Word: hawk
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk nosed into the waters of San Diego harbor last week to end a marathon 9½-month tour at sea and to face a bitter post-mortem on one of the worst race riots in modern naval history. The sights and the sounds of the homecoming were mostly friendly, with helium-filled OPERATION WELCOME balloons lifting off the pier and mothers of crewmen's children born since the ship sailed waving from a special stand. But as the giant vessel came to port, two black crewmen, framed against the disk of the radar screen, lifted...
...outline of the riot was known before the Kitty Hawk docked: a six-hour-long melee in which sailors attacked each other with chains and pipes, resulting in 46 injuries and 28 arrests. The full details of the violence will probably not be known until the end of the current court-martial proceedings against 22 black crew members, if then. However, TIME Correspondent Donn Downing interviewed several crew members of the Kitty Hawk after it docked and pieced together much of the atmosphere that led to the riot. One inevitable conclusion to be drawn from those interviews is that...
According to crewmen, tensions began to mount on the Kitty Hawk almost as soon as Captain Marland W. Townsend Jr. took command in June. Formal and aloof, Townsend replaced Owen Oberg, a popular commanding officer who was given to moving among his crew and not above on occasion going over the side of the ship in a bosun's chair to wield a symbolic chip hammer. "He treated everyone as a minority of one," explained one sailor. Oberg had a way of sympathizing with the crew even when passing out an unpopular order, like the frequent extensions...
...congressional subcommittee is currently investigating the Kitty Hawk riot, along with racial outbreaks on the carrier Constellation and the oiler Hassayampa, to determine whether or not such problems stem from a lack of discipline in the Navy. Meanwhile, the manner in which the Kitty Hawk conducts its courts-martial will also be watched carefully. A biracial Pentagon task-force report on military justice, released last week by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, charged that there was a definite pattern of discrimination against blacks in the meting out of punishment. The report gave substance to black sailors' claims that recent...
...furor will continue. Congressman Edward Hebert, a hard-line traditionalist, is opening hearings this week in the House Armed Services Committee on the Navy's lack of discipline. And the Kitty Hawk returns this week to San Diego, where its officers will continue with courts-martial against the blacks involved in the October riot...