It was an hour and a half wait for the next launch. This time my pilot was the squadron CO. Our launch and climb out to thirty thousand feet were routine. It was a clear day and at one point I could see land on both the north and south coasts of the Mediterranean. As we approached the airfield at Naples, which is situated virtually on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, the weather turned sour, with rain coming out of several layers of solid overcast. As we let down from thirty thousand feet and entered the soup we were being controlled by Naples air traffic center. The controller should have been speaking English, prescribed for international air traffic. If he was, it was not intelligible, and the pilot couldn’t speak Italian. So he decided to cancel his instrument flight plan and try to get in underneath. As we went out to sea to let down beneath the lowest cloud layer, I got a quick refresher on how to work the radar in the ground terrain avoidance mode. As we headed back into Cappodichino Airfield under the overcast, the visibility dropped to zero when we neared Vesuvius. To make matters worse, the rain was so dense that I could not tell from the radar return, whether we were approaching a heavy rainstorm or a mountain of lava. The pilot was trying to fly instruments, coach me on the radar “knobology,” and interpret the picture on the radarscope. He was having no more luck than I. Suddenly, through a break in the overcast, I saw distinctly, although only partially, the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, close and more ahead of us than below. I slapped the pilot on the shoulder and shouted, “Pull up!” He yanked back on the stick, jammed on full power to both engines, and put the A-6 in a left turn at maximum climb rate. It was hairy. We had come very close to smearing ourselves all over the Italian landscape.
We broke out on top and headed south for the NATO field at Sigonella on the island of Sicily. The weather was clear. As we spotted Mount Etna, another volcano, we also made a visual sighting of the airfield. At that moment, the low fuel light on the cockpit dashboard glowed red. I would have declared an emergency and gone straight in to land — we were lined up with the duty runway — but my pilot, having recovered his composure after our close call, elected to make a normal Navy approach, breaking left over the control tower at one thousand feet and landing out of a racetrack pattern.
In an hour the A-6 was refueled and preflighted by the U.S. Navy detachment at Sigonella, and again we launched for Naples. By the time we had completed the three-hundred-mile trip, the bad weather had dissipated and our arrival was routine. The Navy duty officer found a sedan and the driver bulled our way through the Italian traffic to the Excelsior, a lovely old-fashioned five-star hotel on the Naples waterfront where Dabney had taken rooms while waiting for me to show.
Two days later, I headed for the Saratoga, eight hundred miles away in the eastern Mediterranean, and Dabney commenced the drive in our new Volkswagen to Frankfurt, Germany, where she would return to the United States by SPACE A. The Volkswagen Company would ship our VW station wagon to a port of entry in the United States. For her, more than a month of following the fleet had netted only two days together. That confirmed our notion that the role of a camp follower was not easy, even for an admiral’s wife.
AFTERMATH
Commander, Carrier Division 6 was relieved in the Sixth Fleet by commander, Carrier Division 4 on 22 November 1970, and the staff and I returned to our homeport in Mayport, Florida, on board the Saratoga. It had been a good cruise from an operational aspect. Ike Kidd had showered TF 60 with kudos for President Nixon’s successful visit to the Sixth Fleet and awarded me the Navy’s Distinguished Service Medal. Admiral Zumwalt, the CNO, was ecstatic over the Navy’s role in the Jordanian crisis and the MASH evacuation, which had been recognized in the JCS and OSD as solo Navy performances because the other services were unable to contribute. The secretary of the navy awarded the entire Sixth Fleet the Navy’s Meritorious Unit Commendation.
In his monumental work The White House Years, Henry Kissinger sums up the Jordanian crisis of 1970 with the following observation:
There is something abstract and esoteric, at least for laymen, about a fleet at sea. It follows unheard commands in response to dangers rarely seen. It affects people who almost never get a glimpse of what protects or threatens them. Throughout recent crises the Sixth Fleet had been the principal extension of our military power in the Middle East. It had helped mold events without ever approaching closer to them than two hundred miles. Highly vulnerable to Soviet land-based planes, the Sixth Fleet nevertheless had a decisive impact because an attack on it would bring into play the full force of the United States. The dramatic reinforcement of our naval power had been a crucial signal of our determination to prevent the Jordan crisis from getting out of hand. The fleet’s importance had been enhanced by the progressive loss of our land bases and by political restrictions on those remaining.
Within forty-eight hours after Carrier Division 6 had arrived in Mayport, Admiral Zumwalt sent his personal plane to Jacksonville to return me to Washington to present a program of briefings to OpNav and the navy secretariat on the details of the Navy role in Operation Fig Hill. Apparently, the CNO considered that operation a near perfect demonstration of the employment and capabilities of the forward-deployed Navy-Marine forces. Although the accounts were well received, especially by the CNO, Fig Hill never garnered media attention or made the history books.
16
Vietnam
I was just buckling on my sword when the flagship’s forward 6-inch turrets started firing. My quarters were just aft of the barbette, so the concussion was palpable. I thought, What’s going on? We have a change of command in a half hour and that’s no saluting battery. It was May 1972, and I had only been on board the Oklahoma City for two days. Obviously I had a lot to get used to. The phone in the cabin rang, and it was the chief of staff. “Don’t be overly concerned,” he said. “The North Vietnamese are pushing hard on an ARVN salient near Quang Tri, and we have some Marine advisors with the South Vietnamese troops there. The Marines are calling for gunfire support, and they want our 6-inch guns.” I did know enough to understand that this was very important. We could not let our U.S. Marine advisors be overrun. After ten minutes and thirty rounds or so, all was quiet again. The Oklahoma City headed downwind to be sure we would have only gentle breezes for our ceremony.
I headed back to the fantail, where the ceremony for the change of command of the Seventh Fleet would take place. Vice Adm. Bill Mack, whom I was relieving, and I wanted a simple but traditional naval change of command. The principals — Vice Adm. Bill Mack, commander, Seventh Fleet; Adm. Chick Clary, the Pacific Fleet commander; and I — would be in full dress (hence the sword), the sailors would be in whites, and the Marines would be in blue trousers and wearing field scarves (neckties).
Things had changed in Vietnam since my departure from the theater on board the Enterprise in the summer of 1967. On 31 January 1968, the first day of Tet, the principal religious holiday throughout Vietnam, Hanoi had launched a countrywide surprise offensive throughout South Vietnam, utilizing more than 120,00 °Communist troops, Vietcong and NVA regulars, which had infiltrated South Vietnam. U.S. intelligence had not detected any indications that would prompt a warning, and the U.S. forces and the ARVN were unprepared for the well-organized operation. Initially the offensive was successful, penetrating into the U.S. embassy compound and almost overrunning the U.S. Air Force air base at Bien Hoa outside Saigon. However, friendly forces were rallied by the U.S. commanders, and led by U.S. Army and Marine units, they turned the situation around, blunting the offensive and administering what turned out to be a sound defeat to the Communists.