VVA Article

The VVA Veteran, the official voice of Vietnam
Veterans of America, has devoted four full pages
of their September/October 2002 edition to a
wonderful four page article on USS Liberty,
complete with four photographs.

The article can be found on the VVA web site at
http://www.vva.org/TheVeteran/2002_09/uss_liberty.htm

This story was introduced to the VVA by shipmate
John Hrankowski. It appears here due to the
effort of shipmate John Gidusko, who laboriously
hand typed the long article for the benefit ot
those who do not have web access.

get any easier after 35 years." Indeed, no one
among the crowd looked particularly pleased to be
there. But it was clear that for everybody the
occasion was important -- not to be missed, in
fact. Some came every year.

As at many other military memorial ceremonies,
various speakers reminisced -- often emotionally
-- about the dead and the sacrifices they made for
their country. But the LIBERTY ceremony was
different. It always has been -- and not simply
because the annual reading aloud the names of the
34 dead is a ritual that makes the service
movingly specific. The story of the LIBERTY is
complicated, evidenced perhaps most graphically by
the fact that while the granite headstone is
designated as a group memorial, only six names are
inscribed on it. It's doubtful, moreover, that
those six men are even buried there.

"Those men aren't in that hole," says Joseph
Lentini, a LIBERTY survivor who was wounded in the
attack. "What's in that hole is a body bag that
has all the parts they couldn't identify."

The mass grave isn't the kind of mass grave the
federal government would like you to think it is.
Rather, it's a perversely appropriate emblem of
the decades of pain and humiliation that have been
heaped on the LIBERTY's dead and living. But the
ceremony is a testament to the survivors' struggle
to maintain dignity and honor in the face of gross
indignity and dishonor -- not to mention
unconscionable governmental denial and
indifference.

It's a struggle Vietnam veterans have known all
too well. But while Vietnam veterans have won some
of their long- overdue recognition, LIBERTY
veterans and the families of her dead don't yet
know what that feels like.



ISRAEL'S SURPRISE ATTACK


The few undisputed facts of Israel's attack on the
LIBERTY are essentially these. When the
Arab-Israeli Six Day War broke out, the
administration of President Lyndon Johnson sent
the LIBERTY spy ship into the eastern
Mediterranean to determine whether Russians or
Egyptians were piloting six Cairo-based Soviet
bombers flying missions against Israel. The ship
carried sophisticated electronic eavesdropping
equipment, her crew of roughly 300 men consisted
of communi- cations specialists from the National
Security Agency along with U.S. Navy officers and
sailors.

As the LIBERTY neared Gaza in broad daylight,
Israeli reconnaissance aircraft overflew her at
least twice. A short while later, unmarked
Israeli warplanes streaked in, strafing, bombing,
and rocketing the lightly armed ship in
international waters. When the aircraft withdrew,
Israeli torpedo boats appeared, firing at least
one torpedo that struck the LIBERTY dead center.
After the assault finally ended, 34 Americans were
dead and 171 were wounded. At least three of the
wounded were not expected to live.

Israel claimed -- and still does -- that the
incident was a tragic case of mistaken identity.
Israeli Defense Force commanders and pilots said
they thought they were attacking an Egyptian
freighter. In Washington, the Johnson
administration instantly accepted Israel's claim,
and that has been the government's official
position on the matter ever since. The LIBERTY's
survivors and their supporters, however, have
argued for decades that Israel was fully aware it
was attacking an American vessel. They have both
hard and circumstantial -- though not conclusive
-- evidence to back their case. The debate over
these opposing claims still rages.

What cannot be debated, though, is that almost
immedi- ately folllowing the assault, the U.S.
government acted as if it had something to hide.
The LIBERTY's survivors were quickly transferred
to disparate and distant assignments and were
threatened with jail if they ever discussed the
attack with anyone, including family members.
They were watched and monitored. Meanwhile, the
government and the upper echelons of the Navy
portrayed the attack and its aftermath as a
non-event.

For example, according to John E. Borne's 1995
book, THE USS LIBERTY: DISSENTING HISTORY VS.
OFFICIAL HISTORY, the Johnson administration
refused to send the standard letter of condolence
to the families of the men killed because it
typically identified the hostile forces. Not
wishing to characterize the Israelis or their
actions as hostile (and therefore possibly
deliberate), the letter that was sent said that
the men who died had "contributed to the cause of
peace."

The government also initially decided not to award
the LIBERTY survivors "hostile fire pay." At the
time, the Pentagon recognized only Vietnam as a
hostile-fire zone. To designate the LIBERTY attack
as having occurred in such a zone further risked
characterizing Israel as an aggressor. Eventually
the Pentagon decided to give the extra pay to the
171 wounded men. However, the rest of the crewmen
-- who'd fought for their ship and their lives,
many of them covered in the blood of their
comrades -- got nothing.

That the crew fought bravely from beginning to end
was obvious enough that President Johnson gave the
LIBERTY crew a Presidential Unit Citation.
However, the citation was not presented to the
crew -- who knew nothing about it -- until many
years later. Worse, like the sanitized con-
dolence letters, the citation acknowledged only
that the ship had been attacked by "foreign
aircraft and motor tor- pedo boats" -- as if the
attackers' identity were unknown.

When the group headstone was first installed in
Arling- ton Cemetery, its inscription declared
that the men had "died in the eastern
Mediterranean." As Borne points out, survivors
said that "anyone seeing the stone would think
that the men had died in a Middle Eastern
whorehouse or were run over by a taxi in
Constantinople."

At the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, there is a
wall engraved with the names of Navy officers
killed in combat. Two officers were killed on the
LIBERTY. The Navy did not put their names on the
wall.

Perhaps the ultimate insult occurred when the
government awarded the nation's highest military
recognition, the Medal of Honor, to Capt. William
McGonagle, the LIBERTY's skipper, for repeatedly
braving lethal fire to protect his men and his
ship. Normally the President presents this medal
to recipient in a ceremony held at the White
House. But Johnson handed the task to his
Secretary of the navy, and the ceremony took place
at the Washington Navy Yard with little media
attention.

Many motives have been offered as to why the
Johnson administration acted as if wanted to bury
the LIBERTY affair. Most have to do with not
wanting to embarrass and possibly alienate its
only Middle Eastern ally. Similarly, many theories
have gained prominence about why Israel would
deliberately attack an ally's ship -- the fear,
for instance, that the United States might learn
of Israel's then-developing plans to seize Arab
territory, plans the United States might have
objected to.

Whatever the truth or intent on either side, the
result was unequivocally clear as far as it
concerned the LIBERTY survivors: For all
practical purposes, their government was denying
what had happened to them.

As is the case in any sort of trauma, says Herman
Barretto, a Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
counselor at the Fresno Vet Center, if people even
act as if they don't believe something happened,
"it re-victimizes the victim. The first step in
safeguarding against the onset of PTSD is to
affirm the intensity of the moment." This
validates the experience for the victim. Also,
Barretto says it's important for multiple victims
of the same trauma to come together as much as
possible to talk about it. "Social support and
talking are necessary to healing. All the factors
that would've helped [LIBERTY survivors] to safe-
guard against PTSD were not there."

While the specifics differ in each case, the
lingering ordeals of the LIBERTY survivors and the
families of the men killed have been more or less
the same.



SLAUGHTER AND DESTRUCTION


Though completely out of action, the LIBERTY did
not sink. Because of its design and purpose, the
ship's mid- section was the one place it could be
hit by a torpedo and probably not go down. Ernie
Gallo, a communications tech- nician, says that
the comm center, below deck and in the middle of
the ship, had its own heavy vault doors for extra
security. After the torpedo hit, the doors were
sealed off, keeping the ship afloat.

Under escort -- and trailed by a Russian destroyer
hoping to find anything interesting that might
float out through the blast hole in the LIBERTY's
hull -- the ship limped to Malta. The crew, minus
the dead and wounded, who had been evacuated,
thought they could now get off. "But they ordered
us to go back into the ship where the torpedo hit,
and they wanted us to clean out all the classified
material," Gallo says. Several men had been in
the comm center when the torpedo hit, furiously
sig- nalling for help. Most were killed, and, as
Gallo notes, "Their body parts happened to still
be inside."

"They had to go down in there and bag up those
pieces," says Lentini, who lost almost a full inch
from one of his legs to a rocket and was evacuated
with the other wounded. "No damn wonder those guys
have been messed up."

The Navy launched an internal inquiry even before
the LIBERTY reached Malta. Whether the point of
the inquiry was to uncover or cover up what
happened is open to ques- tion. "The Navy
investigators were interested in how we fought for
the ship, how Navy training had paid off in the
saving of lives and the ship," Lentini says.
"They didn't want to know about the Israelis.
Anytime somebody talked about napalm being dropped
or being chased down by the aircraft or the life
rafts being shot up, they were squelched." Israel
denies its forces tried to kill men in the water
or sink the life rafts, which are war crimes,
according to international law.

Lentini is the only surviving crewman who was
inside the comm center when it exploded. "I'm the
only living person who saw those guys in there and
what they were doing prior to the torpedo hit," he
says. "The fact is, they were doing their job.
They were trying to get communications and in a
damn orderly way, given what was going on. Nobody
from the Navy has ever asked me about that. To
this day."

Larry Weaver, a 21-year-old bosun's mate on the
LIBERTY, was one of the three wounded not expected
to live. "I had been hit by rocket and cannon
fire and it blew about two- and-a-half feet of my
colon out," he says. "I had 101 shrapnel wounds.
My right leg was useless -- I could look down
through it and see out the other side, and look
down further and see my kneecap. My skin was on
fire and I had to put it out with my own blood. I
was too scared to pass out because I thought I
might never wake up. It took a long time for us
to be evacuated" -- not until the day after the
attack -- "and I couldn't understand why. We just
sat there, and there's a lot of guys who died
because of that."

Weaver and the rest of the wounded eventually were
air- lifted to the USS AMERICA, where he
immediately underwent the first of 26 major
surgeries. He was subsequently flown to American
hospitals in Crete, Italy and Germany, and then
sent to the Philadelphia Naval Hospital for re-
covery.

"I was four days in intensive care in a wheelchair
in Philadelphia, and I was told an admiral wanted
to talk to me," Weaver recalls. "I went to meet
him in a room and he closed the door and
deadbolted it, which kind of scared me. He then
took his stars off, saying, 'I'm not an ad- miral
now. Tell me what you know.'" Weaver told him,
emphazing, among other points, that throughout
most of the attack, because of his position on the
ship, he had had a clear view of the Stars and
Stripes flying off the ship's bow, clearly
identifying the LIBERTY as American. The Israelis
claim the spy ship was flying no flag.

"The admiral then said, 'Okay,' and he put his
stars back on and he pointed at me. And he said,
'Larry, if you repeat this or talk to anyone about
this you'll be put into prison and we'll throw
away the key.'"

The Rear Admiral similarly visited and threatened
almost all of the other LIBERTY survivors. "In
Malta we got orders every day not to talk to
nobody, no interviews, nothing," says former John
Hrankowski. "As soon as we got back to the
States, they started taking us selectively, one by
one, and shipping us out all over. I went to an
oiler, was there alone. We were spread out all
over."

Isolated from each other, threatened with prison
should they ever speak about the attack -- in
short, treated as if they had done something wrong
-- the men of the LIBERTY obeyed their orders,
which effectively forced them to pre- tend that
the most traumatic event in their lives had never
occurred.



SILENCE AND RAGE


The government's fast and efficient silencing of
the LIBERTY incident was no easier for the widows
and families of the dead to bear. In 1967, Pat
Blue Roushakes, then 22, had barely been married
two years to Allen Blue, a National Security
Agency linguist who was specially assigned to the
LIBERTY for this particular cruise. June 8 was a
work day, and while at lunch Roushakes overheard a
radio report about an American ship having been
attacked in the mediterranean. "My heart just
sank," she said. "I can't tell you how, but I
just knew."

When she got back to her office in downtown
Washington, D.C., she called NSA, which is based
in nearby Maryland. "They said, 'Yes, we've been
looking for you. We'll be there in 45 minutes to
pick you up.' They didn't tell me any more than
that, but I didn't need to hear any more."

NSA personnel essentially moved into her house
with her for the next six weeks. The press
started calling Rou- shakes the first night,
however, and "the NSA took over as far as the
telephone was concerned. And no one was allowed
to answer the front door. They were there to lend
assist- ance -- and they did; they were wonderful
-- but it was also clear they were there to
intercept calls and people at the door." This was
standard procedure, given the highly classified
nature of the NSA.

As a government agency, the NSA had no choice --
public- ly, at least -- but to accept the Johnson
administration's proclamation that the attack had
been a case of mistaken identity. "Privately,
though, the NSA people were furious," says
Roushakes. "They weren't buying the official
story at all."

Neither was Roushakes, but having been devasted at
such a young age by the loss of her husband, she
couldn't do much about it. She took some time off
from work, traveled, thought she felt better, and
returned to her job. Some years later she
remarried and had two children. For the most part
during this period she says she felt all right --
except for sudden eruptions of deep, overwhelming
anger. "It was the worst emotion I'd ever had to
deal with," she says. "Sometimes absolute rage.
I had no experience with it, and I'd act it out in
inappropriate ways."

She says she couldn't believe the claim of
mistaken identity when it was knows that Israeli
reconnaissance air- craft had repeatedly overflown
the LIBERTY prior to the attack. The very idea
that her own government would accept this claim
made her furious. The NSA had made it clear to
her that she was never to discuss the subject. "I
always had this feeling that I would somehow
dishonor Allen's memory if I talked about what had
happened," she says. "People at NSA take their
oath of secrecy seriously, and spouses are
supposed to, too. So I didn't talk, but at
tremendous personal cost."

In 1979, James M. Ennes Jr., a former LIBERTY
officer who'd survived the attack, published
ASSAULT ON THE LIBERTY: THE TRUE STORY OF THE
ISRAELI ATTACK ON AN AMERICAN INTEL- LIGENCE SHIP.
In it he presented evidence that Israeli forces
were fully aware of the LIBERTY's identity before
the attack. He also documented the great doubts
that U.S. gov- ernment officials privately had
about Israel's claim of mis- taken identity from
the very beginning, despite their public
acceptance of the claim.

Roushakes bought the book. "I'd read a little,
but then I'd get so angry again, I had to put it
down," she says. "I just wanted to scream. I
could never read all of the book."

She started waking up in the middle of the night,
drenched in sweat, heart racing and in a dreadful
panic. "I was absolutely terrified," she says.
"Something was terribly wrong, and I didn't know
what it was. At first it was just now and then
that this would happen, then it was every night."
Doctors didn't know what was wrong. Event- ually
she saw a psychiatrist, who told her she was
suffering classic symptoms of Post-traumatic
Stress Disorder.



THE DAMAGE DONE


John Hrankowski's troubles started when he left
the Navy not long after the attack. Painfully
self-conscious of the scars he bore from shrapnel
hits and fuel oil burns, he feared intimacy,
burying himself in excessive work, holding down
several jobs at a time. "I was never home and
mainly a loner," he says, "and this went on for
years, burning myself out. I never understood
what was happening to me because nobody talked
about it back then."

Hrankowski sought help from the American Legion
and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, only to be
turned away, he says. "They didn't want anything
to do with us because [the attack on the LIBERTY]
was not a war to them. They said we hadn't done
anything fantastic or special."

It wasn't until Ennes's book was published that
Hrankow- ski felt any release from the pressure
building inside him. "It was the first time
somebody spoke publicly about it, and it was a
real cathartic thing. Because we'd been told we
can't talk about it, no way. I was able to start
talking about things."

Unfortunately, he wasn't able to talk about it
enough until 1995, when he finally started PTSD
counseling. But by then the damage had been done.
Overwork and stress had weakened his arteries, and
he underwent bypass and bowel surgery in 1997. It
saved his life, but he is 100 percent disabled as
a result.

Carved up by 26 surgeries -- which still left some
60 pieces of shrapnel inside him -- Larry Weaver
felt physical- ly repulsive. His marriage fell
apart. In 1971, he left the Navy to join the
Naval Reserve. When he reported for duty, his
commander took one look at him and told him there
was no way, in his condition, that he could
fulfill his responsibilities. He didn't serve a
single day.

"I was told by several authorities that because of
the wounds I sustained in combat, I should've
received dis- ability retirement from the
beginning," Weaver says. "But they didn't give it
to me. I was very naive and they played on that.
I got a regular separation as if my time had just
expired on my enlistment."

All of Weaver's documentation from the Navy reads
as if nothing unusual had happened to him during
his service. His discharge papers fail to mention
his time on the LIBERTY. Nor do they mention the
Purple Heart he received for his combat wounds.
"All they have on them is my service medal and my
duty stations and my time on one ship, an oiler,
and then they say I'm a patient on the USS
AMERICA."

Weaver has had nightmares ever since the attack.
"The dreams vary," he says. "Most of them are a
feeling of being trapped. I'm caught physically
somewhere, having to fight a battle but having
nothing to fight with. And feeling I'm completely
alone, fighting, and yet my country isn't coming
to help me."

Lentini says he has had periodic problems with
concentra- tion since the attack, less so now than
before, but his anger at the way the government
treated the attack and the crew has never
subsided. "I would've stayed in the Navy after
the attack," he says, "but I got out because I was
absolutely fed up with what was going on." Gallo
quit, too -- when he learned that Capt.
McGonagle's Medal of Honor would not be awarded by
the President at the White House.

"I did not go to the ceremony because of that,"
Gallo says. "I've regretted it ever since, but I
was so upset at the time and said, 'No, I'm not
being a part of this crap. I'm getting out of the
Navy as fast as I can.' I was a reservist and had
to do two years. I got out and went to the CIA
and had a 30- year career with them."

Others were not so lucky. "There was a skinny kid
named O'Connor who had to be in a wheelchair after
the attack," says Lentini. "He gained tremendous
weight and ultimately died. He didn't die from his
wounds, but as a result of them. Another guy had
shrapnel is his brain and it migrated and he
dropped dead. So a lot more than 34 died that
day. They just died later."

With the publication of Ennes's book and later the
formation of the USS LIBERTY Veterans Association,
survivors began to meet and talk to each other
again after years of separation and silence. They
also have been speaking publicly about their
experiences. This, along with the PTSD counseling
that some have received, has helped survivors
enormously. But none of it has come from the
government.

Though the names of the LIBERTY's officers who
were killed have finally been etched on the wall
at the Naval Academy, and the headstone in
Arlington Cemetery now reads that the dead were
"killed on the LIBERTY," the survivors have had to
find whateveer solace they've managed to find on
their own.

Full recognition of the struggles and sacrifices
made by the men who served -- 34 of them for the
last time -- on the LIBERTY won't come, survivors
and their supporters say, until there is a
congressional investigation of the attack and its
aftermath. They maintain that this is the only
such incident in American history that never
received a congressional invest- igation.

Only with the facts finally and completely on
public record, they say, will no one be able to
deny or ignore what happened to them. Perhaps
then, their healing can begin.

The survivors created a Web site,
to tell their story.