Families mark USS Forrestal fire anniversary
Relatives remember 3 local Navy sailors nearly 50 years later
All Cathy Lowe has left of her brother Billy is a big box of military mementos and her memories.
There’s the flag from his casket. An empty slug from the 21-gun salute at the Orlando sailor’s burial. A pristine copy of the Aug. 11, 1967, Life magazine with a cover story about the “Inferno at Sea” accident that claimed his life and 133 others on the USS Forrestal, off the coast of North Vietnam.
“I think about him all the time,” said Cathy Lowe, 61, who lives near Jacksonville. “He never leaves my heart.”
Two other Navy crewmen from Orlando, Russell Larry Fike and Charles David Kieser, also lost their lives on the aircraft carrier the morning of July 29, 1967. U.S. Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican and 2008 presidential nominee who was diagnosed with brain cancer last week, survived the conflagration.
As the 50th anniversary of the blaze approaches, relatives of Billy Lowe, Fike and Kieser mourn their losses and remember the accident so catastrophic that it led to the creation of a training video, “Trial By Fire: A Carrier Fights for Its Life,” that every Navy recruit must watch during boot camp.
The blaze in the Gulf of Tonkin started when stray voltage caused
a Zuni rocket to fire accidentally, striking an attack aircraft on the flight deck and rupturing its fuel tank. Flames quickly spread to two nearby airplanes, including McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk, and set off a series of bomb explosions.
The casualties included firefighters and men asleep in their berthing quarters, fresh off the night shift. Another 161 crewmen were hurt. Twenty-one airplanes were destroyed.
“A lot of people injured got hurt helping others,” said Ken Killmeyer, 71, of Virginia, historian for the USS Forrestal Association.
Kieser’s sister, Betty Jo Stockton of southwest Orange County, remembers how excited her younger brother, known as David, was to embark on an adventure on the 1,039-foot-long ship with more than 5,000 other sailors.
A 20-year-old who was still finding himself, Kieser sang, played the piano, water skied on Lake Gatlin from the time he was 2 and loved his baby-blue 1967 Ford Mustang, which his parents kept in immaculate condition for 20 years after his death before finally selling it.
Stockton’s voice breaks as she recalls the naval officers who came to the family’s home in Edgewood to notify her parents of her brother’s death. Deeply religious Baptists, they were devastated.
“It was the only time I heard my mother say, ‘I don’t care what God wants. I want my son,’ ” recalled Stockton, 76, whose mom, Betty, died in 2008 at age 95. Her only other sibling, Bob Kieser, an Air Force veteran, was 76 when he died in 2015, leaving Stockton alone to preserve the family memories and keepsakes, including a condolence letter from President Lyndon B. Johnson.
David Kieser attended Oak Ridge High School and the now-defunct Florida Military School in DeLand and went to college briefly before joining the Navy in 1966. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Orlando.
His shipmate Russell Fike, known as Larry, was only 19 when he was killed. The son of a World War II Navy veteran, Fike liked cars, girls and hanging out with his friends. The Pennsylvania native dropped out of Evans High School to join the Navy, said Christine Ball, 67, one Fike’s nine siblings.
Their mother, Evelyn, died at 58 of a rare muscle disease, but Ball said she always thought a broken heart was partly to blame.
“It was horrible,” said Ball of Clermont. “Luckily, we were told that he probably was killed instantly.”
Ball and her sister Linda Kornick, who lives in Pittsburgh, are among about 700 people attending a reunion this week sponsored by the USS Forrestal Association. That includes 200 survivors, plus family and friends, said association president Bob Kohler, 87, of North Carolina.
Joe Barry, a former Massachusetts police chief who retired to Winter Park 16 years ago, is one of them.
“It was a life-changing experience,” said Barry, 70, who rarely misses an annual Forrestal reunion. “It really made me appreciate life and the fact that I had survived when others didn’t.”
On Saturday, the anniversary date, the group will attend a service at Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. Then Fike’s sisters and three other families will place flowers at the nearby gravesite where their loved ones are buried together. The names of 18 of the Forrestal’s sailors are on the headstone.
Afterward, they’ll travel to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., and lay a wreath at the panel bearing the names of the victims.
A chest full of memorabilia got lost after their father died in 1993, but Ball still recalls the letter Larry wrote from Rio de Janeiro while on liberty in that port of call. The family read it several times, glad that he was enjoying kicking up his heels before the ship sailed to the combat zone.
“Life is precious, and you never know when a life is going to end,” Ball said.
The third Orlando victim, whose full name was William Earl Lowe, was 21, had been in the service for three years and was married when he was assigned to the Forrestal in January 1967.
A Vietnam War monument near the Evans High football field is engraved with the names of Lowe, a 1963 graduate, Fike and 21 other Evans students killed during the war. The inscription reads, “Let not a whisper fall that they have died in vain.”
Lowe, an Orlando native, is buried in Woodlawn Memorial Park in Gotha.
The Forrestal, named after the first U.S. Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, was decommissioned in 1993 and scrapped in 2014.