Isan’t it amazing how little things change? Reading the Kitty Hawk and Constellation sections of the report its the same old gangs of blacks beating up on whites and then claiming racism.
*******************
I served in catapults on an earlier ship, CVA-42, in 1960-62. Black on white fighting broke out below on the hangar deck one night when we were in the Med. There were some major injuries before it was stopped after a couple of hours. A couple of nights later, one or two of the instigators just “disappeared”.
Seemed to have a way of taking care of itself.
Float check
We had a fairly high failure rate in first term enlistees, about 20-25%. In my divisions I had to get rid of 1 hispanic, 2 blacks, and a Vietnamese for pattern of misconduct, several white kids for drugs, and one little weird kid who came out of the closet. We didn't put up with too much from the sailors. The hispanic kid told his first class to F off, and when he and I had a discussion about it he told me that his tasking (from me) was bulls#$t. He was talking to the Skipper in less than 30 minutes. I thought the skipper would restrict him from liberty for the port period. The Old Man gave him 2 months of restriction and docked him 1/2 his pay for two months. It was all I could do to not yell "Damn! That's gotta hurt."
The Vietnamese kid was the funniest and most infuriating. Our legal officer nicknamed him Keyser Soze (the ultimate criminal from "the Usual Suspects") On the outside he was a bungling idiot, afraid to work on the flight deck, who begged to be kept working heads and beds. Behind that exterior was a criminal mastermind. Not really, but when we started finding out all the stuff he had done it made a better story. He originally was getting processed out for a pattern of misconduct, little stuff like UA and violating verbal and written instructions. As we were processing him out we took him to security for some out processing from the base where he produced a fake id card by mistake. It had his picture, but his BEQ roommate's name and rank. He had stolen it from his roommate and then doctored it with his photo. Theft, fraud, destruction of government property. When he produced the proper ID, the security guy looked him up and said he had to deregister his car, a car he wasn't authorized to have. He then produced a faked request chit for the car forging the signature's for his whole chain of command up to the CO. Forgery, false official statement, violation of a general order. Then we found out he didn't legally own the car and had never paid the appropriate taxes or insurance.
Our legal officer literally begged him to stop breaking the law long enough for us to admin sep him.
The reason we were so quick to jettison the trash was that the rest of our kids were so good. I've never seen a harder working bunch of guys anywhere. They would work a twelve hour day and still greet you with a smile. I would never begrudge them a nap in the p-way just below the flight deck between cycles. They deserved it. Those kids are the one of the things that still gives me hope for the future of this country.