The Circle

by David Poyer

  25

  WHEN he left the lobby the next morning, six inches of snow covered the ground. Not a taxi was stirring in the District of Columbia. By the time he found a Checker he was already late. At the Pentagon he limped up the ramp hurriedly, flashing his pass at the security guard. It was tougher persuading the marines to let him in the courtroom.

  But finally they did. As he took a seat in back, realizing belatedly that he’d forgotten his morning pill, a tall, balding, slightly stooped man in service dress blue was being sworn in. “State your name, rank, branch of service, and present duty station,” Johnstone was droning.

  “Leonard A. Hoelscher,” the tall man said quietly to the three members of the Court. Dan saw that the broad gold on his sleeves matched theirs. Only Ausura, the president, outranked him. “Rear admiral, USN. Present duty station, commander, Carrier Division 42.”

  Q. State your duty station on 25 December, sir.

  A. I was Commander Task Group 21.1 in the eastern Atlantic, aboard USS KENNEDY.

  Q. Under whose control were you operating?

  A. I was under operational control of Commander, Second Fleet, for operation WESTERN VIGIL, an exercise to test the defenses of a carrier strike group.

  At this point the Court sat with closed doors. Witnesses not party to the proceedings withdrew from the courtroom.

  Q. I show you this document. Is it the plan under which you and the ships under your command were operating?

  A. Yes, it is.

  The document was submitted to the parties and the Court as evidence. There being no objection, it was admitted as Exhibit D.

  Q. Now, on the day in question, who was in tactical command of USS RYAN?

  A. Commanding officer, KENNEDY was in tactical command of all the accompanying units.

  Q. Under your orders?

  A. That is correct.

  Q. Where were you, sir, in the ship, from about 2200 the night before to the time of the collision?

  A. I was in flag plot most of that time, though I went to the bridge once to speak to Captain Javits.

  Q. Will you please recount the events of the early morning of the 25th, up to the moment of the collision with RYAN, with particular attention to the orders you gave?

  A. As I said, I was directing the air battle from flag plot. I was in contact with KENNEDY’s bridge, and we had a remote pritac speaker in the plot. We launched an air strike about 2200 on the 24th. The first wave reported inbound at about 0145. Jake, Captain Javits, got that word at the same time from Air Control. As I recall, there were no specific orders given to him as to course to recover and so forth. There are standard operating procedures for this sort of thing, and he was following them.

  Q. Were you kept informed of his movements?

  A. That is standard procedure.

  Q. By what means?

  A. Intercom from the bridge.

  Q. Did you concur with his intentions and movements?

  A. Yes, I did.

  Q. Do you feel in retrospect that he acted correctly?

  A. I have to say I do.

  Q. Would you have given different orders in his position?

  A. In retrospect, perhaps. But in retrospect we are all a lot wiser.

  Q. Please go on. Will you tell the court what signals you heard before the collision?

  A. I heard the corpen—the new course—signal go out. I heard the units receipt for it and I believe I recall RYAN coming back and asking about taking plane guard. I recall that because it was sloppy of KENNEDY’s conning officer to overlook it. But I thought no more about it. Then I heard the change left to two-five-zero.

  Q. What signal was that?

  A. KENNEDY modified her recovery course to two-five-zero instead of two-six-zero, her original intention. The wind had shifted slightly.

  Q. This has not been brought out in previous testimony. At what time did this signal go out?

  A. I’m not sure.

  Q. Did the ships in company acknowledge this signal?

  A. I believe I heard acknowledgments, but I can’t recall which units responded.

  Q. Is there a radio log that would have these transmissions and the responses to them?

  A. There is a log, but as to completeness you would have to examine it.

  Q. All right, sir. Go on.

  A. Well, things happened pretty quickly after that. I heard the whistle go and called the bridge immediately; at the same time, they were calling me, and we got a little fouled up for a minute on the intercom. Then a shudder went through the ship. By that time, we had got comms straightened out and Jake told me what was happening. I went out and saw that we had run over RYAN.

  Q. Go on.

  A. Well, our first thought was of rescue, and I put out orders to the screen to break off exercise play and pick up survivors. I checked on the remaining time our planes had—I had to think of them—and they still had about twenty minutes or half an hour of fuel; so I ordered them to orbit till further word.

  Next priority was damage to the carrier. Jake had been getting reports and it sounded like we had come through okay except for a sheared fuel line. No shaft damage, which was what had me worried, though I knew she was Newport News—built and pretty hard to hurt.

  At that time we were turning, and Jake and I were discussing the situation, and it occurred to us that we had a dangerous situation. The forward part of the destroyer was on fire. Now, I knew her loadout.

  Q. Please elaborate.

  A. RYAN had an operational combat loadout with both conventional torpedoes and nuclear depth bombs for her Asroc. I believe from her reporting-in data that she had five of them aboard. The nukes on that class of destroyer are stored in a locked magazine in what used to be a hangar. We could see that area was a mass of fire.

  Well, this was a difficult decision. I knew three things. First, there were men in the water and on the ship. Second, these weapons are vulnerable to fire. Not exceptionally so, but if they’re roasted for a while, they’ll react.

  Q. The nuclear weapons?

  A. Yes. We wouldn’t have had a nuclear explosion per se, but if the conventional explosive in the triggers went off, or if the torpedoes stored with them detonated, we’d have had a big plume of material in the air. The wind, as I have said, was from the west. We were only a couple of hundred miles off Ireland. I was scared we’d get that explosion, that plume, and it would of course be carried straight off to the east.

  I had to make a command decision. I tried to call RYAN but got no response. I had no way of knowing whether they had flooded that magazine, and it sounds now as if they hadn’t. My decision, and I knew at the time it would cost lives, was to bring KENNEDY around and push the burning section underwater as quickly as I could. That would put out the fire, and once under water, those warheads would be safe.

  I discussed this briefly with Javits. He too was reluctant, but he agreed. We sealed the ship up in case the nukes went off around us, and went around at full speed and got it over with.

  I’ve spent a lot of time since thinking about it, second-guessing myself. I still think it was a single-solution problem. I couldn’t take the risk, politically or, you might say, in a humanitarian way, of putting a fallout plume over Donegal and Belfast.

  Q. Please continue.

  A. Well, after that we vectored the small boys in to pick up survivors. KENNEDY went on west and recovered her strike. Then I launched search-and-rescue helos. We continued area search until noon the next day, when I got orders to discontinue the exercise and put the survivors ashore.

  Q. Admiral Hoelscher, what in your opinion caused the collision?

  A. I have not heard all the testimony before this Court. However, from my understanding of events, I think the captain or conning officer of RYAN made a mistake in maneuvering that neither RYAN nor KENNEDY had time to rectify.

  Cross-examined by counsel for Commander Packer.

  Q. Sir, I have two points I’d like to explore. The first is whether or not you were in oper
ational command of the formation.

  A. As I said, Captin Javits was in tactical command.

  Q. I understand, but on a carrier, it is common for flag and commanding officers to work closely together. You have testified that you were in almost continuous communication with the bridge.

  A. That’s so, but at the same time I was responsible for many other things. The maneuvering of units of the task group was specifically delegated to Javits.

  Q. But you remained responsible and exercised close supervision.

  A. That is true, Lieutenant.

  Q. Second, you were located in flag plot. That is a space within the skin of the ship?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Could you see RYAN?

  A. No.

  Q. Were you maintaining a radar plot of the formation?

  A. No. We were in radar silence.

  Q. Yes, sir, that slipped my mind. Let us now turn to your message of the day before, the order you sent to screen units over your signature. Do you recall that order?

  A. The directive to expedite maneuvering. TALBOT and GARCIA had been imprecise and sluggish occasionally. I wanted that tightened up. That was the intent of the message.

  Q. We have heard testimony to the effect that message was the driving force behind Commander Packer’s using a risky maneuver in preference to a safe one to reach his plane guard station. Would you respond to that?

  A. That’s [expletive deleted]. U.S. Navy destroyers are built for fast maneuvering. We’re trained for it. It’s a combat necessity and we’re out there preparing for combat. You don’t do that by creeping up on station like a bunch of maiden aunts. I have served in ships like RYAN and such a maneuver was well within her capability, if the bridge team was properly trained and alert.

  Q. You were knowledgeable, were you not, of RYAN’s material condition?

  A. Yes, that she had sustained some damage during her operations in the Gap, but the report Packer sent me when she joined said she was C-1 in maneuvering—fully capable, no degradation worth mentioning. I took him at his word and expected RYAN to perform like the other units of my screen.

  Cross-examined by counsel for Lieutenant Evlin.

  Q. Admiral, let us talk for a moment about your decision to ram RYAN. I may have to have some of the background on this explained to me.

  Witness asked whether Mr. Barrett was cleared to the proper level. He was assured that such was the case.

  Q. How much experience have you had with nuclear weapons, sir?

  A. I went to school on them.

  Q. When? How long ago?

  A. I don’t recall the exact year. When I was a lieutenant commander.

  Q. Have they not been upgraded to be much more resistant to fire and shock than they used to be?

  A. I think so. But they’ll still cook off eventually in the middle of a conflagration.

  Q. Are you certain of that?

  A. [Witness paused.] Pretty sure.

  Q. How long had the fire been going when you sent RYAN to the bottom?

  A. I don’t know. Ten or twelve minutes.

  Q. How long does a Mark Five warhead take to cook off in a JP-5 fire?

  A. You’d have to get an expert to answer that one for you.

  Q. What is being done about these weapons now?

  A. The ones on RYAN?

  Q. Yes.

  A. Well, I’m out of the picture on that. Water depth where she went down is over 1,000 fathoms. It would be hard to get to them, if that’s what you mean. If we can’t, I don’t think anyone else will be able to.

  Q. What was your state of mind when you ordered Captain Javits to ram RYAN?

  A. Upset, of course—reluctant—it wasn’t an easy decision. But as I said, I still think it was the right one. I’ve forwarded my report on it. There hasn’t been any response yet.

  Q. Let us return to Lieutenant Hauck’s question about your hurry-up message. Was your task group engaged in combat at the time?

  A. Of course not. We were simulating such operations.

  Q. Do you feel, Admiral, that in peacetime we need to take exactly the same risks we would in war?

  A. You’re trying to trap me into giving a yes or no answer. I will reiterate that the only way to prepare for war is to train realistically, and if we don’t, we aren’t doing our jobs right. Obviously, I was not ordering people to take foolish chances. I was asking them to do things the way they’re supposed to be done.

  Q. If you were sent out again to command a task force, would you reissue that same order? Specifically, sir, would you order them to maneuver at high speed, in the dark, without radar, “even at the expense of an occasional mistake”?—As your original message put it?

  A. [Witness did not answer.]

  THE COURT: Please respond to that, Admiral Hoelscher.

  A. I was going to. I would say that I would, if my ships were moseying around and going too slow.

  Q. Then you have learned nothing from this incident?

  COUNSEL FOR THE COURT: Mr. Barrett, I must caution you—

  THE WITNESS [interrupting]: No, I will respond to that. Sir, I have drawn no conclusions that would reduce what I expect from a Navy destroyer skipper.

  Neither counsel for the Court, the Court, nor the parties desired further to examine this witness.

  The Court informed the witness that he was privileged to make any further statement covering anything he thought should be a matter of record that had not been brought out by previous questioning.

  WITNESS: I would like to say that I did not mean to imply, as I may have seemed to, that occasional accidents like this are inevitable. I don’t think anything’s inevitable. But I don’t think the solution lies in reducing what we expect from our commanding officers. I hope we can find out what happened to RYAN and find some way of fixing it. It’s hard to see a ship go down and go back to sea as if nothing had happened.

  The witness stated that he had nothing further to say.

  He was duly warned and withdrew.

  * * *

  AT this point the Court sat with open doors. The survivors reentered.

  Captain Roland Javits, U.S. Navy, a party, was called as a witness, and was sworn. He was reminded of his rights under Article 31, Uniform Code of Military Justice, and advised that any testimony given by him might be used as evidence against him in any subsequent trial by court-martial.

  Examined by the counsel for the Court.

  Q. State your name, rank, branch of service, and present duty station.

  A. Captain Roland J. Javits, USN. I am captain of USS KENNEDY, CV-67.

  Q. Will you please briefly describe your naval and aviation experience?

  A. I graduated from the Naval Academy and served in the Air Force for a time before requesting transfer back to the Navy. I did the standard things Navy fliers do, including a spell flying F-9s in combat. I was CO of VF-114. Then I attended the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. After that I served with the Chief of Naval Operations staff. Following that, I was commanding officer of DENEBOLA. Following that, I put KENNEDY in commission.

  Q. And you are still her commanding officer?

  A. So far.

  Q. Will you state to the court your recollection of the events leading up to the collision of KENNEDY with USS REYNOLDS RYAN, DD-768?

  A. Yes. I have made some notes here and I will refer to those.

  Q. Would you like to submit that as a narrative?

  A. No, they’re rough. I haven’t had time to … I’ll just make remarks, if that’s all right.

  Q. Go ahead.

  A. On December 24 I was the OTC of a carrier strike formation off the Irish coast. Exercise WESTERN VIGIL was in progress. I had assumed tactical command, since CTG 21.1 was engaged with the developing threat picture. At 2000, in accordance with the operation order, all ships were darkened. The weather conditions were favorable for night flying operations. It was clear, extremely dark, middle overcast around 8,000 feet; visibility 10 miles, wind west southwest, fou
rteen to fifteen knots; sea smooth, wave height 4 feet, period 6 seconds, direction 270 degrees. There was no visible horizon, and from the height of KENNEDY’s bridge the hulls of the escorts merged with the water. Due to the tactical conditions, all our orders were sent by short-range tactical radio rather than signal light.

  About 2230, the admiral ordered me to launch our first strike on the RED fleet. I’d anticipated this, and at 2245 I put out a signal to stand by for a simultaneous left turn to launch course and designated RYAN plane guard. All units acknowledged. Meanwhile lead fighters were being placed on the catapults and pilots briefed. I executed the signal at 2250. We steadied up on two-six-zero, the screen steadied up, and RYAN reported in position. I then manned and launched ten F-4Bs with drop tanks on a vector of one-nine-zero toward the simulated enemy forces.

  The purpose of this exercise was to familiarize the pilots with night launches and strikes under dimmed conditions and radar silence; second, to exercise the deck crew, flight crews, and small boys in night carrier operations.

  At 2316, with the last plane off the deck, I signaled a new course and came right to zero-one-zero true, the course Admiral Hoelscher had directed. All ships rogered and RYAN returned to her position in the screen.

  We had some electronic intercepts around 2400, but the enemy attack we expected didn’t materialize. At midnight, we conducted a radio check with all the screen ships, and comms were satisfactory, though RYAN’s response was weak. At 0055, the strike leader reported “attack complete” and that the force was returning.

  In accordance with my instructions, preparations for night recovery commenced at 0157. This included a voice radio message giving my course and speed intentions. All ships receipted for this signal. RYAN again came through weak and asked about plane guard. My OOD, Lieutenant Commander Garner, had neglected to do this, and I spoke to him about it. At 0221, we commenced a simultaneous turn to the right, first to one-zero-zero, then on around to two-six-zero. I also increased speed to twenty-seven knots. At the beginning of this maneuver RYAN was on our starboard quarter, bearing two-four-five, range 3,000 yards. His new position for night recovery was to be 1,000 yards off our port quarter.

  As we neared recovery course, I noticed that RYAN’s lights were slightly to the right of my bow, but that the relative bearing was changing slowly to the left. I noticed that the actual wind was slightly to port of the anticipated wind, and so I directed a course modification to steady at two-five-zero vice two-six-zero. This message went out and was receipted for.