THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604280045
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 238 lines
She recognized him from across the banquet hall.
Kathleen King had never seen Edward O'Neill, had only heard his voice, but something about the rusty-haired man told her he was the one.
He approached uncertainly, weaving among the tables crowded with former crewmen of the destroyer Soley. Around him stretched a sea of blue ballcaps emblazoned with the ship's name and pulled snug over heads gone gray - sailors turned grandfathers, their middles thick, their once-bright tattoos the color of tarnished copper.
The Soley's three-day reunion had drawn about 120 of them. The prospect of meeting a handful of these men had drawn Kathleen and her mother, Kitty Spear, to this Holiday Inn in Hampton on Friday night.
Because 38 years ago, when Kathleen was a toddler, her father became the only man on the Soley's crew to die in the line of duty.
And until recently, she and her mother had lived with only a vague understanding of the accident that killed Damage Controlman Second Class John Leonard King.
The Virginia Beach women had learned more, thanks to Navy records.
They knew that King had not been ordered to perform the duty that killed him. That he'd felt no pain. That there was no one to blame for the accident.
They also understood that he had been in the company of heroes, of men who very nearly lost their lives trying to save his.
They were about to meet one of them.
``Mom,'' Kathleen whispered, ``here he comes.''
The book commemorating the Soley's 1958-59 Med cruise devoted a full page to John King.
``The loss of a shipmate and friend is a sad occasion indeed,'' the dedication read, beside a portrait of a smiling, dark-haired young man. ``We hope this volume will serve to keep his memory bright.''
A few other pages concentrated on the setting of his death: Iskenderun, a port and railhead on Turkey's southern coast, an ``unhappy place'' the Soley left ``with relief.''
The ship got the call to sail for Iskenderun that Christmas Eve. An emergency waited: The Mirador, a Panamanian tanker under contract to the American military, had been unloading JP-4 jet fuel a few days before when an explosion ripped through its pump room.
Its hull blown out, its aft section afire, the Mirador began to sink. Another American destroyer, the John R. Pierce, helped extinguish the flames and began pumping water from the tanker's flooded spaces, but the Mirador remained imperiled: When the Soley arrived, the tanker was a foundering hulk sheathed in oily grime, its paint blistered and its cargo tanks still sloshing with volatile JP-4.
For two days King and his shipmates battled to keep the Mirador afloat, lowering thick rubber hoses into the tanker's entrails, pumping them dry, moving the hoses to new floods.
It was shifting one of these hoses that brought King and a team of sailors together around a large hatch in the first hours of Dec. 30, 1958. Beneath the hole yawned a dark cargo tank 49 feet deep, its bottom covered with six feet of water mixed with jet fuel.
A pump hose ran from the deck into the tank's blackness. It weighed a ton. The team would have to inchworm it out, using a rope strapped to the hose: A man would descend into the tank to attach the strap, his teammates would pull the rope to create slack in the hose, others would pull that stretch of hose onto the deck. Then they'd repeat the process.
One of King's shipmates clambered down a ladder into the tank, while others aimed a spotlight into the gloom. He got four steps down, paused, headed back. The tank was filled with fumes, he said. He couldn't take it.
King stepped forward.
The hatch was five feet by three, atop a coaming that jutted from the Mirador's deck. King swung a leg over the lip and disappeared into the dark. It took a minute or two to hitch the strap. He climbed back up the ladder. The team hauled away at the rope, dragged the hose away from the hole.
King headed back down. A couple of minutes later, the strap reattached, he was back topside. Man, he announced, a guy could pull a cheap drunk down there. Take a break, a lieutenant told him. Get some air.
The officer walked off. King waited two minutes before returning to the hatch.
He'd been in the tank for about a minute when he hollered to the team to pull the rope. This time it was slack: King had not rehitched the strap. Up on the deck, his shipmates heard laughter echoing in the blackened tank. The men trained the spotlight's beam down the ladder. King was looking back at them from 16 feet down, hugging the ladder's rail, giggling.
The lieutenant returned and peered into the hole. King was swinging to and fro on the ladder, his laughter now hysterical. Get up here, the lieutenant yelled. King didn't budge.
A minute ticked by. The officer shouted for a line, then climbed down himself, sandwiching King against the ladder. King was still laughing, wriggling in the man's grasp. A stiff line of wire and hemp snaked into the hole. The lieutenant tied it around King's chest, called above for the team to haul away, but as soon as the rope was taut the knot slipped.
While others on deck searched for a more flexible rope, the lieutenant, now groggy, called for help. Seaman Ed O'Neill, all of 17, headed down the ladder, looping one arm over a rung and another around King while the officer scrambled topside.
By now King was gagging, and O'Neill struggled to hold him. Another sailor descended into the tank to lend a hand, but couldn't get close. He watched as King passed out and began to slip. O'Neill, still holding the ladder with one hand, grabbed the back of King's shirt with his other.
They dangled there, enveloped in darkness and echoes and the stench of jet fuel, until O'Neill began to black out.
King slipped from O'Neill's grasp and fell more than 20 feet into the blackness. The men topside heard a splash. O'Neill, they saw, was out cold, and they quickly hauled him onto the deck. Far below, King had regained consciousness, and was thrashing around in the mixture of water and fuel at the tank's bottom.
While the men lowered a line to him, an electrician's mate sprinted to the Soley in search of oxygen masks. He reached three of the ship's damage control lockers, each time finding no key to open them. The sailor roused a sleeping shipmate, grabbed his keys and headed back to the lockers.
The lieutenant met him there and, with a third man, ran to the Mirador with the masks. But the effort had eaten valuable time: Splashing around in the tank, at times coming within six inches of the line lowered from the hatch, the disoriented King swam beneath the ladder and out of view. His splashing stopped.
Word of the trouble reached the Soley's skipper, Cmdr. John E. Coste, who now hustled to the Mirador. While his men strove to get the masks working, he stepped onto the ladder. A hospital corpsman stopped him, asked that he not go down. Coste insisted. So, over the captain's objections, the man tied a safety line around his chest.
The skipper found no sign of King. Within minutes, nearly unconscious himself, he had to be pulled back onto the deck.
``It was so senseless,'' Kathleen said, ``so senseless that it had to be something that God wanted. There's no other explanation.
``He needed an angel, and he reached down and picked John Leonard King.''
The telegram arrived later that day. ``It just gave the basics,'' King's widow recalled Friday. ``You know - `We regret to inform you,' and so on.
``Later, other telegrams came in, with a few more details. And then, when the ship got back to Norfolk, Capt. Coste and his wife came to the house.
``I was in awe. They were so nice, and so gracious, and I couldn't believe they were sitting in my house. The captain of a ship! Here I was, a little, 22-year-old Navy wife.''
The message Coste delivered was repeated by other Soley crewmen: Her husband had not suffered. ``He didn't even know he was in trouble,'' she said. ``If anyone could die laughing, he did. The good Lord was unbelievably merciful.
``But I didn't know much about what had happened. It was very cut-and-dried.''
Years passed. The family scraped by. Moths chewed at the flag that had draped King's casket, and his letters to Kitty mildewed. She married another sailor, had five more children. And as Kathleen grew up, Kitty fielded innumerable questions about Kathleen's father, about his death.
``I told her what I could,'' Kitty said, ``but it wasn't easy to talk about for me.''
Kathleen carried her questions through her 20s and most of her 30s, until she realized last year that the answers lay with the Soley's crew. ``I felt that by finding the men, I'd find little pieces of him,'' she said.
She called an association of retired naval officers, whose staff directed her to the people running the Soley's reunions. They sent her a roster of active members. Kathleen pored over the list, circling the names of crewmen who served during her father's stint aboard, mailing each a letter.
She also wrote the Navy's Judge Advocate General for paperwork connected to the accident. The JAG report, and shipmates' letters, arrived last fall.
The report was a revelation not only to Kathleen, but to her mother: Here was the first detailed account she'd seen of John King's last hour of life. Just as important, here were the names of the men who were with him.
``Mr. O'Neill,'' Kitty said, ``he laid his life on the line, and there were others who did that, too.
``All of these people who went above and beyond the call of duty to help him . . .'' She shook her head. ``I can't tell you how I feel about these men.''
So on Friday, Kathleen and Kitty stood in an atrium echoing with laughter and yarns and memories, and renewed their acquaintance with John Coste. Still fit-looking, hair clipped short, the captain hugged both while Marvin Sizemore, who shared a battle station with King, stood a few feet off.
``It tore all of us up,'' Sizemore said quietly. ``He was an outstanding damage controlman, an excellent sailor. And from what I remember, he was a really nice, personable guy.''
Coste led the women to his table, where he'd saved two seats. ``You bet I remember it,'' he murmured. ``Like it was yesterday.''
He turned to Sizemore. ``What was the name of that pharmacist's mate?''
``Porter.''
The captain nodded. ``I'd like to see him. He saved my life. If he hadn't made me wear that rope, we'd have lost two that night.''
Then Ed O'Neill arrived. The retired New Jersey cop held Kitty, embraced Kathleen as she whispered thanks.
``I knew as soon as Kathleen's letter came, what it was,'' he said. ``The moment I touched it. It must have been about two weeks before I could open it and read it.'' He looked at the floor. ``I did a little bit of crying.
``I think about him all the time. I remember looking up that ladder, seeing all those bright lights, hearing a strange sound inside my head, and waking up on deck with a bunch of people restraining me.
``You remember.''
The Mirador eventually sank. It remains off Iskerendun, a quarter-million pounds of rust and ruin mired in the Mediterranean's bottom.
The Soley was retired in 1970. It lies submerged in the Atlantic, a battered bombing target for naval aviators.
Its tin-can sailors, scattered now, dwindling in number, complete their sixth reunion today.
At the first five they held memorial services for shipmates lost, listening as their departed friends' names were read aloud, watching as a wreath was tossed onto water they once traveled together.
They continued the tradition Saturday, a caravan of sailors and their families rolling from the Holiday Inn to the Norfolk Naval Base, the Soley's old home.
They stood on the deck of a modern warship, heads bowed.
They heard the names, too many of them.
Then the men of the Soley handed their wreath to John King's widow and daughter, and watched them throw it over the side. ILLUSTRATION: B\W photos
The Mirador
John King
The Soley
VICKI CRONIS photos/The Virginian-Pilot
Kitty Spear, left, and her daughter, Kathleen King, nervously check
their reflections in a mirror before the reunion.
VICKI CRONIS photos/
The Virginian-Pilot
Ed O'Neill embraces Kathleen King for the first time. Her search for
information about her father's last hours had ended here, at the
reunion for Soley crew members. ``I felt that by finding the men,
I'd find little pieces of him,'' she said.
Kitty Spear, left, and her daughter, Kathleen King, nervously check
their reflections in a mirror before the reunion with Soley crew
members in Hampton on Friday night.
VICKI CRONIS/The Virginian-Pilot
Kathleen King's search for answers ended at the Soley reunion on
Friday, where she met Ed O'Neill. As a 17-year-old seaman, O'Neill
had tried save John King from the dark tank where he died.
KEYWORDS: REUNION ACCIDENT U.S. NAVY by CNB