A Look Back At The Navy Firefighting School

“Always keep the hose’s stream of water between the fire and you,” I recall my Navy fire instructor telling me so many years ago.

If you let the flames get around you, I learned, they’ll reach out and hit you like a boxer’s jab. That’s what happened to me when I was an 18-year-old sailor attending the U.S. Navy Fire Fighting School in San Diego.

I’ve been thinking about my training and experience in Navy firefighting as I follow the story of the July 12^th fire on the USS Bonhomme Richard while the ship was in San Diego Bay undergoing repair. A sailor was arrested and charged with arson and the ship was decommissioned due to the extensive damage from the fire.

In 1970 I was among a group of sailors from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk that attended the Navy firefighting school. After the deadly fire that killed 134 sailors and injured many more on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal in 1967, all carrier sailors were ordered to attend firefighting schools. 

After all, one can't call the fire department while at sea. We were the fire department. 

At the school, we sat through flight deck footage of the Forrestal fire and watched bombs, missiles and jet fuel ignite, and we saw sailors die from the fire and explosions. I recall the gruesome images to this day.  

I liked that officers, chiefs and other senior enlisted people trained alongside junior teenage seamen like me at the firefighting school. All of us were assigned a part of the long hose and told that we had a certain number of seconds to put it together before the instructor turned on the water. The first two attempts failed, and we all were soaked and knocked down by the great force of the water. Laughing together, we were successful on the third attempt. We were wet but happy to have worked as a team.   

I recall the day when we were crowded into a square cement structure that simulated a ship’s compartment.

I held the nozzle of the long hose, and I began to wave the hose in short left to right movements. As I waved the hose too sharply to the left, I allowed the fire to slip past me on my right. The flicker of flame seemed almost human — perhaps even supernaturally evil — as it lashed out like a whip and struck my right arm.

The pain and shock of getting burned and seeing my arm on fire caused me to drop the hose’s nozzle and jump back. Fortunately, the instructor grabbed the discarded nozzle quickly and he ordered me out of the burning structure. To my further embarrassment, the heavy smoke and the hood of my poncho impaired my vision and I hit my head on the oval hatchway as I was exiting the structure. The other instructors rushed to me, as they believed I was seriously injured.

As it turned out, my burns were superficial and the head injury was only a bump, but my pride received some serious blows that day. I returned to the fire and completed the course without further incidents.

After graduating from firefighting school, I went on to serve on a Damage Control Team aboard the Kitty Hawk and fought some real fires, but thankfully those fires were nothing along the lines of the horrendous and deadly fire on the USS Forrestal.

I learned to respect the power and fury of fire at the Navy’s firefighting school and I came to truly respect firefighters in the Navy, in civilian fire departments, and those fighting the great forest fires.

Note: You can read my other sea stories, vignettes, short stories and humor pieces about my time in the U.S. Navy via the below link:

Paul Davis On Crime: Sea Stories: Vignettes, Short Stories And Humor Pieces About My Time In The U.S. Navy

Photos: The top U.S. Navy photo is of the Navy’s firefighting school in San Diego, circa 2007.

The above photo is of a Damage Control Team from the USS Kitty Hawk’s 1970-1971 WESTPAC cruise book.

Below is a photo of the USS Bonhomme Richard on fire, and a photo of the USS Kitty Hawk in 1970:

Last Ride Of The Forrestal, America's First Super Carrier

Christopher P. Cavas at defensenews.com offers a piece on the sad, final ride of the decommissioned aircraft carrier Forrestal from the old Philadelphia Navy Yard in South Philadelphia.

In the frigid pre-dawn darkness of Feb. 4, tugs surrounded the venerable aircraft carrier USS Forrestal (AVT 59, ex-CV 59), long lying dormant at a pier in the old Philadelphia Navy Yard. Huge hawsers were rigged, and before sunrise, the huge Foss Marine tug Lauren Ross, assisted by four smaller tugs, began to ease the ship off the pier, away from another decommissioned flattop, the John F. Kennedy. 

The tow squared up in the Delaware River, and began a slow procession back to the sea. Numerous spectators – many were allowed into the former shipyard to watch the event – dotted the shores of the Delaware, eager to catch a last glimpse of America’s first super carrier.

The ship is bound for Brownsville, Texas, the usual death spot for Navy ships. Several thriving scrapyards line the Brownsville Ship Channel, and one of them, All-Star Metals Inc., was awarded a one-cent US Navy contract in October to break up the Forrestal. She will become the largest warship ever scrapped, anywhere, breaking the record of the Coral Sea, broken up in Baltimore, Md., in the early 1990s.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://blogs.defensenews.com/intercepts/2014/02/last-ride-of-the-forrestal/

Note: The above U.S. Navy photos were taken by Public Affairs Specialist Joseph Battista.

You can click on the photos to enlarge.

Sold For A Penny: Farewell To The USS Forrestal, The Navy's First Supercarrier

Joshua Rhett Miller at Foxnews.com reports on the one cent sale of the USS Forrestal.

Here’s a penny for your thoughts: One red cent could’ve landed you the Navy’s first supercarrier, the decommissioned Forrestal.

The U.S. Navy sold the 1,067-foot behemoth to a Texas company, All Star Metals, to be dismantled, scrapped and recycled, Navy officials announced. It's an inauspicious fate for a ship with a colorful — and tragic — history. It's perhaps best known for a 1967 incident in which stray voltage triggered an accidental explosion that struck a plane on the flight deck whose cockpit was occupied by a young John McCain. A chain reaction of blasts and fires ultimately killed 134 men and injured more than 300.

But its rich past and nearly four decades of service are not enough to spare it. The Navy tried to donate the historic ship for use as a memorial or a museum, but no “viable applications” were received.

“It’s something that the Navy is caught between a rock and a hard place,” said Ken Killmeyer, historian for the USS Forrestal Association and a survivor of the 1967 incident. “They have to have these vessels no matter how big or small they are, and they use them as you would your car until they’re no longer financially viable. So, they decommission them.”

You can read the rest of the story via the below link:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/10/23/forrestal-navy-first-supercarrier-sold-for-1-penny/?intcmp=trending

You can also read about the history of the USS Forrestal via the below link:

http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/f3/forrestal.htm

Note: The above photo was released by the U.S. Navy.

Cool Navy Photo: U.S. Navy Sailors/Firefighters

In the above photo sailors fight a fire during a shipboard firefighting course at Fleet Training Center on Naval Base San Diego on March 14th.

The Fleet Training Center trains more than 28,000 Sailors a year and administers 171 different courses, including firefighting, damage control, torpedo training, radio and communications training.

The photo brings back memories as I graduated from two firefighting courses at the training center in San Diego way back in 1970 when I was a teenage sailor stationed aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk.

After the devastating fire aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal in 1967, in which 134 sailors were killed, all carrier sailors were sent to firefighting schools.

Afer all, when a ship catches fire at sea, one can't call the fire department - we were the fire department.

The above U.S. Navy photo was taken by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Benjamin Crossley.

You can click on the photo to enlarge.

Note: I wrote briefly about my time at the firefighting school in my Crime Beat column on Joseph Wambaugh's Fire Lover, a true crime book about a firefighter/arsonist.

You can read the column via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/search?q=Fire+Monster