Sailors meet again for Oriskany memorial

• By GEORGE MORRIS
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Oct 22, 2009 - Page: 1D

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Fate let Jimmy Mathes meet three men who would become his Navy buddies in 1963. Luck kept them together for four years. Now, an old tragedy has reconnected them.

On Monday, in the Gulf of Mexico, the four former sailors will join other shipmates in remembering the 44 sailors and airmen who died on Oct. 26, 1966, aboard the USS Oriskany. That aircraft carrier, then operating off the coast of North Vietnam, was sunk in 2006 off Pensacola, Fla., to create an artificial reef.

Mathes, who lives in Baton Rouge, is joining Ronnie Marchand, a former Baton Rougean now living in Ascension Parish, and James Hebert, of Breaux Bridge, in the memorial ceremonies to be held in boats over the site of the reef. Charles Chapman, of Iowa, La., cannot attend.

The quartet of would-be sailors met in New Orleans, where Navy recruiters put them up for the night before they would take physicals and be sworn into the service. They became friends, and they went to boot camp together in electrician’s mate school in San Diego, Calif., and served their four-year hitch together aboard the Oriskany.

“That was very unusual,” Mathes said. “We were lucky.”

Certainly, they were luckier than some aboard ship.

At 7:27 a.m. on that fateful morning, Mathes was in the aft steering compartment, standing watch in case he was needed to shift motors to emergency power when general quarters sounded. As soon as his replacement arrived, Mathes headed for his general quarters station, the pump room that served the No. 1 hydraulic elevator that lifts planes from the hangar to the flight deck.

Mathes couldn’t get there. It’s probably just as well.

His route from the rear of the ship to the forward section was through the hangar bay, but when Mathes got there, it was filled with choking smoke.

“The sailors were putting flares in the magnesium flare locker,” Mathes said. “When (a flare) ignited, they tried to close the door thinking it would stop the fire, which it didn’t. It ignited all the other flares.”

Mathes didn’t know it yet, but he and more than 3,000 others aboard the Oriskany were in mortal danger.

Magnesium burns at 5,400 degrees, and water won’t extinguish it. Its smoke quickly spread through the ventilation system into forward areas below decks, where many of the airmen were asleep in quarters. And a greater danger was nearby.

Aircraft loaded with fuel, munitions, fuel, liquid oxygen and combustible paint were all stored within reach of either the flames, the heat or the chain reaction that would result from some of those exploding. Sailors and airmen threw some bombs over the side and turned fire hoses onto other munitions to keep them from cooking off.