Life-changing crisis. That’s the only way to describe what happened to my husband on July 29, 1967. He was off the coast of Vietnam on the carrier USS Forrestal, in a plane on the flight deck and ready for launch. A Zuni rocket from another plane accidentally fired, racing across the deck and hitting the fuel tank of an A-4 Skyhawk. All hell broke loose. Other bombs went off in the heat, ripping a huge hole in the flight deck and burning through sleeping quarters below. Altogether, ten bombs exploded and 134 men were killed, including all of the trained firefighters. Miraculously, my husband survived and started trying to help. He learned some life lessons that day.
At that time, only the designated firefighters were trained to fight fires. Once they were killed, the expertise was lost. My husband was spraying water on the deck, for example, washing off the foam which could put the fire out. Everyone was trying hard to rescue the ship, but lacked the skill. Eventually, they somehow succeeded and headed to the Philippines for repair.
In any crisis, lessons can be learned which forever inform our lives. For the rest of his career, Flack ensured that everyone he was responsible for went to fire fighting school, whether his division, department, squadron, or ship. Once, when a young man complained, his division officer said, “Don’t say that to the captain; he’s trying to save your life.”
On that terrible day, Flack found himself crawling on his belly through pitch-black passageways, trying to find his men. Thereafter, he carried a flashlight on him so he could see his way when power was lost.
He became a better stress manager. On a scale of one to ten, that catastrophe was a ten. As he says, “After that, everything else was less than a ten.”
What life-changing crisis have you faced? What did you learn?
by Kathleen Vestal Logan, MS, MA August 11, 2017