Justice For Liberty

Video Transcript:

And so I was down on the floors, a few prayers, and then all of a sudden everything exploded. Two hours of pure hell, to napalm, burning fires, bombs, armor-criscing bullets, rockets, cannons. I mean, we have so many holes blown in a ship from the rockets, it was ridiculous. I mean, it was divine intervention that the ship stayed afloat. The closer they got, I could tell, and I could see the star David Flegz on him. He's ready to fast-forces. I don't know why they called him to fast because they were attacking us. That's when I knew that, you know, they were the enemy, and not there to help us. In our government, still supports that theory that it was a mistaken identity. There was no mistaken who we were. You knew this wasn't a mistake. It was no accident. It was absolutely a deliberate attack. They still have visions of it to this day. I still see the stretchers that are being brought over, but more than that, I see the bodybags. 34 men killed, 174 men wounded. There was blood everywhere. Just blood everywhere. Terrible. Just terrible. And Congress just looked the other way. The United States is really relationship which began at that time, is based on fabrication and lies. It's just a shame that our government is afraid, actually afraid to tell the truth about what happened on June 8, 1967, and those that were responsible for those actions. 4. Hi, my name is Ed Bactel. And I was born and raised in Northeast Ohio. And I joined the Navy in 1966. My first tour of duty was aboard the USS Liberty. My name is Terry McFarlane. I'm a survivor of the USS Liberty attack on June 8, 1967. My name is Larry Boen. I was a second class petty officer on June 8, 1967. The day of the attack on the USS Liberty. My name is Philip F. Terny. I was 20 years old aboard the USS Liberty. I was a third class petty officer, damage control. Our name is Marie Gallo. And I was a communication technician maintenance second class petty officer. My name is Thomas Bradley and I'm a retired master chief, petty officer in the United States Navy. My name is John Horde. I was a communication technician. I'm Scott Burrow. I was a cryptologist on the USS Liberty. I was a CTR SN at the time. I was an E5, second class maintenance technician. I was 22 years old at the time. I was a CTR 3, third class petty officer. I was a cryptologic technician chief petty officer. I was in charge of the tech per research department. My job was to get on the radio and see what kind of traffic I could pick up. My job was to ensure that the equipment that the other communication technicians used operated properly. I grew up in Michigan and it was fine as a country boy. My function was to intercept foreign communications. I was stationed in the research department of the ship with a torpedo strike. My name is Mo Schaefer. I was a CTR 3, communications technician and I called an R brancher. And with the Naval Security Group, I was stationed on board the USS Liberty. And I'm a survivor of the Juni-Auth attack on our ship. So to tell you what kind of happened in my life that day is parallel probably with most every other life in that day. But we were all in different positions across the ships. So we all saw or felt or had different experiences happened us. We sailed to the coast of Africa and pulled into the port of the Avedgen attack recosed. And then during that weekend we were there. We were instructed to leave Avedgen and go up to the Mediterranean. So we went to Rotis Bay and picked up some supplies and some additional personnel. Russian linguists I think in Arabic. We sailed to the eastern part of the Mediterranean to travel up and down the coast of Egypt and Israel and remaining in international waters of course. And it was a spectacular day. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. And we were obviously at that point in the Sun, an peninsula. And the six-day war had just started a couple days earlier. And we were cruising back and forth. The, just at a slow speed to see whatever we could pick up. We were intercept operators and I was setting in position copy and international morse code. But so if I said to say that we were over there monitoring the effects of what was going on in the Middle East and copying the various traffic going on between the various countries over there. So on that day around 1130 my buddy Bob Eisenberg and I went to lunch and he told me that some of what I was copying was extremely important and that there was evidence based on what I was copying that there was going to be a target not knowing exactly what the target or who the target was but that the target was going to be attacked. Currently whatever it was was being discussed. They didn't identify the target. They just called it a target. It was a beautiful warning and my particular situation was that I was topside helping cleaning antennas and just doing maintenance while I wasn't doing my regular job as a CT. The entire morning we saw airplanes traveling overhead at very low altitude. It was possible to see them taking pictures and so forth and observing what our position was and what we were doing. The connoisseurs aircraft clearly marked with the starry day but we clearly had a flag on our ship and without everything was good. We were glad the Israelis were there because we were in the war zone. We knew that we could see the bombs going off on the coast and so on and so forth. One plane came so low that you could even see the pilots face and he brought this wings and all morning long. In fact some of the sailors were some of some dating and relaxing because we did not feel threatened. We had a GQ practice. General quarters was called around 1300-1 o'clock in the afternoon and I went to my GQ station which was down in Belodex and RR1 and Radio Shack and we were supposed to at that time turn on our radios and see if we could pick up anything. Shortly after the General quarters we were approached aggressively by aircraft and was unidentified aircraft but they came in at us and started attacking our ship. They did not attempt to inform us in any way shape or form to leave the area. They simply attacked. All of a sudden like this jet flew over our head and we heard then the firing of rockets and missiles that they were firing and then I watched my friend Spicer, the mailman go down next to me. Spicer tried to run from the Starbird site to the port side of the ship and the plane just sent a rocket through the L1 level left through and it caught Spicer on the left side of his body with a shrapnel and worked along up and in Jim and us as a thinkward trouble. All of a sudden we hear on one MC which is the internal communications for the ship. Captain McGonagall made the announcement that we were being attacked by unknown aircraft and everyone scrambled to get back to their battle stations. Our ship was not equipped with any defense armament at all. We had 450 caliber machine guns on board that were used in ports to repel borders if necessary. All of a sudden I heard the gunfire. I didn't really hear gunfire what I heard was the bullets hitting the top of the ship or hitting the overhead. We could all hear the bullets striking the ship of a sound. The word was passed that we were under attack. What do you mean under attack? We hadn't heard anything. Not realizing being well below the waterline we wouldn't hear the sounds above. We tried to see if we could pick up any information and eventually the radius. I guess because of all the gunfire and hitting antennas and tags they did some of the equipment starting to slip so we had to shut it all down. I was headed back to my repair station when the explosion started. I went immediately back to my damage control station and started putting together a repair team as much as I could because a lot of my didn't know where they were at. They were dead or shot or whatever. At one point I was asked to find a stretcher and take it up to the bridge. So I left my general quarters area and found my way. It took me a while to find a stretcher. They were all in high demand at that point and found one and took it up to the bridge. It was a bloody mess up there. Captain McGonigal was injured. Commander Thompson was extremely injured and there was I believe a boasons mate that was killed at that point that I was up there. There's many, many guys on that ship that blown up really, really bad. During that time there were many sorties that were attacking us and it became pretty intense for a while. The attack lasted, I'm going to say an hour with ship with airplanes just continuously attacking us with rockets. They palm whatever armor they had. Then it seemed like a long time before the shooting stopped and then we started hearing other types of machine gun fire. I was told that we all had to get down low because there were some shells that were starting to break through the side of the ship. We finally heard the armored piercing coming through the ship. I was in my office when all this occurred for all of the stripy ones actually was wounded by one of them. I had that shot in the right leg, I have scars on the right leg where that happened. I have the bullet yet because it bounced off of me and wasn't across the floor of my office and I picked it up and carried it home. I still have it. And then at that point, after it seems like a long time but it couldn't have been more than probably 20, 30 minutes of this, everything went silent. It was just dead. Then there was this law again trying to remember time. Let's say it's 20, 30 minutes. The captain comes over the speaker and says, prepare for torpedo attack. I looked at my friend Jimmy and we're there and I said, how do we do that? I'm cleaning up my language tremendously there with that. I saw the torpedo boats. There were three torpedo boats. I saw two of them both of them at the Star of David on it and I was pretty excited about that. I thought they were there to help us because we didn't know who was attacking us. The jet aircraft were unmarked. So we thought, well, who knows? We certainly didn't expect it to be these ratings as for sure. And then I could tell the ship was at flank speed because it was not a fast ship. So when it cranked up to about 18 knots, the tables started vibrating and you could really tell that we were all out at flat speed. And once again, I heard several more times to stand by for torpedo attack starboard side. On my way back down from the bridge, I did see off in the distance two more more torpedo boats approaching us. And then finally, I heard a brace for torpedo starboard side. And that definitely shook us up. Remember, we were young, we were all young. We were all in our early 20s. We had never been exposed to warfare. This was our first experience. We were scared. And so we had never been taught in any military situation how to prepare for a torpedo attack. So we laid down on the floor, wrapped our arms around the table leg and buried our heads. And so I was down on the floor, set a few prayers, and then all the sudden everything exploded. We were struck by one of the five torpedoes that were released on us. When the explosion hit it was like an incredible wind. And you could feel that. You could feel things hitting me, the face and the arms. And the next thing I know, I was being, I was shining to the air because of the explosion. All I remember is falling. And I remember falling, and I remember water catching me as I fell. Anyway, I was floating in the overhead, slammed back down on the deck, and I had to, I don't know how long that was unconscious, but was awakened by the water coming in the ship. I woke up, and I don't know, maybe a few seconds, maybe a minute, it couldn't have been long. The torpedo had blasted a huge hole into the side of the ship. And what woke me up, because I was faced down on the floor, was I was garbling a mixture of water, sea water, and oil. And then it's just pitch black. It's unbelievable. You're saying, okay, I just lived through this. And I'm going to drown, and you're grabbing onto people or what, a hold on. When the torpedo blast occurred, of course, first instinct was to get out of the compartment, because the sea was rushing in on us. I was up to my neck and water. It blows this massive hole of 39 feet wide and 24 feet high. Comes through, takes out a bulkhead, a wall, thin metal wall. The ladder takes out another thin metal wall, goes through the other side of the ship through our research spaces over there. And there is this ladder, the only exit to get out. And God left the ladder. There was nothing, the walls were gone. There was one sailor that was ahead of me, the top of the ladder, trying to turn the hatches held in place by a dog, which is a wheel. And he was trying to turn it to the right, and that was taming it. So I had to remove his hands from that dog and turn it the right way. And then they helped him on once we got that open. That was the first light to come down in, because the space was entirely black. There was no light whatsoever. Full of smoke and the smell of oil. What a sea. I couldn't move. And so I'm chasing the water, I'm waking up to the realization that something happened and I'm looking around and I'm trapped in debris. I'm in like a debris pile. And the water is coming in fast because the holes we saw later on was quite huge. So it was dark. So I fell my way down the passageway through the RR1 to where the doorway was into the passageway. And by that time I was up to water. My knees, there was a there was a guy coming out of the PNR office, which was across the passageway from RR1. And he had his foot cut in the door. And the one rushing water was pushing it against his foot. He couldn't get his foot out. So he and I pushed on the door and got his foot out. But by that time we were starting to tread water. So the ocean's coming in fast. I'm scared I'm going to drown. And I'm kicking and pulling and shoving debris out of my way. And as by the time I got up maybe a foot or two, the ocean is up to my waist by this point. I'm looking for the ladder, which Red Addington had come down previously. And it wasn't there. So I heard voices, I heard screaming and hollering. So I headed for the sound and I kept going up and up and started swimming. But now the the area is almost filled with water. When I got to the end of the passageway I was swimming. And apparently a lot of guys had already gone. Now the hatch was about six feet by three feet wide. But it had been dug down because of general quarter-striple. And there was a scuttle, which is a small round hole with a wheel to lock it down in that hatch. So I was hanging on to a pipe in the overhead. We had about 18 inches of breathing space left. And it was waiting for the ship either to roll over or that hatch to open. So I ran to move up in the ceiling area where the fluorescent lights were with several other men that had actually survived as I did. Some injured, we were all injured to some extent. But we didn't know what our injuries were. We were just reacting to the fear that we were going to drown if we didn't get out of there. So we get near the hatch above us, which would have taken us to the passageway above. If we could get somebody's attention that would be running by that hatch or walking by and hear us pounding and pounding on that hatch to get somebody's attention, which we ultimately did. Time-wise I don't have a good recollection. Some guy say it was 15 minutes on a state, say 20, but it seemed like a lifetime because every time the ocean would come in, the tide would come in, we would hold our nose and wait for the tide to go back out so we could take another breath of air. So we just waited there in silence and just here in the water splash around and the level going up and down with the movement of the ship until that hatch was finally opened. The bulkhead that I would have been sitting at was actually totally annihilated from the the blast of the torpedo. Everyone in the Com Center was killed, everyone in the maintenance shop was killed and a good number of the people in the radio research spaces were killed or wanted as a result of that. I'm just fortunate to have survived it because there was a lot of sailors that were killed, the space that was forwarded in the mine. There was only one person that made it out of that space alive because he got hit with the bullet and was on his way to medical central when the torpedo hit. Everybody else in that space was killed. And after it happened I went out the door of my room and it had to go down to the next deck below right there. I opened it up and saw two of my friends that were dead right below me on the deck below. I went down to see if there was anything I could do but it was all a full water and it was really nothing I could do. It was a mess to sit at the very least. We had 25 members of the crew that were handed up in that water retune before we ended up closing it up. That was something that was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life on a water-capurizing and we got to a point where it looked like the water was going to come up out of the spaces. Lieutenant Bennett said that he wanted to get everyone out of there. And he said with emotion in his voice, if anyone is still alive in there, pound on a pipe, let us know that you're alive and we'll come in and get you. And we heard no one call out, no one was pounding on the pipes at that time and we'd dog down the hatches and closed up everything. And we did make our way onto the ladder to go topside or at least go to the next level. And they started pulling us out of the water one by one and giving us life preserves. Larry Bowen was standing there with a life jacket, gave him it and it was passing us out as we came up in that next level and said, head go topside. And word came down to prepare to abandon ship because we weren't sure if the ship was going to actually sink. You get up there and you see this napalm burning fires. There was so much shrapnel on the deck at that time that I was wearing leather soul shoes and the shrapnel stuck into my shoes every time I tried to stand up. I would slide down to where the starboard side of the ship was partly the main deck was partly in the water. And so literally hung on to things to try to pull myself back up. This is one of my fellow sailors right there's a hatch way right coming into that compartment and it turned out it was a muscle clerk and I had heard that he'd gone outside to take a look and it was machine gunned. And one of our medics was trying to keep him alive and it needed help. And Ernie Gallo and I and the third class corpsman tried to you know provide three odds to keep him alive. And he had a life jacket tightly wrapped around him because he received punctures to his lungs and we were trying to keep him breathing and keep the other words of the air within his chest. He was so badly damaged that the only way that the corpsman could keep him breathing was to do a tracheotomy and in the meantime Ernie and I were doing mouth-to-mouth recessitation and chest press compressions to try and keep him alive. We kept that going until mannequin back to us and pronounced it that we had heard him say I bet on his ship so long I'll probably die on his ship and he did end up dying on that ship. After that I had to ask to give him a chance to go outside and get some fresh air. So at that point things kind of quieted down but then there were additional approaches by motor torpedo boats and so we had to go through that drill again preparing but fortunately we weren't hit by any more torpedoes but the motor torpedo boats did strafe our ship shooting our life rafts shooting personnel on board trying to put our fires from an APOLM attack. The lifeboat that I was scheduled to be on it was the only one on my side of his ship that stayed afloat but eventually the torpedo boats ended up putting shells into that one and you know there there wouldn't have been any any any boats any lifeboats that would have been able to be used so they were planning on putting us now okay extremely close to that. The life rafts were shot up I didn't see that in there like I said there was so much tremor on the ground there were holes everywhere and I look over and see my friend Birdman laying on the floor with his head like have his head shot off or whatever with a fire hose almost drowning. I could see the three torpedo boats back on the horizon I could see what looked like a aircraft approaching from the starboard side. The motor torpedo boats continued to fire the four-year-old man of cannons at the bulkets of ship. The closer they got I could tell and I could see the star David flags on him so that's that's what I knew that there were Israelis and that's that's what I knew that you know they were the enemy and not there to help us. There was quite a bit of confusion and not having an actual duty station I heard over the loudspeaker that we were to stand by the reptile portals. We heard helicopters hovering and someone passed their words that there was rallies. I had no idea that all of this was being perpetrated by the Israelis so I went running outside to see what what these what helicopters are ready to do and and I saw armed troops they sent over Marines IDF Marines is ready to defense courses. I don't know why they're coming to defense because they were attacking us and I'm saying I just lived through a tour excuse me an attack on the top side in the sun whatever I just lived through a torpedo hitting a room I just got to the top of the ship or whatever and now they're going to shoot and kill me. There was a helicopter outside that I could see out to one of the holes with men at the doorway I think that they'd be sure by coming on board. It looked like they were coming into you know board the ship so I wasn't to be taken without a fight. We didn't have a key for our repell border locker for the gun cabinet our first our second class petty officer Gunners-Mate Thompson was up in one of the guntubs and he had the keys for that. The gunner was still literally blown to pieces his body was lying on the edge of the folk saw and his blood was running down the the bulkhead there and puddling up there it's amazing to me there was blood everywhere just blood everywhere. So I went to the station where the small arms locker was and had a group of sailors there and sent one down to the machinery spaces to get a pair of bolt cutters cut the lock off so we could access this the small arms and weapons that were stored there he never came back. I think Phil Turnie was trying to get into the locker to no avail he was trying to open it up with a hammer and an axe and we just we couldn't get into that to get any weapons to the repell borders. And at that time they called off the attack and the torpedo boats turned away. Why they didn't stay why they didn't attempt to to board the ship I don't know however there was really no safe place for the helicopters to put down onto the ship and I don't know if they had rope ladders or whatever to put troops onto the backs of the ship but thank god it didn't happen. I personally first hand don't know didn't know why that happened but subsequently I heard that we were able to get a communication out from the ship and SOS indicating that what our situation was. They took all of our antennas out on the first passage show and we were a spy ship and they're all gone over communications luckily one guy Terry Halibov had a message out on a Jerry Rig Quatchable cable on a tuner that he had turned off and he got it working. And that's when we got the Mayday that a ship was being attacked. We did not know who it was we did not know where it was at. We got one message back it said help is on the way and it comes back to what does that mean help is on the way. So you're sure that somebody this fleet is out there in the Mediterranean Sea is going to come and help you. And from that point on we took off and we were steaming and we knew we were going because we had access to the searcher-edars and we knew roughly that we were headed for the east side of the Mediterranean. That night I wasn't really sure what was going to happen to the ship as we were sitting there pretty much dead in the water trying to make our way north but I stayed up on topside and spent the entire night up there and for fear that if I was to go back down down below decks and try and grab some sleep. I didn't know if I'd ever come back up. It was a difficult time immediately after that. A lot of things were taking place. The mess decks where I was stationed became the hospital room if you will. Every table, every chair and table was used to treat sailors for injuries they received during attack. I discarded my communication equipment because it wasn't they need for it at that point and started just helping where I could take care of the sailors. We had a makeshift hospital or trip triage in our mess decks, a place where we ate our meals and the tables were set up as beds and we went through the ship moving people down there where our doctor keeper and our two menics were doing the best to keep people alive. Where our doctor got blessed in Dr. Keeper was a solo doctor on the ship who had had his guts shot up and sewed himself up put a life jacket on to keep himself together and out of the 171 wounded I'm going to guess he saved 100 lives that night. I was down in the mess decks and there are so many wounded people there that had that were really seriously seriously wounded. Body parts all over. You don't even have time to record everything I could tell you about the different injuries. I mean it's just terrible you know just terrible. They asked me to go over and help this guy and I don't remember his name. He had a hole through his head with a 20 millimeter whatever another one over through here here and then I just counted because taking whatever I counted 51 holes in but that's still one single person of 174 wounded people. One of the guys came with brought up his leg was literally crushed in a doorway there was blood running out of his shoes and I'm over with our commanding our excuse me our executive officer Lieutenant Armstrong and he's in the cave which is I'm okay I'm okay give me a bottle liquor. Give me this or what we can have his drink of liquor or whatever but don't mess with them fine so we don't when we look around and he just lay there and blood to death because he wasn't going to let a minute get away from people taking care of his crew on the ship. Tommy Thorne in the guy tonight I had my guitar board ship and Tommy was a kind of folk singer and I was interested in having music and he taught me how to figure pick during the cruise and something I still played that way today but he was killed. I had shrapnel in my back from the explosion in the torpedo I still have a piece of that shrapnel in my Rachel. So I had three gashes in my leg but I also had I was wearing dungaries and I had blood on me from working with some of the other injured so I had blood on my my shirt blood on my pants and the adrenaline was was pumping so hard that I didn't realize that I had been injured until two days later when I had to report the sick bay and and stripped down to be examined for just a normal medical check. I had minor injuries some metal I had one piece of metal that from the explosion had registered in the site in my one side and I had cuts and bruises on my arm both arms and hands so I was one of the fortunate ones I was one of the walking wounded. Other people had a variety of injuries some worse than others of course we had a significant loss of life. The doctor and the querman were doing the best they could and we uh anybody took it lend a hand would lend a hand if they if somebody said okay take here this guy hold his bandage onto this do that so we sat there dead in the water wondering why we were gonna go and stay afloat or seek or whatever was going to happen. It was 17 hours I believe is the number of hours before we saw anybody coming from the sixth fleet. We were told that help was on a way after having gotten out the SOS but we didn't really know what that meant okay and as it came out later that the aircraft off the sixth fleet aircraft carriers was in around but they were recalled back to the ship toys back to the ship's toys. We have what's known as ready cats. There are two planes when you are in a you know a tense area. We always kept two planes on a catapults and they were ready to be launched within five minutes. When we went to general quarters what I first saw as one who was up on the vultures roll and where I would like to hang out a lot was it was general quarters general quarters and you immediately you you head out as fast as you can to where you're supposed to go but they were already firing up those two jets that were on there and so they were launched immediately. Our military tried they were called back by the political the political machinery of our government at the time because the military wanted to do their job those aircraft on the america did take off they were launched they were on their way and they were called back because they did not want to embarrass one of our key allies in the middle east israel and when the planes were being recalled the officers which were senior officers not captains but commanders the conversations began to turn very angrily as they talked to one another and without getting into the expletives you could tell that they were pretty angry pretty confused it was almost like they themselves did not know why the planes were being recalled all they knew was get them back down on a deck to quote you know some of the things that's in writing already and now their job was to bring them back clear the deck set it up for landing which they weren't prepared for and to bring them back down. There was a whole night of not knowing if we were going to sink if we were not going to sink if somebody was coming it was just wait and see but then that next day when the fleet comes it helps us we the one that are flown off the ship I can see in the distance that the USS america and even though still probably 20 miles away from us it was so big that the superstructure was very distinguishable on the on our eyes now we were able to pull it alongside of the liberty and from my perspective again as 19 year old this is my first cruise I'm thinking my gosh we saw the hole in the side of the ship we saw how it was all shot out and I'm a farm boy I'm a hunter a fisherman and I know what different bullets can do but these holes that were in the side of the ship is nothing that I had ever seen before they were probably eight inches maybe 10 inches in diameter they they sent that they were 30 millimeter shells and you know then we again sent the medical people over to help them and now the helicopters started you know bringing the wounded from the liberty over to our our deck and it was one flight after another after another after another I mean we had so many horrific situations there that were taken care of I'm not sure if I was affected very much until I started seeing the body bags coming and and I think that's when I began to really realize we really were at war that night I went out with a repair party and we we tried to patch holes the the the deck force sleeping quarters were in the bow of the ship and there were so many holes in the bow we had to go around and we take a large cone shaped piece of wood and hammer it actually in the in the hole to stop the hole and to keep water from coming in our captain in the meantime was attempting to get us get us out of that area we didn't have a helm at our pilot house we actually had to steer the ship right at the rudder our our engineers kept our boilers on the line and we're able to turn turn our prop and get us out of there and ballast tanks were tanks and held water so that you were a couldn't level the ship and so they had to move that around so they could get trying to get the deck out of the water and get some we still had a pretty good list but not as bad as it was and from there we we sailed about a thousand miles to Malta where we went into dry dock after we got to Malta and they drained the water down we had a team of men that went in to the compartments looking to recover body parts the ship had just gotten into the dry and Ron Cucco and his team were still cleaning out the the 25 guys that were killed in the room the torpedo hit and then I joined in the next day first of all they they told us initially that we could go on liberty and they were going to have a medical team come in and remove all the bodies and all that and all those bodies were down in our spaces that were classified spaces and they decided no they can't have these people are not cleared for secret type stuff to remove the bodies so we had to cancel our liberty to go in town we we had to go down and take remove all the bodies that we could we went down into the spaces to retrieve remains of remains of those that didn't make it there was gruesome I was part of the part of the group of guys that helped take the bodies out of the um balls of the ship after we got into Malta and dry docked and uh what I experienced was worse than than than attack itself because of what we what we picked up was a worse thing that's ever happened to me is having to pick up the body parts and put them in the bag and keeping in mind these were our fellowship mates and some of our friends and uh the bodies they were they were chopped up from all the tribum blood X and it was amazing and more of us were killed and incredible some of the guys that went down made two or three trips to retrieve remains uh I was only able to make one trip down I couldn't emotionally take it you know how your mind works sometimes things are so bad you don't remember them okay and there's very very very few things that I can remember about that and the one thing that sticks in my mind was I remember finding a boot and I quite honestly don't know if there was any if there was a foot in it or not but I remember one of the sailors having a specific boot because I you know I knew him not well but I knew him and I said I know where that goes and uh but it was there were a lot of things like that as people were sailors were trying to clean up the torpedo damaged area of the ship that was very hard and it was really hard um and I think every one of us took time to uh grief um and and um I haven't I don't I'm not ashamed to say that uh I did um and um the memory of that will never lead me I still have visions of it to this day okay I was there when uh the lego and uh found uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh some of them then that had suffered even to this day this was their second and some had a third cruise that they were on when we got attacked they established relationships they were closer to each other they're almost like brothers uh I had a nearly a hand it only been on there a few weeks and I think primarily um I didn't feel it as deeply as they felt it and I didn't feel it as long as they felt it but I still felt it emotionally with some of the bodies because uh you know they were in my division um you know I felt a little bit sad for for them um and uh I think at our 15 year reunion also one of we had a young lady sitting at our table and once we found out what her name was um I told her that I found I found her husband and more stable than in our shop and I don't know if anybody else that would have found him under the me so and I took it pretty hard and I guess that's what I'm all I could say they cut out the damage the exterior walls they welded new plates in they also cut out all of the the cannon fire and the machine gun fire I mean we have so many holes bone in that ship from the arachncy which ridiculous I think all together they had like 800 and some holes that uh entered up in the ship that uh but from the torpedo boats and the planes and everything all the holes in the ship were entirely repaired the ship was almost repainted um which we didn't quite understand why they were going to such great lengths to repair the ship apart from making it see worthy but we wanted it to come home uh beat up and bloodied so people can see what happened and uh unfortunately they uh painted it up fixed it up like nothing ever happened brought her in of course nobody went inside to see where all because there was no guts in the ship anymore during that interim uh animal kid came out to the ship then the cover up again actually it began instantaneously on our ship when we when Admiral board uh kick in the board he was he was in charge of setting up the the Navy Court of Inquiry and he wanted to our guests find out uh get some testimony um going as soon as possible um unfortunately a lot of the testimony never appeared in our and then maybe in the uh Navy Court of Inquiry because it was um quite damning to the Israelis as a matter of fact they committed um they uh they they committed some war crimes and there were some well-high-ranking officers that advised us in person you would never to speak about this if you do you'll be arrested and prosecuted and uh we were dressed down told that there was a thing about it it had been prison or worse and uh the admiral um was very nice initially and then being very stern and one of us to know in uncertain terms that we were never allowed to talk about the the attack uh we were told uh not to reveal any detail about what happened there were huge penalties that we were threatened to with 10,000 dollar fine 10 years of prison and or worse there was the indication that if you you talked you were you were subject to court martial don't talk to your families we were told don't talk to your friends at your next command don't tell anybody that your next command anything apart from the fact that you survived an attack in the Mediterranean and you provide no details no matter what they ask you provide no details but we had people ask us are you you guys on the liberty yeah that's all we told them what happened i can't talk about that it's crazy stupid i can remember when i got got back home the local newspaper came to the house and wanted an interview and i told him i said listen i can't talk to you i can't tell you anything i have a friend who's sister worked for one of the newspapers and since i had it and uh she said we we want to interview would you do that i said i guess so and so uh they contacted me and said well we called the navy and they said there's no way we can interview you we can't do it we're not allowed what a lot of people do you even realize is the USS america was a hospital the little rock was a hospital for five hours those people on those ships were instructed to never talk that there was ever an american from the USS liberty ever on their ship and then the old man the captain he got on the bullhorn and he told us flat out he says we're stopping the mail but what he said was any letters that are going out from this time on and this is where you really knew you were in a black hour any letters that are being sent out we will not accept anything until i tell you but he said now don't seal the letters don't seal the envelopes and he had a team that would go through and read it and they and they did my understanding and those who mentioned anything it was my understanding they were called up to go see a group who would interview them afterwards we had no idea who shot the liberty up they did not tell us they did not give us any information at all and the political aspect of it never really came out until i don't know days and weeks afterwards so those people had to somewhat of a trauma for their life to to wonder why this whole thing happened and they're on a different ship and they can't talk about it they can't go to anybody ever they were threatened with the same thing and i think for for the rest of the time that we were in a Mediterranean it was like you knew you knew this was bigger than what you saw you knew this wasn't a mistake so there was a lot of us there were shipping out at one time so it was interesting I had to say to captain mcgonnical's credit he shook every shook every sandwich when we left and we were reminded once again while we're involved especially that we were not to talk to any newsman and i was i never i never left the ship i did not did not want to be in put in a position where i was even asked about the attack then they asked for volunteers to bring the ship back to the united states and i was one of the nine people from the naval security group part that brought brought her back um we conducted fire and security watch in the compartments that had been there were newly welded in place to make sure there was no leaks that would create a flooding problem as we translate the Atlantic we pulled into a little creek we were there for a few weeks we had stored bags upon bags of scooped up material from the research spaces that had been exposed to the torpedo um and put all those bags on on a flatbed tractor trailer and took them to the Norfolk furnace and then they put her in put her in the uh stuck in uh in the mothballs and uh for a year and sold her for scrap no evidence whatsoever ever again there would be no physical evidence of what us real did so uh yeah it was uh it was a cover up he never talked much about it um very limited i think the most i heard was when he had written an article for uh publication and the readers digest and he said you want to see it uh i didn't know it had happened and i said sure and he handed me these papers with covered with black magic marker and there were very few words left after the government had taken out the story okay and wouldn't i allow it to be published and they covered it in a lot of different ways and i got to germany in july of 67 and i was wearing my uh uh gunkery jacket was called uh because it was cool there and i had a much chips patch with shoulder and uh yes this luri patch one it and i was immediately ordered to take take all that stuff off your jacket and uh i thought at first it was just um kind of a side hurt it was a spitten polish uh base and uh you know it's just a apropos shinier shoe shine and uh um so i thought that was probably the reason uh and then i found out other people had their ditty station patches on there thunkery jacket it was just the uh because i was the uss liberty stuff that had to go and i don't and i remember how long we were there but um i got a uh i received a purple heart at the but it was given to me in a private ceremony in the captain's office with uh there were seven of us there were station there all got purple hearts and they did it in a quiet ceremony uh in the captain's office not in friendly trips he nobody pinned anything on my chest he handed me a box in the paperwork and shook my hand and that was it i did buzzer board of the bronze star and they changed it to presenting ceremony and they changed it to the navy comming mission metal although i've seen the bronze star and i had the citation i read it and then i only got it the next day it was different that took the bronze star away from me he gave me a navy combination metal instead and uh as we know our captain who got the uh metal bonner uh was not it was not given to him by the president of the united states there that doesn't happen they sent him to a navy yard because Lyndon Johnson would not pin captain mcgonigal's metal on him i got a letter from the state department i don't know how long that took in germany and uh it's my get a letter from the state department so i opened it up and it's this and i still have this paperwork that uh um that the israelis were offering like five hundred dollars for uh compensation for my wounds and i thought stupid i mean so i'm a 21 year old kid i said but i don't know what to do in this so i went to the jack office there and there was no uh navy jack officer i had to talk to an army jack of uh whatever he is a lawyer and i said so what do i what do i do with this is it don't be stupid kid take the money so i'm 20 or 21 years old i took five hundred bucks and uh signed the paper which meant i could never uh sue us for what they did the problems i had with all that was that the government didn't admit anything they denied everything we were told the carmen should have talked about it couldn't say anything about it at all but it didn't slow me down once i said pretty much what i wanted to say to the press even though i was i was followed by an officer all the time every time i spoke he was there to monitor what i said so i wouldn't say anything but i did i blabbed too much and i got in trouble with the navy for that and i was frozen for promotion even though i was picked up for e8 i never got it because i spoke more than what i was supposed to they didn't kick me out of anything they just threatened me but i didn't pay much attention to the threats i just did what i wanted to do anyway i helped your minister write his book i provided a lot of the information for that book because i was in Washington at the time of the company classified and one of the guys classified as nvm and then they found out about that so i was in really big a hot water but they couldn't cut burns or we were doing anything you didn't want to press there's no anything about it i didn't say anything about it for years and years and years and uh probably 18 20 years when i got married again second wife when married now been married 38 years i didn't say a word to her and tell i saw an article in the paper by Stan White and i read a book called assault on the liberty from Jim As and i began to speak out and slowly by surely this has been a law a lifelong mission that has uh gone absolutely nowhere until recently and i thank you guys for giving me the chance to tell a little bit about the story but uh i didn't really talk about anything for a number of years with my wife my family i followed the dictates of the leadership my nv leadership that said keep your mouth shut but they had we all did and um it's just a shame that our government is afraid actually afraid to tell the truth about what happened on June 8th 1967 and those that were responsible for those actions i have a life magazine from the week following the attack that has a victorious is really soldier on the cover and back about on page 26 we were the accident that happened um the picture of the ship and um that was it a short paragraph about this unfortunate accident and uh it's uh it's over um that was the same thing with the newspaper i have newspapers from since nade since i inquired and opposed that um um this attack on the ship was on the front page and then it was back on page 3 the next day and then the third day is back you know somewhere near the ads for the stores and then come on nothing else mass media um won't won't touch the story um and if we try and put something out on our facebook accounts um we get censored and um so it's that's one of those things where you've got to be very careful what you say and and how you word things um so it's i don't know i think that's another reason why people just don't want to get involved anymore and it's it hurts us because we can't get anything in the newspaper we can't get anything um radio or tv we tried to get the attention we've talked to congress men we've talked to senators they say we understand we we're going to look into this we'll see what can be done and all turns out to be lip service 54 years later we're still getting the same kind of responses when we try to get the attention of our our politicians in Washington DC uh they're afraid they're reluctant they may have other reasons i don't know if they're being threatened i don't know if they're being controlled but i don't i just think they feel like their hands are tied and what i do but we can't get the true story out as to what and why we were attacked by a primary ally in the Middle East and it hurts it hurts to know that you devoted you in my case 29 years today and four months of my life to the Navy um believing in our cause believing in what we were doing believing in our missions believing everything we were told we believed in what we were doing but we can't get resolution um i spent 21 years in the Navy and part of the reason that i did that was the job that i had was you know related to national security so i um i had a lot of respect for the job um i was supporting the national security agency um i was part of the naval security group and it was um it was a very meaningful position for me plus in my mind i thought there was a chance that i might actually have an opportunity to get some of the answers that we didn't have and as it turned out um later on um i'm going to say probably around 1980 um there was a report through the agency that that came across my desk and it was the agency's report on on the attack and it was a white wash just just like you know you know everything else and i just i was i was flabbergasted i couldn't believe that information that i knew should be in the report wasn't wasn't there and i mean so you know for the past 54 years now we've been trying to get freedom of information you know information released so that uh so that the truth will will get out we formed as a group and our mission statement was to simply get the truth told about the oasis liberty so um i found in certain situations that some people don't want to hear that um and they will get in your face to prevent you from telling the truth um america needs to know that there are people out there with power that will that will prevent this story from getting out there i think the biggest just reluctance of people wanting or not wanting to get involved is because of the it's the c-a pack that's um got got so much power that um if you go against them they uh they have the power to um bring about you know harsh things against you the crew have experienced um hate and discontent simply because we want we tell the truth about the attack and there is a group within our country uh that for Israeli supporters that do not want that information to be presented to the american public i go with him a lot to give his speeches and um i see some of the people that are against what he has to say and knowing hernias i know herni i don't understand why they would think he would stand there and tell them stuff that was untrue um he's always been very truthful he's very religious i mean we're not a communist organization we are combat veterans we are decorated combat veterans that people do not want to hear our story why and it comes back to this group that's found and determined to protect this holy relationship between the united states and israel no matter what we've actively wars because it israel and you made it me least our ship was clearly identified prior to the attack um there's all kinds of speculation that our flag wasn't flown that what our ship was unmarked and that's not true at all the flag was flying it was shut down but it was also replaced immediately with a larger flag um the insignia is on the side of the boat gtr5 there's tall as a six foot man i guess you might say uh and anybody it knows anything about identifying ships in the ocean would tell you that that was enough indication to say that this was an american ship not some obscure Egyptian troller that has it's been claimed to be mistaken for so um you know i over the years i've heard all all these stories that have been told to try to deflect the truth and identification of the ship should not have been a problem at all and our government still supports that theory that it was a mistaken identity there was no mistaken who we were we were marked ship marked gtr5 on the bow usus liberty on the stern american flag they go exactly who they were attacking they took all of our antennas out on it first passive show the story that the attack wasn't accidental was a lie that was developed between our government and israel and fed to the american people so the the united states is really relationship which began at that time that close relationship began at that time is based on fabrication and lies i do believe that johnson would have been in the middle of the war in the middle east as as soon as we went down of course it would have been somebody else that did it would not have been Israel so they all got embarrassed which i'm more than pleased about i just take away the tree to us there was a political machine that seemed to be working and they that machine put my life in at risk it took the life of these guys on the liberty and and i think that that process really made me begin to question what i have been taught as a midwestern that fly to flag fight for your country save it and and good perspective for your family and go home and live happily ever after and and now what i find is that that they whoever they are they don't care they don't care about me they don't care about the liberty they didn't care about america they didn't care about my ship they didn't care about the crew we were expendables and that's how i felt is you know i thought i was doing my my civic duty and in the meantime i'm just an expendable i'm fodder for some guy leaning back on his desk in congress smoke on a cigar feed up on the desk drink in a scotch and they've never probably seen death himself and i question whether or not they even are bothered a moment when they go to sleep at night time the fact that we couldn't tell anyone our story of course had an effect on each of us in that and we couldn't get it out of our system some of the some of my fellow sellers were hadn't gotten ptsd very that to this day are affected by it thank god i don't think i was very much you know with everything that we'd been through it was almost it was almost important to talk about it but you know you couldn't have that in itself was a lot real stressful i know that it impacted him because we lived close to an airport and one night i heard this banging and he was in the closet he had just i guess gone to quarters or something it was like a plane's coming over you know and and so the men who survived lived it for a long time my wife said we were just talking about that a couple weeks ago she said joe i know you came home i saw you i you i lived with you but you never came back your mind was over there yet it had a lot of nightmares it still do yeah i mean you relive this the anger comes out it just the flashbacks they anger everything comes back again and wake up at night with it i don't think i've had a full-night sleep service i still don't get benefits for my 12 back operations and eight defusions he has hearing loss due to the explosion we can't seem to get compensation out of that so it's been the government has been taking advantage of several cents they knew that with everything the government does what they want to do and the consequences are no concern to them i don't seem to be i still feel bad i'm a bad it all the same our government doesn't support us is what doesn't support us we're men without without a country and it's it's disheartening and then more than anything else are are living with the memories of the the smell and the body clean up and the everything that was our home so to speak in our place where we we lived we fellowshiped we worked we had jobs that we went to to work to be totally wiped out and destroyed and then wonder what's next but i remember everything i don't have a throughout one second over and he never told me that because he doesn't open up what happened but he did go down and he had to retrieve his best friend and i started having flashbacks and nightmares so it took me significant time but not near the time that some of their buddies did and still some have not gotten over it and it's just as real today as it was then to that when i talked to you the first day about uh the the the shelling that we received by those planes when they first came over and it was it was so uh my mind was such that you know that happened like a couple days ago but i was telling you about it i i asked myself these questions and and that is why now why now do i have PTSD that don't let me sleep at night that my bed is trash that my wife wants to know why am i fighting why am i kicking why am i talking in my slate but i still see the ship i still see the stretchers that are being brought over but more than that i see the body bags it bothers me when i hear loud bangs like that and it sounds like what are some of the things that annoyed me about the sound like it's both hitting the rockets in the side of the ship fireworks would go in and i couldn't stand the last fireworks it just brought back too many memories so i didn't i didn't stay around on the fireworks to go on off or i covered my ears so i didn't hear it but it sounded like we know rockets could go off or the fireworks would go off or sound just like rocket hit in the side of the ship and they were everywhere he cannot stand fireworks we worked for Walt Disney World for 12 years and was in the park during the fireworks in the park he had to be removed off stage due to the impact uh he has PTSD he does have nightmares he does not remember his nightmares he has medicated at night with drugs so his mind will not remember those dreams per his psychiatrist he has wanted to leave this world due to all the hatred toward the government no we don't hate it is real we have several friends and my brother is Jewish in some circles the us the the liberty crew is looked at as whiners as conspiracy theorists as anti anti semis that if you anything negative that you can think of that uh that one group can can think of another is what what we're portrayed as as the guys that were not in the set of wearing the white hats uh where where the bad guys some of the people do it um by saying stuff that you know isn't true and they know it isn't true but they're just trying to make Ernie or whoever else is with him speaking look like they're making this up and you know you know that they know they're not making it up but yet they're still trying to sabotage what they have to say i'm a businessman i deal with all ethnic groups of people in my business i have a lot of Jewish friends i mean dear friends and uh so i don't ever consider them a part of what happened to me i haven't been anti Jewish at all i don't think i'm i don't think so go away have close friends i i i i'm mad at the government for covering it up i do a lot of Jewish people i did business with Jewish people i worked for Jewish people you know i'm not i don't hate Jews at all um i had many friends from the movie industry but um and i've told them the story they said what they couldn't have done that on purpose must have been a case of mistake and identity or but you know flaneter american flag and and i don't argue with them one time it you know they're they're all supportive of visceral and i understand that i just don't have to be a support her visceral and they know that too what i would hope to see happen now 54 years later is for the truth that come out about the attack um and the story to be told um of what happened and so that for a market and the world to know uh what we experienced um that this bigotry is out there and it's um uh being perpetrated deceitfully so that people don't know the truth so i want the truth to be told completely what i'm getting at is that uh the attack is just the beginning of the story um because of what uh the attack uh represented to the united states the world died off so it won't be long this it won't be many more of us left the truth needs to be brought forward so that the people who come after us don't let it happen again it's important that the uh the world knows that this was not an accident that this was a deliberate attack on our ship let the world know what what happened to us on that day the uss liberty veterans associations number one goal is to get the truth out about what happened who attacked us why the attack was conducted why nobody was allowed to come to our aid and any information at all that will bring the truth out is what we're all about people should know exactly what we went on with that ship and i don't think Ernie or any of the other jama and on that ship will rest peacefully until this comes out i know that my husband and that crew did the very best they could for their country and i'm very proud of them for all of that and then all the people that i know that are writing stories and doing research and people like yourselves are sitting or listening to me babble all uh i appreciate that i would like i would like our government to acknowledge us and the cover up that ensued and why i would like americans just to know that the government covered up i'd like come here i could just stand up and say yes we made a mistake yes we covered it up yes we did this to our american people let the nation know what they did that that's what what i think they're they're all wanting they want to closer to what happened but we need our government to tell that to tell the true story get it out to the public and let the let the cars lay where they where they will i mean these men sign up for to defend their country they want to walk proud and they do walk proud but they've been kicked around what i'd like all americans to do is stand by american service man who were deprived of help trees like trash because always did the serve our country and we got stabbed in the back don't be not only by Israel but our own government then and now both both countries covered it up and told us the crew never to talk about it and and they failed to open up their books to show us what what evidence they have to prove our disprove what we know to be the true story i think the americans need to know that it doesn't matter whether the conservative or the liberal they the the people that we put in office we need to ensure that they do their jobs honestly i think they only profound comment i can make a shame on Israel's government and shape on shaman the united states government for collectively being involved in it is make sure that you do your history and do your study on what's actually going on find out the why and the what and i would like to say you know you can't always believe everything that's reported in the papers i think you already know that so do your homework to your research america needs to know the details what happened that day um to make their own judgments we just need you the american public to help us get the truth out the more people we can reach and reach out to and have them reach you know other people and say hey we just saw something about the u.s. us liberty and do some research on it and start asking your your local politicians and your senators and your congressmen i just hope that the event does get published to the point where it becomes people start asking questions why and that would fool me no and perhaps commerce and all it's infinite wisdom will sink down the answers i think if people hear this story and they they want to help the biggest thing that they can do i think is to contact their local representatives and and say look i just heard about this you know murderous activity that happened 54 years ago and and you people in congress did absolutely nothing about it i want you to do something i want you to you know investigate and and have a full and open congressional investigation our end result would be to have a congressional investigation into the attack and have it finally admitted that it was a deliberate attack by the state of israel and we can misclose you to have them deny it for all these years it was an accident to accept that premise just as an whole water and this is the the only incident that i'm aware of where a us naval ship has been brought under attack by any nation without a full congressional investigation but yet here you've had 34 men killed 174 men wounded you know a 70% casually rating and congress just looked the other way write your congressman write your senator uh call them demand that our congress do the right thing what we've gotten is just a standard letter that this incident this has already been investigated and found to be a case of mistaken identity which we all know is not true call your congressman and asked him for a thorough congressional investigation which the sentiment has never been investigated by congress um every bombing every um everything that happened in bayrude or anywhere else in the in the war on gets investigated by congress but um the sensitive the attack on the uss liberty has never been investigated let them know that you know the question is would i would i serve the country again and my answer is absolutely yes i have i love the country okay it's a great country sometimes it's run by more on this okay and well we have to fix that okay but that doesn't make the country bad we got a good country and uh things that happened to bring this whole attack upon us or contrived by people that had higher plans for their own agenda you know but that doesn't make our country bad and yeah i'd serve again it's 74 i'd serve you I'm going to go back to the place where I'm going to go. I'm