The Twenty · 1 October 1972

Turret No. 2

In the first hour of 1 October 1972, off the Demilitarized Zone, twenty of her shipmates did not come out of Turret No. 2. This page is for them.

Newport News had been on the gun line since 11 May 1972, a heavy cruiser holding station off Quang Tri City — by then the last of her kind in the Navy. Shortly after midnight she was working a fire-support mission when an 8-inch projectile detonated inside the bore of the center gun of Turret No. 2 as it was being fired. A Navy inquiry later fixed the cause: a defective auxiliary detonating fuze. The blast burned through some 720 pounds of powder in the hoists and drove toxic gases — among them chlorine, phosgene, and cordite fumes — through the turret and into the decks below.

Every man in the turret and on the upper and lower shell decks died at his station. Four more died of fume inhalation — men from the lower handling rooms, and one man who was not of the turret crew. Thirty-six others were injured. Nineteen died on the first of October; the twentieth, Seaman Joseph Grisafi, died of his injuries two days later, on 3 October.

Men survived because men led them out. Boatswain's Mate Third Class Craig Baird was in the powder-handling room, the turret's lowest manned level, when the blast knocked him down; he gathered the handful of men with him and brought them out through the side escape hatch, then went to the bridge to report the survivors. Seaman Grisafi, believing Baird was still below, went back into the smoke to find him. The fumes he took in doing that were the injury he died of.

The ship answered, too. In sick bay, Machinist's Mate Second Class Charles Perkins caught a young mess cook brought down through the passageway door — the sailor coughed blood from the green smoke and died in Perkins's arms. "We were young that night," Perkins remembered, "but we aged fast." Hospital Corpsman Second Class Greg McCaulley treated more than 250 shipmates across the next forty-eight hours, on four hours' rest.

What the record found

The Navy's court of inquiry, conducted by retired Vice Admirals K. S. Masterson and L. M. Mustin, determined that a defective auxiliary detonating fuze — manufactured by the Bermite Powder Company — caused the projectile to detonate almost immediately upon firing. The inquiry criticized the era's divided accountability for naval ordnance and recommended that a single command be given control of ordnance design, procurement, testing, and life-cycle management, with 100-percent inspection at successive stages of manufacture and assembly. Families of the dead later brought product-liability actions that were consolidated as In re Warhead Explosion Aboard USS Newport News on October 1, 1972, 411 F. Supp. 790 (J.P.M.L. 1976).

And the ship

The blown-open barrel was cut away and the gun landed at the Cubi Point Naval Station in the Philippines; its port was plated over and the turret locked in train — Turret No. 2 never fired again. With a hole sealed in her face, she went back on the gun line on 21 October and worked two more firing periods before reaching Norfolk on Christmas Eve, 1972. She finished her career two guns short of nine.

Where they are kept

Their names are cut into Panel 1W of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, lines 76 through 80 — twenty names together, the way they served. In Norfolk, the Lone Sailor at Wisconsin Square stands ringed by bronze plaques for the ships homeported there that met tragedy — hers among them, over the names of her people. And aboard USS Salem (CA-139) at Quincy, Massachusetts, the USS Newport News Museum and Memorial Foundation keeps a memorial to Turret No. 2 and the twenty — told on The Keepers.