Last Updated on May 24, 2026 by admin
In the summer of 1967, USS Forrestal was off the coast of Vietnam. She was the first of the supercarriers — a hundred thousand tons of steel, four flight elevators, an air wing of eighty aircraft, and somewhere down in the supply hold, beneath the hangar deck, a gray-and-white tabby kitten named Doc.
Petty Officer Third Class Frank Velasquez was twenty-two. He was from Petaluma, California. He worked supply. He was the one who had brought Doc aboard, in a duffel bag, at Norfolk, the previous April.
The way Velasquez told his daughter Annette about it, fifty years later, on the porch of the same house in Petaluma — there was a stray litter in a barn outside the base. The mother had been hit by a truck. There were four kittens. Three went to other sailors. The fourth was the runt. The fourth was Doc.
Doc lived behind a row of crates in compartment 4-110-2-Q. Velasquez fed him out of mess-hall tuna and a saucer kept under the bottom rack. Half the supply division knew. The chief pretended not to. Doc slept on the rolled-up dungarees of whoever was on watch.
On July 29, 1967, a Zuni rocket on a parked F-4 misfired on the Forrestal’s flight deck and struck the external fuel tank of an A-4 piloted by Lieutenant Commander John McCain. The fire that followed killed one hundred and thirty-four men and burned for seventeen hours.
Compartment 4-110-2-Q was below the waterline. The hold did not burn. Doc was found, three days later, in the same place, by a damage-control party still going compartment to compartment looking for bodies.
Velasquez was alive. Eighteen of his shipmates from supply were not.
The Forrestal sailed for Naval Air Station Norfolk three weeks later for repairs. Velasquez went home on emergency leave. Doc went with him, in a sea bag, in the cargo hold of a chartered TWA flight, in violation of every regulation that existed.
Doc lived in the house in Petaluma for sixteen years. He died on the back porch in 1983. Velasquez was sixty-eight when he told his daughter the full story, the part about compartment 4-110-2-Q, and the names of the eighteen men.
Velasquez died last November. He is buried at Sacramento Valley National Cemetery. Annette put a small ceramic tabby on the grave.
On this Memorial Day Sunday, somewhere in Petaluma, a daughter is telling the story to her own kids — about her father, and the eighteen men, and a small gray-and-white cat who lived below the hangar deck.
That is also the war.
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