A memoir, 40 years later, by the
Captain of the search vessel which located the wreckage of Roberto Clemente’s
ill-fated mercy flight to Managua, complete with ‘asides’, including corrections
of mis-remembered events from available articles from The San Juan Star and El
Nuevo Dia.
A private (closed to the public) commemorative ceremony was held a Base
San Juan October 22, 2012 at the
request of Sra. Vera Clemente, in recognition of the upcoming 40th
anniversary of her husband, Roberto’s, untimely death. In addition to the Clemente family, six
members of the SAGEBRUSH crew were
in attendance, provoking more stories and opening other seemingly forgotten
memories which may be of interest to the reader. These and other trivia from that time period
have been added as endnotes. (The reader
is reminded that some stories have been known to improve with age.)
On New Year’s Eve, 1972, about a
dozen and a half of us were gathered at the quarters of LT Robert Connelly and
his wife, Karen, and their young daughter, at ‘Stop 7 ½.’ to celebrate the New
Year. Stop 7 ½ was a small Coast Guard
housing unit of two single family homes and 5 or 6 duplexes, located in Puerta
de Tierra between ‘the high road’ (Munoz Rivera) and ‘the middle road’ (Ponce
de Leon), across Munoz Rivera from the Reserve Officer’s Association Beach, and
just west of the public park. Bob
Connelly, a highly decorated Viet
Nam war veteran, was serving as the Senior
RCC (Rescue Coordination Center Caribbean Sea and adjacent Atlantic
Ocean .
Those in attendance were mostly
junior officers and at least one Warrant Officer, and their wives, assigned to
Base San Juan, RCC, the office of the Captain of the Port (COTP), possibly the
COTP and his wife (after forty years, my memory is a little foggy), and myself
and my family (mother, father, sister and brother-in-law) visiting from stateside
for Christmas. Me? LCDR Guy P. Clark, the 32 year old bachelor Commanding
Officer of USCGC SAGEBRUSH (WLB-399).
SAGEBRUSH was built in 1943 as a single-screw diesel-electric multi-purpose
auxiliary vessel. At 1000 tons and 180’
in length, she had since been reclassified as an offshore buoy tender[i]. Not only was she the largest Coast Guard
vessel permanently assigned in the Caribbean, she was also the largest
permanently assigned U.S. Government vessel within the Navy’s COMCARIBSEAFRONTIER.
Unbeknownst to us was the tragic
incident unfolding about eight miles to the east of us. Besides the holidays, we were still reveling
about our recent rescue of 21 crew members (of 22) from the sunken gypsum
carrier LINCOLN EXPRESS during the
night of December 14-15. That is a
different story, and one with a much happier ending than that which was about
to involve us.
A short time before 11:00 p.m.
the Connelly’s telephone rang. Upon
hanging up, Bob rang his glass with a spoon to get our attention. He announced: ”SAGEBRUSH has been recalled.
Roberto Clemente’s mercy flight to Managua [ii]
just crashed, right after take-off. This
party is over. The ladies are welcome to
stay.” It took no more than two seconds
to realize that Bob was not joking. We all
might have taken one more swig before putting our glasses down. I turned to my father, Battalion Chief Burton
G. Clark, FDNY, and my brother-in-law, CPT Patric S. Enright, USMC (a USNA
graduate who chose the Marines due to a propensity to mal-de-mar) and asked
them: “Are you coming?”
Perhaps I was reciprocating for
the times I would jump in the back of (fire chief) car 29 to accompany Dad to a
fire.
We piled into my ’64 Corvette for
the short trip (1+ mile) to the Coast Guard Base at La Puntilla.
Upon arrival, I was greeted by my
boss, Section Commander CAPT Vincent A. Bogucki, who was standing on the pier
(in his whites). The latest information
he had received was that the plane took off and started losing altitude as it
reached the ocean, started a left turn to try to return to Isla Grande Airport,
but went down about one mile off the beach.
I was to get underway as soon as I had enough crew to do so. For those who miss our sailing, he planned to
transport them to me in the 30-footer after sunrise. As a stopgap, he closed the canteen at the
Base and ordered 6-8 of his young seamen (SN) and seaman apprentices (SA) to
sail with us. They were accompanied by
an experienced QM2 from RCC, and were already aboard.
This was not 21st
century PC here. This is New Year’s Eve,
in 1972, in the Caribbean, where the cost of a quart of Bacardi’s at the Navy
Liquor Locker had just gone up from 90¢ to $1.00 (our lives were probably closer to McHale’s Navy and Mr. Roberts than to today’s cyber world.)[iii] The SA’s were fresh out of boot camp and had
never been to sea. The SN’s were but little
better experienced. Their intoxication
levels were suspect.
Most of my married crew members
lived in family quarters at Fort Buchanan just a few miles away down ‘Crashway
2.’ But this is New Year’s Eve, and the
traffic on ‘Crashway 2’ was worse than it is during rush hour. My (second in command) Executive Officer (XO),
LT Theodore T. Musselman, was the first of these to receive a ‘recall’ phone
call giving him the earliest start to return to the ship, which he managed to
do in spite of the traffic. Let me note
that fifteen years earlier Ted and I had been classmates at the U.S. Coast
Guard Academy.
At full strength, SAGEBRUSH would have a total crew of
fifty. On a typical day we would be
understaffed by two or three, and another four would be on leave, leaving us
with a crew of 40+ when we sailed. Our
in-port watch numbered about ten. Few,
if any, of the unmarried crew members who lived aboard were aboard on this New
Year’s Eve.
Ted took stock of the crew. He and I were the only officers aboard. The QM2 from RCC was the only quartermaster
to stand a bridge watch. BM2 Rodney
“Mouse” Martinson was the only petty officer from my deck force. I had enough engineers to stand an underway
engine room watch. I had no cooks or
stewards. Ted designated EN1 Victor “The greatest fisherman in all of Puerto Rico”
Gonzalez, to be the cook, Master-at-Arms and the immediate supervisor of the
novice seamen from the Base. This leads
me (some forty years later) to believe that ENC “Rod” Rodriguez was probably
aboard and filled in as my Chief Engineer.
Yes, food and coffee were important; most of us had been awake for the
previous 16-18 hours. Add in Onyx[iv],
the ships dog, my USMC Captain and my FDNY Battalion Chief and we had our
skeleton crew of 20 or so.
Monday, January 1,
1973
As we took in our #2 mooring line
at one minute after midnight I heard the rumble of my EMC’s ’63 Corvette bouncing
on the cobblestones of Old San Juan. I
paused momentarily and re-moored with just my #2. I did not want to take the time to re-rig the
gangway, so I had Mouse slew the boom over the pier. Chief Quinn grabbed the handholds on the
block, stepped on the hook, and Mouse brought him aboard. I know, the safety folks frown on this
practice, but this is 2 minutes into 1973 ….
We took in #2 and got underway, again, at two minutes after midnight,
making us both the first and second USCG ship to get underway in 1973.
We normally traveled 3 miles
offshore along the north coast of Puerto Rico due to the north-east trade winds
and swells, and reefs off the Condado shoreline. Our search datum, however, was only one mile
off the coast, less than ten miles away, a trip that would take us close to an
hour. We set a course one mile out,
although I had never sailed that close in, even during the day.
In 1973 there were no cell phones
or computers; there was no GPS, no Loran-C in the Caribbean, one useless
Loran-A signal near the baseline extension, and charts based on surveys dating
to the nineteenth century. Navigation
was primarily visual and supplemented by radar and depth soundings; and for
those offshore, celestial.
SAGEBRUSH had removed its carbon arc searchlight a year and a half
earlier intending to replace it in kind from Navy surplus. The surplus searchlight received was in worse
condition than the one removed. Plans then
were to reinstall it when next in a shipyard during the summer of ’73. (We did, but with a custom installed standard
lighthouse 2-place lampchanger fitted with 1,000-watt tungsten-halogen lamps,
which uses less energy and required less maintenance.) Thus, on January 1st, we were
limited to the use of signal lights[v] and
buoy deck floodlights. This did not
cause any problems.
Upon approaching the Condado,
about ½ hour after midnight ,
we set as many lookouts as possible and turned on the signal lights and floodlights,
aimed forward and outward. It seemed
like only a matter of minutes until we steamed into a debris field consisting
mostly of large tin cans which were part of the cargo of the mercy flight. We slowed and continued on, retrieving some
personal effects (clothes and an attaché case, if I remember right). It was about then that we accepted that this
was probably going to be a search but not a rescue mission. Our prayers went out to all those aboard the
downed DC-7. I had Mouse lower the port
anchor with one shot of chain (90’) as a safety precaution, to fetch up in the
event we drifted too close to the offshore reefs in the area. We spent the rest of the night and almost the
rest of the day retrieving whatever we found other than the thousands of cans
of lard. All this time, the wind and
seas set us and the debris field to the west and toward shore. Many of the cans washed ashore, probably in
the vicinity of La Perla. Ted kept the
crew functioning and spelled me on the bridge from time to time.
In mid- to late-afternoon[vi]
the 30-footer finally came out with many of my missing crew, including
Navigator, LTJG Alexandre LeGault, and Chief Boatswains Mate Jose Suarez. They said that most of the crew missed our
sailing by 15 minutes or so, and that they were in no shape to relieve us en
masse since they, too, had been up all night waiting for their ride. Dad and Patric (who did not succumb to the
ocean) returned to the Base in the 30-footer to catch their flights back home
that evening. Al also relayed that CAPT
‘Bo’ wanted us to return around sunset for a debriefing meeting, which became a
daily routine.
After four packs of cigarettes
and who knows how many cups of coffee during the previous 18 hours, we did
so. Some of us had been up for 36 hours
with little or no sleep. I called my
mother to tell her I was sleeping on the ship that night.
Tuesday, January 2,
1973
With our normal, but somewhat
weary crew, we got underway around sunrise with no specific orders. We were amazed at the throngs of humanity
holding vigil on the beach. Other than
pray, they had little to do but watch us.
Clearly, public relations was now a new item high on our agenda. We lowered our grapnel at datum and dragged
it in an expanding square pattern, hoping to, by chance, locate the
wreckage. Since our datum was rather
imprecise, this was much like looking for a needle in a haystack. The masses of humanity on the beach grew as
the day went on, and continued to grow as the days went on. Our dragging the grapnel, at 1 or 2 miles per
hour, turned up nothing. To be blunt, it
turned out to be a very boring and frustrating day. We returned to the Base around sunset for
another debriefing meeting.
We again sailed around sunrise,
this time accompanied by several members of the press. What would this day bring? Especially with our inquisitive passengers.
I slowed down some distance
before reaching datum and again lowered the grapnel. After all, it’s a big ocean and our datum was
still imprecise. Why not? It couldn’t hurt. We continued heading
towards datum and then began a new dragging pattern.
When dragging with a grapnel,
speed must be slow so as to hook, or snag, an object on the bottom, and not bounce
over it. It also helps to put a boat
hook into the dragging chain and hold the wooden handle of the boat hook to
one’s ear. That way, it acts like a
sounding board to allow the listener to hear the grapnel sliding through the
sand bottom and then a different noise when it snags something hard.
The Man Upstairs must have heard our
prayers.
About 3:30 p.m. we snagged
something. The needle in the haystack! One of the wheels still attached to some of the
landing gear floated to the surface along with some smaller pieces of the plane,
and so did the body of the pilot. We
launched one of our small boats to recover the body, and hoisted the landing
gear aboard.
During this commotion my senior
quartermaster QM1 Brent(?) Whitener quietly shot and recorded a round of
horizontal sextant angles to mark the spot on our chart, and more importantly
to allow us to return to that spot (wherever it really was).
We lowered the jackstaff on the
fo’c’s’le and carried the litter with the pilot’s body to the fo’c’s’le to have
it transported ashore by a CG helicopter.
This comes under a category we called vertical replenishment. The
good news is that we just practiced this maneuver for the first time a couple
of months earlier; the other news is that the seamen on the fo’c’s’le who
practiced it were not available because they also served as the boat crew. The helo hoisted the litter successfully.
We carry a small (3rd
class special) red nun buoy for emergency use.
It was designed for use in water less than 50’ deep. Using the smallest chain we had aboard, we
were able to set this buoy in 129’ of water[vii],
using Whitener’s sextant angles, to mark the new datum. It floated low, but it floated (for the
Coastie’s who may read this, that’s why the engineers give us ‘pounds per inch
immersion’) and did so until we disestablished it in August. We then returned to the Base.
The photo of Mouse and me with
the landing gear provided my 15 minutes of fame; it appeared the next day on
the front page of my hometown paper, the New
York Daily News.
A video on the local news on TV that
night caught me walking across the buoy deck without my hat on. That is when I learned I was starting to lose
my hair.
Thursday, January 4,
1973
We again sailed around sunrise,
this time carrying 8 Navy scuba divers.
Our role now was simply to provide a diving platform for these divers
who located and mapped a “field of wreckage” in the vicinity of our new datum. Ancillary to this was the task of chasing a fishing
boat away from the divers when they were in the water. Jose, who was in our small boat, told me the fishing
boat was rented by a very distraught Manny Sanguillen.
Friday, January 5,
1973
We again sailed around sunrise,
with the addition of three Navy civilian oceanographers and their side scan sonar. The senior oceanographer told me how happy he
was that we had already found the wreckage with our (low tech) grapnel so he
would know where to look with his (hi tech) side scan sonar to precisely locate
and map the wreckage. After doing so,
the Navy divers retrieved some debris from the bottom.
Shortly after returning to the
Base, CAPT ‘Bo” came aboard and was escorted to my cabin. He was accompanied by the widow, Senora Vera
Clemente, who was escorted by a Witch Doctor from the Dominican Republic, Pirates Manny Sanguillen (C), Richie
Hebner (3B), and one or two others. I
offered my condolences on behalf of my crew.
The Witch Doctor was far more optimistic, vowing to bring Roberto back
to life after we recover his body. Sra.
Clemente thanked us for our efforts. We
briefly discussed our plans for continuing the search.
As they were leaving, my eyes
locked in on a page from Sports Illustrated that I had long ago taped to one of
my cabinets behind my visitors. I would
have removed it had I known they were coming aboard. I hoped that they did not notice it, and if
they did that they were not offended, as no offense was intended.
You see, I was born in Brooklyn and grew up an avid Dodgers fan during the ’48-‘57 heyday of ‘The Boys of Summer.’ (Roberto signed with the Dodgers in ’54 and played that year in AAA with the Montreal Royals as had Jackie Robinson
seven years earlier). In ’62 I had no
choice but to become a Mets fan. I attended opening day[viii]
at Shea Stadium in ‘64, and the first game of the ’69 World Series. The page from SI was a pre-’69 photograph of
a banner hanging in Shea proclaiming “WHAT ME WORRY? I’M A METS FAN.” Today, I’m an Orioles fan. I always was a
Clemente fan; he was the ultimate class act.
Saturday, January 6,
1973
Another day with the Navy divers.
Sunday, January 7,
1973
Our last day was another day with
the Navy divers. We also had a diver
from the faculty of UPR. Since the Navy
prohibits its divers from diving with a civilian diver, we served as a traffic
cop, if you will. During the afternoon
the UPR diver located one of the wings.
On a subsequent dive he took down one end of one of our old (1 ½“?) boat
fall lines and secured it around the landing gear on the bottom of the wing. The ocean was the calmest it had been all
week. We very slowly and very carefully
hoisted the wing from a depth of over 120’.
The line was taking a good strain, and clearly would not hold the weight
of the wing out of the water. We had all
non-involved personnel clear the buoy deck and the fo’c’s’le. Chief Suarez planned to hook a 4” cross-deck
line around the landing gear to finish hoisting the wing. As he was about to do so, SAGEBRUSH started rolling ever so
gently for some unknown reason. As we slowly
rolled to port, the horizontal wing would be trying to lift the weight of the
water above it, adding more strain to the old boat fall line. On the second or third such roll Jose looked
at me with concern and I told him (and everyone else) “Take Cover.” On the next roll there was a big pop and a
poof of small shards of cordage, and the wing began its return to Davy Jones’
Locker. The FAA investigator with us expressed
his relief that we lost the wing since there were only 3(?) DC-7’s (reported elsewhere as a DC-9) left
flying in the world and having the wing to study would have amounted to a big
waste of a lot of (his) time.
I told my watch officer: “It’s
time to go home.” The U.S. Navy salvage
vessel USS PETREL would arrive the
next day with her hard hat divers.
Footnotes
[i]180’
WAGL’s (redesignated WLB in ’65) were originally designed for buoy tending, ice
breaking, cargo carrying, ASW (anti-submarine warfare) and net-tending. The “ash can” depth charge racks on the
fantail were removed prior to 1960, and the “hedgehog” launchers on the
fo’c’s’le and the sonar were removed during the mid-‘60’s. Had we still been fitted with sonar we would
have used it on January 2-3,
1973 (probably for the first time since WWII). The 3”-50 guns mounted aft of the stack were
also removed during the 60’s, for refitting on the then-new 210’ WMEC fleet.
SAGEBRUSH, at some early point, had her heating system removed and
replaced with a DIY ‘cooling system’ consisting of piping through which water
the temperature of sea water was pumped.
It did help in the warmer climate, but it was a little chilly when we arrived
in Curtis Bay
[iii]
One of my senior PO ’s proposed to a lovely
local hairdresser; a widow with a young teenage son. She asked me: “Capitan, would you please give
me away?” (At least she did not ask me
to perform the ceremony.) I did, in a
chapel with most of the off-duty crew in attendance in uniform. - While working in St.
Croix , we received TAD orders for our senior cook, CS1
Wigglesworth, and BM3 Maldonado to report to the Base. A helo training flight from Ramey Air Station
was “diverted” to pick them up. It just
so happened that they were the pitcher and the third baseman on the CG softball
team in the inter-service league and the CG was playing the Navy team in San Juan that night. -
Speaking of softball, SAGEBRUSH’s
softball team went undefeated during our 3 ½ months in Curtis Bay Mayaguez
for a night where the off-duty crew went ashore to a nearby watering hole. When the barmaid refused to serve Onyx, my
Puerto Rican crew members assured her in no uncertain terms that we were the
crew of SAGEBRUSH and that since
Onyx was part of the crew if she did not serve Onyx she would not serve any of
us. Onyx was then served his favorite, a
saucer of milk mixed with a shot of scotch.
- Did I hear a rumor that every
tenth can dispensed by the soda machine was a cerveza? - A
wayward tug dragged a buoy in the harbor off-station early one Friday
evening. We (re)called the crew to sail
the next morning to reset the buoy, informing them that it would be ‘Family
Day’. We sailed Saturday morning to do
so, accompanied by wives and kids so they could see what their husbands/fathers
did for a living. – BM1 Bobby Chambers was due to reenlist and wanted to do so
with more fanfare than sitting with the XO in the Ship’s Office. Bahia de San
Juan Lighted Buoy 11 was just off the pier, and being an 8X26 was big enough to
do the job. With the XO at the conn,
Chambers and I jumped the buoy, where he raised his hand and I swore him in, atop
the buoy, for another hitch.
Unfortunately, I know of no photos to attest to this. - A
junior officer stopped in traffic in a vehicle with Massachusetts plates heard a tourista from a
cruise ship remark to he husband about the plates, and then asked my JO how he
got the car to San Juan . Dead panned, he replied: “The trans-Caribbean highway.” She was then overheard telling her
husband: “Honey, let’s come by car next
time.” – The pass-it-on JO bachelor pad in Old San Juan used nautical charts as
wallpaper. - Where else could one find (Canal del Este) red nun buoy 0 (0 being
the even number which precedes number 1)?
[iv]
Mascot 1/C Onyx Sage Jackson
was born at the Onyx Bar in Jacksonville ,
Florida St. Thomas .
He turned himself in to the 82 footer POINT WARD there and awaited to be returned by our color-blind QM3
(yes, we had a color-blind quartermaster) who flew over in an Antilles Airboat
(after the crew took up a collection to pay the airfare) to retrieve him. Not wanting to miss anything, he was always
the first into the small boat (where he always kept his paws inside the
gunnel). His Cutterman certificate was signed by then-Commandant ADM Owen W.
Siler. He retired after seven (human)
years of service on Lighthouse Day, August 7th, 1978 when he joined this writer and
my family in Gales Ferry, CT. He
suffered a coronary on July
18, 1979 , and left behind an unknown number of offspring from La
Guerra, Venezuela
to Gales Ferry, CT.
[v] We
still used flashing light and semaphore to communicate with small boats and
work parties. This note is testimony to
the reliability of our AN-PRC59 portable radios.
[vi] The morning seas offshore were too heavy for
the 30-footer.
[vii]
Before we set the buoy, someone on the buoy deck (who didn’t know I had done
the calculations) hollered to me “Captain, this buoy will sink (from the weight
of the chain) in water this deep.” I
hollered back “If you are right, you will not be able to get the hook out of
the buoy and we will retrieve it.” I
appreciated his concern about my unorthodox decision, and that he recognized
the backup plan in my response.
[viii] Opening day at Shea was against the Pirates.
Willy Stargell, if I remember right, hit the 1st homer at
Shea. Since it was not hit by a Met, I would have been happier had it
been hit by #21!
[
Clemente's DC-7 took off from Isla Verde International airport rather than Isla Grande. I think the place in Venezuela was La Guaira rather than La Guerra. The cutter based in St. Thomas was Point Whitehorn. Pt Warde was based in San Juan.
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