Ceremony for the Fallen

by Dave Payson, 1964-68                 

------------------------------Author’s note:  This story originally ran on the USS Wilhoite’s website under the title “Aircraft Down.”  However, at the 2007 reunion in Silverdale, Washington, during a ceremony aboard the USS Turner Joy honoring the Wilhoite’s fallen, I realized that I had the story wrong, and upon returning home from the reunion I had it taken off the website.  Evidently, trying to remember events that happened in the 60s, a decade that has been “lost” to many Baby-boomers, was a problem for me, as well.  Lame humor aside, in the first story I described how the Wilhoite went to the rescue a pilot whose jet had been shot down over the Tonkin Gulf, but when we arrived on scene it was too late, and all we could do was recover his body.  But after the memorial service on the Turner Joy and conversations I had with my shipmates, I realized it wasn’t a pilot’s body we’d recovered that night in 1965, but rather the body, or bodies, of Turner Joy sailors who had been killed in a gun-mount explosion during a gunfire support mission.  (The record shows that three Turner Joy sailors perished in the accident.)   In this rewrite of the original story, then, I attempt to set the record straight about what really happened that night in Vietnam when we came to the rescue of Turner Joy in her time of need, a ship that had already earned legend status from the Gulf of Tonkin Incident a year earlier.  Ironically, for the several Vietnam vets at the memorial service on the Turner Joy, it was the closest we had been—physically and emotionally—to the Vietnam War since we were young sailors on the Wilhoite.  Obviously, the Wilhoite wasn’t at the 2007 reunion, but in my mind’s eye, she was there.  I could see her one pier over from the Turner Joy as the VFW honor guard’s rifle salute crackled across Bremerton’s inner harbor setting sea gulls aloft like kites in the wind.  For me, the 2007 reunion was special for a number of reasons:  (1) my wife and I had been married 35 years earlier at the Silverdale Methodist Church just down the street from the reunion hotel, (2) my hometown of Steilacoom is just 50 miles from Silverdale, across the saline waters of Puget Sound, (3) after the Wilhoite was struck from the Navy’s rolls in 1972, she was scrapped at General Metal Corp. in Tacoma, five miles from my hometown, and (4) the most important reason of all, after staying away for too many years, I was attending my first Wilhoite reunion.  

---------------------------------We had no idea what to expect on those first Vietnam patrols.  Everything was new for us.  By the time the ships of the Seventh Fleet (including the Wilhoite) began arriving in the war zone in significant numbers, our ground forces had been at war for years trying unsuccessfully to route the enemy with superior firepower.  The war in Vietnam rewrote the book on guerilla warfare, and our war fighters never got the hang of countering it.  At sea our mission was to patrol the coastal waters to stop weapons infiltration (smuggling) by the enemy, and we had it much easier than our troops on land or our Air Force and Navy carrier pilots.  The enemy had nothing to speak of in the way of ships or planes to challenge us, save for a few hand-me-down Russian Migs that our jet jockeys knocked out of the sky like clay pigeons at a skeet shoot.   Uncontested by our enemy at sea, we ruled the coastal waters and the deep waters as well.  Out on Yankee and Zulu stations, our carrier jets conducted around-the-clock air ops, obliterating and defoliating targets on land with precision bombing.  So while our pilots were terribly vulnerable to the enemy’s Triple-A (anti-aircraft artillery) and SAMs (surface-to-air missiles), with many ending up dead or as POWs, the sailors who crewed the warships of the Seventh Fleet, well, we were strangely insulated from it all.

Back to the aircraft carriers for a minute . . . one of them—the USS Midway, CVA-41— was my old ship, and when she was out there on Yankee Station and I was patrolling the coastline on the Wilhoite, I often had a déjà vu, out-of-body-like experience of being two places at once.  Though I had only been on the Midway for six months, in ’63–‘64, making one pre-war West-Pac cruise on her, she was my first ship, and, as such, she has left a lasting impression on me.  I’m a member of a Midway reunion group made up of radarmen, and I edit the group’s newsletter, “Scope Dope News.”  Claiming the title as the U.S. Navy’s longest serving ship (47 years), today the Midway earns her keep as a museum ship in San Diego harbor, and is that city’s number-one tourist attraction.

Again I have drifted off course in the telling of this story, which is supposed to be about the Wilhoite, not the aircraft carrier Midway.  I apologize for my frequent meanderings, but somehow all these different story lines seem to interweave, distracting my attention on any one subject.  Focusing now, this story is about the 2007 Silverdale reunion and Wilhoite’s role in the Vietnam War.  The connection between the Wilhoite’s crew returning to the Turner Joy is “newsworthy,” I think, because of the connection the two ships had during the Vietnam War.  But while this is interesting, the real story here are the men who attended the Silverdale reunion, for they represented the entire life cycle of the ship, from her commissioning in 1942 to her decommissioning in 1970.  Several generations of Wilhoite sailors gathered at the 2007 reunion.  Heading the attendees were three “plank-holders,” who we honored with special plaques and other acknowledgments; their presence at the reunion was remarkable.  They served on the Wilhoite during World War II, in the Atlantic Theatre, and today are part of the “The Great Generation.”   Also present representing the Wilhoite were Korean War vets, Vietnam War vets, Operation Deep Freeze vets, Cold War vets, and vets who made the Wilhoite’s last journey across the Pacific to decommission her at Bremerton, Washington, in 1970.   So there is still another connection between the two ships:  the men of the Wilhoite gathered for a ceremony on the Turner Joy, in Bremerton, Washington, where the Wilhoite was decommissioned and the Turner Joy is a museum ship.

But returning to the part of this story that chronicles the Wilhoite’s years in Vietnam, those five or so years when she patrolled the coastal waters of Vietnam as part of Operation Market Time, searching the local fishing fleets, and anything else on those waters that looked even remotely suspicious, for weapons or other contraband the enemy might be smuggling, and occasionally finding the Mother Load, like the time she intercepted and destroyed the big steel-hulled, weapons-laden trawler I write about in my sea story titled “The Trawler Incident,” which you’ll also find on this website.  The beauty of it is that we were fully engaged in our mission, remarkably so, it seems, since this was during that period in our country’s history when just about everyone was protesting—often violently—against the war.  Our morale was high for two reasons, I think.  One, we believed in our mission (having no second thoughts about it whatsoever) and, two, we knew that following these extended patrols we’d be reveling in Hong Kong or Bangkok or Sasebo or Subic Bay or any of the other exotic liberty ports of the Orient that the Seventh fleet ships frequented.  Call me biased but few ships’ crews over there were as gung-ho as the Wilhoite’s.  When we intercepted a suspected enemy weapons infiltrator, we acted accordingly, using stern measures, but never deadly force, that I can recall.  Most of the people we encountered in the rag-tag fleet of sampans, junks and trawlers were simple fishermen who wanted nothing more than to feed their families and to scratch out a living—and to survive, of course.  Many were displaced citizens, refugees who feared for their lives and who had had their lives turned upside down by the war.  They were on the run, in one direction or the other, north or south, friend or foe, it was impossible for us to tell.  Frequently they couldn’t produce identification to prove to us they were not the enemy.  But unless we found weapons, or they shot as us or tried to escape, we let them go, after we put a scare into them.   The rules of engagement in Vietnam were ambiguous at best, and we left our options open; otherwise we would’ve spent most of our time transporting prisoners into Da Nang and Saigon.  Our job was to stop weapons smugglers—to stop weapons infiltration by sea—not to be a prison ship.  For every weapon we intercepted, we saved the life of one of our fighting men humping it out there in the jungle.  Our captain told us that one time when we were gathered on the fantail for some occasion.  It sounded good to me then, and it sounds just as good to me now 43 years later, as I write this in the comfort of my home.

We learned about war by OJT—on the job training—and what we learned helped write the book on naval coastal warfare in that strange war, which was so unlike any other our country had ever fought in.  With our superior weaponry we should’ve rolled right over them, like powerful industrial nations had done to non-industrial countries since the American Civil War.  On paper it was a total mismatch.  But wars aren’t fought on paper, and you can’t kill what you can’t see—which is what made the North Vietnamese Army and their guerilla brethren, the Viet Cong, so hard to fight—rarely would they come out in the open to fight.  We had to draw them out.  I can recall at least two times, for example, our captain drove the Wilhoite right up to the beach to draw enemy fire, offering us up as bait in hopes of giving our gunners something to shoot at.  We were spoiling for a fight on those first patrols, shooting at real targets (or at least at targets that we perceived to be real) and providing naval gunfire support for our forces on shore.  NGS was not typically a job for a radar picket ship.  But this was before U.S. warships had arrived on the scene in significant numbers.  And although we enjoyed giving our gunners mates a hard time (like after the time a spotter plane reported the sum of our target destruction was one water buffalo), on occasion we shot at the enemy and the enemy shot back.  Fortunately his aim was no better than ours. 

But, again, I am getting sidetracked in the telling of this story.  It’s easy to lose the main thrust of this story because it seems there is so much to tell—and it was so long ago.  I’m meaning to get back to the part of the story in 1965 when the Wilhoite went to the rescue of the Turner Joy—if rescue is the right word for it—in the waters off South Vietnam.  But before I return to that part of the story, allow me to give you some background on the Wilhoite during those years, and how she came to find herself in troubled waters, and how I found myself right there with her. 

I’ll never forget that first deployment to Vietnam.  We drove ourselves to the war, so to speak, crossing the Pacific from Pearl Harbor, and not knowing what to expect after a week of steady steaming across an ocean that sparkled under a brilliant sun like our own personal jewel.  When we arrived off the coast of Vietnam, it didn’t take long for us to realize that the Navy was still learning how to fight this war; hell, all forces, ashore, in air and at sea, were still learning how to fight this war!  By then, I considered myself a Wilhoite veteran, though I was still a boot compared to many of the men in the radar gang.  As I mentioned previously, before coming to the Wilhoite, I was a crew member of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Midway, CVA-41, for six months, making one prewar West-Pac cruise on her before going to radar school at Treasure Island, California, for another nine months.  So the Wilhoite was my second ship, and by the time I came aboard her I was already a “Fleet Sailor” and a graduate of Class “A” Radar School.  I wasn’t a boot, but no matter how “salty” I fancied myself to be, there were plenty of my shipmates who’d been in longer.  The moral of the story:  once a boot, always a boot.

The year before our first Vietnam campaign, in 1964, the Wilhoite conducted cold war missions out of Pearl—Northern and Southern Ops, we called them.  These patrols took us from one end of the Pacific to the other.  On the northern leg, we operated in the frigid waters of the Bering Sea near the Aleutian Islands.  There we monitored Soviet Union ICBM test shots and participated in Operation Dew Line (Distant Early Warning) operations, as part of the elaborate radar network to detect potentially threatening aircraft headed toward the United States, so-called “Sundowners.”  These patrols were serious business, during the first half of the 60s when anything could happen and usually did—America versus the Soviet Union, like in the “Fail Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove” movies popular at the time. 

On the southern leg, again monitoring Soviet missile tests, we operated near the equator, in emerald-green tropical waters alive with flying fish skipping across the wave tops like flat stones.  Weather-wise and scenery-wise the southern ops couldn’t have been more opposite than the Bering Sea patrols.  But whether we were in the frigid northern Pacific waters or the tropical southern Pacific in the conduct of these patrols tracking the Soviet missile ships, one thing was constant:  before going to sea we would be “invaded” (that’s how we felt about it) by ECTs (electronic collection technicians), who were electronic wizards in collecting and analyzing telemetry from the Soviet missiles.  From this telemetry, they could learn a lot about the Soviet’s ICBMs, or so we were told and they claimed.  And they quite literally took over a large section of section of the Wilhoite’s radar room, which we resented, of course.

But returning to the main story, which I keep digressing from and I apologize for these digressions, among the first of the U.S. warships to arrive in the coastal waters of Vietnam was the USS Turner Joy (DD-951), a Forrest Sherman-class destroyer.  And by the time we arrived on station a year and a half later, Turner Joy was already a legend in her own time for the role she’d played with the USS Maddox (DD-731), when the two destroyers engaged and sank several North Vietnamese gun boats off the coast of North Vietnam.  It was this controversial action, famously known as the “Tonkin Gulf Incident,” that helped propel the United States into war with North Vietnam.

When it comes to describing that moment in time that we rendezvoused with the Turner Joy that night long ago, the precise details are hard to recall, which is why I feel compelled to disclose that I’m not so much remembering this part of the story as I am “reconstructing” it.   Oh, it happened, all right. Wilhoite’s encounter with Turner Joy in Vietnam in 1965 is a historical fact, a matter of record—and it probably happened somewhat in the way I describe it here.  But this is a sea story, after all, and the teller of a sea story is allowed some leeway on how he or she presents the facts in this genre of storytelling.  Hence I am filling in the gaps as best as I can . . .

Plus there is anecdotal information about the meeting of the two ships, eye-witness accounts, reiterated most recently by the Vietnam vets at the Wilhoite reunion—a half dozen of us from the Vietnam era who assembled on the forecastle of the Turner Joy to honor the Wihoite’s fallen in October of 2007,  a half dozen of us who compared notes after the ceremony in the hospitality room later that night, where tall tales were exchanged. 

One of those tall tales exchanged in the hospitality room, I do believe, was mine—and it went something like this.  The Wilhoite was on a routine Market Time patrol searching for weapons smugglers, patrolling the coastline in her quadrant, when she received a message that the Turner Joy had suffered a serious accident; her forward gun-mount had exploded and there were casualties.  On duty in Combat Information Center (CIC)—I was a radarman during my three years on board the Wilhoite—I heard the radio transmission when it came over the bridge speaker, which we monitored in CIC.  The captain, after scrambling to the bridge from his quarters, ordered us to proceed to the coordinates of the Turner Joy’s position at full-speed.   He didn’t have the authority to issue this order himself, of course.  The word would have come to him from his superiors onshore, COMWESTPAC, or whomever . . .

Save for dim starlight filtering down from the heavens, the night was inky black, moonless, as I recall, as we cut through the calm seas of the South China at the best speed the Wilhoite could make, some 22.5 knots, avoiding the nests of junks and trawlers that we otherwise would have been harassing had we not been called out on this rescue operation.   We didn’t complain.  It was a welcome diversion from our normal routine.

Two hours later we arrived at the Turner Joy’s position, about 3 nautical miles off the coast.  From where I sat on the radarscope in CIC, there really wasn’t much to see, of course—not with my eyes, at least.  But they don’t call the eerily green-glowing confines of CIC “the eyes of the ship” for nothing.  From studying my radarscope with my hawk-like radar-trained eyes, monitoring the bridge’s radio transmissions in CIC, and receiving continuous reports from my good buddy, fellow radarman John Wayne Bohon, who had lookout duty on bridge and was hooked up to me via sound-powered phones, I had a pretty good idea about what was going on topside.

“It’s a tin can all right, Payson . . . the Turner Joy.   Forward gun mount blown to sh—”

Well, I knew—we all knew—it was the Turner Joy, for crying out loud, Bohon, I thought.  But I didn’t say anything to him because I didn’t want to spoil his fun, his little game, if that’s what he was playing.  So I said, “Roger that, Bo.  Geez, you remember she was the one who helped start this—”

“I know, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.  Holy Sweet Jesus, what a mess!  I think there were men lost.  I mean . . .” his voice was shaky as he digested the scene below him from his perch at the forward lookout position on the bridge.  I knew exactly where he was standing; I’d pulled lookout duty up there many times myself.

Bohon was from the “Show Me” state, hometown Sedalia, Missouri, and he was getting it showed to him, all right—especially when they put the flood lamp on the partially mangled destroyer.

So my original introduction to this tragedy on the Turner Joy came to me through the normally cool but this time halting voice of John Wayne Bohon.  This time he was all shook up, as the song goes, which was very unlike “Bo,” as we called him.

At some point, I’m sure, after I was relieved of the radar watch, I headed topside with Bo and our other good buddy, John Shanahan, who hailed from Newtown, Pennsylvania.   We came aboard the Wilhoite about the same time, in 1964, and were inseparable for a couple years.  Back in Pearl, we even shared an apartment and a car for a year at Waikiki Beach, commuting to Pearl Harbor every day just like we were regular civilians.

Topside, we must have watched the scene unfold in the pitch-black night, not a rescue operation but a recovery operation, of those men lost in the gun-mount explosion.  I remember only one body being recovered, but there were three, we must have learned later—and then I learned it again at the ceremony of the Wilhoite’s fallen aboard the Turner Joy at the 2007 reunion.  So many years later.  This was the “false memory” I had of the pilot in my first story.  But after so many years, how can we trust our memories on anything?  They are mostly just bits and fragments of our lives, in the end.

We probably stayed up on deck for some time while our crew offered what assistance she could to the Turner Joy.  I talk of this now as if it were two ships interacting with each other out there that night in the Gulf of Tonkin, in the metaphorical sense—but, of course, it was the officers and crewmen of the two ships who did the interacting.

Bohon, Shanahan, and I, normally three wild and crazy guys who needed only the slightest excuse to skylark, probably didn’t have much to say that night as they recovered the bodies from the water; we must’ve watched in stunned silence and morbid disbelief, and eventually we would’ve gone below deck, back to CIC perhaps, or most likely, back to the radar berthing compartment and our racks.  At sea a sailor’s rack was his girlfriend, if he was lucky enough to even have a girlfriend, which many of us did, back home.  But out there, in Vietnam, Gulf of Tonkin, Southeast Asia, we were a long way from home.

The Turner Joy would live to fight another day, returning stateside for several months for repair of her badly damaged gun mount; within half a year she would find her way back to ‘Nam with rebuilt armament.  There, she would serve several more years, finishing out her long and illustrious career in 1982, being decommissioned in San Diego.  She was a tin can’s tin can, no doubt about that.  The Turner Joy won nine battle stars in Vietnam.  Today, as I have described here, she is a museum ship in Bremerton, Washington, which is where the Vietnam vets of the Wilhoite crossed paths with her again, at the 2007 reunion.

 The Wilhoite, commissioned a decade and a half before the Turner Joy, would go on to patrol the coastal waters of Vietnam for two more years, performing her Market Time duties with distinction and generally living up to her motto of “Can Do.”  Two years after the Turner Joy accident in 1965, she would chase down and help destroy a big steel-hulled trawler, which turned out to be the largest weapons infiltrator killed or captured during the war.  She was decommissioned in 1972, three years before the Vietnam War ended in 1975.  Looking back on it now, as a sailor who served on the Wilhoite for three years, we fought the war on our own terms, and we did plenty to upset the enemy’s coastal supply line off the coast of Vietnam.  We made a big difference.  The Wilhoite won six battle stars in Vietnam, and we served on her with pride.  Most importantly, not one of her sailors died in the war from combat-related wounds; not one of our names ended up on The Wall—the Vietnam War Memorial—in Washington, D.C. 

Finally, I have reached the telling of this story about the Wilhoite and her crew, of the years I served on her, of the war, and of so many adventures on the high seas.  The Wilhoite is gone but not forgotten; she will always live through us, her crew.  We will not let her die.  It is a wondrous thing, this bond between a sailor and his ship. 

I don’t think anyone can really explain it.

The End