Post-Attack on the USS Liberty–Israel’s Blood Bath
By Phil Tourney
On the horizon we could see another helicopter coming at our ship. We thought to ourselves “Oh no, here we go again…more bloodshed from our so-called “friends” in Israel.”
The helicopter hovered above the main deck of the ship and then, to our surprise, dropped a brown paper bag containing an orange and, to our even greater surprise–a business card. On the front of the card read ‘Commander Ernest Castle, Naval Attaché USN’ and on the back of the card, handwritten it asked ‘Have you casualties?’…
As if the dummies couldn’t tell we had casualties after what our ‘allies’ had just done to us after a million armor-piercing rounds, a thousand rockets and 5 torpedoes. Rick Aimetti took the card to the bridge and gave it to the Captain, who was obviously in no mood to deal with this new lunacy. He told them clearly to get the hell away from his ship, finishing his remarks with ‘We want no help from you.’
They left the area and soon were out of sight.
There were many heroes that day who put life and limb on the line in order to save their shipmates in harm’s way. I found out later that the boiler tenders never left their battle stations, even though the boiler was Israel’s main target. Israel did her homework ahead of time and knew that a direct hit on the boiler would have blown the ship into tiny pieces and that would have been that. For Gary Brummett, J.P. Newel, Gene Owens, it turned out that their bravery saved our ship.
Now was the time to care for our wounded, damage control, plugging holes, putting out fires, etc. The mess deck was full of men because we were using it as the main triage center. Every table had a body on it, as well as the deck itself and there was almost no room to move…So many wounded were there, so much blood. I and others were the walking wounded and, judging by what we saw, we were very lucky.
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