USS Liberty Survivor Speaks Out | Candace Ep 118
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 10 minutes
Words per Minute
158.93336
Summary
On June 8th, 1967, the crew of the USS Liberty was attacked by an enemy nation. They didn t know who it was, but they knew it was an attack by a country that had no idea who they were fighting for.
Transcript
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All right, you guys, I'll get right into this. A couple of weeks ago, I received a letter that changed my life, certainly changed the course of my life in politics.
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And I'm going to read you that letter now and let you know that the author of it is sitting across from me.
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My name is Philip Turney. I am 77 years old today. On June 8, 1967, I was just 20 years old when the gallant crew of the USS Liberty was savagely attacked.
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Our American flag was proudly flying on our ship in the Mediterranean Sea that day.
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The designation AGTR5 was clearly painted on the bow, port, and starboard sides. USS Liberty was written in English on her stern.
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When we arrived on June 7, we were overflown by Israeli reconnaissance aircraft, and the same activity was repeated on the morning of June 8.
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We were positively identified as American and friendly by the IDF.
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We had requested a destroyer escort long before we entered the Mediterranean, but we were denied twice.
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Our captain assured us that we were clearly marked as American, and we therefore had nothing to fear.
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We were alone, 12 and a half miles off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula, always in international waters.
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The Israeli reconnaissance aircraft were clearly marked with the Star of David.
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We therefore felt secure, seeing a flying boxcar and other smaller recon propeller aircraft taking good care of us.
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The attack began at 2 o'clock on a beautiful, bright, sunny day by French-made Mirage and Mr. Ray jets, painted black with no markings.
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We had no clue who was attacking us, but assumed it was an Arab state.
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During the first pass by, the jets took out all but one of our transmitting antennas, as well as every watertight door above the waterline.
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The air attack lasted about 25 minutes, killing and maiming our firefighters and any sailor who moved.
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Our radio man took one antenna offline, so it wasn't transmitting and wasn't hit.
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He ran a long wire to it, and the SOS went out to the 6th Fleet.
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Rockstar, rockstar, under attack by an unknown jet aircraft.
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Captain Tully, skipper of the USS Saratoga, sent jets to come to our aid.
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Before the jets hit the horizon, they were recalled by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
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Captain Engen of the USS America in Tully relaunched more aircraft to aid us.
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They were also recalled, this time by Lyndon Baines Johnson himself.
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How did he know who was attacking us if we did not?
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We were set up by our own government to let a foreign government have their way with us.
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The IDF even dropped Napolm on the bridge of our ship.
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Three motor torpedo boats headed our way, and one torpedo hit our starboard side.
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The attack continued for another hour and a half.
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Attacking jet aircraft destroyed all but three of our life rafts, which we had put overboard.
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We were going to place our most seriously wounded in them so that they would have a chance at life.
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They shot two of them out of the water and took one aboard their boats as a trophy of the kill.
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They left and we thought that it was over, but it wasn't.
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IDF helicopters were sent with troops armed and ready to board our ship and finish us off.
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I guess the gig was up when the mighty IDF could not sink our defenseless ship.
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When it was all done, there were over 821 rocket and cannon holes
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and over 5,000 armor-piercing bullets riddling the ship.
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Nat Bomb was burning us up, and a 40-by-40-foot torpedo hole was in her side,
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causing the ship to list badly to our starboard side.
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I guess they hoped that we would sink that night.
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Help was only 40 minutes away from us, but they left us out alone to die.
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When the USS America and the USS Davis arrived to help us,
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Their wounds were so horrific, words cannot explain.
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Admiral Kidd boarded our ship a few days later, and the cover-up immediately began.
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We were ordered to never speak of the attack to anyone, not even with one another.
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Penalties would be fines, imprisonment, or worse, and we all knew that worse meant death.
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We have been treated like garbage for the last 57 years.
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Congress has been bought and paid for with the exception,
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Their names are Representatives Pete McCloskey, Paul Findlay, and Jim Traficant.
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As the courageous Rep. Thomas Massey has noted,
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all Republican members of Congress, except for him, have AIPAC handlers.
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We can assume this is also true of nearly all Democrats.
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We are the most decorated ship in naval history for a single engagement.
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I believe God saved us that day to allow us to communicate the truth of this attack to leaders like you.
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We are just his servants that horrible day and now.
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The USS Liberty survivors are the biggest whistleblowers this country has ever seen.
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We have been smeared as anti-Semitic, Jew-haters, and Nazis.
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Israel did all the murdering that day, and the U.S. government did all the covering up.
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I'm asking you to help us save America by telling other the facts about the slaughter of my mates.
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Respectfully, Phil Turney, the president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association.
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It's a great honor for me to be here and represent the gallant crew of the USS Liberty
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that had been treated so badly, as I said in the letter, for 57 years.
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So, I just want to start just really at the beginning, I guess.
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When did you sign up to be in the United States military?
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I joined the Navy at 17 years old at San Diego, California, as far as I went to boot camp.
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I did two tours of Vietnam before I got aboard the USS Liberty.
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And I did three tours with her, including her last.
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So, that was my naval career, and I got out of the Navy, and then I wasn't working at the time.
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I thought I'd never go back in, because why would I go back into a place where people are going to try to kill me?
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So, I went back in, and I got aboard the USS Maddox, DD-731, which was in the Tonkin Gulf,
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So, just as a question, I mean, most people, just being in the Vietnam War, I mean, that was traumatizing enough, obviously.
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So, you came back, and you decided that you were still going to serve the country.
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When exactly did you find out that you were going to be aboard the USS Liberty?
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I found out when I got orders to go to the East Coast from the West Coast.
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I was on an ammunition ship then, USS Mauna Kea AE-22.
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I said, well, great, I'm going away to the East Coast, and I always wanted to go there anyway.
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And when I got aboard the Liberty, they said it was a ship that mapped the bottom of the ocean.
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And I said, wow, how could that be when all the antennas are going straight up?
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I believed anything they told me until a few months after that.
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So, they initially said to you, they didn't even, you're serving on a ship, and they don't even tell you the truth about why you're there.
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So, here you are, and they're like, you're just here to map the bottom of the ocean?
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Well, there were two different crews aboard that ship.
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There were 200 spies, CIA, NSA spies, and I was in ship's company, engineering, and there were 100 of us with the other guys, boats and mates, cooks, things like that, to run the ship.
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Our only job, Candace, was to make sure that the communication technicians got to where they had to go so they could do their deal.
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And so, when did you notice, or I guess, when did it become apparent to you, how long had you been aboard before you went, I don't really think that we're here to map the bottom of the ocean?
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Did they tell you, hey, I'm actually in the CIA or I'm in the NSA?
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They didn't talk to us, and we didn't talk to them.
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And so, it was two different crews, and I, you know, we figured it out pretty quick what was going on, you know, but, yeah, it was so secret.
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I mean, everything was secret, very, very secret.
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And did you, just wondering how the setup is, are you sharing a room with four or five people?
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The spikes, the spies were in the back of the ship.
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Typical day was get up, take a shower, go to chow, go to work, stand your watches.
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And when we were out of sea, we had sunbathe a lot.
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Because, you know, we were always off the coast of Africa.
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And we were doing reconnaissance there, up and down the coast, four or five miles an hour, all the time.
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And we'd go to ports, different ports, Luanda, Angola, Abidjan, you name it, all the ports on the west coast.
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And you're also thinking this is very low risk.
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You're going, hey, in terms of having an engagement, I'm being sent out here.
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But on the last cruise, we were headed to Africa again, just like we always did.
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So at this point, and just to be clear, how long had you been aboard the USS Liberty?
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I did a little over two and a half years on the Liberty.
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I got seasick after the time I went out for about a week, and then it was gone.
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So now you get these emergency orders, and you have no idea where you're going.
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Are they giving you any information, or they're just saying it's an emergency, everybody get back in?
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Everybody get back in, and we headed to Rota, Spain.
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And a civilian, Alan Blue, he was killed, by the way.
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He was another linguist, but he worked practically for the NSA.
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We head into the Mediterranean, you know, and to go through the rocket, your Walter, and all that.
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And all the ships were going this way, going the other way, and we were the only one going that way.
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And still nobody's informing you about the Six-Day War?
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Yeah, we did find out that we were going into a war zone.
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And what information, if any, did they give you?
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No, we were prepared because our captain, Captain Montgomery, we trained all the time for, you know, different situations, chemical drills, fire, all kinds of different stuff.
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And what's the general mood as you guys are heading towards there, the conversation between you and your shipmates?
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People had Star Davids all over the ship, inside the ship, hoping that Israel would win because they were our best buddies in the whole wide world.
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Is that correct, when you arrive into the Sinai Peninsula?
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We get, well, we were, we got there on the 7th.
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And the Israelis started overflying us then, taking pictures of us.
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You could see the cameraman taking pictures of us.
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They would dip their wings like everything's great.
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We felt good because our best friends were there, and we had no worries.
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I mean, none at all, because they were going to protect us.
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So you had described in your letter saying that you had the American flag displayed.
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Can you describe for me, first and foremost, again, reiterate where it was displayed and also how large the flag was?
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It was on the mast, and the flag was brand new.
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And, in fact, the Israelis identified us as American and friendly.
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Well, we know it because of the intercept we picked up, and they admitted it themselves.
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And when they changed the watch, they forgot to tell the other watch commander that we were there.
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When you say take you off the war table, I'm not familiar with that lingo.
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Well, on the war table, they have, like, different ships or different.
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Like, literally, they set up the table that shows you.
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When they overflew us, they took the pictures of all the ship.
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They knew exactly what to hit and when to hit it.
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And I might add, I believe, and I think most of my shipmates believe, that this attack was planned a year in advance.
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Well, there was another spy ship in the area, USS Valdez.
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It was a civilian man ship, but it was owned by the Navy.
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It could have done the same thing that we were doing, but they took them out of the area.
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Sink and the USS Liberty is a hell of a lot sexier than Sink and the Valdez.
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And so they could blame it on the Arab states and bring us into World War III.
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And like you said, on the 7th, they took pictures.
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Did they still have, at that moment, the CIA agents on board?
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So you still got the exact same amount of people that are on board here.
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So we're talking about a pretty big sacrifice they were willing to make.
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And like I say, we go to chow and take a shower, go to chow, go to work.
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We had a damage control drill just before the attack, say about 1 o'clock.
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I was an assistant on-scene leader in damage control.
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And I was in an impregnated suit, which is a suit for washing down the ship of chemicals.
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I mean, 100 degrees on the deck, easier or more.
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The sound-powered phones were working on the Starboard gun mount.
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Yeah, they're sound-powered phones, you know, from, just like, you know, you could put on headphones.
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And I went to the IC shop, and I got a friend of mine, David Skolak.
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He was an IC seaman, and that was his job, to take care of the IC system there for sound-powered phones and the IC system intercoms on the ship.
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And he came up there, and the gunner's mate was up there also.
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Because we could see the bombs going off and everything on the Sinai.
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So we thought, you know, this is really not a good place to be.
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And just as soon as I left that gun mount, about 30 seconds after I left it, I got back to my workstation, and all hell broke loose.
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The first thing I remember was, all hands get to your general quarter station.
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And I got to my GQ station, which is in the front part of the ship.
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And those two men that I just left there, not a minute, it took me to get back up there.
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Anything that moved aboard that ship, they were shot at.
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As in the letter, they took out all of our antennas within three seconds.
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And this went on for 25 minutes, dropping napalm on us.
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And you got people severely blown up, wounded badly, badly.
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And it continued and continued and continued for 25, 30 minutes.
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And we thought, the Star of David, you know, oh, good.
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And the Star of David said, oh, man, here's our best friends.
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When you talk about them dropping napalm, and so they did this immediately, what does that do for people that are not aware?
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And how does the body react to napalm, the chemical agent?
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It can burn you severely, and it also can explode your lungs.
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I tried to go up and put it out with CO2, and I couldn't do it.
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We had no way to fight fires with water at all.
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Instantly, in that first 25 minutes, so they took out the antennas instantly, the fire hoses instantly, so you couldn't take out fire.
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And during those 25 minutes, what were you doing specifically?
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I was getting people off deck, taking them to a triage in the mess decks.
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The whole mess decks was full of people laying on the tables, on the floor.
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And it continued like that for, like I say, for the entire attack.
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And they're obviously assuming that you can't communicate your distress.
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You indicated in your letter, was it before the torpedoes that fortunately somebody had taken one of those offline?
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Terry Haldebardier is a third-class radium man.
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He took that antenna off, lying, because it wasn't working.
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So they didn't hit it because they were using heat-seeking missiles to hit all the antennas.
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Because when they're tuning, they throw off heat.
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They automatically sent aircraft from the Saratoga and Captain Tully.
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And before they even hit the horizon, McNamara says, bring those aircraft back.
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So our Secretary of Defense, I mean, this attack could, in theory, since he was able to get that message out,
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in theory, the attack could have been over how long after it started?
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In fact, they could have saved 25 brave American lives, old spies that got killed when the torpedo hit.
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If they would have just let those planes come help us.
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So Robert McNamara, who, in interviews thereafter, says he doesn't remember a single thing that happened that day.
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He doesn't remember anything that happened that day.
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Then the American and Tully reconfigured their aircraft and they sent aircraft again because they went to a different command.
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It was their prerogative to go to a different, higher...
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Because they're thinking, what do you mean pull us back, like our American...
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And his exact words were, I don't give a GD if all those sailors die.
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I'm not going to embarrass my ally Israel, like I said in the letter.
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Now, how did he know that if we didn't know it, who was attacking us?
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So they then have the President of the United States.
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So this guy's trying to do the right thing, Captain Tully.
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He gets called back by the Secretary of Defense.
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He's thinking, I'm going to go over his head because this is crazy.
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And now the President of the United States is saying, I don't care.
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I am not going to embarrass our friend and ally Israel.
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And, you know, they destroyed Captain Tully's career, too.
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In fact, he came to one of our reunions and broke down like a baby and cried.
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Having to follow orders when the orders were so demonic.
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This time it's from the president of the United States.
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And now you are seeing torpedo boats with the Star of David.
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Now, now you guys know, and you're thinking, amazing.
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We don't know who's attacking us, but we know these are our friends.
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When did that, when did you notice, wait a second, something's not right here?
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When the old man said, prepare for torpedo hit starboard side, I saw two torpedoes go aft.
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Where the other two went, I don't know, but I know where one of them went.
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It hit in the communications spaces and killed 25 brave young men.
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And that's one of the reasons I'm here today, to be their voice.
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Because we're not going to let them die in vain.
00:27:00.740
You know, there's not many survivors left that are dying out.
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And it's our duty as Americans and patriots to take care of them and make sure their lives didn't die in vain.
00:27:14.060
And, you know, all presidents and all Congress, including Donald Trump, has not done anything for us.
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You know, Donald Trump's a new president again.
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I mean, we gave our lives and our blood for this country at the hands of the Zionists, Israel.
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And does he stand with Israel or does he stand with the United States fighting men that were slaughtered that day
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by the Zionist state and covered up Satan with mistaken identity?
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I call on you, President Trump, to give the USS Liberty the same courtesy we deserve or any fighting man that was killed that day.
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He's the longest serving admiral in the United States Navy.
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He served as the European commander and the Pacific commander and two times as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
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And he says, I'll never believe it was a mistaken identity.
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And he called on Congress over and over to have an investigation.
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Congress says there already has been an investigation.
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There's been a board of inquiry by Admiral Isaac Kitt and his underling JAG officer, Ward Boston.
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They completed that investigation in seven days.
00:29:13.160
And you escape, fortunately, are able to escape this.
00:29:20.700
Because I just am thinking of that moment of consciousness when you think you're going to be saved because you see your friend and your ally.
00:29:26.960
And then suddenly you realize that your friend and your ally is actually killing you.
00:29:33.820
So there's no way they know this is an American ship.
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What's going on in your mind and emotionally in that moment if you could take yourself back?
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That conscious switch of, wait a second, this is not my friend.
00:29:49.600
Well, I think Jesus Christ would know a lot about betrayal.
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And I think that's one of the reasons I'm here is because Jesus Christ didn't want us to die that day.
00:30:22.860
We were going to put our most seriously wounded in them.
00:30:27.020
They shot two out of the water and took one aboard.
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So there's absolutely no way they did not know.
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You're now realizing that you cannot help the wounded.
00:30:54.280
Well, when the torpedo hit, we did what we could do for damage control.
00:31:03.520
And they continued and continued and continued doing that.
00:31:11.300
They sent over a troop carrying helicopters with Marines in it to board our ship, scholarship, and kill us all.
00:31:21.580
I was on the main deck when they were coming over.
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I was on the main deck trying to still get people off the main deck.
00:31:33.760
And then they got there, and this Marine, he had his foot on the skid.
00:31:38.500
I thought they were going to come down in a rope or a ladder or whatever.
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And he gave it right back to me and just smiled.
00:32:10.920
And they got by with it because of the crooked government then and now.
00:32:17.300
So you're watching your mates die, bleeding, torpedo, nap bomb.
00:32:22.680
And you make eye contact with this guy thinking he's going to board the ship.
00:32:25.540
You give him the finger and he gives you the finger back and smiles at you.
00:32:32.320
And we were left out there for 17 hours for help.
00:32:36.860
This is the part that is so shocking to me because the President of the United States knows that you're under attack.
00:32:43.860
The Secretary of Defense knows that you're under attack.
00:32:48.360
You know that, as you said, Captain Sully, Scully, Tully, tried twice to help save you.
00:32:58.360
And you're telling me that after they went away, 17 hours.
00:33:08.300
How many people at that moment were injured, dying?
00:33:12.860
What was happening on that ship for the next 17 hours?
00:33:17.480
Well, two-thirds of the crew was either dead or wounded.
00:33:21.660
And Doc Kiefer, we had one doc aboard the ship.
00:33:37.520
I helped him in one operation, a guy by the name of Gary Blanchard.
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So I rubbed his feet, tried to get some circulation.
00:34:12.420
Put a few stitches on him and put him over to the side.
00:34:24.320
Because I'm sure, as you said, many people died.
00:34:29.040
I mean, what were the conversations that you recall?
00:34:33.780
You know, Candace, I really didn't recall a whole lot about that.
00:34:39.080
But I do know that the Lieutenant Commander Armstrong, he died in the mess decks.
00:35:10.760
And all they did was want to help their fellow shipmates.
00:35:20.740
We had none to fight back with but our will and our wits
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because it was going like that, ready to whirl over.
00:35:56.700
Well, the first thing we saw was several days later
00:36:16.980
He had four or five of us in the sick bay at the time.
00:36:26.480
We told him about the machining of the life rafts
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you better never talk about this again to anybody.
00:36:46.700
I'll make sure you end up in prison, fine or worse.
00:37:06.380
He's still got 50 pieces of shrapnel name right now.