William Lee, Vietnam War CasualtyPorter County Data on Vietnam War Casualties . . . .
William "Bill" Lee
AN-E3, United States Navy
Date of Death: July 29, 1967
Cause of Death: Non-hostile Casualty at Sea (body recovered)
Hometown: Chesterton
Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Panel 24 East, Row 31
On the 50th Anniversary of the Forrestal Disaster Tom Lee
Honors Brother Bill
By Kevin Nevers
Think of the decisions we make in life as forks in a road we're only dimly
aware of traveling.
Decisions made in the heat of the moment of with due deliberation. Decisions
made for good or frivolous or no reason at all. Decisions whose consequences
come to us at midnight, long after the dust has settled, to make us wonder
what might have been.
Other decisions are made for us -- we often have no idea they're being made
at all -- by bean counters and bureaucrats behind closed doors, by
politicians whose loyalties are to party and policy, not to people.
These decisions are also forks in the road. For some they're just the end of
the road.
This is the story of two decisions made half a century ago.
William Lee and the USS Forrestal
On July 29, 1967, 134 sailors died on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal
in the Gulf of Tokin, when eight 1,000-pound bombs which had no business
being on board -- bombs which everyone who'd seen and handled knew to be
defective -- exploded catastrophically on Forrestal's flight deck.
On of the dead was a Chesterton boy, Aviation Boatswain's Mate William Lee
(CHS 1965). Lee had been preforming his primary duties, assisting in the
catapult launch of A-4 Skyhawk fighter/bombers, when a fluke fire ignited on
the flight deck. Lee was the first to grab a hose, the first to step into
the breach, and probably the first to die, when the first of the defective
bombs booked off in the heat of the fire and detonated, raining shrapnel on
him, killing him instantly.
Lee was 19. He left behind a widow and a newborn, his parents, and one
other: his identical twin and Forrestal shipmate, Tom.
Bill, as always, was serving the aft catapults that day, Tom the forward
cats, and in the normal course of things, -- under U.S. Navy policy -- the
twins wouldn't even have been assigned to the same ship. Not since the five
Sullivan Brothers all went down on the light cruiser USS Juneau, torpedoed
by a Japanese submarine in the Pacific on Nov. 13, 1942. "Bill and I were
always close," Tom says. "We wanted to serve together. We had to sign a form
so that we could get on the same ship."
The last time Tom saw his brother alive was early on the morning of July 29.
"I didn't see him every day, sometimes we'd go a week," Tom recalls. "But I
saw him that morning in his apartment before we had to go launch. We talked
about our families, him and his wife, Kathy, me and Diane, what we were
going to do when we got out of the service, what we were going to when we
got to the next port, just the normal stuff sailors talk about."
The next time Tom saw Bill was in the morgue.
The First Decision
The first decision was made at the highest levels of the Defense Department,
no name specifically attaches to it, but it was executed through the HQ of
the Commander In Chief, Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC): to replace Forrestal's
supply of the 1,000-pound Mark 83 bomb -- drastically depleted by a
relentless naval bombing campaign on North Vietnam -- with a shipment of
ordnance which included 16 1,000-pound AN/M65A1 bombs. Those 16 were
obsolete, at least some of them had been produced as early as 1953, and all
of them had been stored in substandard conditions in an open-air dump at
Subic Bay Naval Base, exposed to tropical heat and humidity.
That wasn't the least of it, though. The AN/M65A1 bombs had thinner skins
and were chemically less stable than the Mark 83s, the latter of which were
rated capable of withstanding the direct heat of a jet-fuel fire for a full
10 minutes without cooking off.
Subic Bay's ordnance officer wanted nothing to do with the AN/M65A1s,
recognized them for what they were -- clear and present dangers -- and
absolutely refused to authorize their onloading to the resupply ship USS
Diamond Head. CINCPAC was unimpressed by the officer's concerns and
teleprinted to Subic Bay an explicit written countermand ordering the bombs
put on board and releasing him from responsibility.
Forrestal's ordnance officers wanted nothing to do with the
AN/M65A1s either, on taking delivery of them from Diamond Head on
July 28. The bombs were befouled and rusted and quite clearly leaking, and
the suggestion was seriously made to dump them immediately overboard. That
suggestion went up the chain of command to Forrestal's commander,
Capt. John Beling, who asked Diamond Head to exchange the AN/M65A1s
with Mark 82s. Beling was told none of the latter was available and in the
end he accepted the AN/M65A1s, because to refuse them would have jeopardized
the upcoming bombing mission.
The catastrophe was set in motion at 10:50 a.m. the next day -- 50 years ago
tomorrow -- when an electrical malfunction caused an underwing rocket on an
F-4B Phantom being prepared for launch to fire. That rocket flew across the
flight deck, hit the fuel tank on a Skyhawk, and ignited a fire which
instantly began spreading across the deck and involve other aircraft,
including the Skyhawk then occupied by Lt. Com. John McCain. McCain was able
to escape to safety. Not all of his fellow pilots were.
Ninety-six seconds after the fire began, the first AN/M65A1 detonated. Seven
more followed in quick succession -- as did a newer model 500-pound bomb in
a sympathetic explosion -- in blasts which breached the flight deck in
multiple places and allowed burning jet fuel to cascade into the
Forrestal's interior decks and living quarters. In addition to the 134
dead, 161 were injured, in the U.S. Navy's worst carrier fire since World
War II.
For the record: all of Forrestal's remaining Mark 82 bombs
performed as rated, none cooked off.
The Second Decision
The second decision was made by Tom Lee himself: to tell a lie, just a
simple white lie, the sort any sailor might tell to get out of KP duty. It
was this: while still in basic training, Tom listed typing as one of his
skills. He couldn't, not a word, but it went on his official record anyway.
"I lied," Tom says. "I figured if I said I could type they'd put me in
supply."
They did. Tome was duly made a clerk on the Forrestal. The job
lasted only a short time, -- only as long as it took a petty officer to
recognize his uselessness on an Underwood -- and this mistake was
subsequently rectified by assigning Tom to the forward catapults.
Bill, in the meantime, had arrived on Forrestal later than Tom did
-- Kathy had just given birth -- and he'd been assigned to the aft cats.
And Tom still wonders about that fork in the road. "If I hadn't screwed up
in boot camp and lied about being able to type, if they hadn't put me in
supply, I would've probably ended up on the aft cats too. Bill and I might
have been assigned to the same catapult."
But it was from the forward cats instead that Tom watched the Forrestal
burn. "I knew where Bill was. I knew he was one of the first ones there
attacking the fire on the fire hose, trying to put it out and save the
pilots. And that's when the bombs started to go off."
Tom heard stories of the eerie -- almost telepathic -- closeness some
identical twins are supposed to share. And he frankly admits that he and
Bill had no such connection. Except on that day. "I knew that Bill was
dead."
"Everyone not essential to firefighting had to go the hangar bay," Tom says.
"We were preparing to abandon ship. They started handing out life vests. I
one of those bombs had gone down one level lower, it would have hit the
munitions bunkers and blown up the ship."
"I was running around looking for Bill in the hangar by," Tom remembers. "I
found his chief but he didn't know where Bill was. I went everywhere. I went
to sick bay. When they began to bring bodies into the hangar bay, they
wouldn't let me look for him. I didn't know until 10 o'clock that night. His
division officer told me."
There was one other thing the Navy couldn't get right. "They told my parents
that Bill was dead," Tom says. "And they told them that I was missing in
action. My folks didn't know for three weeks I was alive. My mom took it
real bad, real real bad."
Tom's Letter to Bill
On being discharged in 1969, Tom returned to Chesterton and to the job he'd
had -- the job he'd had with Bill -- before enlisting: as a laborer on the
EJ&E. "I started out as a painter, then I was a carpenter, then carpenter
foreman, then pipefitter, and I retired as a pipefitter foreman." Bill, Tom
figures, almost certainly would have joined him on The J. "Bill was a lot
smarter than I was. He would've ended up a supervisor, where I was a
foreman."
Today Tom's in Washington, D.C., where tomorrow, with his former shipmates,
he'll mark the 50th anniversary of the Forrestal disaster, honoring
the 134 who perished because a man behind a desk in an office on the other
side of the world made a decision. To this day Tom blames Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara. "He was the one pushing the heavy bombing. It was
his decision to use the old ordnance. And he never took the blame for it."
In the course of tomorrow's events, Tom will visit the Vietnam War Memorial
and there he'll leave a letter for his brother in which, as best he can,
he'll try to make sense of the decisions men make, of the one made for them,
and of the forks in the road.
"I don't know why Bill died and I didn't," Tom says. "I really don't. My
life turned out great, a fantastic wife, three great kids, four great
grandchildren. How much luckier can a man get? And I think I did good in my
life. I did everything I could. I tried to make my life valuable. I don't
think I wasted it. But it's going to be hard for me to explain to him. I
feel bad it was Bill, not me. He was a damn nice guy. He would've done
anything for anybody."
________________________________________________________________
Source: Chesterton Tribune, Chesterton, Porter County, Indiana; July
28, 2017
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List of
Porter County Vietnam War Casualties
Information abstracted and transcribed by Steven R. Shook