from:The Virginian Pilot


Carrier's bomb builders do things 'by the book'


Lt. Steve Folsom, surrounded by 2,000-pound Blu-109 bombs, is the ordnance officer aboard the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman.  HYUNSOO LEO KIM PHOTOS | THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT

By LOUIS HANSEN, The Virginian-Pilot


ABOARD THE HARRY S. TRUMAN

Airman Melissa Hassard sewed and embroidered pillows and curtains to pretty up her small bunk aboard ship. In her spare time, she draws and makes collages.

Some day, the 21-year-old North Carolina native would like to become an elementary school art teacher.

But for now, she builds bombs for the Navy aboard its most lethal class of warship.


Airman Melissa Hassard specialized in weapons because it's almost the family business - her father spent years in the Marine Corps teaching the craft.

Hassard and other young sailors build and protect the various missiles, bombs and bullets that deliver the punch for the Navy air squadrons. It's a community that has come far from its defining day 40 years ago today.

On July 29, 1967, a small missile accidentally fired from an F-4 fighter plane aboard the Norfolk-based carrier Forrestal, igniting a fuel tank and a pile of weapons, setting the deck ablaze. Nearly 200 sailors were seriously wounded or killed in the worst accident in modern U.S. Navy history.

It's a vivid lesson, captured on grainy ship's videotape, that the Navy has never stopped teaching. It's an ever-present reminder for the 110 ordnance handlers aboard the aircraft carrier Truman.

Safety equipment and procedures have been added to flattops. Rules for weapons handling and production are orderly and strict.

"They're written in blood for a reason," said Lt. Steve Folsom, ordnance officer aboard the Truman. "We're in a less-forgiving environment."

The sailors handle weapons by the ton, filling 32 specially designed magazines deep into the lower decks of the ship. The loaded carrier brings along $483 million worth of ordnance, ranging from a $2,000 dumb bomb to a $1.5 million guided missile, Folsom said.

The precisely designed weapons can collapse a chemical factory with a few well-placed hits, or pound the breath from a group of insurgents with an airborne explosion.

The typical sailor building these destructive devices is 20 years old.

"I wouldn't trust a 20-year-old to drive my truck," Folsom said with a smirk.

But he trusts this cadre of sailors he calls " little Nintendo kids."


Lt. Folsom heads down one of 32 magazines where ordnance is stored. The lowest magazine is 11 floors below the flight deck.

The weapons community has changed since Folsom enlisted two decades ago. The job belonged to men, with rarely a woman in the ranks, and required more brawn than brain.

As a new seaman, the 6-foot-2-inch Folsom was the sapling amongst a forest of taller, broad-shouldered men. He worked his first deployment with teams of knuckle-dragging brutes under F-14s and A-4 attack planes, hoisting 500-pound bombs attached to steel pikes known as "hernia sticks."

Sailors now use more elaborate hoists, lifts and elevators, reducing the physical demands of hauling ordnance. It has opened up for some women.

The bomb handlers compare themselves to Marines - eating and bunking together, training intensely and often blurring the chain of command to get a job done.

Their in-your-face attitude greets visitors on their headquarters door: "The war starts and ends here."

Down in the restricted magazines, the air is filled with the acrid smell of explosive chemicals. A series of metal assembly tables, with sliding trays, form an assembly line for a team of sailors to install fuses, fins and guidance systems.


The ordnance handlers aboard the Truman compare themselves to Marines – eating and bunking together, and training intensely.

The sailors are banned from wearing rings, belt buckles and other metal jewelry that could produce sparks. At top speed, they can produce as many as 300 bombs a day.

A network of hoists, levers, forklifts and elevators transfer the finished materials from the magazines to the airplanes.

Petty Officer 1st Class Sean Conklin said teamwork and caution are the keys.

"It's not real difficult, but it's detail-oriented," Conklin said. "As soon as you get comfortable, that's when people can get hurt."

Truman sailors this week are working up to the fast pace expected on a deployment to the Middle East. The strike group is steaming off the Virginia coast in a two-dozen-ship exercise, its final major test before a fall deployment.

Folsom expects this cruise will be different from the heavy opening salvos of the Iraq war. Fighter pilots have few large military targets left. More often, they strike bands of insurgents fighting Army and Marine units with small, precise bombs and machine-gun fire.

Many in Folsom's unit will be making their first deployments. Airman Christopher Reed, 22, saw a chance to build something unique to the military.


Bombs fill one of the carrier Harry S. Truman’s 32 magazines. The loaded carrier brings along $483 million worth of ordnance.

"You have to go by the book," said Reed, a slightly built sailor from Philadelphia. "You have to build every one almost like it's your first."

Hassard, the airman from North Carolina, came to the Navy to pay for school. She specialized in weapons because it's almost the family business - her father spent years in the Marine Corps teaching the craft.

Hassard remembers bomb casings and other non explosive parts decorating the family home. Rob Hassard showed his daughter how the bombs were built.

"At the time, he taught me a lot that I didn't understand," she said. Now, she said, she does.

Louis Hansen, (757) 446-2322, [email protected]

Now to the real question....

Would you hit it!?!?!


I'd hit it like a 2000lb'er and then some!

from:www.pensacolanewsjournal.com

Vets recall tragedy aboard Forrestal
Sunday marks 40 years since carrier fire


Troy Moon
[email protected]

When now-retired Navy Rear Adm. Peter Booth took command of the USS Forrestal in 1977, it was as if he were working and living aboard a ghost ship.

From the ship's bridge, Booth, the Forrestal's commanding officer from 1977 to 1979, would gaze out and see the tragic events from 10 years earlier unfolding before his eyes again and again.



"Almost every single day that I was on the bridge, I would relive that sad day," said Booth, a pilot aboard the Forrestal in 1967.

The sad day was July 29, 1967. A fire broke out on the now-decommissioned supercarrier off the coast of Vietnam, killing 134 men and seriously injuring 64 others. It remains the Navy's biggest disaster in a combat zone since World War II.







Today, Booth, a Warrington resident, will be a guest speaker at a ceremony at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the fire and pay tribute to those who lost their lives that day.

In an advance draft of his speech, Booth wrote:

"Walking out to the starboard bow catwalk, a few of us watched in disbelief as our proud ship and air wing started going up in towering flames as one 1,000-pound bomb after another exploded on the flight deck aft. Looking down the flight deck at eye level, we could see some brave souls racing into the conflagration and then, as more bombs went off, there were none."





Booth, 73, is one of at least three Pensacola residents who were aboard the Forrestal when a Zuni rocket accidentally launched from a plane on the flight deck. The rocket hit the fuel tank of another plane, causing a fuel-fed fire that — normally — could have been controlled, Booth and others said.

But the fire detonated nine 1,000-pound thin-skinned bombs, blowing holes throughout the flight deck and igniting crowded compartments underneath.

"It was a huge fire, and the gasoline was just bubbling," said retired Navy Capt. Flack Logan, who would later become commanding officer of the Navy's training carrier, USS Lexington, which was homeported in Pensacola from 1969 until it was decommissioned in 1991. "It was clearly overwhelming. No one had seen anything like it."

The Navy used the Forrestal tragedy as a teaching tool to ensure no one would see anything like it again. Video of the ship ablaze still is used in Navy shipboard firefighting training. Almost immediately after the fire, safety changes were made fleetwide.

"We learned a lot of lessons the hard way," said Logan, 67. "A lot of us tried to get involved in fighting the fire. It was good that I wanted to do something, but it was bad because I wasn't trained."

Firefighting training

Before the Forrestal fire, most ships had a firefighting unit, but firefighting wasn't taught to most of those onboard.

Now, all Navy and Marine Corps personnel stationed on a Navy ship must take firefighting courses, said Chief Warrant Officer III Patrick Halinski, aviation's boatswain's mate-handling training officer for Naval Air Technical Training Center at Pensacola Naval Air Station.

"It is what we train to today — a Forrestal-type fire," Halinski said. "Anybody who is assigned to a ship has to have some type of aviation firefighting."

Firefighting also is taught to all sailors in basic training.

Logan was trained to fly, not fight fires.

And he was sitting in his F-4 Phantom II waiting to take off when he saw the Zuni rocket, ignited by a short circuit, zip across the flight deck and hit the fuel tank of an A-4 Skyhawk piloted by Lt. Cmdr. John McCain, now a Republican senator and presidential candidate, who was preparing to take off.

McCain struggled out of his cockpit, climbed down the nose of the plane and jumped onto the burning deck. It was minutes before 11 a.m.

"That's when I made my famous statement, that this is going to delay our launch," Logan said. "It was our fifth combat day, and we were ready to go out there and win the war."

Logan believed the fire would be contained.

But 94 seconds after the rocket hit McCain's plane, a bomb cooked by the heat of the flames exploded, ripping a hole in the flight deck and spraying the deck and crew with shrapnel and burning fuel.

"I was probably about 110 feet away when the bomb went off," Logan said. "It killed one guy next to me and seriously wounded another person near me. I had shrapnel in my leg and mouth, pieces of bomb fragments. I landed on my back."

Logan crawled off the flight deck and went below to warn others who might not have been aware of the extent of the problems on the flight deck.

"The lights were out," Logan said. "The night shift guys were asleep for the day, and some didn't react quickly and never got out. My squadron lost about 40 men."

Booth was in his squadron ready room when the disaster hit.

"When the first bomb went off, it severed all the fire hoses," Booth said.

And many of the firefighters on the deck were killed. Booth and Logan, like most on the ship, scrambled to help any way they could.

Without firefighting training, the Forrestal's sailors did what they thought was best. Some sprayed the deck with foam to contain the blaze, while other crewmen sprayed seawater to combat the blaze, washing away the foam. Ironically, water can help some fuel blazes spread.

"The firefighters were mostly all killed when the bombs went off," Logan said. "So we had these people there with hoses washing away the foam. We fought the fire wrong. It's a pretty bad indictment of the training we had at the time."

The flight deck fire was controlled within an hour, but secondary fires in lower decks took another 12 hours to contain.

News travels quickly

Word of the fire reached the United States quickly.

Bill Dollarhide, a Pensacola businessman, was in college at the University of Southern Mississippi when he got a call from his father. Dollarhide's older brother, David Dollarhide, was a pilot aboard the Forrestal.

"He was sitting on the flight deck in his jet ready to get catapulted," Dollarhide, 61, said of his brother, who lives in Orange Park. "That's when it all broke loose. I remember Dad calling me and saying, 'Your brother ... have you seen the news?' Everyone knew the Forrestal had almost sunk. We didn't have details. It was scary. My mom was extremely upset."

David Dollarhide was injured when he jumped out of his plane, landing hard on the flight deck. He broke his hip and arm, and seconds later, was hit by shrapnel in his hip and feet when the bombs began detonating. He was hospitalized for about a month.

Logan, who had been hit by shrapnel, later made his way to the sick bay.

"There were bodies everywhere," he said. "The medics were trying to fix them up. I said, 'There's nothing wrong with me' and went back up to the ready room."

When the flames had been contained, more grim duty lay ahead.

There was a memorial service three days after the fire, and many of the deceased were committed to the sea, Logan said.

"I was involved in bringing bodies out," Logan said. "We'd go down to the berthing compartment and bring out bodies in body bags. What I thought were three or four people, the corpsman said were parts of eight people. It was nasty stuff."

Booth returned to the Forrestal again in 1971 as a squadron commander, and a third stint aboard the Forrestal from 1977 to 1979 as its commanding officer.

"When I came back, such vast improvements had been made, principally as a result of the fire," Booth said. "That fuel-fed fire, in today's Navy or when I was back on board, would have been handled in a heartbeat. It did improve safety."



Booth said the crew's bravery helped save others. Crew members pushed bombs and aircraft to safety, saving lives, and men scrambled throughout the ship to help their fellow shipmates.

"The heroism on that ship, from the lowest sailors to the captain of the ship, was unbelievable," Booth said. "Flack Logan, I might add, was one of those heroes. He put on an oxygen breathing apparatus and went way down inside the ship where men were trapped and fires were still going on.

"Everyone did the best they could."

All I read was the title of the thread, and my first thought was, "I certainly hope so!"

I've known a bunch of ammo troops in the last 18 years, both AF and other services.  Their attention to detail is pretty good, for some reason.