Picking up the pieces

On the morning of July 29, 1967, the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal was conducting combat flight operations on "Yankee Station" off the coast of war-torn Vietnam.

Suddenly, at 10:50 a.m., a "stray electrical signal," a U.S. Navy investigation concluded, caused a rocket strapped beneath the wing of a fighter to ignite, sending it hurtling across the flight deck of the carrier. It hit the fuel tank of another plane, which exploded, causing volatile jet fuel to burst into an orange ball of flames.

That explosion also caused a 1,000 pound bomb to fall to the deck, where it cracked open and began burning before it too exploded.

Then a second bomb exploded, sending razor-sharp shrapnel and other debris flying in all directions. The explosion blew a gaping hole in the carriers flight deck into which burning fuel, water and firefighting foam flowed -into crews quarters located directly below.

According to the Navy investigation, while fires on the flight deck were controlled within an hour, it took over 17 hours to extinguish the fires raging below decks in the ships tight spaces and passageways.

When the flames and smoke finally cleared, the USS Forrestal Incident, as it came to be known, claimed the lives of 134 sailors and airmen and severely injured or burned 161 more.

USS Repose

To the south aboard the hospital ship USS Repose, Corpsman David Griffith was initially unaware of the catastrophe as his ship plied the waters of the South China Sea off the South Vietnamese coast in support of combat operations.

The Repose was immediately escorted north under heavy security, where it met the crippled Forrestal off Da Nang. In addition to providing medical assistance to the wounded, the Repose took aboard the Forrestal's dead.

The crew of the Repose, according to Griffith, emptied one of the ship's two substantial refrigeration units, which where then filled with body bags - an improvised morgue. The bodies were transported to Da Nang.

Normally, Griffith said, the Repose would anchor some distance from shore to take on provisions and to conduct other ship-to-shore activities. Not this time. The Repose moored directly to the dock in the Da Nang harbor.

"That was the only time we ever. ... "Griffith stopped to collect himself. "...That we ever moored at the pier."

He and his fellow crewman watched as the body bags were unloaded.

"I will never forget it," Griffith recalled. "I looked out and watched the ship's crew take those body bags out on stretchers one by one by one. Yeah, that was. ..."

Griffith didn't finish his sentence. Instead, he simply said, "As far as specific casualties are concerned ..." and he again struggled to find the words.

This from a man Cheney who had seen his own share of maimed bodies and death aboard a ship whose mission was to treat combat wounded Marines and others, day in and day out.

Enlistment

The son of a Nazarene pastor, Griffith spent a majority of his early life in Cheney. After graduating high school in Wenatchee, where his father had moved his family to tend to another flock, he attended college.

He later enlisted in the Navy after depleting all his student deferments for the military draft. Seeing the writing on the wall, he wanted some degree of control over his military service that being drafted wouldn't allow. He was specific.

"I didn't want to go into the Marine Corps," he said.

Instead, he became a Navy corpsman.

After training, Griffith shipped aboard the USS Repose in late 1966 and was assigned to the ship's malaria ward. But soon after he was offered an opportunity to become an operating room technician. He accepted, even though he had to extend his overseas deployment by six months.

Mercy service

Although the Repose mainly served to patch-up wounded Marines and other servicemen, it also served South Vietnamese soldiers and wounded civilians and children.

Doctors would often go ashore when the Repose was in port for repairs in places like Subic Bay in the Philippines. There, they would hold health clinics ashore, and often treated civilians who needed surgeries or other medical care aboard the Repose.

"It was just like a civilian hospital," Griffith said. "We did everything."

But while cruising off the Vietnamese coast the ship's medical staff dealt with a constant string of surgeries on wounded serviceman. Medevac flights typically came in most frequently during the day, with only the most critical arriving at night.

While estimates vary, over 153,000 American service members were wounded during the roughly 20 year Vietnam War; over 58,000 were killed in action, according to the National Archives and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"During the day it was it was one flight after another," Griffith said of medevac flights.

At least until early 1968, that is.

Tet

Causality counts took an 11 percent jump when 1,928 Americans were killed in action in 1965. The death count continued to mount each year, peaking in 1968 at around 17,000. The beginning of that year was a turning point in the war that history generally remembers as the Tet Offensive.

Late on Jan. 30, 1968, the work of Griffith and his medical colleagues took a drastic turn as the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong guerillas launched a large-scale, coordinated surprise attack on military and civilian targets throughout South Vietnam.

"The casualties were coming in so fast for two solid weeks," Griffith recalled. "We could hardly keep up with keeping the floors mopped, keeping the blood off the floors, keeping the gurneys clean."

The pace of causalities was so fast that Griffith said he felt like he was losing his mind. Some did, he said. Despite his Christian upbringing, he said he couldn't even pray. In a moment of reckoning he resolved not to let events overwhelm him.

"Tet was tough," he said.

The ship's triage area became so full that the wounded spilled into the ships passageways. Normally, there were breaks between surgeries.

"During Tet there were none," Griffith recalled. "The triage space wasn't big enough to hold the casualties as fast as they were coming in."

He paused to collect himself.

"So there you are," he said.

The shield

Much is made of the effect on troops who experience direct combat. But there are many types of indirect war trauma as well.

For Griffith, the effect of seeing and treating a constant stream of combat wounded, patching some together as best they could while others died on the operating table, took its toll.

"I had to put up a shield," he said. "As difficult as it was, I had to put my emotional feelings aside from the horrific visual things that I saw."

It took some time to dismantle that emotional shield after returning home, Griffith said, and to relearn the empathy he'd been taught as the son of a minister.

"That shield worked too well," he said. "I saw that I began to lose my humanity. I lost the ability to feel the hurts and the fears of my fellow human beings."

It took, he said, four to five years after his honorable discharge to regain that empathy.

Lingering effects

To this day Griffith finds it difficult to watch movies or documentaries related to Vietnam.

"They bring up anxiety in me," he said

War leaves wounds, both internal and external. Griffith is a 14-year pancreatic cancer survivor, a condition the Department of Veterans Affairs has attributed to secondary exposure to Agent Orange, a cancer-causing defoliant used extensively during the war to remove vegetation the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong guerillas used for cover.

Marines and other casualties were routinely medevac'd with their contaminated clothing on, arriving on the Repose where medical staff were exposed to the carcinogenic agent as well.

Griffith also suffers from hearing loss due to helicopter noise, which prevented him from finding work as an operating room tech as a civilian.

"Which was a disappointment," he said. "That's what I wanted to do in the first place."

All told, Griffith served 18 months aboard the Repose. After his honorable discharge in 1969, he landed a job with an insurance company as a medical fraud investigator. He was later hired at Lakeland Village, a state-run facility offering services to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Medical Lake. He eventually retired from Lakeland.

Despite his experiences, Griffith had nothing but praise for the training he received in the Navy that allowed him to work in the medical field for the rest of his life.

"I'm so thankful for the Navy that put me in a career that was good for me," he said.

Casualties of war

But Griffith wasn't so enthusiastic about American leadership that continues to put the country's young people in harms way.

"From my experience, we need to realize the real cost of going to war," he said. "Since the Vietnam War we've taken war lightly."

He felt that policymakers need to take into account not only the physical, but emotional ramifications of those sent into war zones.

"The casualty rate is 100 percent," Griffith said. "Either emotionally or physically, you are going to be a casualty. It changes you."

In 2017 there were 18.2 million living veterans in the United States. Of those, just over 4 million had some sort of service-related disability - about 1 in 5 - according to the U.S. Census Bureau.