Murder By Fire
By Paul Davis
I was sitting at my desk in the Radio Communications Division's Message Processing Center aboard the USS Kitty Hawk in 1971 as the aircraft carrier was on “Yankee Station” in the Gulf of Tonkin, launching aircraft that flew combat sorties against the North Vietnamese, when I came across a copy of a message for the ship’s captain.
My small desk was located in a cubbyhole partially hidden by a series of pneumatic tubes, which we called “Bunny Tubes.” We used pneumatic power to shoot high priority messages, such as the message I was reading, in a two-foot-long missile-like container to the captain’s office and to other senior officers aboard the ship.
As I was responsible for the administrative security of messages that were distributed, filed and eventually destroyed, a copy of the message landed on my desk. The message informed the captain that former Engineman 3rd Class Robert Bean, a former sailor assigned to the Kitty Hawk, had died in prison.
I remembered Bean as I attended a U.S Navy firefighting school in 1970 with him prior to our setting sail to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.
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.
As the USS Forrestal was conducting combat operations on Yankee Station, a fire erupted on July 29, 1967. An electrical failure caused a Zuni rocket attached to an F-4 Phantom to launch as the jet fighter was sitting on the flight deck. The rocket struck another aircraft on the flight deck, an A-4 Skyhawk. The aircraft’s highly flammable jet fuel spread quickly across the flight deck, which ignited a series of explosions that blew sailors and aircraft apart.
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 still 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. At one point, 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 successfully as a team.
I was 18 years old at the time, and Bean was a couple of years older. He was squat with dirty blonde hair and a pimply face. I recall that he was surly and inattentive. More than once, the instructors screamed at him to get him to focus. He was also chewed out by a Kitty Hawk senior chief who was also taking the firefighting course.
“Son, you’re not taking this training seriously. This course can not only save your worthless fuckin' life, but it can also save the lives of your shipmates should there be a fire on the ship,” the crusty chief said in a gruff voice. “So get your head outta your ass and get with the program.”
Bean stayed to himself that week and he didn’t join the camaraderie of his fellow sailors. He was not much of a team player, although the course stressed teamwork.
“Always keep the hose’s stream of water between the fire and you,” I recall one of the Navy fire instructors telling us, "If you let the flames get around you, they'll reach out and hit you like a boxer's jab."
And that’s what happened to me.
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 and medical corpsmen 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 carrier and fought some real fires, but thankfully those fires were nothing along the lines of the horrendous and deadly fire on the USS Forrestal. With an abundance of bombs, missiles and JP jet fuel onboard, even a small fire on a carrier can escalate and become a major catastrophe, as it did on the USS Forrestal.
I later learned that Bean, who never had a girlfriend until he joined the Navy and met a portly and exuberant college student in San Diego, did not want to leave her when the aircraft carrier departed San Diego on route to Hawaii, then the Philippines, and lastly, to the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam.
After the aircraft carrier made a port of call to Hawaii, Bean was so angry and heartbroken that he became drunk in a Honolulu bar just off Waikiki Beach.
When the bar closed, Bean took a cab back to the aircraft carrier at the Pearl Harbor naval base and he staggered aboard and leaned against bulkheads in the passageways as he traveled to his workstation below decks to an engine room compartment. The compartment space had three sailors on watch, and they told Bean to go to his rack and sleep it off as he was annoying them with his sad sack love story. Bean sat in a chair and appeared to pass out, so the enginemen on duty ignored him.
When one of the enginemen left the compartment to go to the head, and the other two were talking to each other with their backs to him, Bean in his drunken state had an idea to punish his uncaring shipmates and cripple the carrier so it would head back to San Diego for repairs rather than go on to Southeast Asia.
Angry at the enginemen, as well as with the entire U.S. Navy, Bean took out his lighter and reached into a trash can filled with paper. He lit a piece of paper and dropped it back in the trash can, which quickly set fire to the other papers. Bean then lifted the trash can and tossed it into a corner near a supply cabinet and ran out of the engine room compartment.
The trash can fire ignited some stored flammable material, and the compartment was quickly engulfed with fire and smoke. The two enginemen tried to contain the fire with fire extinguishers, but they were soon overcome with smoke, fell to the deck, and died. The engineman who had gone to the head raised the alarm.
The fire was extinguished by a Damage Control Team that came on the scene in less than a minute. Although there was severe damage to the compartment, there was not enough damage to prevent the aircraft carrier from departing Pearl Harbor later that week and sailing towards the Philippines.
After a brief investigation, Bean was arrested, court-martialed and sentenced to prison for arson and murder. He never saw his girlfriend again.
The message to the captain that I read at my desk reported that Bean, who was left unattended in a prison kitchen for only a moment, died of self-immolation, having doused himself in cooking oil and then set himself on fire. He died horribly as he was engulfed in searing flames as he fell to the floor.
Some thought it was a fitting death for a man who had committed murder by fire.
© 2024 By Paul Davis
.jpg)
