan, blood work, and urine tests before anyone made him turn his head and cough. He did have a hernia when checked, but modern medicine turned the diagnosis into a $3000 odyssey. Surgery for the hernia is next week.”

  “You must have noticed that the older attendings said the same thing in the meeting summary,” Gadhavi said.

  Wolfe nodded to himself while holding the cell phone to his ear. “You’re right. Sorry. I got off on a tangent. What’s up?”

  “Did you see the obituary in the St. Augustine Record this morning?” Gadhavi asked.

  “I did. Was the retired chief petty officer in the obituaries the man who died the other day?”

  “Yes. His family, wife and daughter actually, are coming in this afternoon to pick up his personal belongings. They have been released by the sheriff. Shall I ask them to stay and talk with you?”

  Wolfe nodded, and then answered. “That would be terrific. I have to take some frozen food home from Publix, but I can be there in an hour an a half. Would that fit their schedule?”

  “Yes. That works well. They said they would be here in about two hours,” Gadhavi said. “I’ll have his chart out for them to see, also. You may want to see that, if they’ll give you permission.”

  “That’s fine,” Wolfe said. “I’ll be there right after I put this stuff in the freezer.” And find the newspaper to remind myself of the man’s name, he thought.

  “See you then,” Gadhavi said.

  “Good-bye,” Wolfe said. His phone clicked. He went back to looking at his grocery list.

  ***

  Parking on a Sunday at Flagler Hospital proved easier than on the previous Friday. Gadhavi led him to the MICU consultation room, a combination bereavement, informed consent, good news, bad news room. Comfortable seating and subdued lighting, along with the pastel colors and insulated quiet in the room, made family members more comfortable when discussing stressful situations.

  Gadhavi introduced Wolfe to the dead man’s wife, an elderly, short, nervous, thin woman, who obviously needed a cigarette, or a beer. Her daughter, about fifty-years-old, gray and slightly overweight, grasped her mother’s hand as the two sat on a couch behind a walnut coffee table. A six-inch thick, paper, medical chart held their attention. It sat closed on the table in front of the women. Beside each woman was a clear plastic bag with a built in handle. Both bags held clothing and personal items, evidently the dead man’s.

  “Mrs. Clemons, Mrs. Wright,” the resident physician said, nodding first to the older woman and then her daughter. “This is Dr. Wolfe, the man I talked to you about. If you would like me to stay, I will be happy to. Otherwise, I’ll be in the MICU. The nurse will find me if you need me.”

  The older woman waved Gadhavi out of the room. “We’ll be fine, Doctor,” she said. “I doubt Dr. Wolfe bites and I’m sure you have other things you would prefer to do.” Gadhavi backed through the door, closing it tightly behind him.

  “Please sit, Dr. Wolfe,” the daughter said. She pointed to a chair across the table from them.

  “Thank you for agreeing to chat with me,” Wolfe said as he sat down. “I am sorry for your loss. You have my condolences.”

  “Thank you,” the women murmured together.

  The older one continued, “Dr. Gadhavi says you may have been in the navy with my Richard?”

  “There’s a possibility that’s true,” Wolfe admitted. “I don’t know that I knew your husband, but I did know a man named Jimmy Byrnes.”

  “Who was he?” the daughter asked. “And what does he have to do with my father?” She pulled a tissue from her large purse and dabbed her eyes.

  “Well,” Wolfe said, “If he is the Jimmy Byrnes I remember, then he served on the USS Oriskany with me and maybe your father in 1967. He was a good friend. We worked on the hangar deck together. He made ABH-3, third-class petty officer weeks before I transferred to a different ship.” Turning his head toward the older woman, he added, “I guess the first question is this: Was your husband on Oriskany in 1967, Mrs. Clemons?”

  Clemons nodded, silent tears fell in her lap. She made no effort to staunch the flow, or to catch them with a tissue. “We lived in Oakland, California. Missy,” she pointed to her daughter, “was barely a year old. We were having financial difficulties. When he left for the cruise, I thought I’d never see him again. We were talking about a divorce. I went home to Chicago to live with my parents. After the overhaul and Oriskany came back from another WestPac cruise, Richard was promoted to second-class petty officer. We could then afford an apartment. When Missy was four, we moved back to Oakland to be with him. And he went on another cruise, on a different ship.”

  “I’m sure that being a navy wife and raising a family is complicated, when your husband spends so much time at sea,” Wolfe said. “It was much easier for me, being a bachelor.” Clemons nodded. Her daughter stroked her hand.

  “He wasn’t a bad man,” Clemons said. “There were a lot of temptations on the cruises. Booze, women, even some drugs. Eventually, he became an alcoholic, got cirrhosis. The corpsmen treated him for multiple venereal diseases, too. We only stayed together for Missy’s sake. I left for a while, but came back when he got so sick.”

  “Mom’s been nursing him for twelve years,” Wright said.

  “That’s a long time,” Wolfe said. “Don’t know that my wife would do that for me.”


  “She would if she loved you,” Clemons said, “even if you are a son of a bitch. Sorry, Doctor. I miss him, but I’m happy he is no longer in pain. And, I guess, I will always be angry with him.”

  “Of course,” Wolfe said, nodding.

  “Can you find out who this Byrnes is and what he has to do with my father?” Wright asked.

  “Now that I am pretty certain he was the man I knew onboard Oriskany, I would very much like to find out what he has to do with your father,” Wolfe said. “Would you give me permission to read his medical chart and contact his friends from the Navy? And do you have a list of his friends from his time on active duty?”

  Wright pulled a palm-sized black notebook from her purse. “This is Daddy’s little black book,” she said. “I was going to burn it to save Mom the heartache of going though it. If you would do us the favor of contacting everyone in it who is still alive and informing them of my father’s death, I will give you this address book and sign a release so you may have a copy of his medical record.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “Wolfe!” a yellow-shirted man Wolfe didn’t recognize barked at him. Wolfe, wearing a blue jersey, had been sitting on the seat of the tractor, looking out the hangar bay opening to the elevator, watching the sea roll by. The elevator spent most of its time at the flight deck level, coming down to the hangar deck level only to drop off or pick up aircraft. He had been on Oriskany for a little over three weeks and had learned the names of most of his comrades. The man continued, “You and Higgins go with Byrnes. On the double.”

  Byrnes, Wolfe knew. He also wore a yellow jersey and was one of the aircraft directors in the crew in which Wolfe struggled to learn terminology and his new menial labor job. The blue-jerseyed sailors physically pushed aircraft around the hangar deck, when the tractor and spotting dolly could not fit in a space, or were not available. That was most of the time on the crowded hangar deck. Constructed during World War II and commissioned shortly after, Oriskany had been designed for smaller aircraft. Blueshirts also carried the chocks and chains used to immobilize and tie aircraft to the deck. It was their job to break down the tie-downs prior to moving a plane and then to re-attach them after it had reached its new position. The job was dirty, the chains often coated with grease, fuel, and grime. It was also slightly dangerous. The underside of every aircraft bristled with antenna, rocket and bomb fins, and devices that secured fuel tanks, bombs, and other devices to the aircraft. To get firm leverage on the aircraft without pushing on control surfaces or other fragile parts, blueshirts crawled under the planes and pushed on the landing gear struts, bomb racks, fuel tanks, or bombs. Occasionally, after being distracted, a blueshirt would have a foot or hand run over, or have the skin on his back raked by a bomb fin. In the subtropical heat, on a ship with no air conditioning, the back breaking work had everyone in the crew smelling of sweat and salt.

  The yellowshirts determined the direction the plane went by giving instructions to either the driver of the tractor or a man who pivoted the nose wheel of the aircraft with a long steel pole, the nose wheel steering bar also known as the tiller. A fully loaded A-4 Skyhawk, better known as the Scooter, could weigh almost 20,000 pounds, an F-8 Crusader almost twice that. During air operations the hangar deck crew routinely worked 15-18 hour days. They moved aircraft to the flight deck for launches. Later they moved aircraft dropped from the flight deck to the hangar deck during recoveries. Most recovered aircraft dropped to the hangar on elevator #1 in the middle of the forward hangar bay. One plane after another dropped quickly from the flight deck. From there the three crews took turns pushing the planes toward the stern, filling all three hangar bays. That left room on the flight deck for the recovery of aircraft to continue. After air operations ended, they spotted and re-spotted aircraft for the squadron mechanics, so they could make certain each aircraft was in flying condition for its next sortie.

  Depending upon how exhausted the aircraft handlers were, they either lounged for the two hours between launch and recovery, or worked at duty stations, cleaning up messes on the hangar deck made by the mechanics, polishing brass, or repairing or upgrading hangar deck equipment. The navy required all support and maintenance equipment, generators, tractors, aircraft jacks, rolling ladders, and more to be painted yellow. Sailors referred to the collection as yellow gear.

  Coated in salt from evaporated sweat, his blue jersey ringed by many layers of white, Wolfe rolled out of the yellow tractor seat and stood quickly. He located Byrnes, who waved at him and Higgins from a hatch in the third hangar bay. “Run!” the yellowshirt yelled.

  Higgins beat Wolfe to the hatch by a step. The three men climbed the ladder on the outside of the ship to a sponson several feet below the flight deck. Catching his breath, Higgins, another lowly blueshirt, asked Byrnes, “What’s up? Why the rush?”

  Silently, Byrnes pointed to the starboard horizon. A funnel of black smoke ascended from a large ship about five miles away. After they fixed the ship in their gaze, Byrnes said, “Forrestal may be dying.” Pointing next to the rolls of fire hose on the sponson, he added, “When I give you the word I want each of you to carry a fire hose to the helo after it lands. Keep your heads down. The rotor blades dip occasionally. There will be injured men from Forrestal on the chopper. We’ll take them off the helo. Four of us to each stretcher. We’ll carry them down to sick bay. Got it?”

  Wolfe nodded, staring in the distance. He had heard stories about Oriskany’s fire. It seemed unreal that Forrestal would repeat the disaster less than a year later. More men joined their group, and another crowd of sailors watched them from the other side of the flight deck, the Landing Signal Officer’s station. If they stood upright, their shoulders were even with the flight deck. “Down!” Byrnes shouted. They squatted and the blast of prop wash from the chopper’s rotors and its jet exhaust blew over their heads.

  “Go!” Byrnes ordered. Wolfe climbed the last ten steps on the ladder to the flight deck, arms around the coil of canvas hose. In a crouching run, he ran as fast as he could toward the helicopter and tripped, landing on the roll of hose. V-2 division had set up the arresting cables used to stop aircraft by their tail hooks. The cables stretched across the deck from port to starboard and about six inches in the air. Wolfe’s foot had caught one of the cables. Scrambling to his feet, he completed his mission in time to grab the fourth handhold on a stretcher.

  “Oh, and mind the arresting gear,” Byrnes said to Wolfe, no trace of sarcasm in his voice.

  The man on the stretcher howled in pain. Only shreds of his shirt remained, the rest burned away. From the waist up, his skin peeled in large sheets. A medic poured water over gauze on his face and chest as the four men struggled to carry him down to the hangar deck and then to sick bay.

  Over the next two hours, Wolfe, Higgins, and Byrnes made four such journeys. The injuries looked worse with each trip. Finally, they ran out of firefighting equipment to load onto the helos. They made three more trips to sickbay. Exhausted the men climbed again to the flight deck. A large man in a yellowshirt waited for them to gather around him on the sponson. “Forrestal feels she can continue air operations after the fire is out. She needs men to take the place of her injured flight deck crew. I’m looking for volunteers.”

  Wolfe never hesitated. He raised his hand. Ten other sailors did the same. “Never volunteer, Wolfe,” Byrnes said.

  The flight deck chief took the men’s names. “Okay. Back to your duty stations. We don’t expect any more casualties to come here. Bonny Dick is taking them now,” he referred to the USS Bon Homme Richard, another World War II era aircraft carrier nearby. “I’ll contact you if you are indeed needed.”

  The Air Boss or the admiral canceled flight operations for the day. Wolfe spent an hour under several aircraft moving them for the mechanics. Byrnes got into an argument with an aviation mechanic because the man refused to tie down his aircraft jacks securely. The yellowshirts and blueshirts constantly moved the jacks to avoid hitting them with an aircr
aft. Dinging an aircraft on a jack, another aircraft, or part of the ship earned a yellowshirt director or his safetyman the ire of the hangar deck chief. Too many dings and a yellowshirt might find himself reduced to blueshirt status, as a driver or nose wheel tiller man. If the chief was angry enough or the damage serious enough, he might even be demoted to tying down and pushing.

  Chief Powell ran the hangar deck as his own personal fiefdom. Even the hangar deck officer knew better than to argue with him. Out of the corner of his eye, Wolfe saw the pot-bellied, gray-haired chief step out of hangar deck control and stare in his direction. Elevator #3 operator put down his sound-powered headphones and sauntered over to Wolfe. He and the third bay crew stared out the starboard elevator space at Forrestal less than a mile away. The two destroyers, USS Rupertus and USS MacKenzie, which had been spraying Forrestal with foam and water in an effort to control the multitude of fires had pulled away from the carrier. At one point they had been within feet of the huge ship. They joined a third destroyer, USS Tucker, searching the debris field for survivors and bodies of crew who were blown or jumped overboard. The dark black smoke had lightened to a haze gray funnel that climbed into the sky. “What did you do to piss off the chief?” the elevator operator asked Wolfe.

  Blank look on his face, Wolfe shrugged. “I haven’t done anything all day, except carry fire hoses and injured up and down ladders. Don’t imagine that could have pissed him off.”

  “Well, he’s pissed about something,” the operator said. “Wanted me to tell you to double time to control. Wants a word, he said. By the way, that’s never a good thing.”

  “Great,” Wolfe said, turning and jogging between aircraft and yellow gear to the second hangar bay and hangar bay control.

  Four men occupied the ten by twelve foot room, seated on a couch or two chairs or standing behind the status board: the Hangar Deck Officer, Lieutenant Rogers; Chief Powell; Airman Jake Snow; and first-class petty officer, Guy Munford. Chief Powell had returned to his usual position in hangar deck control, sitting next to Snow on tall stools behind the Plexiglas Ouija board, a desk-sized Plexiglas representation of the hangar deck. On the board, V-3 Division Chief Powell choreographed the movement of aircraft on the hangar deck. Flat, plastic, scale silhouettes of aircraft sat parked on it, as they were in the hangar deck. Lt. Rogers and Munford sat in plush lounge chairs near the huge coffee machine drinking coffee.