us navy aircraft carriers in vietnam war 1972

Benjamin Cloud, a San Diego native, scrambled to quell the mayhem, and six hours after it started, the riot was over.īut after the accused were flown to San Diego and put in the brig at the 32nd Street Naval Station, Truhe said he realized there was more to the story. Townsend and the ship’s Black executive officer, Cmdr.

Shortly after, several White sailors also began roaming the ship, carrying out assaults on Black sailors.” “A small group of Black sailors began roaming the carrier, venting their anger and frustration with apparent random assaults on White sailors. “The spring had been tightly wound up and was about to be released,” Truhe writes. Both were false, but by then it almost didn’t matter. Townsend was dead, that Black crew members were being killed and thrown overboard. Word of those incidents spread, fueling more tension. There were arrests with handcuffs and clubbings. Marines were told to disperse any people they saw huddling together several misunderstood that to mean they should focus on Black gatherings.

A White Marine pulled a gun at one point, and Black sailors nearby felt they were going to to be shot. In Truhe’s account, they focused their nightsticks on just the Black crewmen. Questions about integrity and honesty.Ī detachment of Marines, in charge of security on the ship, swung into action. Questions about fairness in the legal system, an arena where he would do his life’s work. There were questions about deep-seated racism in the Navy, an institution he respected then and respects still. More questions followed, all of them unsettling to a South Dakota farm boy raised by his father to resist discrimination aimed at Native Americans. Not many people - in the Navy, in Congress, in the media - asked the question that bothered Truhe from the outset: If this was interracial fighting that left service members on both sides injured, why were only Black crewmen being prosecuted? Most were “below-average mental capacity,” the subcommittee said, and probably never should have been accepted into military service. The report rejected any suggestion of institutional prejudice in the Navy and blamed the Kitty Hawk riot on a small number of “thugs,” all of them Black. A congressional subcommittee investigated behind closed doors and issued a report three months later that focused on what it called “more relaxed discipline in the military services.” It also attracted nationwide attention at a time of explosive racial tensions affecting various parts of American society, not just the military.

Us navy aircraft carriers in vietnam war 1972